_The Athenaeum_ gave the book the place of honour in its number for the
23rd of July. The review was severe; but not unjust. "Mr. Wilde's
volume of poems," it says, "may be regarded as the evangel of a new
creed. From other gospels it differs in coming after, instead of
before, the cult it seeks to establish.... We fail to see, however,
that the apostle of the new worship has any distinct message."
The critic then took pains to prove that "nearly all the book is
imitative" ... and concluded: "Work of this nature has no element of
endurance."
_The Saturday Review_ dismissed the book at the end of an article on
"Recent Poetry" as "neither good nor bad." The reviewer objected in
the English fashion to the sensual tone of the poems; but summed up
fairly enough: "This book is not without traces of cleverness, but it
is marred everywhere by imitation, insincerity, and bad taste."
At the same time the notices in _Punch_ were extravagantly bitter,
while of course the notices in _The World_, mainly written by Oscar's
brother, were extravagantly eulogistic. _Punch_ declared that "Mr.
Wilde may be aesthetic, but he is not original ... a volume of echoes
... Swinburne and water."
Now what did _The Athenaeum_ mean by taking a new book of imitative
verse so seriously and talking of it as the "evangel of a new creed,"
besides suggesting that "it comes after the cult," and so forth?
It seems probable that _The Athenaeum_ mistook Oscar Wilde for a
continuator of the Pre-Raphaelite movement with the sub-conscious and
peculiarly English suggestion that whatever is "aesthetic" or
"artistic" is necessarily weak and worthless, if not worse.
Soon after Oscar left Oxford _Punch_ began to caricature him and
ridicule the cult of what it christened "The Too Utterly Utter." Nine
Englishmen out of ten took delight in the savage contempt poured upon
what was known euphemistically as "the aesthetic craze" by the pet
organ of the English middle class.
This was the sort of thing _Punch_ published under the title of "A
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