BOO KS
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reasons or meaning. Whatever is apt to raise a man's self-consciousness–
be it birth, rank, wealth, intell ect, daring or achievements-will add to
his stature; but it has to be translated into the truest expression of a
man's subconscious self-valuation, uncontending ease, the unbought grace
of life." It was Edward's easy assumption of some of these characteristics,
and his recognition and admission to his friendship of those who pos–
sessed the others, that endeared him to his people. It gave his royal
progress through life some value.
There is something oddly like the estheticism of
fin de
sucle
in
Edward's relish for display and for the ceremonial aspects of his job.
At his own coronation he had been impressed most by the "simultaneous
movement of the peeresses in putting on their coronets." The sight of
their "white arms arching over their heads" had suggested to him "a
scene from a beautiful ballet." Edward, like Beau Brummel, made clothes
his religion. One of his friends, Lord Hardwicke, perfected the top
hat; another, Lord Dupplin, the dinner jacket. Thus, in his rather heavy
germanized style he declared himself a dandy. (When redoing Bucking–
ham Palace, he remarked, rolling his r's: "I don't know much about
arrt,
but I think I know something about arrangement.") Beardsley was
surely much more the court painter of the period than Edward's butt,
his Marine-Painter-in-Ordinary, the Chevalier Eduardo de Martino.
Some of Beardsley's fatter figures might well be inspired by the King,
Prince Tum Tum, or as he permitted some of the children of his friends
to call him, "Kingy." And certainly Wilde was Tum Tum's devilish
counterpart, in his period of triumph, before he broke the eleventh
commandment. To suggest the limitations and superficiality of the age,
as well as its fascination, Schmutzler, in his sober and handsomely illus–
trated study, quotes from Wilde's retelling of the legend of Narcissus.
The pool speaks: "But I loved Narcissus because, as he lay on my banks
and looked down at me, in the mirror of his eyes I saw my own beauty
mirrored."
In
the 1890's when England was still the most powerful country in
the world, Art Nouveau was primarily an English-dominated move–
ment. As with English menus, its name of course was French, derived
from Bing's shop in Paris; and its Englishness was only attested to in the
rarely used term "yachting style" and in its Italian name, Stile Liberty,
after Arthur Liberty, the founder of the silk firm. Art Nouveau descends
from Blake, was vastly expanded by the pre-Raphaelites, and found full
expression in the work of Mackmurdo, Beardsley, Ricketts, and Voysey.
Despite the accomplishments of Art Nouveau in Belgium, France, Ger–
many and Spain, its triumph, to my mind, came appropriately in the
great commercial city of Glasgow in the work of Charles Rennie Mack-
