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Portfolio Gleeson White
Door Donald Weeks
In Gleeson White, Frederick Rolfe found a man of artistic integrity. In him, Rolfe found a friend, a councillor, a person to encourage and aid his own efforts in the artistic.
When White died in 1898, F. York Powell wrote an ‘In Piam Memorial,’ which reads, in part: ‘There are some men whose companionship is eminently helpful, their sympathy being so wide, their judgment so broad, their temper so fine, that one is lifted as it were on to a higher plane into serener air while one is with them. Such a man was Gleeson White. It was a refreshment to pass an hour with him, one came away from him with more hope, faith and charity. The secret of his influence lay in his sincerity, his single-mindedness, the sensitive feelings that enabled him to understand others, while his amazing and accurate acquaintance with the various means of expression that are employed in literature and the arts enabled him to see precisely what was the line along which any individual development was proceeding. His wit lit up the most serious discussions, and his absolute freedom from all the sordid motives that so often clog men's opinions, his lack of jealousy, and generous delight in other men's work whether in his own or other's fields gave his conversation qualities exceptionally rare and valuable to his friends. He was also notably patient, and this patience for so quick-witted a man must have been an acquirement; he was even too long-suffering, allowing people who had no claims on his time or attention to take up both rather than hurt their feelings or run the risk of not being able to help them in some way. [In Hadrian the Seventh, Rolfe calls him “a martyr” - “a good man... and I immensely admired him”.] He was never in a hurry, hence what facts and knowledge he won, he had always ready for use. He was eminently teachable, always desirous of learning more, of seeing more, of getting to understand more minutely the things and persons in whom he was interested... But he could not bear to do less than his best, and he would sacrifice strength and time ungrudgingly to act up to his
ideal.’
Two people stand between Rolfe and White: John Gambril Nicholson and Charles Philip Castle Kains-Jackson.
Of the two, Nicholson was the drabber: a sexual neurotic, relatively unsettled in mind and a final hypochondriac. A school teacher all of his life, he prematurely retired because of imagined diseases. Too demanding as a patient in his sister's house, her husband had him removed to a nursing home, where he died. Nicholson, Kains-Jackson, Rolfe and White originally were bound together by the invisible ties of the Arts - embracing Literature, Poetry, the Theatre, Music and Painting. Although he wrote lyrics, Nicholson lacked the stamina or enthusiasm toward Music and Painting. His sparsely colourful life may be inspected via his sonnets and two novels. Yet he deserves credit, in however small a degree, in adding to Rolfe's glossary of names. Rolfe never utilized a completely fictional name for an actual person. The character's name always had to describe some aspect of the original. Leaving Christchurch, Rolfe's first published fiction was in 1894, in To-Day, a ‘Catholick story’ called ‘An Unforgettable Experience,’ wherein he, in London, goes with a priest to visit a slum family living in Maltravers Alley. And, in 1897, in ‘Temptation,’ he gives the name to the ward of a boy - a Mrs. Maltravers - who, as the name of the alley, connotes evil. It was as though, whenever he looked upon Nicholson, Rolfe saw a birth-
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Book-cover design
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Bookplate designed in 1891 for his daughter, Cicely Rose Gleeson White
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Book-cover design
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Title-page design
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Book-cover design
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Book-cover design
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Bookplate designed for himself in 1898,
the year of his death
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mark with hooves or horns. There was that little bit of evil attached to Nicholson which Rolfe carried in his memory - associating it with Maltravers. At the turn of the 1880s, Nicholson had been one of Rolfe's pupils. His Love in Earnest was published in 1892 and contained his version of one of his former teacher's poems. Rolfe was not amused; he did not appreciate Nicholson's ‘polished crystal’ to his own ‘uncut diamond’ - a ‘burglary’ which meant only one thing: a law suit. Rolfe sought advice from Whithers, Pollack & Crow, Solicitors. (Note the last name, an inaccurate rendering of ‘Corvo’ and, with a final e, the name given to Mrs. White in Hadrian.) The solicitors' offices were in Arundel Street-and in Maltravers House. (At another time and in another world, the creator of archy and mehitabel, Don Marquis, wrote ‘Pansy, the Girl Revenoor, or Rum Hound Versus Righteousness,’ in which part of one line reads: ‘She saw the evil face of Maltravers...’) Rolfe was a master when compounding names to fit the people in his work, basing the invented name upon some make-up of the real person. From the Holywell of the late 1890s, he began to despise Fr. Beauclerk and in his writing called him a Spaniard. The mere fact that Beauclerk had Spanish blood in him was not the only reason for this branding, for Rolfe thought of him as a traitor and, as such, recalled the words of the King's Attorney to Sir Walter Raleigh at his trial for treason: ‘Thou art a Monster; thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart... Thou hast a Spanish heart and art thyself a spider of Hell!’ A year before Rolfe became Nicholson's teacher, he was in London teaching at Stationers' School, the school Nicholson would later teach at and remain with until his retirement. Rolfe had been the school's Swimming
Club's General Secretary and had written up the colours worn by the boys in races on 21 and 24 July 1879: ‘rose and azure,’ ‘saffron and dragon's blood,’ ‘vert, azure, or,’ ‘iris,’ ‘salmon and silver,’ ‘saffron and rose,’ ‘amber and ultramarine’ - saffron, azure and vert standing respectively for courage, peace and faith.
Although stormy at times, Rolfe and his onetime pupil maintained an association until his death in 1913, and it was this pupil who introduced him to a friend, Kains-Jackson. (It was this same pupil who introduced Rolfe to Masson Fox, when each was in Venice 1909, their meeting being the prologue to Rolfe's infamous Venice Letters.) Born in 1861, one year after Rolfe, Kains-Jackson was a London solicitor but also editor of The Artist. He communicated with the various Muses and, if not an artist in one or another field, he was its critic. In a lifetime of appreciating Painting, he only ever owned but one: a Sassoferrato ‘Madonna and Child’ of the seventeenth century. Displayed in his house near Hammersmith Bridge - but steps away from William Morris' Kelmscott House and the Doves Pub, the name origin of the Doves Press - this painting so enchanted Rolfe with its essential religious beauty that he copied it as a smaller water colour.
One more person actually fits into the picture: Cecil Castle, nineteen in 1889 and Kains-Jackson's cousin. One aspect of the occult in Rolfe's life - to whatever degree - originated in the Christchurch of 1889 - when he learned that Cecil collected wax seals - an occupation of interest to Rolfe throughout his remaining days. Just before Professor Dawkins took him to Venice in 1908, the two men were on their way from South Wales to London. Dawkins had with him ‘a small collection of Cretan seal stones. It happened that I [Dawkins] was traveling to town and Rolfe chanced to be in the same train; he liked these stones, but merely from a sort of fantastic half-magical idea. With this sort of thing I have no kind of sympathy and this led me to regard Rolfe as a man of no learning, but a sort of amusing fool.’ The summer of 1889, Rolfe was at Christchurch, learning about the village through Kains-Jackson. There he not only met Cecil but also the Gleeson White family for the first time. It was through Kains-Jackson that this introduction took place. He knew Rolfe before the summer began- | |
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before Rolfe's first meeting with White - as is attested to the fact that The Artist printed Rolfe's poem, ‘Dux Amor,’ in April 1889:
My Lady sat within an oaken stall
Framed as the virgin of Beltraffio,
And nature's golden halo shown aglow,
Shaming the painted saints and magical
Glory of holiness poured all over:
So that what erst was hid I humbly know,
That life is life and death is life, if so
She be my guide, and I obey her call.
For when I saw the angels of her eyes
They beckoned me to follow, and I went
By inner paths I knew not, past surmise,
To where my Lady, when this life is spent,
Shall reign, and I shall tire her with a gem
The costliest stone in God's own diadem.
Cecil spent his summers at Christchurch, on the southern coast of England, while he fancied a stage career in London, an event which never materialized. Kains-Jackson spent his August holidays in this little village of 3,994 people, which included the souls in the Royal Artillery Barracks and the Workhouse. In light of the future, especially in the form of Hadrian, it is interesting to know some little portion of the village's history. Gleeson White had been born there in 1851 and operated a book-lender's and stationer's shop called Caxton House. Christchurch has an ancient history, but did not come into political prominence until the early 1800s, when a certain George Rose was elected a Member - to retain his position for more than a quarter of a century, even though declared ‘Vexatious and Frivolous’. There is no knowledge if he were related to Annie Matilda Rose who married Gleeson White, but the surname is tempting enough for a supposition - as well as the similarity to George Arthur Rose in Hadrian. With three factories in the 1800s, Christchurch was the English centre of the manufacture of fusee chains, an essential part of clocks and watches of the day. Not only were females employed in factories which would be condemned today but they - of all ages, even girls of ten - worked in their homes, making the almost microscopic links of the fusee chains - thus earning but a few shillings a week. One village guide book states: ‘The very poor received a little help in the form of bread... and an annual small distribution of shillings from White's...’ In this small community at that time, there was only one family named White - and a bakery was part of the Caxton House property.
The same guide book ends: ‘In a thousand years Christchurch has given birth to no heroes or events important enough to get into the general history books, no great saints and no great sinners.’ If not a drama of import, the years 1889 and 1891 brought together Rolfe and Gleeson White, who achieved much in his short life. It was at least a dramatic episode. This, then, is the story of one man - even if portrayed in the shadow of the other.
The Studio. In the 75th Anniversary Number of The Studio, its history falls under an article ‘Dilemmas,’ beginning: ‘The first issue of The Studio: A Magazine of Fine and Applied Art. came out in April 1893: monthly... It had a cover by Beardsley: this was expurgated, as he might have expected, for the usual reason: his faun was too phallic... No figures of circulation have come to light... or anything really reliable for the circumstances of the foundation or direction in its first, crucial, five years. And in so far as there is a received opinion about this, it is rather doubtful. Three men were involved. C. Lewis Hind, Charles Holme, Gleeson White. Only Hind left a story... and written in 1928'35 years later. In 1887, he then said, he wished to start a new magazine. He received financial backing from Holme ‘and in December 1892, an agreement was signed between the two, making Hind editor’. The following April - April 1893! - Hind, continuing his own narrative, was presented the editorship of The Pall Mall Budget, newly owned by the American
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William Waldorf Astor, who later became Viscount Astor of Hever Castle, once the property of Anne Boleyn. (About this time, Rolfe wrote to Astor a begging letter, saying that ‘a couple of thousand [pounds] would be my salvation just now’.) To find a new editor for The Studio, Hind said, he suggested White, who naturally accepted the job. A completely illustrated magazine has to be planned at least two months in advance of its publication date. With an entirely new magazine, even more time is needed - not only to plan the very first issue but several other issues to follow - to establish a continuity of visual and textual policy. So, if White accepted the magazine's editorship only in April 1893, why is it that he commissioned Beardsley to design a cover for the new magazine and then commissioned Joseph Pennell to write an article on this new young artist? D.J. Gordon, the author of ‘Dilemmas,’ says: ‘What we cannot determine is how much Holme influenced day to day editorial policy until Gleeson White died in 1898. The casual minimizing... of Gleeson White's role... cannot be accepted. Gleeson White died young; available records of his life are scanty, and puzzling... In Christchurch he spent almost forty years [born there in 1851, he went to school at least until 1861, then moved to London in 1892], and there, certainly, he was already designing bookplates, an interest The Studio is to perpetuate. Gleeson White apparently spent a year in America, in 1891; and seems to have arrived in London in 1891 or 1892. He was certainly working for Bell as a designer of bookcovers from at least 1885...’ The many changes the world has seen during its history does not include the mind of man. It can be as faulty as ever. Writing 35 years after April 1893, Hind's memory does not today tally with documentational records.
The evolution of a relationship at times cannot be fathomed. How did White first know George Bell - one living in Christchurch; the other in London? Near Christchurch lived one of Bell's sons, Arthur, with his wife, writing under the name of Nancy Bell or Nancy D'Anvers. She had chosen this home for reasons of health and was always noticed, due to her flopping, florid hats and ‘tin ear’ because of her weak hearing. If employed by Bell himself, White had to be working for him before 1888, the year of his retirement from George Bell & Sons, two years before his death. However, going through the Gleeson White papers, the fact is brought to light that he visited London in 1890-primarily to establish the foundation of a magazine along the lines of The Studio. He was already an accomplished artist and designer and was just emerging as a critic. Before he could appear in the role as editor of a magazine of his choosing, one thing was needed: experience. To gain editorial experience, he left England to travel to New York - spending a year as editor of the Art Amateur. He became not only its nominal editor, but dictated policies of format, layout and substance of contents. He wrote articles for the magazine - some on contemporary American and British artists. His direct contact with this magazine influenced its policy - and, thus, was the direct parent of The Studio.
He was in America on 4 November 1890, when he visited Camden, New Jersey, to see Walt Whitman. This occasion was made especially memorable for him by a presentation copy of the poet's Complete Poems and Prose - into which Whitman pressed some flowers from his table - flowers which are still in this copy of the book. (Whitman's three-page manuscript will was sold for 3,100 dollars in New York in 1936 - on March 26th, the day on which he died in 1892.)
Rolfe visited Christchurch in the summer of 1889 - going to seminary duties at Scots College, Rome - only to last there for five months. About the beginning of 1891, he returned to Christchurch - as Baron Corvo - at which time, he says in Hadrian, White ‘was away on business for a few months’. When White did return - as 1891 closed or 1892 began - he did so with a full knowledge of experience. The
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year in New York had given him the proper insight into the business methods underlying large-scale artistic and literary merit in published form. He saw something in New York which he never would have found in London: an insatiable craving for novelty, an eager attraction toward interesting work (such as Will Bradley's art, his posters and type designs), an instability of taste, the limited but still not quite hopeless capability for being taught to distinguish between good and bad in matters of art and literature. He had learned the necessity of trained and sincere criticism as the only true and constant support of those who were doing honest work and as the only effective foe to sham.
Whatever White was or did, he was no Revolutionist - but he indeed was a Pioneer - as scaled by the commercial success of The Studio - from its ‘just-as-in-your-own-home’ contents. In people such as Bradley, White saw a clean break with tradition - even if it were a modern one - such as William Morris'. Morris, almost evangelical in his heyday, was of a school White was now beyond. If not looking too greatly ahead, at least White did try to sense the near future in the presentation of the various, and especially the graphic, arts - a presentation which introduced new, but not radical, trends and tastes to the discerning and appreciative public. On his own, he maintained touch with the past masters of English art. As editor of The Studio, he divorced himself from this attribute and strove only to endorse the acceptable-as-of-today designs which could fit about any person during any average setting or time. ‘That [Gleeson White in] The Studio chose to ignore the official fine art of the day was the first sign of its bolshevism. It felt intuitively what we today see clearly, that the stream of inspiration had been diverted to a fresh channel. For the applied arts, as we see them reflected in The Studio, are “finer” than the applied arts of any period before or since’ (Hilary Evans). And this same Studio, guided by the hands and mind of White, had an audience in other countries as well: its content was not meant only for the English. Old copies of The Studio were ‘always to be found in Els Quatre Gats tavern, the meeting place of Picasso and his friends. It is also among the papers whose receipt was always acknowledged by Foventut at the time Picasso was contributing to this periodical [and in Barcelona] Picasso's wellknown menu-cards for Els Quatre Gats with their use of a strong
wood-cut outline [were] partly derived from English book illustrations, posters and covers of English magazines, including The Studio... The incursion of The Studio into fin de siècle Barcelona is perhaps only interesting as a page in the history of taste’ (Phoebe Pool).
When Gleeson White died in 1898, at the age of forty-seven, several of the long obituary pieces written on him included this phrase: ‘Founder and Editor of The Studio’.
Photography. Not only did White depend on photography as a means of reproducing art and works of craft in his magazine, but he considered it as an art form in itself. As such, this was as much a feature in the periodical's contents as other works of art. From April to June is but three months. And in the June 1893 issue of The Studio, White first - and he was the only editor or publisher to do so - printed photographs by Rolfe - or Baron Corvo. These two photographs adorn an article, ‘The Nude in Photography’ - to be reprinted in the 75th Anniversary Number. (One month later, White published one more - ‘The original was taken with a flash light’ - at a time when artificial lighting was barely conceivable. The photograph is of White's son Eric holding a candle.) The two ‘Nude’ photographs are from 1890, when Rolfe was in Italy. (In his Bibliography of Frederick Rolfe, Cecil Woolf adds: ‘I am not inclined to attribute this article to Rolfe.’ He certainly should not have done so. But he could have done some homework. The article was reprinted in the American Photographic Times for July 1894 - a fact not appearing in the
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Bibliography. And the title's byline is: ‘By the Editor of “The Studio”’ - which was Gleeson White. Only one of the two Corvo photographs appears here - the same one that is later used in W.I. Lincoln Adams' In Nature's Image, 1898 - which is mentioned in the Bibliography and which clearly cites the above article as being by ‘Mr. Gleeson White’. However, the photograph's credit has been metamorphosed into ‘Corso’.
While in Italy, Rolfe began experimenting with colour photography and continued in this process during his stay at Christchurch in 1891, a report of which appeared in The Artist. In his book, Hadrian imparts to Iulo the secret of colour photography: ‘Then understand that all colours lie hidden in the black and white and greys of the negative... At least, everybody wants to photograph in colours; and they play the fool with triply-coloured negatives. Only one man in the world knows that the colour already is there... stored in the black white grey negative; and that the black white grey ordinary negative will give up its imprisoned colours to him who has the key.’ By the time he was in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1893, he had advanced to the stage of near-perfection. Without the use of foreign pigments or coloured lenses, Rolfe was able to produce vivid blues and greens in his prints, but bright reds and yellows could be washy and flecked with mauve. The secret of his process was an emulsion with which both plates and paper were coated. One photograph of about 1896 was of a girl in a yellow straw hat with a red tartan band. Although mentioned in Hadrian, no coloured prints of his are known after the middle of his stay at Holywell. In Aberdeen, he also experimented with underwater photography. During routine maneuvers, on a calm day in the Mediterranean in June 1893, hms Victoria collided with hms Camperdown, sinking within minutes, with a total loss of 358 men, including her captain. (The Victoria had an ill-fated horoscope similar to that of the Titanic.) This was Rolfe's chance to prove to the world his photographic ability. He wrote to various people, the Government, to newspapers - pleading that he may be sent to the Mediterranean to photograph the sunken ship. But all of his pleas went unheard.
During March 1903, while Rolfe was contemplating the beginning of Hadrian, cases of poisoning broke out on Malta. These were finally traced to the eating of bread baked at certain bakeries which had gathered the same wood for their ovens. The wood in question was covered with lead-contained paint, the lead permeating the bread. The wood was from the dismantled hms Hibernia, first laid down in 1792 and finally becoming the Base Flagship of Malta. In her years afloat, she had been painted numerous times, and each time with lead-contained paint. This epidemic of lead-poisoning in the Malta of 1903 had a link with Aberdeen exactly ten years earlier. The court martial of the Victoria-Camperdown collision was held aboard the Hibernia in July 1893 - the same year that the British Admiralty added to their files the fact that Frederick William Rolfe was the inventor of submarine photography.
Critic. White was never a critic who could be placed into any one category, as so many are today. A criticism coming from his pen was not one of ill omen. As a critic, he was fair. Severity was never a part of his critical attributes for the simple reason that he chose only the betterthan-average work or person to comment on. The many articles he wrote can be found today - but only after tedious searching. Yet his books speak for him.
Published at the time when Rolfe's ‘Anglicanism was falling away from him,’ White's Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c., was a compilation of these various forms, with a long Introduction, defining each. This book had a wide enough circulation, in that Rolfe may have known about it; for he certainly did practice each of the poetic mechanisms mentioned by White. This book is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the writers to be found in his Letters to Eminent
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Hands, which followed Letters to Living Artists. His collections of poetry from old and modern, from English and American poets do credit to his taste. These are Garde Foyeuse and Book-Song. He edited Practical Designing, in which he wrote a chapter on ‘Drawing for Reproduction’. (White instilled within Beardsley ‘the care and knowledge of... the processes of reproducing his work’. In 1897, Beardsley was using the auto-chromatic, or iso-chromatic, process for colour printing, which had only just been invented.) In size, his most majestic work is The Master Painters of Britain in four volumes. But his masterpiece is English Illustration, ‘The Sixties’: 1855-70 - published a year before he died. During his last year, he did A Note on Simplicity of Design in Furniture for Bedrooms for the largest furniture store in London: Heal's - of which family Ambrose Heal lived to see a full ‘report’ on Baron Corvo published - first in 1923 by (later Sir) Shane Leslie, whom he knew, as he did White. While in New York, White sent in monthly notes to The Artist on Art in America. Kains-Jackson's magazine even allowed Rolfe to experiment during 1891 - in dramatic criticism. At intervals of time, Rolfe would travel up to London. Loving the theatre, he would see a play and then write a review or criticism of it. A favourite actor was Henry Irving and Rolfe reports on his revival of W.G. Wills' Charles I. Another review is for A Sailor's Knot. A third play inspired more than merely Rolfe. This was L'Enfant Prodigue - which audience held two other men. Beardsley was one - whose Pierrots eminate from this French play and who made four designs for the published version of another play, written by the other man.
The result of the inspiration is The Pierrot of the Minute and its author is Ernest Dowson. (‘I have just made a pretty set of drawings of a foolish playlet of Ernest Dowson’ and ‘that foolish book “The Pierrot of the Minute”’ were two ways Beardsley described Dowson's work, a play commissioned by the American poet, William Theodore Peters. Yet a young man, Peters died in Paris of privation. Dowson died young. So did Beardsley.)
Other than the crystal-clear depiction of the characters in his books, perhaps the best place to look for Rolfe's pure critical work is in ‘Reviews of Unwritten Books’. In April 1903, his ‘Lionardo da Vinci's “Notes on Modern Engineering”’ expresses Lionardo's technical knowledge of recent achievements, with his drifting ‘in and out between admiration and regret’. Putting words into Lionardo's mouth, Rolfe writes: ‘Take, for instance, [Lionardo's] treatment of the Annexe to Westminster Abbey built for the Coronation of Edward vii. He has nothing to tell us which could not be learned elsewhere on the actual construction of the annexe from slight material having the semblance of solidity [but adds] that the value of a work of art, which appeals to the eye through the mind, must in fairness be judged by its effect upon the eye. To condemn it because it is a sham is to import an ethical distinction with which art is not concerned. There is no inherent reason why lath and plaster should be inferior to stone: the result is all that need be considered. The temporary nature of the construction was sufficient excuse for the choice of materials. If we want a whole abbey somewhere for a few hours only we are aethetically justified in building it of paper, if we can make paper look as beautiful as stone. Although we may have a horror of sham, it is difficult to quarrel with Lionardo's logic.’
Monograms. Is the anagram and the monogram similar? In a way, perhaps, yes. The anagram was a favourite device used by Nicholson in the writing of sonnets to young boys. A number of his poems have now been ‘deciphered’ - revealing the recipient of each poem. (Too, February 14h seemed to have some sort of significance for Nicholson. Of all the dates used in the inscriptions of his books. February 14th outnumbers all others.)
An anagram and a monogram each begins mechanically. Only a true artist can create a
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finished effect which is pleasing to view as well as being meaningful. White was such an artist. In his day, there was a wealth of precedents for monograms, of all periods of time - monograms of sacred names, the familiar iHs, for instance - monograms of painters, potters and a hundred other craftsmen. He listed a few general rules, stressing that ‘the really important item in the matter is the question of unity of style... It must not be thought that a good monogram is a simple thing to make; speaking personally, I doubt if among several hundred examples from my own pen, published here and there anonymously, looking at them now critically and dispassionately, I should select a dozen as satisfying entirely even my own taste.’ He added that a monogram came within the boundary line of Art only when it justified its existence and became good ornament. One of these anonymous monograms done by White was composed of the initial letters of the Walter Scott Publishing Company and graces the title page of The Canterbury Poets series which includes his own Ballades and Rondeaus... &c.
Bookplates. As Toulouse-Lautrec used the poster to full advantage, White utilized his imaginative flair on the bookplate - which can be called a Recorder (or Mirror?) of (at least Literary) History. In the realm of the bookplate, there are two sorts to be connected with White: his own, designed for himself or other people, and those designed for him by other artists. Although limited to the regimentation of area, his lines have a graceful sweep as if produced by a brush - but a brush in the hand of an artist completely controlled. The bookplate, he said, is a ‘name-plate decorated, and not decoration with a name-plate defacing it’ or, in different words, that it ‘should always be a decorated label, not a label arbitrarily placed on a panel of decoration... Wiser folk know that many “etchings” are as valueless as the average engraving in a patent medicine pamphlet, and these care no more for a bad book plate than they do for the “chromo-prints” enclosed in packets of cheap cigarettes... Rubbish, be it in the form of book-plates or cigarends, is merely rubbish [to] lay unheeded in the gutter.’ (Even Rolfe, in Hadrian, calls something inside a London Catholic church tawdry in saying that it was ‘decorated with a chromolithograph’.)
White designed bookplates and such artists as Alan Wright and Charles Ricketts, among others, did bookplates for him. (Wright did Kains-Jackson's only bookplate and designed one for John Lane, publisher of The Yellow Book and three of Rolfe's books.) White worked in his combined library and studio - with flowers in a metal goblet, his books, a seltzer-water bottle and spirits, and framed pieces of original art - including work by Beardsley. At a plain desk, beneath an overhanging bookshelf, he worked - in a straightback chair and next to a fireplace. His library included Japanese prints and pattern-books, chosen for their decorative qualities and uses. An important part of the library was his collection of bookplates, an eclectic one, based on artistic rather than bibliographic tastes; for, from his collection of bookplates - designed by himself or by others - he would choose the right bookplate in shape and theme to fit into one particular book - a bookplate the design of which would enhance the printed pages of the book. For so many other people, a bookplate can be but simply an index of wealth that can endow a library and not a revelation of the former possessor's individual and personal likings and sympathies.
Bookplates by or for White are illustrated in English Book-Plates by Egerton Castle, who had to ‘express my obligation to Mr. Gleeson White’ in producing his book. (Egerton and Agnes Castle together wrote a number of novels, one of which is called Count Raven - which is so close to ‘Baron Corvo’.) In Ladies Book Plates, two of his designs are shown: one for his daughter, Cicely Rose Gleeson White, and an anonymous one used on the printed
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pages of books by George Bell & Sons.
Beardsley also designed bookplates - and wrote. In the tenth paragraph before the end of his Story of Venus and Tannhauser, he uses the name ‘Corvo’ - but they ‘met’ again. Beardsley designed a bookplate for Olive Custance, whose poetry was published by John Lane, of whom she once asked about finding a position for her husband, Alfred Douglas. This was before Douglas nominally edited The Academy, which printed Rolfe's ‘Deinon to Thely’ in 1909. Olive pasted her Beardsley-designed bookplate into her copy of In His Own Image.
Rolfe ‘marked’ his books in two ways: either with a wax seal (of his own heraldic design) or a small purple bookplate, designed by himself and printed about 1905. (Did the purple refer to the royal obligation Hadrian commanded?) The bookplate is described in Hadrian - at the end of Chapter ix -‘The cross will be the kind called Potent, elongate: the Figure will combine the body and limbs of the Apoxyomenos with the head and bust of the Antinous, but posed as We have described.’ (Later, Rolfe's cross was to become more than two-dimensional, when the Pirie-Gordons have him for Christmas 1907 an ankh - ‘my cross-potent-elongate, all of which make it my very very own’.) And the words ending this chapter in Hadrian can well be repeated for the work done by Gleeson White: ‘...the visionary ideal of Beauty which really inspired joy.’
Book covers. In writing of ‘the late Gleeson White,’ Edward F. Strange had to say that ‘No worker of our generation was ever at so much pains to be thoroughly identified with each latest phase of contemporary art; and few have so often succeeded in being distinctly in advance of it... To permit a sum to be made of the achievements of his short years of labour before his untimely death, it has to be stated that Gleeson White was for all practical purposes a self-educated designer... The interest thus early awakened in decorative art was fostered by his study of music, and by his gradual acquaintanceship with the colony of artists who have always made Christchurch a painting-ground... Almost without exception Gleeson White devoted his powers of drawing to such classes of work as especially appeal to the book-lover. He made a considerable number of book-plates, and was the suggestor of very many more. He also devised ornamental monograms by the score, and of no small worth. But his chief craft was the planning of ornamental book-covers: and in these, what originality and merit he may be allowed to have possessed will probably be seen at their best. His work of this kind was essentially modem. The uses to which it was to be put had nothing in common with the old tradition of fine tooling or stamping on leather. His business was to make a design which could be easily reproduced in brass, and stamped in colours on a cloth cover... What was required was simple ornament in strong line; flat, well-conventionalized details, and judicious massing or distribution, entitling him to a very definite rank as a successful practitioner of applied art... He was a pioneer of the modem decorated book-cover in cloth... Among covers worth referring to, mention may be made of that for his own book, “The Illustrators of the Sixties,” a beautiful diaper of square masses of flowers and foilage in gold on white buckram... Gleeson White was a great
lover of the end-paper; and it is rather extraordinary that he did so few. One of his best was made for Messrs. Bell's “Endymion” Series. The quaint treatment - and so modem withalof the promegrante tree, with the pruning device at the end of the scroll, is a piece of artistic euphuism, quite characteristic of a certain intricacy of suggestion in which he delighted... He was a keen and intelligent student of the principles of Japanese ornament... and many of his patterns show evidence of a direct influence of this nature... As the organizing spirit of “The Studio,” he exercised a great and valuable influence over his younger contemporaries. He was a sure and kindly spirit... for he never failed to find reasons for the encourage- | |
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ment of younger men. None knew better than hemself the value of a little appreciation at the crucial moment of a young career... He was a humble and patient student, an untiring and most disinterested master.’
The obituary running in The Academy spoke of White and his ‘artistic production’ - the best ‘devoted to the decoration of books, a branch of art of whose requirements and capabilities he made a special study. His views upon the subject may be found set forth in an interesting article contributed to the Studio, for October, 1894. Already then decorative cloth covers had become a feature of Messrs. Bell's books, due mainly to the taste of Gleeson White, under whose direction for the past five years their numerous ornamental bindings have been produced, the designs in the majority of instances being the work of his own hand. None, perhaps, but those who knew him intimately were aware that he laboured under the infirmity, which increased in later years, of failing eyesight; a disability of serious moment from the very nature of the craft and the materials employed... A book-cover design of his would consist of an intertwining of roots of trees, rose-bushes and laurels, forming the basis of the ornament. Gleeson White was among the earliest of our modern designers to preceive and develop the artistic possibilities of roots and bulbs. In this connexion tulips and crocuses were favourite motifs of his decorative patterns.’ Yet, another phase, that of the purely abstract, is represented by his cover for the Cathedral series, for which he had become the art editor for George Bell & Sons, as well as the Connoisseur and Ex Libris series. The final words of his Studio article are extremely important to any designer: ‘Yet Nature, who is perfect in trifles as in universes, is not wholly wronged thereby; the finishing touches of a cycle of art ofttimes attack the smallest details.’
Leaving art for a moment, The Academy spoke of White's personality: ‘Neither did he withhold his generous acknowledgment of the yet unrecognised talents of young men struggling to obtain a place in the world of art. It is they who are most deeply indebted to Gleeson White; they who will mourn most.’ But one such artist did not mourn him: Aubrey Beardsley - who had died seven months before White himself did and who said about the young artist: ‘Death has given Aubrey Beardsley the immortality of youth; and in future histories of illustrations, whether for blame or praise, man must needs add that it was a mere boy who did these things, and did them as no other had ever attempted to do them before.’ At the death of his colleague, Henry Harland of The Yellow Book said: ‘I wonder whether people who know Aubrey Beardsley only through his work ever realise how young he was... Aubrey was not yet one-and-twenty [when, through White's instigation, his name was brought forth in the first issue of The Studio]. He was barely five-and-twenty when he died. And at the moment of his utmost celebrity... he was twenty-two [and still] had a boy's playfulness and mischievousness.’ A school chum of Beardsley's, Scotson Clark - who also worked in New York - later wrote that ‘Gleeson White was a man whose mission in life was to help the young and struggling and there are many artists of national reputation both in England and the United States who have him to thank for their first introduction to the public. Beardsley was perhaps the greatest.’
Now, Rolfe knew White - even considered him a friend. What, then, did Rolfe take away with him from Christchurch in 1891? To speak of Christchurch first, he took away with him two designs - for each of which Cecil Castle posed. Cecil became the young Tarquinio when the novel came out in 1905 and his figure is part of Rolfe's design for the book's cover. In 1909, Don Renato was printed (but not published) and on its title page is Rolfe's heraldic device, with two figures, one of whom is naked Hypnos (Sleep) - copied directly from a drawing he made in 1891 of Cecil as St. Sebastian. As White supervised the art contents of the publications
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under his hand, Rolfe selected the illustrations for Chronicles of the House of Borgia (1901), as well as picked the front-cover motif, which is blocked in gilt on either red or black buckram. When he had been in Rome in 1890, the Borgia Apartments had just been opened to the public, information of which he relayed back to Kains-Jackson and which appeared in The Artist. Rolfe chose a Pinacoteca fresco, ‘Resurrection,’ as the book's frontispiece and was furious when Grant Richards, its publisher, cropped out all but the kneeling figure of Alexander vi. (Today, the pope's figure alone in this fresco is all that is credited to Pinacoteca.) Rolfe did lend a design to his first real book, In His Own Image (March 1901). This was published by John Lane in New York and London. The American edition has Rolfe's lettering on the front cover and spine blocked in white on royal purple. This book also is the first to carry a drawing by him as a device on the title page - as do Hadrian, Don Tarquinio and Don Renato. For Hadrian, Rolfe also did the typographical format. (In Holywell, he created the layout for the monthly Holywell Record.) On the cover of Hadrian, blocked in white on a dull purple cloth, ‘a Pope in profile and pontificals, with spectacles pendant over the Pallium, giving the blessing Urbi et Orbi, surmounted by the sign of Cancer and a crescent moon, a cat (presumably Cheshire) disappearing under his fingers’ (Shane Leslie). Although the design is his own, the theme of a cat near a man had already been used on covers of several Doctor Nikola books by Guy Boothby. The cover of Don Renato comes closest to the idea of White's artistic taste as pure design: a basic overall pattern of birds. Gleeson White's name prefaces no entry
today in any reference book about English art. On the extremely rare occasion, it may occur in a book pertaining to the 1890s and nothing more. Otherwise, he has today been forgotten by almost all people in the very professions he outlined, defined, and worked in. (His English Illustration was reprinted about a dozen years ago.) His critical eye and touch would be much appreciated in today's world of Advertisement, where so much of its work and effort is entirely worthless - yet costly. No doubt, a Designer cannot be compared with a Painter? Is that the reason for the lack of his name in any work of art? Because his monograms, bookplates and book-cover designs are small in size, and thus cannot be acknowledged in the same space which regards an oil painting as Art - but subconsciously adds: Major Art - why is there no mention of Minor Art? The influence of Minor Art - in our day-to-day existence - is just as visual, just as aesthetic as a visit to an art gallery. The majority of White's art and service should be no reason for exclusion in any mention of ‘the Art of the Period’.
The irony of this fact about White is more apparent when Rolfe is ‘brought back to life’ - shrouded in myths. In 1891, after his last stint at a Catholic seminary, he returned to England, settling in Christchurch for this year, to become a professional photographer and painter. With few, small exceptions, he never obtained the role of either Photographer or Painter. Yet the Corvine myths which grew, and jelled, after his death credit him with feats he never could have performed. In Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by Nikolaus Pevsner and David Lloyd (1973) ‘Corvo, Baron’ is listed under Index of Artists. On one page, ‘the altar fresco [mural!] Painting by Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo)’ is mentioned, with these words added: ‘The technique Corvo used is typical of the man. There is an element of cheating in the competence. He is said to have photographed models in the appropriate attitudes, made lantern slides from the negatives, and projected them on to the wall, where he could then trace the outlines.’ The date given here for the mural (not fresco!) is ‘1891-2’. But the mural, when cleaned only a few years ago, disclosed a date: 1910 - almost twenty years after Rolfe had left Christchurch. Of the artist, no name had been unearthed. Then, did the artist who actually did this painting - in 1910 - use ‘an element of cheating’?
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Or is this expression used only because it is connected with Rolfe? Yet this same book gives another credit - in a church near by: ‘The Painting of the English Martyrs... looks as though it might be by Frederick Rolfe’ - but can be compared with nothing of his known works. Tradition and myths - as weeds - either die hard or merely live on. In the first biographical study of Baron Corvo, by Shane Leslie in 1923, he states that ‘Rolfe... settled at Christchurch, Hampshire, where he... painted the wall painting in the local Catholic Church.’ This is the first mention of this myth - a myth which is just as alive today as it was more than half a century ago. The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles (1977) is more honest in saying ‘there is considerable doubt as to whether the original [in Christchurch] was the work of the strange, enigmatic man who was author, schoolmaster, artist, and failed priest’. But the definitive Dictionary of Victorian Painters (1978) - carefully researched - has an entry for ‘Rolfe, Frederick’: ‘At certain stages during the 1880s and 1890s he spent much of his time painting. His subjects were generally religious, often commissioned as church furnishings’ - but citing no example. Such, then, are vapourous myths and figments of fiction crystallized.
Although a year younger than Rolfe, Kains-Jackson published Our Ancient Monuments and the Land Around Them in 1880 - quite a substantial book when compared to Rolfe's meager poem, Tarcissus, printed either at the end of 1880 or the very first of 1881. This was one link which united the future author of Hadrian vii and Nicholas Crabbe with Kains-Jackson, White's solicitor. Unlike the first, Kains-Jackson knew almost all of the various artists of the 1890s, major or minor. Friendly with each, it was only natural that, on the day of Oscar Wilde's arrest, Alfred Douglas wrote to his friend the solicitor to ask what may be done - no action of which could now be recommended. (Rolfe was a master of tautology in his works, yet Oscar practised it on a small scale. ‘Take from life while life and love were new’ is a line in Ravenna and ‘The Grave of Keats’. ‘Like AEschylus at well-fought Marathon’ is in ‘Humanitad’ and Ravenna. ‘Some started bird, with fluttering wings and feet / Made snow of all the blossoms: at my feet, / Like silver crowns, the pale narcissi lay’ of Ravenna is repeated in ‘Sonnet: Written in Holy Week at Genoa,’ with ‘silver moons’ replacing ‘silver crowns’. With the change of about half a dozen words, ‘...I have already seen / Some twenty summers cast their green Autumn's gaudy liveries’ appears in The Sphinx and Ravenna.) Kains-Jackson's Artist proved fertile ground for Rolfe's dramatic criticism, only one more piece by him being known-that for H.B.. Farnie's La Vie, freely adapted from the French of Mailhac and Halevy, who together composed the libretto for Bizet's Carmen. White was responsible for having Rolfe's finest poem
appear in 1890 in The Art Review - ‘Ballade of Boys Bathing,’ which was closely imitated by Kains-Jackson twice - as an unpublished poem, ‘Ballade: Of the Serpentine,’ and one in The Artist, ‘Ballade. To G[leeson]. W[hite].’ A look at the first volume of The Art Review is a startling one, considering either the subject or author of some of the printed items. There is art by Alan Wright, who was later to illustrate Rolfe's ‘How I Was Buried Alive’ ‘with drawings done under [Corvo's] supervision’. He also did a water colour of Cecil Castle which was exhibited at the New English Art Club. White himself contributed prose and poetry. One story is ‘Fragments From the Lost Journal of Piero di Cosimo’ - having in common a theme and vocabulary later to found in Don Renato. Edmund Gosse's poetry is presented and he was soon to be a friend of Henry Harland, who was to buy Rolfe's Toto stories for The Yellow Book, of which he would edit and Beardsley would be art director. Laurence Housman and Arthur Symons both have poems in the magazine and each knew White and Kains-Jackson. There is a photograph of
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Rodin's ‘Groupe de bourgeois de Calais,’ the ‘six burgesses’ mentioned in the Prooimion of Hadrian. An article about Antonio Fogazzaro speaks of the Italian writer who, in 1906, was to publish Il Santo, a book to be grouped with Hadrian by churchmen. There is also a poem called ‘A Martyr’, with an illustration in the manner Rolfe wished to present art for his poems. (He did an illustration for ‘Ballade of Boys Bathing,’ which was not accepted; but it did make an appearance - in print only - as ‘a mysterious group of divers in the clear of the moon’ in Hadrian. Another poem is by Edward Carpenter, who knew Kains-Jackson, Nicholson and White and whose work was copied by Rolfe in his commonplace book. And the name Vernon Lee appears. She lived in Venice, which was to be Rolfe's final home. During 1890, while Rolfe was in Rome, five books published by Elkin Mathews contained this announcement: ‘Will be published shortly / The Story of S. William / The Boy Martyr of Norwich / From forty contemporary and subsequent Chronicles, all of which are / given in full, with copious Notes and Translation, etc., etc. /By the Rev. Frederick William Rolfe / Late Professor of English Literature and History at S. Marie's College / of Oscott’ - a book which apparently Rolfe never even wrote. In 1891, though, he composed his first Toto story, which is complete in itself, in that Toto is killed. Completely revised, this appears as ‘The Princess's Shirts’ in The Pall Mall Magazine of 1906 - which also features a story on ‘The Rebuilding of the Campanile of St. Mark at Venice,’ with one photograph showing the Belle Vue Hotel, his first home there. The foundation stone was laid on 23 April 1903, in the presence of the then Patriarch of Venice and later
Pius x.
In 1895, now living in London, White designed the cover of Nancy Bell's Masterpieces of the Great Artists, A.D. 1400-1700. The entire year of 1891 was employed by her in the majestic translation of the Marquise de Nadaillac's Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples. She would not write The Tourist's Art Guide to Europe until 1893 - when Rolfe and the Whites had all left Christchurch. But, while still in 1891, Rolfe read a new novel: Hay Forbes' Detective in Italy or The Mystery of Berwyn Kennedy - the first novel in English about ‘the Mafia’ - ‘they rob... they assassinate [and include] men who use their [political] positions to direct this brutish force’. In Hadrian, the pontiff recognizes ‘the “Mafia”... chiefly in evil deeds. They murdered... They robbed [and were] a corporate body for political purposes’. Hadrian prays that the ‘Mazzini Autorizza Furti Incendi Avvelenamenti’ become the ‘Madonnia Applaude Fraternita Individualita Amore’. It was also in 1891 that White designed a bookplate for his daughter, Cicely. One odd fact about Rolfe's life has never been mentioned. Soon after leaving Christchurch, there were rumours that he had asked for the hand of Cicely, who was seventeen years younger than he. And, after one summer in Aberdeen, rumour again had it that he sought the hand of the elderly Georgiana Hay, ward of the two Hay boys he tutored in 1892. At the same time in Aberdeen, a medical student by the name of Cruickshank was his only friend and Rolfe would frequently visit the young man's house - but only when Cruickshank's sister was present. If there were any romantic thoughts on Rolfe's part, they were certainly quashed by his abject poverty. This poses a psychological question: Did Rolfe don poverty's robes in order to be free of any romantic
entanglement? When he left Scots College in 1890, he had sworn himself to twenty years' celebacy. And, embracing the Franciscan Order, he took an oath to maintain poverty. In Nicholas Crabbe the two may have been combined when the question of the single or married status of George Arthur Rose (Rolfe) is asked and Crabbe (Rolfe again) answers that he is ‘running for Popedom’.
Rolfe uncannily produced in his books characters totally outside himself - unlike other contemporary authors, who only depicted
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various aspects of themselves, if they created anything beyond people as real as cardboard cut-outs. In Hadrian, Mrs. White is cast as Mrs. Crowe, the mother of Alaric (Eric) and Amelia (Cicely). At one point in the story, Alaric defends Rose by saying: ‘I liked him. A-and father liked him.’ To this, Mrs. Crowe replies: ‘Yes indeed, he's just the sort of man your father would have liked, unfortunately. He liked that sonnet-man [Nicholson], too. A pretty kind of person. All I can say is, Alaric, if I were to let you see the letters I've got of his and the albums full -: but there, you don't know as much as I do about your father!’
In writing intimate letters, Nicholson somewhat blatantly flaunted the same subject which adorns all of his printed verse: boy-love. The 1880s and 1890s in England became the height of the revival of the cult of the Boy - as worshipped by the ancient Greeks. Although a school teacher all his life, Nicholson permissively published his sonnets in adoration of the Boy. As editor of The Artist, Kains-Jackson accepted and printed poems on this same subject - poems from various hands, including his own and Gleeson White's. In his more adolescent years, Rolfe wrote individually versed entreaties to boys who were the ‘bravest of boys’ or the ‘best of friends’. And in 1888, a year before Rolfe met Kains-Jackson, the latter wrote a poem on Cecil Castle's eighteenth birthday beginning: ‘Bravest of boys and best of friends’. Although not among the papers which Mrs. Crowe-Mrs. White cited, one of Kains-Jackson's poems to his younger cousin, called ‘Nocturn’ and inspired by Ezekiel, xxviii, 14, reads:
Lie thou above me breast to breast
And lie above me face to face
The beauty of thy body pressed
Against my heart in my embrace
Let me be clasping and enfold
Thy body's ivory and gold.
Sacred companionship of thighs
And arms that round my body twine,
The magic of thy glowing eyes
Which light my own and melt in mine!
Let one more rapturous clasp be tried
Then, let us slumber side by side.
(A page or two in Hadrian after the episode of the ‘woman scorned,’ Cecil appears briefly as ‘a young lover’ and was married in 1901.) Kains-Jackson also composed the following verse, Fox being the recipient of Rolfe, Venice Letters:
See Mass. On Fox. Your name should bid you go
The road to Rome, make ending orthodox
And certainly like Peter you show
Yourself an authority on cocks.
‘The albums full -’ could easily have been no more than pictures - prints of paintings, engravings, reproduced drawings or photographs. (From Rome, Rolfe sent prints of his photographs of nude boys - always artistic and never crude - to Kains-Jackson. And one print may have been the reproduction of Frederick Walker's ‘Bathers’ - a scene revealing some dozen and a half boys, in various stages of dress or undress, in or out of water. This one print of a painting has been confused by some essayists on Rolfe, Kains-Jackson and White with Tuke's ‘Bathers,’ an entirely different one, both in colour and composition, as well as in size. Kains-Jackson mentioned the Walker print in his Artist and White wrote an article on Walker for the Art Amateur.) To the Victorian English, and female, mind of 1890, anything disclosing the structure of the human body - male or female - in any undraped fashion definitely had about it the odour of hell-fire and brimstone. Yet, in 1889, both Mr. and Mrs. White gave permission to let Rolfe photograph their young Eric in the nude. The photographs are artisticsimple in detail, but with a Aida-like setting. And, in 1891, Kains-Jackson granted his permission for Rolfe to both photograph and paint Cecil - at times in the nude.
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married - with Rolfe having sworn to be celibate. White was married and the father of two children. Yet he retained an interest in the Boy, along with the other three. One other person, who was an actual homosexual, was John Addington Symonds, who was also married and a father. He contributed verse to The Artist (see Hadrian) and, just before his death, sent his very last poem to Kains-Jackson. A good section of the ‘creative world’ of the 1890s in England was interwoven around the Greek attitude between men and boys. The literature, illustrations, paintings of the day show this kinship - directly or veiled. By the time he began to write Hadrian, Rolfe had been told that this theme permeated his work. (See Nicholas Crabbe.) Realizing this much, he could speak of others and have Mrs. Crowe say: ‘...the albums full -’ - leaving the reader to decide what may be meant here - be the reader pious or otherwise.
Rolfe was a man who lived ‘within coincidences,’ but he lived within a rigid mental attitude which made these ‘coincidences’ a coherent part of his life and no mere happenings. The closest he ever attained to priesthood was being elected a Franciscan. In the Middle Ages (and Rolfe was erudite scholar), the Order of St. Francis was composed largely of symbolism. The number three alluded to the Trinity. Added to this, four stood for the elements of Earth, Air, Water and Fire. The sum total was seven, the symbol for Man, both spiritual and physical. And this final number went into Hadrian the Seventh - the cover of which depicted his moon and his Crab, in the shape of a horizontally placed 69 - and Hadrian was created at 69 Broadhurst Gardens, as were Crabbe, Tarquinio and Renato. All of his previous life had been a rehearsal for Hadrian. A recent Dutch critic called Rolfe a ‘pathological stylist’. This is true - as well as his elephantine memory and devious alliances. In Holywell, later in the 1890s, he became Frederick Austin. Yet, in defending his use of such a name, he refers to it as Austin White. What else from the Whites of the Christchurch of 1889 and 1891 did he borrow for Hadrian?
The White family were musical. White had been an early admirer of Wagner. (And in 1913, Rolfe died next door to his Palazzo Verdramin-Calergi in Venice.) White's daughter became a singer and sang in the first Wagner opera with an English libretto. Before his early death, White heard her sing in only one opera, Don Giovanni, when she vas still a student. Eric was only twelve in 1891. He loved music but later disappointed his mother when he became yet one more ‘Gentleman’ in the four-acre, windowless Bank of England. His mother, who played the piano, wondered why he had not at least become a music critic. ‘To do that,’ he replied, ‘would mean sitting through too many evenings of tiring music that would dull my appreciation for what I like.’ In Hadrian, Cicely, as Amelia, is first seen as she flows ‘into the room in a pink wrapper, finishing a florid cadenza’. As Alaric, Eric's some-time stammering is faithfully reproduced. (In Don Renato, he is ‘a very docile tender juvencal son’.) White is first found in Hadrian as ‘a great friend’ - yet Rolfe's tone changes 340 pages later. In the act of defending his right to pseudonyms, Hadrian-Rose-Rolfe says that ‘the man whose shop I am said to have offered to buy... himself used a trade-name’. This is quite a stretch of the imagination. White's full name was Joseph William Gleeson White. He merely dropped his first two names. (Rolfe could have used the same accusation against Grant Richards, who, also, had dropped his first two Christian names: Franklin Thomas.) Because of White's ready wit, his close associates called him Gleeful. Just one of his remarks concerned a certain contemporary author: ‘He always reminds me of a feminine Marie Corelli!’
The dedication to White's monumental work, English Illustration, reads: ‘To A.M.G.W. and C.R.G.W.’ The first set of intitials are his wife's: Annie Matilda Gleeson White. (After her husband's death, she hyphenated Gleeson-White.) Rolfe wrote to his publisher in 1899:
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‘All the tales of the “Gleeson White” order are false. He remained on friendly terms with me for some years after the episode of the Woman Scorned’ (reported in Hadrian) and in another letter referred to Mrs. White as ‘Hairless Nancy’. (In Victorian slang, ‘Nancy tales’ meant ‘humbug’.) In Hadrian, Mrs. Crowe ponders upon the trip to Rome and decides, before going, that she ‘must have a new transformation [wig]’. She is even once called the ‘Bald She’ in the same book. In Don Renato, she has ‘a total defect of hair’ - her husband having been ‘the Tyrant Bianco di Correale’. Unfortunate for her, she lost her hair in her teens during a bout of scarlet fever and had to resort to wigs for the rest of her life. Before November 1898, she was one of six women Rolfe tolerated, for he had named them in an essay, ‘Women of a Woman Hater’. Bella Danvers was Nancy Bell or Danvers, whichever name she chose to use on her latest book. Agnes Dixon was Mrs. Richardson, who operated the Greyhound Inn in Holywell, where Rolfe lodged for two years; and he includes her in Hadrian as Mrs. Dixon. Caroline Shirley had been the illegitimate daughter of the self-styled Viscount of Tamworth who later married Duke Sforza-Cesarini, whom Rolfe met in Rome in 1890 and who is part of his stories for more than a decade after she died. Mrs. White is Teresa Coverhill - her address at the time being 10 Theresa Terrace, Ravenscourt Park. However, after November 1898, at the time of the Aberdeen Attack upon ‘Baron Corvo,’ Rolfe thought she was one of its three authors. In Hadrian, in the Attack, he sees ‘the obscene touch of the female’ - after also sensing ‘the fine Roman hand’. In his
suppressed Appendix iii of the Borgia book, he writes: ‘At one or another time, [the Borgias] have made an enemy, have scorned a woman, flouted a priest...’ In fact, it was Georgiana Hay's hand which added ‘the obscene touch’.
The second set of initials in the dedication are for Cicely Rose Glees on White and he designed her bookplate at a time when life was changing
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for him and to the better. Rolfe foresaw the family's move to London and offered to buy some of his property. The amount offered was 1,300 pounds, but it was soon discovered that Rolfe hardly had that many pennies. Yet the sum was adequate for the property in 1891. White had no estate worth more than that. He had worked in his stationer's shop and earned no more than loo pounds a year. Beginning about 1890, his fortunes ascended, but they never reached 400 pounds per annum. When the family moved to London, they sold their house but not the two shops, which brought in an annual fifty pounds. This was the financial position for the family when, after a trip to Italy with the Art Workers' Guild, White returned to London with typhoid, dying on 19 October 1898, at the age of forty-seven.
In 1896, White had been presented with a silver medal by the Society of Arts. This was the same year that typhoid fever's causative bacillus was discovered. A.E. Wright and D. Semple introduced an anti-typhoid vaccination in 1897, but at this time the general public was suspicious over such methods, especially after deaths had been attributed to it. Also in 1897 one of England's magazines boldly stated its cause against vaccination: ‘In a free country such an abominable violation of the liberty of the subject, at the bidding of medical priestcraft, should be wiped out by Parliament. The ghastly risk of the filthy rite of vaccination is mournfully exemplified in the distressing death of the poor [twenty-year-old victim] it was reporting on.’ At the time of his death, White had been editor of The Pageant, art editor of George Bell & Sons and had completed at least 68 covers for books and periodicals. At Bell's, his immediate successor was George C. Williams, who lived in Hampstead, no more than five minutes' away from Rolfe's favourite church, which is mentioned in Hadrian. Also, from what he heard from White at Bell's, he began investigating Rolfe's life and became the first person to collect his work and emphemera. (Williamson's Cities of Northern Italy was published by Grant Richards in 1901 - the same publisher and year of Rolfe's Borgia book.) White died a year before Rolfe's return to London to begin his literary career. Too, his death left his family almost destitute. Three years before, Mrs. White had a serious operation for the removal of a tumour. This, coupled with an attack of rheumatic fever and a kidney complaint, left her physically weak. About this time, she also had a collision with an unconcerned boy selling newspapers who was running aimlessly and knocked her down. The result of this was a broken hip, making her use a stick for the rest of her life.
(The stick today is being used by her daughter-in-law.) Primarily thinking of his children, White spent as much as possible on their education. Cicely was still a student at the Royal College of Music. Eric at nineteen suffered from recurrent but only slight deafness and stammering, but conditions preventing him from following any vocation at the time which would earn a steady income for himself and the rest of the family. The only work he could find in 1898 and thereafter allowed him to bring home about one pound each week. At first, friends took up a subscription to help the family ‘tide over’. Lord Rosebery (one-time Prime Minister and Lord Hippis in Rolfe's Desire and Pursuit of the Whole) supported an appeal for a Civil List pension to aid the family, although he did not sign the formal Memorial.
At this point, one more person entered the scene: Temple Scott. (Born Isaac Isaacs, he had his name changed by deed poll to Isaac Temple Scott and was using this surname as early as 1895. When White died, he was living at 3 Welbeck Mansions, West Hampstead, not too far away from Rolfe's Broadhurst Gardens. He becomes Church Welbeck in Nicholas Crabbe, ‘an Israelite’ in Don Renato, ‘a certain idiot’ in Don Tarquinio and ‘a piece of pork’ elsewhere.) Scott had been employed at Bell's and grew intimate with White, who told him of Rolfe's progressions through Christchurch. He was next employed by Grant Richards (Doran Old- | |
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castle in Crabbe) and, from there, moved to John Lane (Slim Schelm in Crabbe), who published Rolfe between 1895 and 1903. After going to New York as Lane's American agent, Scott became a publisher, a scholarly author and then a ‘gentleman book dealer,’ forming some of America's choice collections, such as Jerome Kern's. At the time of White's death, and before money came from any other direction, Scott did the family a tremendous service. He arranged for the sale of White's extensive library - which included 322 volumes he had collected and preserved from his research on English Illustration and 1,191 items from his personal collection which made it ‘a collector's treasury,’ having such things in it as the Elzevir Republica Venetorvm Libri Quinque by Caspar Contareni (1628), first belonging to Thomas Hobbes and then to Dante Gabriel Rossetti and then to Kains-Jackson, who gave it to White on 1 January 1889.
Among others, the Memorial for the pension was signed by the President of the Royal Art Society, Chief Rabbi Adlar, Sir Walter Besant, the Physician to the Queen, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Walter Crane, Richard Gamett (Dr. Richard Barnett in Hadrian), Austin Dobson, the Bishop of Ely, Edmund Gosse, Anthony Hope Hawkins, Richard le Gallienne, Cosmo Monkhouse, George Meredith, John Ruskin, John Sargeant, Norman Shaw, G.F. Watts, Swinbume, Hamo Thomeycroft, Clement Shorter, six peers, and A. de Vallaney, the family doctor. On 15 june 1899, Mrs. White was granted an annual pension of 50 pounds. As the widow of Gleeson White, she had already received the sum of 100 pounds from the Royal Literary Fund on 17 November 1898.
From 1892, the Whites' London home had become a literary salon for the artists and writers of the 1890s. Some time after his death, White's figure was seen in a dream by one of these men. Upon waking, some of the details of the dream had blurred. What was remembered was the fact that White repeatedly opened a door to make an announcement. Whether the door opened to an office, a gathering of people or only the dreamer could not be recalled distinctly. But White, in evening clothes, made the announcement each time that some man of the 1890s had just died. The name was always different, but the date was always the same: 1902. And so many men of the 1890s had died between 1898 and 1902.
Not long before his death, White was given a book of verse by Percy Hemingway Addleshaw. And in the book the poet had inscribed a poem to White, entitled ‘Hereafter’:
It may be we shall know in the hereafter
Why we, begetting hopes, give birth to fears,
And why the world's too beautiful for
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