In I895, as Oscar Wilde sat in Holloway

Prison awaiting trial on charges of sodomy,

Punch ingenuously wondered whether Art has

"a mission that may not be named, with "scarlet

sinS to enervate the age."

The age dealt with that mission by naming it

aestheticism, impressionism, decadence, symbol-

ism, and various other labels none entirely satis-

factory, all displaying certain characteristics of

the nervous sensibilities of those who sought in

art, as Walter Pater suggested, a sort of cloistered

refuge from a certain vulgarity in the outside

world. J- E. Chamberlin s brilliant study is about

that mission--as it was perceived both by its

missionaries and by those uncomfortable with

its implications.

In Ripe Was the Drowsy Hour, Chamberlin

focuses on Wilde, and on the personalities and

events that defined his world. His study moves

outward to include the culture and society of the

rime, and inward to suggest some of the motiva-

tions behind individual beliefs and commitments.

The world of Oscar Wilde, which included

such luminaries as Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beer-

bohm, Sarah Bernhardt, D Oyly Carte, John

Ruskin, George Bernard Shaw, James Whistler,

and W. B. Yeats, was an inseparable part of the

intellectual dilemmas, social confusions, and

aesthetic turmoils of the age. The fascination

with the perverse and the paradoxical, with

images of sinister charm and metaphors of

splendid artificiality, with the complex interrela-

tionships between sorrow and joy, pleasure and

pain, and beauty and truth, are Chamberlin s

subjects in this engrossing and important work.