THEODORE WRATISLAW

HEODORE WILLIAM GRAF WRATISLAW is a member of a family settled in Rugby for four generations. His greatgrandfather was a Bohemian noble, Count Marc Wratislaw von Mitrowitz, who came to England about 1770, and held the post of foreign language master at Rugby School until his death in 1796. Theodore Wratislaw, born at Rugby in April 1871, is the son of Mr Theodore Marc Wratislaw, for many years a solicitor practising in that town. He was educated at Rugby School, 1885-1888, passed the final examination for solicitors in 1893; and in 1895 entered the Estate Duty Office, Somerset House, where he still holds a position.

His earliest little volumes of poems, Love's Memorial and Some Verses, were published at Rugby in 1892. They were followed by Caprices, 1893, with a cover design by Gleeson White. Mr Wratislaw was now a member of that talented coterie of writers and artists -including Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Lord Alfred Douglas, Arthur Symons, Lionel Johnson, Gleeson White, Henry Harland, and Max Beerbohm-who will ever be associated with the last decade of the nineteenth century. Some of these men were called "decadent," but in the main their work was arresting, distinctive, and daringly original, and its characteristics are indelibly impressed upon the artistic history of the epoch in question.

Theodore Wratislaw's last volume of verse, Orchids, 1896, was produced by Leonard Smithers, the remarkable publisher who identified himself with the uncommon

literature of this time. He has also written The Pity of Love, 1895, a tragedy based on the dramatic love story of Sophie Dorothea (wife of George I.) and Philip von Königsmarck; and Algernon Charles Swinburne: a Study, 1900, which is his best-known work. Mr Wratislaw's verse is characteristic of the literary movement he allied himself with, or, as he put it: "A shrine of loves that laugh and swoon and ache, a temple of coloured sorrows and perfumed sins." But there is something finer in many of his poems-a plaintive regret for the fleeting joys of life, and, further, an interpretation of the sadness that underlies all earthly things and the transient beauties of Nature. For instance:

A MOOD

The tide was weary as it came
Towards the shore this autumn eve :
It caught the sun's descending flame,
And sighed and seemed too faint to grieve
Because the summer hasted to be gone
And all the days were done.

The sea heaved languidly and rolled
Its purple breakers on the sand;

An infinite sadness manifold

Fell on the deep and quiet land;

The seamews rested on the dipping foam
And had no thought of home.

The poppies shivered as the breeze
Went by and fell before it passed,
And from the cliff I heard the sea's
Faint requiem, the first and last,

Above the tomb of pleasures that were sped
And with the tear lay dead.

One with the season's languor, I
Lay long to watch the changing flight
Of colours in the dreary sky

Until the advent of the night,

While banks of cloud above the sea-line rose
And sorrow found repose.

And what a delicate, sad little threnody-worthy of Verlaine, with whom Wratislaw's verse may rightly be compared-is this:

So vague, so sweet a long regret !
So sweet, so vague a dead perfume
That lingers lest regret forget,

A memory from an old-world tomb

Where vainly sunshine gleams and vainly raindrops fret,
And dying summer's wind-breath goes

So lightly over petals of the fallen rose.
Autumnal starlight, scents of hay
Beneath the full September moon,
And then, ah! then! the sighing tune
That fades and yet is fain to stay:
Ah! weep for pleasures dead too soon,
While like the love-song of an ancient day
The distant music of the perfume dies away.

Somewhere, some day-I pray the day be soon!—
Shall I lie dead, perchance when this green floor
Of chequered grass beneath the sycamore
Is burnt up by the fierce September noon:
Some midnight when the sea's wan waters croon
Their lullaby to the enchanted shore,-

An ebb-tide with its vague and muffled roar—
Past where the wet sands glisten to the moon.
Then shalt thou gain at length thy great desire,
O heart of mine, O heart of tears and fire!

Thy life is troublous as the changing foam.
Then shalt thou lie at peace and solemn rest,
In calm attainment of thy life's long quest,
The haven of thy wish, thine only home.

This, indeed, seems to sum up the philosophy of the "decadents" of the nineties: how few of those who made that period memorable survive to-day.

S. M. ELLIS.

PART II

THE POETESSES OF

WARWICKSHIRE

ARRANGED IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER