After the subdued hues of the previous issue, the palette Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951) uses for The Green Sheaf’s twelfth number draws on warm, deep tones (fig. 1). This rich array of chroma, however, comes almost exclusively from Smith’s luminous image for one of her own poems, “The Town.” She hand colours the issue’s only other illustration, by Eric Maclagan (1879-1951), in quiet shades of pale blue, gray, and off-white. Smith and Maclagan provide the verses that accompany their respective images. Maclagan’s lines are selected from aphorisms addressing the experience of the individual alone with the self in The Wanderer and His Shadow (1880) by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). As the issue’s opening item, Maclagan’s illustrated translation establishes the issue’s thematic interest in the impressions of the solitary individual. Typically situated in a night setting, when the senses may be heightened and individuals feel most isolated, poems by Alix Egerton (1870-1923), Cecil French (1879-1953), Yone Noguchi (1879-1947), and John Todhunter (1839-1916) explore variations on this theme. Although keyed to the Nietzschean lines that open the number, the contents also evoke Walter Pater’s famous Conclusion to The Renaissance (1873): “Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” (Pater 235). The Paterian aestheticism expressed in this passage informs the symbolist proclivities of The Green Sheaf and its editor throughout the print run, but particularly in this, its penultimate number.

Placing Eric Maclagan’s illustrated translation of Nietzsche’s “Pinie und Blitz” (literally, Pine and Lightning) on the verso and Alix Egerton’s “A Song of the Night” on the recto, Smith opens the issue with two poems that address, in different ways, the situation of the solitary individual whose voice is unheard (fig. 2). Within a ruled border, Maclagan pictures a lone pine tree standing on the brink of a snowy cliff, with dark clouds portending a storm above; beneath this image, Nietzsche’s German text appears in calligraphic capitals. Maclagan’s free translation, “The Pine Tree Speaks,” is printed in italic font below the framed picture. The overall effect evokes an illuminated page by William Blake (1757-1827). Following in the path of W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), Maclagan treats Nietzsche’s aphoristic verses as if they emanated from one of Blake’s symbolic works. In December 1902—the same month he wrote Lady Gregory about Pamela Colman Smith’s plans for a new magazine—Yeats told his patron that “Nietzsche completes Blake & has the same roots” (Yeats, Letters 3.272 and 284). As co-editor of The Prophetic Books of William Blake: Jerusalem (advertised in The Green Sheaf’s back pages), Maclagan was very familiar with Blake’s oeuvre. How well either Smith or Maclagan, an art historian who later became the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, knew Nietzsche is less clear. The fin-de-siècle little magazine community had, however, been introduced to the philosopher’s life and controversial thinking in a series of essays by Havelock Ellis (1859-1939) published in volumes 2, 3, and 4 of The Savoy in 1896. Notably, The Savoy complemented Ellis’s tri-partite series on Nietzsche with Yeats’s series on Blake in volumes 3, 4, and 5. Here, the Irish poet famously identified Blake as “certainly the first great symboliste of modern times, and the first of any time to preach the indissoluble marriage of all great art with symbol” (3.41). Similarly, it is as a visionary illuminating art and symbol that Maclagan presents Nietzsche in the twelfth number of The Green Sheaf.

In contrast to Maclagan’s visual/verbal representation of the sublime pine tree awaiting the lightning’s assault, Egerton’s “A Song of the Night” on the facing page moves the reader into domestic space. Picking up on the theme of the solitary self who is unable to connect with another individual, Egerton itemizes a list of sounds that fail to penetrate the consciousness of the isolated addressee. Smith punctuates Egerton’s poem with small gray mouse, whose tints complement Maclagan’s dramatic image on the facing page, even while its tiny, vulnerable body differs dramatically from the pine tree’s sublime stoicism (fig. 2).

Exploring the experience of individual solitude in the midst of urban interaction, Smith’s “The Town” contrasts the darkness of the nocturnal setting with the warm light streaming from windows and illuminating walkways (fig. 3). The effect is to draw viewers into the scene in a way that makes them share the uncertain space occupied by the foregrounded character. The large central figure is a woman carrying a basket of oranges, who views the scene of pleasure before her from a detached distance. At left and slightly ahead of her are two gentlemen, who appear to be making their way toward the party-goers glimpsed in the illuminated spaces of the building, arcade, and grove pictured in the background. Taking the point-of-view of the isolated woman in the foreground, Smith’s verses comment negatively on the shallowness of “This great and weary town,” where “people talk and never do / As they go up and down” (“The Town,” 5). While chiming with the keynote established by the opening Nietzschean verses, the speaker’s solitude and disillusion with the human condition also recall Smith’s “Alone,” published in The Green Sheaf’s fourth number. As Katharine Cockin observes, the isolated figure is a recurring one in Smith’s art, typically “presented in a landscape which is both empty and, under the brooding surveillance of the figure, presented as if in a provisional state, waiting for something to happen” (77). In her illustration for “The Town,” Smith substitutes shadowy urban locale for barren landscape, but the isolated figure overlooking the scene retains “the introspective and individualist experience of the dream/vision” iconography Cockin describes (ibid).

Smith places two free-verse lyrics by Japanese poet Yone Noguchi on the page facing “The Town.” Like Smith’s quatrain, Noguchi’s poems use a night setting to explore the experience of solitude. Noguchi’s “Evening” contrasts the solitary speaker, waiting “for the Moon’s ascent, longing to see my own shadow— / My one wooer in the whole world,” with an image of couples making their way home for a night of love at the end of the day. Notably, Noguchi’s solitary man engaging his shadow evokes Nietzsche’s The Wanderer and His Shadow, the collection from which the issue’s opening item, “Pinie und Blitz,” derives. Noguchi’s other poem, “Mugen,” takes its title from the Japanese word for “infinite” (“Mugen,” def.). Using symbolic tropes, the lyric speaker describes meeting a Poet in spring and imaginatively riding the wind together with him and the Moon (Noguchi 4). In both setting and mood, Noguchi’s two lyrics also recall his free-verse poem “The Violet,” which Smith had included in the previous number of The Green Sheaf. The first Japanese poet to publish in English, Noguchi was admired on both sides of the Atlantic throughout much of the twentieth century (Marx 31).

The last two poems in the number are by Irish contributors Cecil French and John Todhunter. In this, his final contribution to The Green Sheaf, French presents a pair of poems in dialogue. In “Aithne,” the female speaker describes how she has “grown strange to my own self of late” and, like the “wanderers [who] lose both hope and memory,” now “yearns for twilight and dim space” (French 6). In “Dermid,” the male speaker imagines “Druid fantasies” where “the snows lie white kissed by the moon” and the “Untroubled stars look on the troubled world” (ibid.) Although the names Aithne and Dermid appear in Irish mythology, French seems to be drawing on occult tropes favoured by Rosicrucians and members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, rather than the traditional songs of Ossian. The mystical vision of his lyrics relates closely to that expressed in “The Nameless Ones” on the facing page, by Golden Dawn member John Todhunter. His lyric speaker describes how “the Nameless Ones come building and destroying” the “Mansions of Endeavour” through the elemental forces of air, water, and fire (7). A leader in the Irish Revival movement, Todhunter had published poems in two previous issues of The Green Sheaf and would make an important contribution to the Supplement for its final number: a personal memoir of the late Frederick York Powell (1850-1904), whose recent death, at the age of 54, had come as a shock to many.

In the Advertisements at the back of the number, Smith promotes “Some Interesting Books from Elkin Mathews’ List, by the late Professor F. York Powell” (Advertisements). She uses the front cover to alert readers that the Supplement to The Green Sheaf’s thirteenth number would honour the Oxford historian and President of the Folklore Society by printing Powell’s “A Dream” together with a memoir by Todhunter and a pencil portrait by John Butler Yeats (1839-1922). The final issue of The Green Sheaf would also include pictures by Reginald Rigby (1881-1943), Dorothy P. Ward (1879-1969), and Smith, as well as poems by Alix Egerton (1870-1932), Eleanor Vicocq Ward (1889-1976), and first-time contributor Evelyn Garnaut Smalley (1869-1938). Notably, Smith also takes advantage of the magazine’s public-facing cover to promote The Green Sheaf School of Hand-Colouring at its new premises in Knightsbridge, promising subscribers that they would receive “notices of all publications issued by them” (Smith, Front Cover, [i]).

With the completion of the periodical’s print run in sight, Smith was already planning her next publishing venture. The Green Sheaf Press was to bring out small editions of books with hand-coloured illustrations, printed on a hand-press and sold by subscription. Although Smith was not able to bring out an illustrated edition of William Blake as hoped, she did publish works by some Green Sheaf contributors (O’Connor 56-58). In addition to her own West Indian Chim-Chim Stories, the Green Sheaf Press list includes titles by Lady Alix Egerton, Reginald Rigby, and Christopher St. John (aka Christabel Marshall, 1871-1960). Continuing the approach established in the Green Sheaf magazine, Smith’s Green Sheaf Press would feature local-colour writing and poetry, often by women writers, in beautifully designed editions.

©2022 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, FRSC, Emerita Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Digital Humanities, Toronto Metropolitan University

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