The Birmingham age-herald., 1921-07-22
M D N, w O M E. N
 A ND HING

Hats off to the Birmingham Realty
 company and to Groom Beatty. ths
 beautifier, who always sees to it
 that trees. ornamental shrubs and
 Towering plants are set out to add
 to the charm of the new subdiyi
 sIons.
 had my attention called to this
 some months back, when some hand,
 were getting the plot of ground at
 the Mountain Terrace junction in or
 der to be sowed down with sunflower
 seeds. l have often wondered why
 this handsome and showy flower has
 been so little used. I reckon the
 reason Is that down south we are
 so used to it that its beauty is lost
 upon us.
 It took an Englishman to seize upon it and use it until it became as-
 sociated with him on his featuring
 tour in the United States, as Oscar
 Wilde and the sunflower were insep- arably used by the witty paragraph CTS and csrtoonist of the day. until their jibes and caricatures came very
 near plotting out his gospel of the
 beautiful.
 A chance remark of my older
 brother, Will, the father of Mercer. sank deep into my mind, although at tho time I was rather indifferent to aesthetics. He said it Is mighty easy to poke fun at the dress and postur- ing of the English aesthetic, but his
 mission is a worthy one in that this country of ours needs to be. indoc-j trinated with aestheticism. It changed my attitude towards tho tour of os- car Wilde.
 It Is hard to be fair in speaking or writing about"wilde as his life ended in disgrace. It was unhealthy from the start, and his career at Oxford. brilliant intellectually as he showed himself to be, was chiefly signalized by the part he played in what came ment which played such an important part in the thought and manners of the intellectual and fashionable world of his time
 Wilde adopted what to undergrad uates appeared to be an effeminite pose of casting scorn upon manly sports. wearing his hair long, deco- rating his rooms with peacock feath- CTS, lilies, sunflowers, blue china and other objects of art, which he de- clared his desire to Hive up to- af- fecting a lackadaisical manner, and protesting intense emotions on the subject of "art for art sakesy the Whistlerian doctrine.
 Wilde made himself the apostle of the new cult of aestheticism and ca.- rying the apostleship to such an ex- tent that his behavior while at Ox- ford got him ducking in the Cher we'll and & wrecking of his rooms. but this only advertised him and the doctrine, and so it spread among the fast society set to such an extent that languishing attitudes, "too-too" costumes and "aestheticism" general ly became a recognized pose.
 All who are old enough to remem- Der Patience. which came out in 1881, will remember how the aesthetes were burlesqued in the Gilbert and Sullivan travesty. l made my first trip to London in 1882 and struck ! the old town when it was in a fit over the new craze. Never was comic | opera able to do such cleansing work | for the clever wording and apt cos and realistic staging soon | killed the absurdities of the grow ing cult.
 But beneath the posturing of Wilde 1t cannot be denied that the "aes- | Lhetic" movement, in the aspect fund amentally represented by the school ,f William Morris and Rossetti. had | l permanent effect on decorative art. | [ have recently had occasion to read some of Wilde's articles on art and | he surely writes with the touch of d IndStCf anu N6S "SAA ooAS eO AOAN his own even with the unique, bit Ing and cool Whistler. the artist | whom we lent to Europe to disturb some of the "mandsrins" of the art schools.
 As the leading exponent of aesthet- | cism, Oscar Wilde got a vogue which | outran even London town and fn- vaded Paris, and finally crossed the Atlantic, and he became one of the | prominent personalities of the day; apart from the ridicule he encoun- tered, his paradoxes and his witty sayings were quoted on all sides. But am not writing of him as man or author or even faintly trying to ap- praise his worth or indict his shame less frailities. 1 simply had him brought to mind by the sunflower patch, which is we'll worth trip to the Mountain Terrace Junction car inc to see.
 1