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Title: Oscar Wilde in outline
Author: Charles Joseph Finger
Editor: E. Haldeman-Julius
Release date: December 18, 2025 [eBook #77494]
Language: English
Original publication: Girard: Haldeman-Julius Company, 1923
Credits: Tim Miller, Terry Jeffress, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OSCAR WILDE IN OUTLINE ***
TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 442
Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
Oscar Wilde in
Outline
Charles J. Finger
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright 1923,
Haldeman-Julius Company.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
OSCAR WILDE IN OUTLINE
One fiery-coloured moment of great life!
And then--how barren the nations’ praise!
How vain the trump of Glory! Bitter thorns
Were in that laurel leaf, whose toothed barbs
Burned and bit deep till fire and red flame
Seemed to feed full upon my brain, and make
The garden a bare desert.
With wild hands
I strove to tear it from my bleeding brow,
But all in vain; and with a dolorous cry
That paled the lingering stars before their time,
I waked at last, and saw the timorous dawn
Peer with grey face into my darkened room,
And would have deemed it a mere idle dream
But for this restless pain that gnaws my heart,
And the red wounds of thorns upon my brow.
--_Translation from the Polish of
Madame Modjeska by Oscar Wilde._
THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE
Thou knowest all; I seek in vain
What lands to till or sow with seed--
The land is black with briar and weed,
Nor cares for falling tears or rain.
Thou knowest all; I sit and wait
With blinded eyes and hands that fail,
Till the last lifting of the veil
And the first opening of the gate.
Thou knowest all; I cannot see.
I trust I shall not live in vain,
I know that we shall meet again
In some divine eternity.
Men in general often find it hard to dissociate the work of artists
from the circumstances of their lives. Let a company fall to talking
of Villon, and it is a safe bet that before long someone will drag in
the incident of his having wandered very close to the gallows. Talk of
Baudelaire, and we are prone to forget, for a moment, his _Flowers of
Evil_, to recall that he painted his hair green. Of Dowson, we remember
that he was a pot house drunkard and overlook his _Impenitentia
Ultima_. Sometimes it seems, indeed, as though more truth was in the
saying that the evil that men do lives after them and the good is
often interr’d with their bones, than the reverse. Certainly Oscar
Wilde’s place in literature would have been decided long ago but for
the distortion caused by circumstances in his life. But, as the mists
clear, certain points stand out. It seems very definitely decided
that as a poet he flew on wings too feeble to reach the clear, cold
heights of Parnassus, two poems only being marked for distinction.
_The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ and _The Sphinx_. As a writer of fiction
he will probably be forgotten, or at best, remembered by one book, as
is Charles Brockden Brown, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ living as a
literary curiosity as _Wieland_ lives, or as Beckford’s _Vathek_ lives,
a thing at once odd and curious. As literary critic Wilde cannot rank
with Hazlitt or Sainte-Beuve. As dramatist, doubtless, his fame is
secure, and as essayist he will not be forgotten.
His friend, M. Andre Gide, has told us that Wilde said his novels and
stories were written as the result of wagers made. That is hard to
believe. Too plainly both novels and stories bear the earmarks of Wilde
the stylist. His novel, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, approaches too
nearly his expressed ideal, his desire to write a tale that should be
of the wondrous beauty of a Persian rug. If Wilde wrote either novel or
story on a wager, he must have wagered with himself. For Oscar Wilde
took himself far too seriously to hang his art on a hair, to stake his
literary reputation on the casting of a die. Indeed, he took himself
and his art more seriously than he took the world, and that to his own
undoing.
In another place I have shown how Wilde was influenced, how his
life’s path was pulled out of its calculated orbit because of his
feminine soul, and how heredity swayed his acts. Of that last he was
well aware, has, indeed, confessed to the world more than once and
especially in a passage in _The Critic as Artist_:
Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative
life. It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try
to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and
written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch
it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that
mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of
the Fates, and the most terrible. It is the ONLY one of the Gods
whose real name we know.
The feminine soul naturally had its influence, gave his literary work
a tendency, a direction. To say that it did so seems so obvious as
almost to be platitudinous. With that feminine soul he could never have
written a _Call of the Wild_, for instance, nor could he have written
a _Walden_, because he was physically and mentally incapable of living
a life of adventure as Jack London lived, or of scaling life down to
the bare bone as Thoreau did. The fact is that Wilde himself was a
contradiction, this giant of a man with the feminine soul was the sport
of the gods, and that the spirit of contradiction entered into his
writings is everywhere apparent in the written page.
Another thing the feminine soul did for him. Because of that inner
urge, he was filled with a burning desire to be admired, and therefore
wrote much for the pyrotechnical effect. In a word, he loved to show
off, to say and write things calculated to startle. You have exactly
the same spirit manifest in Chesterton, in Belloc, too, but to lesser
degree. But in Wilde, that self-satisfied strutting, that peacock
exhibition of brilliant parts is very obvious, indeed.
Added to the spirit of contradiction and the pavonic display, there
was, in Wilde, a strong spirit of partizanship. That accounts for his
proclamation of himself as a kind of John the Baptist for Charles
Baudelaire. Indeed, for a time, the Baudelairean influence colored all
that he wrote and he outdid his master in ornateness. The same spirit
of partizanship led him to out-Pater Pater. He conceived it to be a
worthy mission to acquaint the stolid British public with Platonic
teachings, especially as relating to affection between men. That,
of course, was as impossible a task and as hopeless as it would be
to attempt to grow banana trees in Greenland. However, Wilde worked
valiantly in his cause and, because of ignorance, and some wilful
distortion and misrepresentation, much that he wrote in all sincerity
later in his life plagued him.
As final ingredients there may be cited his opposition to the
commercialism and the philistinism of his day which he shared in
company with John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, and his real desire to
cultivate the capacity for refined enjoyment of the beautiful in art
and literature, an outcropping of his partizanship of Walter Pater.
THE SPIRIT OF CONTRADICTION
In some respects Wilde was like a clever debater who takes keen delight
in flouting the opposition. He was of that sort who, privately granting
the conclusions of his opponent, will deliberately beat about the bush
in an effort to discover entirely new reasons, spiritedly rejecting all
those advanced by the other side. Chesterton is of the same stripe. To
such men to be destructive, to dazzle, to astound, is meat and drink.
Of all pleasures, there is none to interest them as does the game of
conversational entanglements. At whatever cost, they must score off of
the opposition, be that opposition an individual, the public, custom or
convention. Nor do they come unscathed from the battle, for prejudices
and widely held beliefs are very solid things to butt against. Not
with entire impunity may anyone attack what men have imbibed with
their mother’s milk. Conventions and customs are results of ages of
experience and to modify them with changing circumstances is, at the
best, a slow task.
By way of instance of the argument contradictory and provoking, let us
take a passage from _The Importance of Being Earnest_. It runs: “The
modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly
a thing to be encouraged in others.” Reading that, your average man
who belongs to a fraternal order, who subscribes to charity funds,
who rushes to fountain pen when a begging list is thrust before him,
is shocked. “What!” he exclaims, “would this fellow abolish sympathy?
would he weaken personal love and human affection? Does he scorn the
little child whose mother clung to it until it sunk into its grave? My
dear, old mother who----” and so on. There would be sentimentalities,
and, at the end, Wilde would stand condemned as a cold callous
anti-Christ.
But without trying to read anything into what Wilde has written except
that which was actually there, reading carefully and accepting it as
the result of his own thought and experience, we find much of value.
We remember that Wilde had pondered long on hereditary influences,
was fully aware that he came from a failing stock and inherited fatal
weaknesses. He had also said something anent the stupidity of holding
that marriage was an institution determined by an omniscient divinity
and if anything was made in heaven it was divorce, not marriage.
Putting these together we have, not a cold and callous piece of
impudence, but an idea which, if pondered, we find leads to the belief
that society would do well to regard as an offense against itself the
mating of undesirables from whom might spring unhealthy branches,
or those prone to weaknesses or disease. Approached from another
direction the teaching looks sound enough and we embrace it, calling it
the gospel of Eugenics. Certainly, a couple having married and finding
in the course of time that their union was unfavorable, unpromising as
to their mutual happiness, would, most certainly, do well to separate,
for of all creatures, who so unhappy as children of a joyless union?
Hence Wilde’s “Divorces are made in heaven.” Hence, also, his scornful
contempt for those who spend efforts on the result of those social
ills which we see in the sick. After all, it is not vastly removed
from Christ’s swift answer to the sentimentalist: “Let the dead bury
the dead.” The Wilde idea closely touches Nietzsche’s. There is little
time to waste on failures. Man is in a state of transition and must
be surpassed. The human race has a long march before it. Which leads
to another apparently contradictory statement, another solid truth:
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” Of
course it is, although shallow or thoughtless people denounced Wilde as
a stirrer up of trouble when the saying was quoted by socialists and
organizers of the unemployed. Had Wilde said, “It is the duty of every
Englishman to be progressive,” the platitude would have been hailed
with delight, and he might have basked in the concentrated smiles of
the black-coated million. But he chose the argument contradictory and
shocked with a truth. The unthinking saw in the saying, not a very
ordinary remark, but a gospel of discontent calculated to make men
vicious and improvident, anarchical and cruel.
Take another instance of the argument contradictory, one from his
essay, _The Decay of the Art of Lying_, which enraged many on this side
of the Atlantic. Here it is:
The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit,
its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of
imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due
to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who
according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie,
and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington
and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of
time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.
The book of collected essays, be it said, is called _Intentions_. Now
Wilde’s intention in the passage quoted, in the entire essay in fact,
was to register a condemnation of the idiotic habit of pestiferous
puritans in forever trying to tack a “moral lesson” to a work of art.
And the desire to do that is distinctly an American vice. Not more
than two weeks ago I came across an instance in which a school teacher
had set his pupil the task of writing an essay with this as subject:
“What moral lesson do we get from Robert Louis Stevenson’s _Treasure
Island_?” Now it must be clear to any thinking man that Stevenson
had no more idea of trying to convey a moral lesson in that glorious
tale than he had of advocating murder and piracy. Healthy minds read
for pleasure and not for moral profit, and no sane boy rushes out to
murder his grandmother because he has read the life of Nero. But our
moralists are forever trying to turn the world into a loveless place, a
hell in which each and every one is expected to be forever in a state
of awful spiritual anguish, imagining themselves to be reprobate,
shaken with religious doubt. The dark and cruel fanaticism of the
uplifter would rob both youth and man of joy, and the world would be,
had the moral-lesson monger his way, a duller, blanker, grayer place
every day. The uplifter would fasten upon us a blighting, spiritual
tyranny. On young America, then, the meddlers made an early start.
Washington, the national hero, must be portrayed first and foremost as
inhuman, a something not of the world in which all men are liars. But
at bottom, Wilde was driving home the salutory lesson that art is, must
be, independent of morality: must, assuredly, follow its destiny quite
independent of moral purpose.
From quite another point of view, from a common sense point of view,
we may come to a realization of the folly of painting our national
heroes as monsters of virtue--as Charles Grandisons, all correct and
precise, and finicking. To endow our Lincolns and Washingtons with
middle class respectability is to belittle them. The picture of them
is unconvincing, as the picture of men without faults always is. Your
sensible European knows better than to set up a moral scarecrow with
all bad spots painted out, and loves his Nelson none the less because
of the Lady Hamilton affair, approves of his Dickens while admitting he
loved his glass, had a golden opinion of the late King Edward, although
he had his _affaires_.
“The crude commercialism of America,” that Wilde denounced time
and time again, seems to be something that we are only now coming
to realize. Thoreau denounced it, of course; also did Emerson, but
theirs were voices in the wilderness. Today the cry is being taken up
everywhere. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, John Hall Wheelock and a
dozen others are calling upon men to see something more than the mere
piling up of dollars in life. It is being realized that we are, as a
nation, sadly under-educated, that we have overlooked something of
the highest import when we have overlooked real self-culture. Wilde’s
words, once considered odd, now no longer have the appearance of oddity.
The development of the race depends on the development of the
individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the
intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately
lost. If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in
educating himself--a rare type in our time, I admit, but still
one occasionally to be met with--you rise from table richer, and
conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified
your days.
And in another place in the same essay, _The Critic as Artist_:
Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence,
noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
section of the community among whom he cast his lot, can seriously
claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment
about any one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The
necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in
the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which
people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And,
harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people
deserve their doom.
To say that “we live in an age in which people are so industrious as to
be stupid” has a ring of contradiction, especially to a people taught
to sing with Dr. Watts:
How doth the busy little bee
Improve each shining hour,
but, after all, what have we in the paragraph but a very honest
admission that in life, too much is often sacrificed to that _eclat_
of success, that too many signally fail to see that there is such a
thing as losing a life while trying to gain it, that in the chase
for supremacy or for wealth, the finer things are often missed. And
you know, and I know, and we all know that men are overworked and
under-educated, and that there is a certain culture which modern
education cannot supply. The position taken by Wilde is quite tenable
to those who have been fortunate enough to read Matthew Arnold’s
_Literature and Dogma_. Nor is it a new truth that Wilde gives, but, on
the contrary, a very old one brilliantly stated. It is the tale told
by Aesop, the tale of the dog crossing the bridge with a bone in its
mouth. The shadow of notoriety is grasped at and the bond of really
desirable things lost forever. It is the viewpoint indicated by that
sturdy individualist Sumner that the man who makes the most of himself
and does his best in his sphere, is far more valuable in the long run
than the philanthropist who runs about with a scheme which would set
the world straight if everyone would accept it. Wilde, in his oblique
way, was getting the truth home that a man is a bundle of possibilities
and that it behooves each and every man to find his bent, to chart his
course true to some Polaris. And, moreover, each and every one must
find his compulsion in himself. “Become what thou art,” said Nietzsche.
One thing more seems necessary to say in this connection anent the
crude commercialism of America and its materializing spirit. For
generations we have not only hammered away at the moral lesson,
but have made the mistake of setting up a kind of god of social
ambition, of domination, telling the young that with this, that and
the other quality encouraged, great will be the material reward. The
governmentship of the state, the presidency of the country, we have
insisted, would be the goal within the reach of everyone, the height
to which all should aspire, the prize within each grasp. That, of
course, is pernicious nonsense, and not only nonsense but senseless
social ambition. The stupidity of it may best be realized by imagining
an employer inept enough to tell his hands that each of them, by
being punctual and accurate, would have the management of the concern
within his grasp. Apart from the untruthfulness of that because of the
possibility of several developing the required qualities to the same
degree, consider the foolishness. For, it is perfectly obvious that a
manager of, we will say, a scrap iron business, having discovered a
good man at the handles of the electric hoist, would certainly keep
that man in his position and not advance him through the auditing
department and so on the road to the management. No wise manager would
spoil an excellent hoist man to make an indifferent bookkeeper. To do
that would be a step towards disintegration. In other words, everyone
in authority in the business world aims at the development of the
individual and not to the inculcation of social ambition. Nationally,
the same idea should be pursued on the ground that “where self-culture
has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly
lowered.” In a passage in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ we find the same
idea:
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature
perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid
of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all
duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are
charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their
own souls starve, and are naked.
Without individual self-development, insists Wilde, a society,
a nation, must become an empty thing, a thing all front, like a
Scandinavian troll. In the play _A Woman of No Importance_ Wilde,
emphasizing the point, puts a searing speech into the mouth of his
character Hester Worsley:
You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How
could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the
good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do,
on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you
throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a
season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how
to live--you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you
can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and
do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty
of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life’s secret.
Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It
has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper
in purple. It sits like a dread thing smeared with gold. It is all
wrong, all wrong.
Yes, there was a spirit of contradiction in Oscar Wilde and he
delighted in awakening opposition, but looked at properly we find much
that is inexorably logical beneath what seems to be tricksy humor.
He made his hearers writhe while they smiled, and the writhing was
salutary.
WILDE’S SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP
As I have said, Wilde’s writings are tinged with Baudelaire, a man of
strong convictions and with a very definite attitude to art and to
life, who has been made a symbol of perversity and decadence. But
let that pass for the time. Granted that Charles Baudelaire had made
excursions into strange dream lands by way of the opium and hashish
door, it is not for us to damn any more than to deify. What engages
us at this moment is Baudelaire’s poetic creed and its influence upon
Oscar Wilde. Baldly translated, I give the Baudelairean poetic creed
thus: “Poetry ... poetry has no other aim than itself; it cannot
have any other aim, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly
worthy of the name of poem, as that which will have been written
only for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to say--be it
understood--that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result
may not be to raise men above vulgar interests. That would evidently
be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a moral aim, he
has diminished his poetical power, and it is not imprudent to wager
that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, under pain of death or
degradation, assimilate itself to science or to morals. It has not
truth for its object, it has only itself.”
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this does not mean that there
is a predilection for things immoral, a delight in depravity and in
ugliness. It simply means what should be a self evident truth, a truth
accepted by all reasonable men; that art runs its course independently
of morality just as it runs independently of science or of political
economy; that wise men do not look for a moral lesson in works of art,
should, indeed, accept poetry just as they accept music. Who, hearing
a Beethoven sonata, would search for the lesson in it? Who so foolish
as to seek a moral sentiment in Rubinstein’s _Kammenoi-Ostrow_? Wilde’s
way of stating his artistic creed was very similar to Baudelaire’s.
Thus:
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon
eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes
are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To
morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
I wrote, a few paragraphs back, that Baudelaire had become a kind of
symbol. A word of explanation is due. Just as Hogarth chose to picture
a side of life which others of his time were either too blind, or too
squeamish, or too cowardly, or too conventional minded to attempt,
pictures that showed the beast in man, the human being as Yahoo and
Struldbrug, pictures a man debauched, dissipated, degraded and
filthy, so has Baudelaire sung of the unwholesome things which are
part of our artificial life--of vice, and crime, and corruption. Very
engagingly too he dabbles in things esoteric and diabolical. Take that
little prose poem, _The Generous Player_--a tale in which the chief
character sells his soul to the devil on condition that he shall be
free from boredom for the remainder of his days, but, after the compact
is made, begins to doubt with horror whether his satanic majesty will
keep his word. So, to reassure himself, he prays in semi-slumber: “My
God; Lord my God! Let it be that the Devil keep his word.” It is a
queer tale and there are others akin to it, but each must read for
himself, must try to understand the peculiar attraction for, not only
the diabolical, but the loathsome, the morbid, the criminal and the
lewd had for the Frenchman. Of course, the more Baudelaire was attacked
for his supposed immorality the more extravagant he became. Still, he
was a great poet and a master of the word.
Unfortunately, somehow, we are inclined to overlook the fact that
it is not Frenchmen alone who have pictured the horrible. We forget
Morrison with his _Tales of Mean Streets_, Caradoc Evans with his
stories of sordid poverty and crime in the Welsh hill-country, Thomas
Burke and his dock-land sketches. But pass all that. Enamored of
Baudelaire, Wilde’s work became affected just as Swinburne’s work
was by the same influence, and, in another branch of art, Aubrey
Beardsley’s. But let us not overlook the fact that there is everywhere
manifested a vast interest in the odd and the bizarre, in the occult
and the fantastic. That peculiar interest accounts for the popularity
of others besides those whose names I have mentioned; Poe, for
instance, and Ambrose Bierce, and Zola, and Gautier and De Maupassant.
It accounted for the vast interest which, as Frank Harris tells us,
was manifested in Wilde’s poem, _The Harlot’s House_, as a poem slight
enough, but as a picture very attractive, as all forbidden things are
attractive.
We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot’s house.
Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille.
They took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.
Then, turning to my love, I said,
“The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.”
Baudelaire, and Wilde as well, sometimes ran _fanti_, just as men
in arguments are intoxicated with their own verbosity. So we find
Wilde in the warmth of his partizanship not only couching a lance for
Baudelaire, but handling edged swords, to be wounded later with his
own weapons. Thus:
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it
the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its
curiosity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its
intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony
of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality,
it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What
are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about
chastity and it may be that it is to the shame of Magdalen, and not
to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their
freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it
makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a
multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty
of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly
proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged
in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method
by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival
of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain
which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and
which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars
in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the
criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we
had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint
goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his
harvest.--_The Critic as Artist._
That, which played a great part in Wilde’s trial, is apparently a
kind of advocacy of the M. Fr. Paulhan point of view, (_Le Nouveau
Mysticisme_, page 94) the Decadent philosophy dished up and watered
for British consumption. Baudelaire had said that “the vulgar sought
goodness as an end,” and Wilde had this:
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is
obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid
terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low
passion for middle-class respectability.--_The Critic as Artist._
Instances might be multiplied, but enough has been said to show that
Wilde not only depended for effects upon a manifestation of his spirit
of contradiction, but somewhat suffered in his art because of his
partizanship. Still, of his originality there can be no doubt and a
partizan is not necessarily a plagiarist.
As to the charge of plagiarism, while others have charged Wilde with
the literary sin, it remained for his former friend, Lord Alfred
Douglas, to be the most bitter in denunciation. “His (Wilde’s) sonnets
are, for the most part, Miltonic in their effects; the metre and
method of _In Memoriam_ are used in the greater number of his lyrics;
and he used the metre which Tennyson sealed to himself for all time
even in _The Sphinx_, which is his great set work; while in such
pieces as _Charmides_, _Panthea_, _Humanitad_ and _The Burden of Itys_
he borrowed the grave pipe of Matthew Arnold.” Writing of the poem
_Le Mer_, Douglas says: “The bird is Wilde, the plumage and call are
Tennyson’s to a fault.” Again, “While Wilde arranges the stanzas as
though they consisted of two lines, they really consist of Tennyson’s
four ... Tennyson’s suns as well as Tennyson’s stanza!” In another
place Douglas writes: “I have not space to enter into great detail
with regard to those lyrics of Wilde which are not flatly Tennysonian.
There are about twenty of them, and they include a cheap imitation of
_La Belle Dame sans Merci_, a flagrant copy of Hood’s lines beginning
‘Take her up tenderly’--(Douglas refers to the poem _The Bridge of
Sighs_)--and sundry pieces which are childishly reminiscent of Mrs.
Browning, William Morris and even Jean Ingelow.... Wilde was an
over-sedulous ape, so over-sedulous, in fact, that he is careful to
emphasize and exaggerate the very faults and defects of his masters.”
Douglas is bitter as gall and, like the gallant Michael Monahan, I
prefer to quote him with the sonnet he wrote on learning of the death
of Oscar Wilde:
I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress.
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress,
And all the world was an enchanted place.
And then methought outside a fast-locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds,
And so I woke and knew that he was dead!
It leaves a sweeter taste in the mouth.
AS FICTION WRITER
Possessed with the spirit of contradiction, obsessed with the
Baudelairean diabolism, Wilde tried his hand at fiction with curious
results. Be it remembered that he was one of those odd and lucky
individuals in whom bubble up at all times plots and ideas and
situations capable of being used in the making of stories. Such
minds see not only the thing before them, a man and a woman, we will
say, walking towards one another over a bridge, but with a leap into
a strange world of possibilities or probabilities, there is conjured
up within them a thousand visions of things odd and fantastic, which
might happen. It is not even correct to say that they are men of great
imagination--they are more than that. They are, in a respect, tortured
men, men whose minds project them into all kinds of situations. They
themselves die a thousand deaths, suffer a thousand sorrows and pains,
are torn with a thousand griefs. You see that kind of character in
Charles Dickens who is always on the verge of tears or laughter,
enjoying life, actually enjoying it with Micawber, with Pickwick, with
Sam Weller, with Cap’n Cuttle, with the Crummeles: suffering with
Oliver Twist, with Sidney Carton, with his little Nell, with his Tom
Pinch. Such men live the lives that they portray and there is a vast
gulf separating them from those writers who artistically contrive
their characters but keep themselves apart from them as a Creator is
apart from his creatures. Thackeray for instance, who will paint for
you a Beatrix, a Henry Esmond, a Harry Warrington, a Madam Bernstein,
a Captain Costigan, but who will step down as it were, among his
audience, and comment upon the characters upon the stage; sometimes,
indeed, interrupt his narrative to point a moral. Of that sort too was
Trollope: of the other sort was George Eliot. Yet, in both cases, in
the case of Dickens as well as in the case of Thackeray, with George
Eliot as with Trollope, you have accurate pictures of life and of
society, and the prejudices, the motives, the ambitions, the form and
construction of the mind of the fictional personages are as evident to
the reader as if he lived in their very presence.
Accepting Dickens and Thackeray as examples, we see Wilde with that
peculiar constitution of mind which made him prone to identify himself
with his characters, but, again, he had that streak of perversity in
him which refused to allow the characters he imagined to act a rational
way or to live in a rational world. There was in him that childish
and destructive habit of destroying his own toys, the habit we see in
Chesterton who paints pictures perfectly credible in his Auberons and
Barkers and Quins, but sets them to doing fantastic tricks, standing
on their heads, running about in queer disguises and undertaking to do
things that would, in a sane society, promptly land them in the lunatic
asylum. And, of course, with the trick of perversity, Wilde had that
Baudelairean bent.
With what has been said kept in mind, consider Wilde’s story, _Lord
Arthur Savile’s Crime_, which appeared in the _Court and Society
Review_ in 1887 and in book form in 1891. In the story you have a mimic
world that is a faithful reflection of the contemporary world with its
lords and ladies and society folk of wealth, hobnobbing with poets,
socialists, nihilists, sceptics and odd characters. To verify the truth
of his picture of the reception at Bentick house, one has but to turn
to the pages of the newspapers of the day, the society journals rather,
and mark the names of those in the public eye: Lady Jeune, William
Morris, Prince Kropotkine, Burne Jones, Labouchere, the Positivist
crowd with Frederic Harrison and his friends, the theosophists with
Madam Blavatsky and Sinnett, the agnostics with Annie Besant and
Stewart Ross and Dr. Marsh; others too, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard
Shaw, Belfort Bax, Walter Crane. Such a gathering is hardly possible in
America where there is no democracy, but, instead, an aristocracy of
wealth. It was, and is, quite possible in the older country in which
there is a real democracy, where two impulses are present, a respect
for tradition and for visible authority and a regard for precedent on
the one hand, and on the other a regard for certain abstract principles
and a strong sense of the value of individual judgment. Between an
organized aristocracy and an organic people things are balanced and the
triumph of one does not develop into despotism, nor does the triumph
of the other result in sullen mob rule. So, as I say, the picture of
the reception is perfectly credible and Wilde paints well, as well as
Dickens paints when he tells us of the belfry in _The Chimes_, or of
Fountain Court in his _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
But now mark the Wilde who twists things, who, in a stage set for
things as they are, chooses, in his contradictory spirit, to bring in
events as they are not at all apt to be.
One of his characters is a palmist and to him goes the hero, Lord
Arthur Savile. The palmist, Mr. Podgers, tells his client that his fate
is read--that he is to become a murderer. Now see the odd kink, the
paradox. Lord Savile, being about to marry, finds his mind occupied
with the prediction. So, since it is decreed that he must do murder,
the sooner it is done and out of the way, the better. There is a kind
of Benvenuto Cellini touch here, the Cellini who when at work in
his shop finds his brain on fire because a fellow has annoyed him,
so rushes out dagger in hand to stab him and have done with it; the
Cellini who finding himself filled with amatory desire while at work,
satisfies himself with his model and gets to work again. So Wilde’s
Lord Savile. To him it does not very much matter who the victim is, so
he tries to poison an aunt and fails, then attempts to kill an uncle
with an infernal machine. Disgusted with his ill success he takes a
walk along the Thames embankment to ponder, when his eyes light upon
the palmist leaning on the parapet with folded arms, gazing into the
black depth. Then:
In a moment he had seized Mr. Podgers by the legs and flung him
into the Thames. There was a coarse oath, a heavy splash, and all
was still. Lord Arthur looked anxiously over, but could see nothing
of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an eddy of
moonlit water. After a time it sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers
was visible. Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky
misshapen figure striking out for the staircase of the bridge, and
a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to
be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a
cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realized the decree
of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and Sybil’s name came
to his lips.
You see the kink, or course. A murder with no cause. A murder and
no remorse. The victim rather a scarecrow kind of figure. And you
see also, the Baudelairean gesture properly watered for English
consumption. Bear in mind, too, the quotation made a few pages ago from
_The Critic as Artist_, relating to sin as an essential element of
progress.
Of course, the story is all tricksy fooling and certainly not worth
while. It is thin stuff, poor stuff, unworthy stuff and all this
largely because insincere and imitative. One seems to see Wilde
starting seriously enough, to break off at a tangent with a discordant
burst of laughter. But here is a point to consider. Had Wilde been
accused of murder, and placed on trial, what hidden tendency think you,
would have been discovered by a keen lawyer in the book? There’s matter
for thought there.
We pass to the longer story, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. In this,
Wilde tried to do something new, putting indeed, into the mouth of
one of his characters his ideal: “to write a novel that would be as
lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal.” He did, or attempted
more, endeavoring to break away from the English tradition and write
a novel with no love interest as motive. A task glorious enough to be
sure, for, as every thoughtful man must have realized, the Anglo-Saxon
is not obsessed with sex. The acquisition of a woman is by no means
the greatest thing in life, nor is it the thing that absorbs a man.
Marriage is a mere incident. Other things occupy his mind far more than
sex: business, for example, and art, and ambition.
Now the story thread of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is slight enough.
A picture has been painted by Dorian’s friend, and, while the subject
of the picture retains his youth and beauty, the picture ages, the
face on the canvas reflecting the life of the man, showing the stigmata
of a life of folly, of vice, of lust, of hypocrisy. The discovery of
the change is thus described:
“You won’t? Then I must do it myself,” said the young man; and he
tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in
the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him.
There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust
and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own face that he
was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely
marred that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the
thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The sodden
eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble
curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiseled nostrils and
from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done
it? He seemed to recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his
own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized
the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left hand
corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire.
Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. “My God!
if it is true,” he exclaimed, “and this is what you have done with
your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against
you fancy you to be!” He held the light up again to the canvas,
and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as
he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness
and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life
the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting
of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.
A mere extract, of course, robs the scene of its vitality, but still,
Wilde does not stir in the reader the passion of horror that a true
artist should. Compare the scene with that never-to-be-forgotten page
in Conrad’s _Secret Agent_ where the woman thrusts the carving knife
into the heart of her husband, or the latter part of _Le Père Goriot_
where Balzac bruises the reader’s heart as he tells of the torture of
anguish; or the picture in Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ where Steyne is
knocked down. The truth is that Wilde, as Ross told Blunt, was forever
thinking of his style, and when a man has his pose in mind, he is not
very apt to lay the lash on heavily. Machen, in his _Hieroglyphics_,
has had much to say on the ecstasy of writers, much that is well worth
reading, and he proves his point to the hilt. That ecstasy, Wilde
lacked. Within him were no eternal tempests. Never could he say with
Byron, “I have written from the fulness of my mind, from passion, from
impulse, from many motives but not from their sweet voices.” Wilde did
write for “sweet voices” and, consequently he lacked much that a writer
of fiction requires. Turn to the passage in the _Secret Agent_, which I
have mentioned, read it and compare it with this, the death of Dorian
Gray. Wilde seems sluggish, uninterested, aloof.
Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the half clad domestics
were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was
crying, and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.
After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of
the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no
reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly
trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on
to the balcony. The windows yielded easily; the bolts were old.
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid
portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the
wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was
a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was
withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they
had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
The most patient of readers is surfeited in the book with long,
descriptive, catalogue-like passages telling of the fantastic pursuits
of Dorian Gray, a literary trick evidently imitative of certain
French writers--Barres, Huysmans and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. Indeed,
in places, the character Dorian Gray is strongly reminiscent of the
character Des Essientes who “with his vaporizers injected into his
room an essence formed of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, ess.
boquet....” There is much more of it in the pages of _A Rebours_. As I
say, Wilde proved himself to be very imitative. You must read his ninth
chapter, but a single quotation will give some idea:
And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their
manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils, and burning odorous
gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that
had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself
to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in
frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred
one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead
romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that
stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real
psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of
sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic
balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens of
hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able
to expel melancholy from the soul.
Dorian Gray collects many things, plays with many things, to chase away
his _ennui_: musical instruments, jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical
vestments, and there are long catalogues in the case of each one
similar to that given above in relation to perfumes. There are pages,
especially in the ninth chapter that remind the reader of nothing more
than a great storehouse with Wilde standing before jumbled piles,
picking this thing after that in the manner of a suave auctioneer and
commenting upon each article quite oblivious of the fact that his
hearers yawn, and that no real business is being done.
There is, all through the book, the Baudelairean influence. Dorian Gray
becomes very like the owls of Baudelaire sitting in a row, in his moods
of inactivity. Nor is the Baudelairean interest in crime and criminals
unimitated. Dorian ponders over strange things: over Gian Maria who
used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was
“covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on
his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle
stained with the blood of Perotto; Petro Riario, the young Cardinal
Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sextus IV., whose
beauty was equaled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora
of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with
nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve her at
the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be
cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red
blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the fiend, as was
reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling
with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took
the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of
three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta,
the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was
burned at Rome, as the enemy of God and man, who strangled
Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup
of emerald, and in honor of a shameful passion built a pagan church
for Christian worship; Charles VI., who had so wildly adored his
brother’s wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that
was coming on him, and who could only be soothed by Saracen cards
painted with the images of Love and Death and Madness; and, in his
trimmed jerkin and jeweled cap and acanthus-like curls, Grifonetto
Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his
page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the
yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose
but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.”
The truth is, that in the character Dorian Gray, Wilde portrayed not
a normal man, but one who comes very near the border line of being
what Krafft-Ebing would have termed a degenerate. Certainly he shows a
moral insensibility, a lack of proper judgment and ethical ideas. His
egoistic ambition is unlimited and he is full of a sentimentality that
is shallow cant. The book made a sensation and estimates of it ranged
from the zenith to nadir. There were those who extolled it and those
who damned it, just as there were those that extolled and others that
damned _Jurgen_ and _Ulysses_, as there were those that raised Rossetti
to the skies and others who charged him with all sorts of artistic sins
and said things anent the extolling of fleshliness as the distinct and
supreme end of pictorial and poetic art.
The thing that is rare and valuable in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is
the vivid coloring, the effect of an atmosphere of expensive and highly
artificial life and cultured luxury; the florid and poetic style.
He depicts a highly artificial life and idealizes it. He portrays
a quite impossible world, as impossible as the world of pastoral
poetry where meadows were inhabited by youths and maidens who guided
sheep and carried beribboned crooks, and conversed in rhymed iambic
octosyllables, and danced and sang. For, in your experience doubtless
as in mine, never has man talked to man, off of a chautauquan platform,
like this:
“Let us go and sit in the shade,” said Lord Henry. “Parker has
brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare
you will be quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again.
You really must not let yourself become sunburned. It would be very
unbecoming to you.”
“What does it matter?” cried Dorian, laughing, as he sat down on
the seat at the end of the garden.
“It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray.”
“Why?”
“Because you have now the most marvelous youth, and youth is the
one thing worth having.”
“I don’t feel that, Lord Henry.”
“No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled
and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and
passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it,
you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.
Will it always be so?... You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr.
Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius--is
higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one
of the great facts of the world, like sun-light, or spring-time, or
the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon.
It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It
makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost
it you won’t smile.
“People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be
so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty
is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not
judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible,
not the invisible.”
But Wilde was idealizing, making deliberately an untrue, but charming
picture--doing indeed in another way what old Izaak Walton did in
his _Compleat Angler_, or what John Fletcher did in his _Faithful
Shepherdess_.
As for the vivid coloring of which I spoke, read this:
“The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the
light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came
through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was
lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored
blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly
able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and
now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted
across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front
of the huge windows, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect,
and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in
an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of
swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering
their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with
monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early
June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive,
and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant
organ.”
You see from that what Wilde meant when he made his character express
a wish to write a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet.
I think that in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, Wilde started with
the Persian carpet in his mind’s eye, but sometimes lapsed into the
carelessness of a wool sack maker. He is not innocent of passages
suggestive of the transpontine drama. But that we overlook in sheer
delight at his joy in magnificence.
A last word on _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. It appeared at the end of
a time when the English world was full of books with a purpose, such
books as Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_, Edna Lyell’s sentimental
agnosticism, Grant Allen’s _Woman Who Did_, and, at the same time,
there was a lively stream of Zola translations, much energetic,
realistic stuff very comparable with the work of Sherwood Anderson
of our day. To go further, there was much of the kind of fiction,
conventionally unconventional on the order of the present day Ben
Hecht. There was George Moore, too. The strictly conventional had
Hall Caine, Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, writers of the stripe
of Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton Porter. Oscar Wilde struck a
path away from all that kind of thing and swung towards a modified
romanticism, a something that should not be literary photography. His
attempt was rather to lead away from the morass of realism into the
valley of idealism. You get the idea somewhat in the Shakespearean
lesson that
Nature is made better by no mean,
But Nature makes that mean; so o’er that art,
Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes.... This is an art
Which does mend Nature--change it rather: but
The art itself is Nature.
So we come to the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, the best by far of which
is _The Happy Prince_. These naturally gave Wilde full scope for his
passion for color and luxury and decorative effects. But Wilde’s fairy
tales were fairy tales for grown ups and not for children. Indeed, it
is safe to say that for small folk who are in the Grimm’s Fairy Tale
age, they do not stand the test of reading aloud--the only test in a
children’s book. Oliver Goldsmith observed wittily that Dr. Johnson
made his little fish talk like great whales. Oscar Wilde made his fairy
animals and creatures talk like Oscar Wilde. Try this on a child and
observe the effect. “Tomorrow my friends will fly up to the Second
Cataract. The river horse couches there among the bulrushes and on
a great granite throne sits the great God Memnon. All night long he
watches the stars, and when the morning star shines, he utters one cry
of joy and then is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the
water’s edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar
is louder than the roar of the Cataract.”
It would be waste of space to spend words on what children do, and
do not, appreciate. Had Wilde sought a guide, he could have taken
none better than his contemporary, Walter Crane. One careful study of
Walter Crane’s illustrations to Grimm’s household stories, the picture
of the Sleeping Beauty for example, would have been sufficient. But
Wilde was not writing for children, nor had he the faculty of doing
so. What Wilde cared about was his style--consideration of that filled
his horizon. Besides, his fairy tales carried altogether too obvious
a moral lesson. Children demand simplicity, and simplicity and Oscar
Wilde were ever strangers. The single tale, _The Happy Prince_, be it
said, is in altogether a different category. Wilde must have written
it because he wished to write it. Turning to the bibliography of Oscar
Wilde, I find that in every case, when fellow authors have written
about the book of fairy tales, there has been mention of _The Happy
Prince_. Walter Pater mentions it in a letter dated June 12th, to Oscar
Wilde: it is mentioned in a poem printed in the Harliquinade; Thomas
Hutchinson has a dedication to Oscar Wilde in his Jolts and Jingles:
“To you who wrote The Happy Prince,
The sweetest tale of modern time...”
Next appeared _The House of Pomegranates_, dedicated to Mrs. Wilde, a
book of tales frankly written for grown up folk in whom the love of
Romance is not dead. It was not a financial success and the stock was
sold off as a remainder. Wrote Wilde to the editor of the Pall Mall
Gazette: “... in building this House of Pomegranates, I had about as
much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the
British public.” In another letter he compares his situation as writer
of fairy tales with Andersen’s, saying that the true admirer of fairy
tales was to be found “not in the nursery, but on Parnassus.”
True, equally with Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde might have
written fairy stories because it pleased him to do so, but between
the method of the two men there was a gulf of difference. Andersen
wrote because he wanted to, but he wanted to do things that would
please children. Wilde wrote because he wanted to, but he wanted to
do things that would please himself. The fuss aesthetic is the one
thing that fairies will not put up with, the atmosphere that destroys
credibility. Wilde’s fantastic creatures were sophisticated rather
than simple, often self-conscious, like precocious children, hot house
beings eager for applause of their elders. Andersen’s fairy folk were
simple, dream-creatures that could stand cold water and clear air
and sunshine. In Wilde there is elegance always, but never rascally
gaiety. In Andersen there is quiet unobtrusiveness, never cleverness
nor facetiousness.
THE STAGE
It would seem that in some mysterious way, all things pointed to
success for Wilde as a playwright. His love for gorgeous scenes, for
spectacular effects, for swift surprises, for witty dialogue, for
neat, staccato sentences, for the brilliant social life, for silver
laughter--all these were ingredients for success on the boards. More,
in his essays, we find the result of his study of the theater, a study
concerning itself sagely with stage, with scenery, with effects, with
management. As spectator and as critic, he accumulated a vast store of
knowledge and we find him, in _Lady Windermere’s Fan_, experimenting
with that knowledge. As Shaw pointed out, Wilde played with everything;
with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with
the whole theater.
Wilde’s appearance on the English stage was as a bright star in a dark
sky. His advent caused a flutter like the advent of Sheridan. It was
a time when the theater had sunk, when stage craft had slipped into
the slough of spectacularity. People flocked, here to see the dresses
that Mrs. Patrick Campbell wore, there to see Wilson Barrett in the
lime light with his subordinates duly subordinate, to another place
to gaze at the spectacles provided by Augustus Harris, to the music
halls for an exhibition of strong animal spirits and physical agility,
to the Lyceum to bathe in the heroics of Henry Irving, to melodramas,
to pantomimes, to acting versions of old plays that were little more
than falsifications. “Nobody goes to the theater,” wrote Shaw in 1896,
“except the people who also go to Madame Tussaud’s. Nobody writes for
it, unless he is hopelessly stage struck and cannot help himself. It
has no share of the leadership of thought; it does not even reflect
the current. It does not create beauty; it apes fashion. It does not
produce personal skill; our actors and actresses, with the exceptions
of a few persons of natural gifts and graces, mostly miscultivated
or half cultivated, are simply the middle class section of the
residuum. The curt insult with which Matthew Arnold dismissed it from
consideration found it and left it utterly defenseless.” And it was
into a theater world thus described, that Oscar Wilde stepped with his
skill and cultivated taste.
The situation was much as it is today in the world of moving picture
production, a situation extremely demoralizing to true art in which, by
what we may call the star system, a few short sighted managers strive
to obtain vast wealth. I say demoralizing to art, because in time the
public wearies of its stars, and, having been educated to no standard,
deserts the field. I point to the moving picture world as analogy,
because in spite of all the advertisements of the correspondence
schools featuring scenario work as the way to fame, it is pretty well
admitted that today plays are written for actors, for stars, and actors
do not exist to act. Therefore we have, perforce, so much that is
sensational, childish or merely vulgar; so little on the screen that is
artistic.
But Wilde with his wit, his gentle mirth, and, above all, his pose as
egotist, took London by storm. It was a real triumph of ability over
ineptitude. There was a delightful page written by A. B. Walkeley
in the _Speaker_ at the time _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ was produced,
a passage that gives an admirable picture of not only the play,
but the author, and it is easy to imagine the astonishment of the
fashionable audience at the St. James’s Theater. “The man or woman who
does not chuckle with delight at the good things which abound in _Lady
Windermere’s Fan_ should consult a physician at once; delay would be
dangerous. Of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s coming forward at the end, cigarette
in hand, to praise his players, like a preface of Victor Hugo, and to
commend his own play, ‘of which I am sure, ladies and gentlemen, you
estimate the merits almost as highly as I do myself,’ you will already
have read. I am still chortling ... at its exquisite impertinence.”
There was something new indeed for London: piquancy, pungency,
wit, ingenious situations--to cap all, a throwing overboard of the
conventional self-depreciation and a public self glorification. Wilde,
clever, lucky, amiable, was a Beaumarchais redivivus. He walked into
his place like a monarch: considered his new position to be his
birthright. Life became to him as a holiday. I think that my friend
Haldeman-Julius hit the mark when he said to me, one day, that Wilde
would live for posterity as Sheridan has lived. There is a singular
resemblance between the two men indeed. Lord Byron, the friend of
Sheridan, has left on record his opinion that he had never heard nor
conceived of a more extraordinary conversationalist: has told us how
men spent nights listening to him: has told us that no one equaled him
at a supper: has told us how he retained his wit even when drunk. It
is Wilde to a hair. There was, in Wilde, the sparkling individuality
of the author of _The School for Scandal_, the sustained brilliancy,
the infinite variety, the inexhaustible vigor. Both men had the art of
repartee, of heaping witticism on witticism and happy phrase on phrase
in a fine crescendo. Both had the gift of satire--not the satire of
Swift to biting and stinging, but the satire of La Bruyère, a satire
that hides behind a gracious smile. One is inclined to think that the
plays are too good for acting, so swiftly comes arrow after arrow of
wit.
_Vicomte de Nanjac (approaching)._ Ah, the English young lady is
the dragon of good taste, is she not? Quite the dragon of good
taste.
_Lord Goring._ So the newspapers are always telling us.
_Vicomte de Nanjac._ I read all your English newspapers. I find
them so amusing.
_Lord Goring._ Then, my dear Nanjac, you must certainly read
between the lines.
_Vicomte de Nanjac._ I should like to, but my professor objects.
(_To_ MABEL CHILTERN.) May I have the pleasure of escorting you to
the music-room, Mademoiselle?
_Mabel Chiltern (looking very disappointed)._ Delighted, Vicomte,
quite delighted! (_Turning to_ LORD GORING.) Aren’t you coming to
the music-room?
_Lord Goring._ Not if there is any music going on, Miss Mabel.
_Mabel Chiltern (severely)._ The music is in German. You would
not understand it. (_Goes out with the_ VICOMTE DE NANJAC. LORD
CAVERSHAM _comes up to his son_.)
_Lord Caversham._ Well, sir! what are you doing here? Wasting your
life as usual. You should be in bed, sir. You keep too late hours!
I heard of you the other night at Lady Rufford’s dancing till four
o’clock in the morning!
_Lord Goring._ Only a quarter to four, father.
_Lord Caversham._ Can’t make out how you stand London society. The
thing has gone to the dogs, a lot of damned nobodies talking about
nothing.
_Lord Goring._ I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only
thing I know anything about.
_Lord Caversham._ You seem to me to be living entirely for pleasure.
_Lord Goring._ What else is there to live for, father? Nothing ages
like happiness.
--_An Ideal Husband (Act I.)_
I choose, deliberately, the less talked of portions of the plays I
quote. Here again:
_Lady Hunstanton._ We who are wives don’t belong to any one.
_Lady Stutfield._ Oh, I am so very, very glad to hear you say so.
_Lady Hunstanton._ But do you really think, dear Caroline, that
legislation would improve matters in any way? I am told that,
nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the
bachelors like married men.
_Mrs. Allonby._ I certainly never know one from the other.
_Lady Stutfield._ Oh, I think one can always know at once whether
a man has home claims upon his life or not. I have noticed a very,
very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men.
_Mrs. Allonby._ Ah, all that I have noticed is that they are
horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably
conceited when they are not.
_Lady Hunstanton._ Well, I suppose the type of husband has
completely changed since my young days, but I’m bound to state that
poor dear Hunstanton was the most delightful of creatures, and as
good as gold.
_Mrs. Allonby._ Ah, my husband is a sort of promissory note; I am
tired of meeting him.
_Lady Caroline._ But you renew him from time to time, don’t you?
_Mrs. Allonby._ Oh no, Lady Caroline. I have only had one husband
as yet. I suppose you look upon me as quite an amateur.
_Lady Caroline._ With your views on life I wonder you married at
all.
_Mrs. Allonby._ So do I.
--_A Woman of No Importance (Act II.)_
Compare such a discharge of wit with the current popular “Revue” with
its slap stick farce, its reference to booze, to negroes, to sporting
drummers and the absurd bids for applause by a little thrown in about
the flag--and let us hope that we may produce a Wilde.
But for sheer color and gorgeous vision, Wilde achieved nothing better
than his unpublished Burmese Masque, _For Love of the King_. As in a
lightning flash the eye takes in a scene of wondrous richness. King
Beng on his ruby sewn cushion; the blinding blue of an eastern sky; the
hundred waiting elephants; the peacocks; the silken banners “propelled
with measured rhythm”; the tables and chairs piled high with fruits
on golden dishes; the flower crowned courtiers and dancing girls,
some half nude, others splendidly robed. But everywhere that intense
brightness of a sunlit scene. There is little in the Masque that
would make it attractive to a stage manager, much that should attract
a scenario man. Indeed, it reads as though Wilde had visualized the
possibilities of the screen world. I copy from Act II, Scene I:
“The jungle once more. Time; noonday. In place of the hut is a
building, half Burmese, half Italian villa, of white, thick wood,
with curled roofs rising on roofs gilded and adorned with spiral
carvings and a myriad golden and jewel-incrusted bells. On the
broad verandahs are thrown Eastern carpets, rugs, embroideries.
“The world is sun soaked. The surrounding trees stand sentinel like
in the burning light. Burmese servants squat motionless, smoking on
the broad white steps that lead from the house to the garden. The
crows croak drowsily at intervals. Parrots scream intermittently.
The sound of a guitar playing a Venetian love song can be heard
coming from the interior. Otherwise life apparently sleeps.”
It is an arabesque: it is a something very like that novel Wilde wanted
to write, the novel that was to have been as splendid as a Persian rug;
it is a word weaving in silk and gold and splendid feathers taken from
quetzal, and peacock, and golden crested wren. It is, in a word, Oscar
Wilde in his glory; a free fantasia of description; a rhapsodie of
color.
As may well be imagined, Wilde was the target of the dramatic critics
of his day, especially of those of the malignant type. The type is not
unfamiliar and Coleridge has characterized it.
No private grudge they need, no personal spite;
The _viva sectio_ is its own delight!
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
Disinterested thieves of our good name;
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.
But Wilde was no Keats to be wounded by abuse. For instance, consider
his letter to _St. James’s Gazette_ from which I copy a paragraph as
follows:
“... When criticism becomes in England a real art, as it should
be, and when none but those of artistic instincts and artistic
cultivation is allowed to write about works of art, artists will,
no doubt, read criticisms with a certain amount of intellectual
interest. As things are at present, the criticisms of ordinary
newspapers are of no interest whatsoever, except in so far as they
display, in its crudest form, the Boetianism of a country that has
produced some Athenians, and in which some Athenians have come to
dwell.”
Much that passed as adverse criticism of Wilde’s dramatic work,
grew out of personal dislike--some out of scandal which had already
begun to raise a reptant head. There was one Charles Brookfield for
instance, who not only was active in adverse criticism, but also
produced a burlesque on _Lady Windemere’s Fan_ entitled _The Poet and
the Puppets_, the poet being Wilde. It was the same Charles Brookfield
who was largely responsible for collecting the evidence against Wilde,
which brought about his downfall very soon after. Indeed, Brookfield
and a few others entertained Queensberry at a banquet in celebration
of the conviction of Wilde. It was “criticism” of the kind impeached
by Coleridge in a never to be forgotten passage that should not be
lost to the world. “As soon as the critic betrays that he knows more
of his author than the author’s publications could have told him; as
soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he
avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure
immediately becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults.
He ceases to be a critic and takes on him the most contemptible
character to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a
gossip, backbiter, _pasquillant_; but with this heavy aggravation,
that he steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into
the museum; into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory,
should be our sanctuary and secure place of refuge; offers abominations
on the altar of the Muses, and makes its sacred paling the very circle
in which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit.” And it is
because of the existence in the Wilde case of so much of that which
Coleridge thundered against, that much of the so-called criticism of
Wilde’s dramatic work must be cast out. But the wonder of it all is
that knowing what was behind, for he must have been cognizant of it,
Wilde fought so well. If ever man died in the last ditch it was he.
Greatly he dared and we love him for his daring. We find him throwing
down the gage to the whole body of critics in a brilliant interview
published in _The Sketch_ of January 9th, 1895, three months before his
downfall, when he knew perfectly well that the dark clouds were rolling
up, and that poison tongues were fast wagging. He is talking to Gilbert
Burgess. Hear him:
“... For a man to be a dramatic critic is as foolish and inartistic
as it would be for a man to be a critic of epics or a pastoral critic
or a critic of lyrics. All modes of art are one, and the modes of art
that employ words as its medium are quite indivisible. The result of
the vulgar specialization of criticism is an elaborate scientific
knowledge of the stage--almost as elaborate as that of the stage
carpenter, and quite on a par with that of the call boy--combined
with an entire incapacity to realize that a play is a work of art or
to receive any artistic impression at all....
“... The aim of the true critic is to try to chronicle his moods,
not to try to correct the masterpieces of others.... Real critics?
Ah, how perfectly charming they would be! I am always waiting for
their arrival. An inaudible school would be nice.... There are just
two real critics in London ... I think I had better not mention
their names; it might make the others jealous ... I do not write to
please cliques. I write to please myself.... It is a burning shame
that there should be one law for men and another law for women. I
think there should be no law for anybody....”
The whole interview is too long to quote and I have taken some of the
salient passages. The complete thing may be read in the New York Daily
Tribune of January 27th, 1895, under the heading _A Highly Artistic
Interview_.
WILDE AS CRITIC
The critic of the critics was himself a critic. Whether he modified his
work to suit his editors, or whether he was of the kindly sympathetic
nature of a Michael Monahan or a William Marion Reedy is impossible to
say, but certain it is that the Wilde of the criticisms is altogether
a different being from the Wilde of the satirical epigram. You find
very little of the Wilde perversities and idiosyncrasies, certainly
none of the Hazlitt waspishness nor any of the Mencken bluntness. Now
and then there are discovered occasional touches of tenderness as in
his criticism of William Morris’s _House of the Wolfings_, (_Pall
Mall Gazette_, March 2nd, 1889) and again in the review of W. B.
Yeats’ _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_, written for the
magazine of which Wilde was editor, the _Woman’s World_, February,
1889. There is a geniality almost equal to that of Charles Lamb or
of Leigh Hunt somewhat evident. “As we read Mr. Morris’s story (The
Wolfings) with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative
and descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and
adventurous themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from
the ignoble fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day.
We breathe a purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind
of poetical quality of its own, and was simple, stately and complete.”
Certainly, Wilde as critic sought to be just, was at pains to write
frankly, vividly, accurately as possible. As critic he was thoroughly
in earnest. The clever smartness we discover in him in his plays is
absent in his critical work.
I think that the very real Wilde was revealed in a little essay,
a writing that appeared in _The Speaker_, February 8th, 1890. It
deals with a translation of the works of Chuang Tzu as made by Mr.
Herbert Giles, British Consul at Tamsui. With the Chinaman, Wilde was
sympathetic. The idea pleased him that all modes of government are
wrong, that they are unscientific because of their tendency to alter
the natural environment of men; immoral because they interfere with
the individual. In the essay there is a ring of Edmund Burke with his
“the thing, government, the thing itself, is the abuse.” It pleased
Wilde immensely to find that the sage born in the fourth century before
Christ denounced the uplifter, because trying to make others good was
as foolish an occupation as “beating a drum in a forest to find a
fugitive.” Wilde found a man after his heart in the philosopher who
declared against chattering about clever men, and lauding good men,
and, what was worse, deifying powerful men. Then there is this by
Wilde, talking about the accumulation of wealth, which, he says, Chuang
Tzu denounces as eloquently as Mr. Hyndman. Wilde agrees with the
philosopher, or at any rate, interprets him approvingly.
“The accumulation of wealth is to him the origin of evil. It
makes the strong violent and the weak dishonest. It creates the
petty thief and puts him in a bamboo cage. It creates the big
thief and sets him on a throne of white jade. It is the father
of competition, and competition is the waste, as well as the
destruction, of energy. The order of nature is rest, repetition and
peace. Weariness and war are the results of an artificial society
based upon capital; and the richer the society gets, the more
thoroughly bankrupt it is, for it has neither sufficient rewards
for the good nor sufficient punishment for the wicked. There is
also this to be remembered--that the prizes of the world degrade a
man as much as the world’s punishments. The age is rotten with the
worship of success. As for education, true wisdom can neither be
learnt nor taught. It is a spiritual state to which he who lives
in harmony with nature attains. Knowledge is shallow if we compare
it with the extent of the unknown, and only the unknowable is of
value. Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue
cleverer than others.”
Compare that with the passage in _The Critic As Artist_, a speech that
Wilde puts into the mouth of Gilbert:
_Ernest._ We exist, then, to do nothing?
_Gilbert._ It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is
limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him
who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age, are at
once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and
too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations
about life in exchange for life itself. To us the “citta divina”
is colorless, and the “fruitio Dei” without meaning. Metaphysics
do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of
date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes
“the spectator of all time and of all existence” is not really an
ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter
it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts
of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by
Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They
have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.
And in another place, later, in the same essay:
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct,
and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism,
is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
The great majority of people, being fully aware of this, rank
themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that
elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly
against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question
that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational
animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in
accordance with the dictates of reason.
Certainly, the philosophy of Chuang Tzu impressed Wilde greatly,
influenced him more than has been generally thought, and, in fact, the
philosophical basis of the greater part of the essay _The Critic As
Artist_ rests on that of the Chinese mystic, with a decided substratum
of Boehme. Boehme, certainly. The idea of self-surrender that Boehme
promulgated, you find everywhere in Wilde, like a recurring golden
thread in a tapestry. There is the Boehme “to-be” for which one will is
necessary; for the “becoming,” two. So Wilde:
Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for
its aim not _doing_ but _being_, and not _being_ merely, but
_becoming_--that is what the critical spirit can give us.
The mystery of it is that Wilde should have so intermixed in his
own life and philosophy the self-surrender of Boehme with the
self-assertion of Nietzsche. That he did so is not to be denied--to
attempt to explain how it so came to be is impossible. But then, who
can explain another? Who can understand or explain himself? The truth
is that Wilde, like everyone else, was a bundle of vain strivings, as
Thoreau put it. Wilde, like everyone else, gathered together his things
to make a bridge to the moon and wound up by making something like a
woodshed of the material. So do we all. Man’s reach certainly does
exceed his grasp. Browning said much there in a half dozen words.
Of course, there are _Sententiae_, little impatiences, sympathetic
critic though he was. “Most modern novels are more remarkable for
their crime than for their culture.” “Though the Psalm of Life be
shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it good poetry.”
“Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature,
and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.”
“Such novels as ---- are possibly more easy to write than to read.” “There
seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.”
“It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not
national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he
loves rather than to the land he lives in. The Muses care so little for
geography!”--but as critic of literature Wilde was eminently fair and
just, pointing out the good in writers so vastly apart as Walt Whitman,
Pater, Yeats, Blunt, Matthew Arnold; dropping his own prejudices,
getting inside the skins of those whose work he found to be worthy.
WILDE AS ESSAYIST
Perhaps Wilde was to the fashionable of London much as the robust
Henry Fielding was to the literary world when Samuel Richardson
wrote _Clarissa Harlowe_. He had to shock the polite world out
of its terrible complacency. For there were such proper waxen
figures as Samuel Smiles and Martin Farquahar Tupper cooing, and
there were many who modeled their conduct upon the example of Sir
Charles Grandison--milk and water men, sanctified prigs, pious and
irreproachable gentlemen in whose mouths butter would not melt. To be
respectable was the one virtue, and tender sensibilities were shocked
when Shaw wore a woolen shirt and when Morris solemnly sat on his silk
hat. Yet, there must have been a secret delight in scandal. Turning
over the newspapers of the day we find prominence given to items with
salacious base. For instance, the crimes of Jack the Ripper, the
Charles Dilke divorce case, the Parnell-O’Shea tangle, Stead’s Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon. The fascination of murder held them as now.
Quiet men and women found something of vast interest in reading reports
of acts of violence, in living in imagination unrestrained lives.
But, the record of crime had been left to inept hands. To be sure in
novels, action hinged upon crime, but in novels criminals were always
black, lost souls who bore the brand of Cain on their brows, had no
single redeeming trait and went their way for a time certain of being
laid by the heels. It was, then, a tremendous and daring conception of
Oscar Wilde to take a wholesale murderer as the subject of an essay,
but he did so and produced a most interesting piece of work conceived
in graceful vein in his _Pen, Pencil and Poison_--the story of Thomas
Griffiths Wainewright. The subject of the essay has been confused with
another murderer, Henry Wainwright, also an educated man with literary
tastes, familiar with the actors and poets of his day, but the last
named murderer was but a clumsy fellow compared with Wilde’s hero.
The late Max Nordau in his book _Degeneration_ has found, stupidly
enough, evidence of a love for “immorality” in Wilde because of the
essay, tearing from the context certain passages and adducing them
as proof of Wilde’s diabolism. One paragraph is truly amusing in its
ingenuousness. I quote from page 320:
“Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In
a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith
Wainewright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of
several people, he says: ‘He was a forger of no mean or ordinary
capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without
a rival in this or any age.’ ‘This remarkable man, so powerful
with pen and pencil, and poison.’ ‘He sought to find expression by
pen or poison.’ ‘When a friend reproached him with the murder of
Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Yes; it
was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”’ ‘His
crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked.’ ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea
that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’
“He cultivates incidently a slight mysticism in colours. ‘He,’
Wainewright, ‘had that curious love of green which in individuals
is always the sign of subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations
is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence, of morals.’”
That, of course, is sheer stupidity. We do not denounce Charles
Dickens because he told the story of Bill Sikes, of the Artful Dodger,
of Fagin, nor do we shudder at the name of Conrad because he ended
_Victory_ as he did. Doubtless, Max Nordau, on similar grounds to those
on which he condemned Wilde and Ibsen and Nietzsche as degenerates,
might have found cause to place the Bible on his index expurgatoris.
The fact is that Oscar Wilde wrote a fine essay on the murderer and
not perhaps so much because he was a murderer, as that he was one of
those extraordinary men who failed to become what he bade to be, and
was the friend and companion of such men as Charles Lamb, Dickens,
Macready and Hablot Browne. Perhaps Wilde had in mind his own case,
certainly there are prophetic passages and there is for example a
parallel existing between the incident told by Gide when he met Wilde
in connection with Wainewright.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came
across him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of
London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they
suddenly caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiant
stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was “horrified to recognize a
man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he
had dined.”
Look at the essay on Wainewright as the picture of a man who tortures
himself, a man of taste and sensibility at whose heart the worm of
misery gnawed constantly, a man sickened with secret maladies, a man
with brain on fire who moved among his fellows with a smiling face,
fearing at every moment the knocking at the gate which would mean his
doom--read the essay with all that in mind and you will be rightly
attuned for the pleasure. No show mannikin, no machine of creaking wood
has Wilde in his Wainewright, but a living thing, a frightened thing, a
tormented thing, a vice ridden thing. You feel the daily fear that must
have been in the murderer’s heart though Wilde does not play on the
vulgar emotions, displaying remorse crudely as Dickens does in his tale
of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit. But, in some mysterious manner, Wilde
makes his reader sense a melancholy, just as Beethoven makes us sense
a melancholy in that immortal passage of his seventh symphony when the
stringed instruments sob in the bass.
Here is Wilde’s picture of the man in the midst of the things that he
loved:
And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the
delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted
figures and the faint ΚΑΛΟΕ finely traced upon its side, and behind
it hangs an engraving of the “Delphic Sibyl” of Michael Angelo,
or of the “Pastoral” of Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine
majolica, and here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the
table lies a book of Hours “cased in a cover of solid silver gilt,
wrought with quaint devices and studded with small brilliants and
rubies,” and close by it “squats a little ugly monster, a Lar,
perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily.” Some
dark antique bronzes contrast “with the pale gleam of two noble
_Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other molded in
wax.” He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
_bonbonniere_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
“brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,” his citron morocco
letter-case and his “pomona-green” chair.
One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts
and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning
over his fine collection of Marc Antonios, and his Turner’s “Liber
Studiorum,” of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with
a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, “the head of
Alexander on an onyx of two strata,” or “that superb _altissimo
relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.”
And again, in a charming passage:
Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and
his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale
lemon-colored kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded
by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while
his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave
him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different
from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw
him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. “Amongst the
company, all literary men, sat a murderer,” he tells us, and he
goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated
the face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with
intellectual interest across the table at the young writer beneath
whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much
unaffected sensibility, and speculates on “what sudden growth of
another interest,” would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was
even then guilty.
In that last sentence, the reference to the “terrible sin” of which
he knew himself to be guilty, I cannot but see a subtle reference to
himself. Indeed, Wilde seems to be constantly projecting himself,
giving hints as it were, of what might be, just as a child guilty of
some misdemeanor, will make veiled references to its plight yet, at
the same time, do all that is possible to avoid discovery. Here is a
passage in which, writing of Wainewright, he surely describes himself:
His delicately strung organization, however indifferent it might
have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly
sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing that mars
and maims human life.
Again:
Like Baudelaire, he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier,
he was fascinated by that “sweet marble monster” of both sexes that
we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.
And this too, which is Wilde to a T:
Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to
any man of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of
Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school
_Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have invented. He also saw that
it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public
interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic
articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had
for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and
in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly
notes for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the
least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most
obvious influence. A publicist, now-a-days, is a man who bores the
community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.
Perhaps too there is an apologia in another passage:
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
literary London, and made so brilliant a _debut_ in life and
letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew
Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many
of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is,
indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of
art and nature was a mere pretense and assumption, and others have
denied to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or
at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is
nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true
basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists.
But it is neither safe nor wise to theorize too much, though, to be
sure, more than one of us feel strongly inclined to say of Wilde as he
said of Wainewright:
The moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection
that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required.
Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero,
or scolding Tiberius or censuring Cæsar Borgia. These personages
have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with
terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not
in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them.
They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither
art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.
Wilde’s two essays, _The Decay of Lying_ and _The Critic as Artist_ I
have referred to several times in the course of this essay, and also
in another booklet, _The Tragic Story of Oscar Wilde_. In much, both
essays are complementary to his _Art and Decoration_: the themes wind
in and out like the theme in a fugue. There are inconsistencies, there
is sometimes flippancy and there is much of utmost exquisite polish.
But always--style--style that becomes sometimes pavonic display.
Witness, from the _Decay of the Art of Lying_:
The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like
the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvelous tale, and fantasy _La Chimere_,
dances around it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned
voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are
all bored to death with the common-place character of modern
fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings.
And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall
all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of
wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will
change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth
and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do
on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were
actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places,
and the phœnix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We
shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the
toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand
in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing
of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and
that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But
before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.
Of course, it must be admitted that there is truth in those who
complain that Wilde advocated no system of morality which could
console, raise or satisfy men. But to do that was not Wilde’s mission.
He was no moralist--made, indeed, his art his religion and deals with,
as Wordsworth said:
the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all.
(Prelude xl, 142.)
but his world, like the world of the Pre-Raphaelites, was confessedly a
falsehood, a world other than that which we see. That art, or poetry,
could go on to take in things other than of fairy land, could deal
with such things as sky-scrapers, fire vomiting factories, machinery,
as it does in the hands of Carl Sandburg, was unthinkable to Wilde
as it would have been unthinkable to Ruskin. But then, Wilde found
things to love which would have been altogether strange to his men of
Greece--mountain mists, brown fogs, clefts in rocks. So, pondering,
we get into deep water. The idea of truth as conceived by the artist
and the idea as conceived by the religious mind.... religion born of
faith and art born of perception.... religion growing out of a soil of
disillusion, art growing out of joy of life....
AS POET
Oscar Wilde did not have a jealous care of the art poetic. There was
too much of that “style” for real ecstasy; that style, too, was too
often encumbered with preciosities, overhung with ornamentation. Then,
too, he was constantly trying new forms, experimenting, seeking a
satisfactory model. Yet it would be wrong to assert that his poetry
lacks verbal charm, and the average man who has no great patience with
poetry, who would never sit down to read an _In Memoriam_ or an _Ode
on a Grecian Urn_, the kind of a man who loses himself among poetic
phrases, finds that Wilde evokes a picture by words full of color. Take
this, for instance:
SYMPHONY IN YELLOW
An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.
Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moved against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.
The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.
A slight enough thing, but full of interest and spirit. Your man
who loses himself in verse based on legendary lore or mysticism,
understands and enjoys that. It means something to him. For the same
reason Wilde’s _Ballad of Reading Gaol_ interests and excites, almost
like an adventure story, combining simplicity and beauty in a way that
is altogether satisfying. Mark how a concrete image is called up by a
short descriptive passage.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
“_That fellow’s got to swing_.”
And mark the dramatic appeal of this:
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman’s hands were near.
But why he said so strange a thing
No warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher’s doom
Is given as his task,
Must set a lock upon his lips,
And make his face a mask.
He gets very close there to the heart of the common man, as close as
James Stephens indeed, with his _What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub_.
The truth of the matter is that under pain, the artificial Wilde
vanished and his poetry became something other than pretence and
artifice. I say that, because Douglas has told us that up to the time
of his imprisonment, Wilde had “held that style was everything, and
feeling nothing; that poetry should be removed as well from material
actuality as from the actuality of the spirit, and that no great poet
had ever in his greatest moments been other than sincere.” (Page 209,
Oscar Wilde and Myself.) And of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, Douglas
writes, “(in it) we have a sustained poem of sublimated actuality and
of a breadth and sweep and poignancy such as had never before been
attained in this line. The emotional appeal is ... quite legitimate and
... the established tradition as to what is fitting and comely in a
poem of this nature is not outraged or transgressed.”
Another great poem grew out of his prison life. I refer to the long
letter, made into a book by Mr. Ross and entitled _De Profundis_, for a
poem, a prose poem, it is. It would be better to mention in this place
that _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not composed until Wilde had
left prison. _De Profundis_, however, was written within stone walls.
In another place quotation has been made of Blunt’s Diaries in which
Ross is quoted as having said that it is impossible to tell how much
of _De Profundis_ is sincere repentance, and how much the result of
self pity. Be that as it may, it is very certain that the spirit of the
man was bitter in his solitude, that his egoism fell away from him at
times. But it is absurd to expect that punishment and imprisonment and
disgrace could change the man himself. If he had that feminine soul, he
had it. It was part of him, and he could not get away from it, prison
or no prison. But he could know in his own heart that he was not as
he should have liked to be, that his life’s ideal was other than his
life’s path. In other words, he realized, as we all realize, that
while his eyes were fixed on the stars, his feet were firmly planted in
the mud, and for that fact he was very sorry indeed. Not only sorry,
but rebellious that things were as they were, and, as Wilde said, the
mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the
air of heaven. The mood rebellious and the mood penitential cannot sit
side by side in the same heart. Penitence presupposes submission and
gratitude for gifts bestowed, and Wilde felt no gratitude to the fates
that had, at his birth, dropped into his veins the one drop of black
blood which colored his life. Destiny is omnipotent, and destiny had
given Wilde the feminine soul. Doubtless, had Wilde been what he wished
to be, in his better moments, he would have sat with august divinities.
But neither Wilde, nor you, nor I, have it in our powers to command the
winds that would waft us to the Islands of the Blest.
Transcriber’s Notes
- Italics represented with surrounding _underscores_.
- Small caps converted to ALL CAPS.
- Obvious typographic and grammatical errors silently corrected.
- Variations in hyphenation kept as in the original.
- p. 37: Corrected "a course oath" to "a coarse oath".
- p. 68: Corrected “It is the father of competition is the waste
as well as the destruction of energy.” To “It is the father
of competition, and competition is the waste, as well as the
destruction, of energy.”
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