THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE
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:
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.
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:
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