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:
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.
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:
(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: