which inspired the parodist with—

"MORE IMPRESSIONS"

(By Oscuro Wildgoose)

Des Sponettes

I quote the two parodies to show how little Oscar Wilde's verse was appreciated by his contemporaries. There is an unfairness and misrepresentation about them which is significant of how the poet's poses and extravagancies had prejudiced the public mind.

In the two love poems "Apologia" and "Quia multi Amori" a deeper key is struck, and a note of pain predominates. There is a restraint about the versification and the colour of the words that strikes the right chord and tunes the lyre to a subdued note.

The underlying passion and regret find their supreme expression in the lines—

The "hadst thou liked me less and loved me more" deserves to pass into the language with Richard Lovelace's

In "Humanitad" we get a view of the country in winter time, and

The picture is complete, we see the bare countryside, the sky grey with impending snow, and the animal life introduced uttering nature's cry of desolation. But hope is not dead in the poet's breast; he sees where, when springtime comes, "nodding cowslips" will bloom again and the hedge on which the wild rose—"That sweet repentance of the thorny briar"—will blossom out. He runs through the whole flower calendar, using the old English names "boy's-love," "sops in wine," and "daffodillies."

Once more we note how the flowers are personalities for him, a view which could not long escape the humorists of Punch, and which was amply taken advantage of by the writer of some burlesque verses, two of which are sufficiently amusing to quote—

Nature appeals to Oscar Wilde in all her moods, and though he might at times assume the pose of preferring art to nature, he gives expression to his real feelings when he exclaims:

The lines speak for themselves and are strongly indicative of his attitude towards nature and art at that period. The true spirit of Catholicism had gripped him; the influence of Rome was at work, though enfeebled, and remained latent within him till in his hour of passing he found peace in the bosom of the great Mother, who throughout the ages has always held out her arms to the sinner and the outcast.

There has always been a certain amount of mystery attached to another poem of Wilde's called "The Harlot's House," written at the same period as "The Duchess of Padua" and "The Sphinx"—that is, when he was living in the Hotel Voltaire. It was originally published in a magazine not later than June 1885. It is a curious thing that all researches up to the present as to the name of the publication have proved fruitless, and that the approximate date of the appearance of the verses has been arrived at by reference to a parody entitled "The Public House," which appeared in The Sporting Times, of all papers in the world, on 13th June 1885. First, an edition of the poem was brought out privately by the Methuen Press in 1904 with five illustrations by Althea Gyles, in which the bizarre note is markedly, though artistically, dominant. Another edition was privately printed in London in 1905 in paper wrappers.

The idea of this short lyrical poem is that the poet stands outside a house and watches the shadows of the puppet dancers "race across the blind."

"The dancers swing in a waltz of Strauss"—the "Treues Liebes Herz"—"like strange mechanical grotesques" or "black leaves wheeling in the wind." The marionettes whirl in the ghostly dance, and——

The man turns to his companion and remarks that "the dead are dancing with the dead," but drawn by the music she enters the house. As Love enters the house of Lust the gay seductive music changes to a discord, and the horrible shadows disappear. Then the dawn breaks, creeping down the silent street "like a frightened girl."

That is all, but as a high specimen of imagina-verse it stands alone. That the author was inspired by memories of Baudelaire and Poe is beyond dispute. Nevertheless, the poem, in conception as well as execution, is essentially original. The puppet dancers' motif was afterwards introduced by him with telling effect as we shall see later in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." Hardly ever have the bizarre and the macabre been used with such artistic effect as in this short poem, nor have the imaginative gifts of its author ever found a finer scope. If he had written nothing else than these lines they would confer immortality on him. Like all truly great work they are imperishable and will form part of English literature when far more widely read effusions are set aside and forgotten.

I have remarked on the original character of the poem in spite of its obvious sources of inspiration, and there can be no better way of verifying this than by giving an example of Baudelaire's own incursion into puppet land—

"DANSE MACABRE"

The French poem lacks the simplicity and the directness of its English fellow. It appears overloaded and artificial in comparison, and above all it lacks the music which results from the juxtaposition of the Anglo-Saxon a, e, i, and u sounds, and the Latin ahs and ohs.

But, on the other hand, as an example of the precious and artificial in literature, a further poem of Wilde's written at this period, "The Sphinx," reveals another phase of his extraordinarily versatile genius.

The metre of the poem is the same as that of "In Memoriam," though, owing to the stanzas being arranged in two long lines instead of the fairly short ones in Tennyson's poem, this might at first escape attention. The poet at the time of writing we learn had

(which would seem to indicate that this part, at any rate, was written at an earlier period than the rest of the poem), and in the very first lines he tells us that—

Day and night—

Here we have in a very few words an exact picture of this "exquisite grotesque half-woman and half-animal," whom, after the manner of Edgar Allan Poe with his raven, he proceeds to apostrophise—

and plies her with many questions of similar nature. Presently he adjures her—

This idea of comparing the velvet depths of the eyes to "cushions where one sinks" is quaint and original, though distinctly decadent, nor is the note of the macabre wanting, as—

There is a wonderful use of contrast in the introduction of sweating mandragores in connection with the purple of the corridors and the scarlet plumage of the Ibis. How daring, likewise, the grotesque note introduced as he recites the catalogue of her possible lovers and asks—

The speaker will find out the secret of her amours. There is nothing too bizarre, too monstrous to include in the list.

Not Baudelaire himself could have invented anything more precious than the description of this sea-nymph, but the gruesome must be introduced. "Did you," he inquires,

Wilde catalogues through the whole Egyptian mythology; he is inclined to give first place to "Ammon."

Decadent the idea may be, but how cleverly, how subtly the effects are produced and how well sustained is the atmosphere of chimerical, nightmare horrors. Wilde makes use of the impression derived from the contemplation of colossal figures—the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre were, one may be certain, a daily haunt of his at the time—and he describes—"Nine cubits span" and his limbs are "Widespread as a tent at noon," but he was of flesh and blood for all that.

and he was royally clad, for—

His love of rare and beautiful things finds an outlet in the description of the jewels and retinue of the god.

Barbaric splendour and Eastern gorgeousness we have here and in one line the sense of immense wealth is conveyed—

But now—

And he bids her—

With mocking irony he tells her to "wake mad passions in the senseless stone."

He counsels her to return to Egypt, her lovers are not dead—

He advises to—

and take him as a lover or to mate with a tiger—

But "her sullen ways" pall on him, her presence fills him with horror, "poisonous and heavy breath makes the light flicker in the lamp."

The poet wonders what "songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night." He drives the cat away with every opprobrious epithet for she wakes in him "each bestial sense" and makes him what he "would not be." She makes his "creed a barren shame," and wakes "foul dreams of sensual life," and with a return to sanity he chases her away. "Go thou before," he cries,

On this note of pessimism and refusal the poem ends. In the realm of the fantastic it has no equal and though the objection may be raised that the whole thing is unhealthy, the truth is that it is merely an experimental excursion in the abnormal. It has all the fantastic unreality of Chinese dragons, and, therefore, can in no way be harmful. The nightmare effect has no lasting influence. We read it as we would any other imaginative grotesque. But whilst we are alternately fascinated and repulsed by the subject, we are lost in admiration of the decorative treatment of the theme. The whole performance is artificial, but so is all Oriental art.

It is true that Baudelaire's poems, with their morbid, highly polished neurotic qualities, had fascinated the young artist and exercised a powerful influence over him, but "The Sphinx" was an achievement apart and totally different from any other of his poems. It is more in the nature of an extravaganza, an opium dream described in finely chiselled, richly tinted phrases. Every young poet goes through various phases and this was only a phase in the author's literary career. Nothing could be better than the workmanship, and that the poem should so rivet the attention and attract where it most repels is the greatest tribute to the genius of its creator. It is essentially a weird conception expressed in haunting cadences, an esoteric gem for all those who have brains to think and the necessary artistic sense to appreciate really good work. That persons of inferior mental calibre and narrow views should be shocked by it is only to be expected, and the author himself excused the delay in publishing it by explaining that "it would destroy domesticity in England!" The original edition, it may be mentioned, was published in September 1894 by Messrs Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and was limited to two hundred copies issued at 42s. with twenty-five on larger paper at 105s. It was magnificently illustrated by Mr C. R. Ricketts, the delicacy and distinction of whose work is too well known to need comment.

In striking contrast to the artificiality and decadent character of "The Sphinx" stands the author's imperishable "Ballad of Reading Gaol." What the circumstances were that led to the writing of this great masterpiece have been already sufficiently dealt with in the earlier portion of this work. It has been aptly said that all great art has an underlying note of pain and sorrow, beautiful work may be produced without it, but not the work that is worthy to rank among the great creative masterpieces of the world. "Quand un homme et une poésie," writes Barbey d'Aubrevilly, "ont dévalé si bas dans la conscience de l'incurable malheur qui est fond de toutes les voluptés de l'existence poésie et homme ne peuvent plus que remonter." There can be no doubt that this poem could never have been written but for the terrible ordeal the poet had been through. It is incomparably Wilde's finest poetic work—great, not only by reason of its beauty, but great on account of the feeling for suffering humanity, his power to enter into the sorrows of others and to forget his own trials in the sympathetic contemplation of the agony of his fellow-sufferers which it reveals. The words of another distinguished French critic might almost have been written about him:

"Désormais divorcée d'avec l'enseignement historique, philosophique et scientifique, la poésie se trouve ramenée à so fonction naturelle et directe, qui est de réaliser pour nous la vie, complémentaire du rêve, du souvenir, de l'espérance, du désir; de donner un corps à ce qu'il y a d'insaisissable dans nos pensées et de secret dans le mouvement de nos âmes; de nous consoler ou de nous châtier par l'expression de l'ideal ou par le spectacle de nos vices. Elle devient non pas individuelle, suivant la prédiction un peu hasardeuse de l'auteur de Jocelyn, mais personnelle, si nous sous-entendons que l'ame du poëte est nécessairement une âme collective, une corde sensible et toujours tendue que font vibrer les passions et les douleurs de ses semblables."

With Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," "Reading Gaol," holds first place amongst the ballads of the world, and by many critics it is held, by reason of its deep feeling and anguished intensity, to be a finer piece of work than the older poet's chef d'œuvre.

Although the author's identity was concealed under the cypher "C33," there was never a moment's doubt as to who the writer was. It came as a shock to the British public that the man who, but a couple of years before, had stood in the public pillory, the man whose work the great majority, who had never even read it, believed to be artificial, meretricious, and superficial, should be the author of a deeply moving poem that could be read by the most prudish and strait-laced.

The Times, that great organ of English respectability, devoted a leading article to it of a highly eulogistic character. The edition was sold out at once, and the book was on all men's tongues. Wherever one went one heard it discussed, priest and philistine were as loud in their praises of it as the most decadent of minor poets. No poem had for a generation met with such a friendly reception or caused such a sensation.

A critical notice of the poem from the pen of Lady Currie appeared in The Fortnightly Review for July 1904. In it the author writes of the "terrible 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' with its splendours and inequalities, its mixture of poetic farce, crude realism, and undeniable pathos." As to the crudeness of the realism, that is a mere matter of opinion: it is easy to supply an adjective—it is more difficult to justify the use of it, and give satisfactory reasons for its application. Realistic the poem doubtless is—crude, never, but the writer shows a far keener appreciation when she says—"all is grim, concentrated tragedy from cover to cover. A friend of mine," Lady Currie says, "who looked upon himself as a judge in such matters, told me that he would have placed certain passages in this poem, by reason of their terrible, tragic intensity, upon a level with some of the descriptions in Dante's 'Inferno,' were it not that 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was so much more infinitely human."

Among the many laudatory notices that appeared at the time, there is an extract from a review of the work taken from a great London paper and quoted by a French writer which is worth reprinting as showing the attitude of the press towards the poem.

"The whole is awful as the pages of Sophocles. That he has rendered with his fine art so much of the essence of his life and the life of others in that inferno to the sensitive is a memorable thing for the social scientist, but a much more memorable thing for literature. This is a simple, a poignant, a great ballad, one of the greatest in the English language."

Never, perhaps, since Gray's "Elegy" had a poem been so revised, pruned and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell. The publisher was driven to the verge of distraction by the constant alterations and emendations, the placing of a comma had become a matter of moment to the fastidious author, but the work was published in its entirety save for two or three stanzas concerning one of the prison officials that it was deemed wise to suppress.

The poem bears the dedication—

In Memoriam
C. T. W.
Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards
Obiit, H.M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire
July 7th, 1896.

The case of the trooper to whose memory the work is dedicated excited a good deal of interest at the time. He had a fit of jealousy, murdered his sweetheart, and though public opinion was inclined to take a merciful view of the crime, and a petition was presented to the Home Secretary for the withdrawal of the capital sentence, it was without effect, and the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in the Gaol at Reading.

The first line—

rivets the attention at once, and as surely as do the opening lines of "The Ancient Mariner." The reason for this is given at once—

That the whole incident that led to the man's being there should be communicated in the very first stanza, to make that stanza complete, is an artistic necessity, and in the next two lines we are told who the victim is—

The tragedy is complete. We have the picture of the soldier deprived of his uniform and the whole story is revealed to us. A more concise or supremely reticent description of the pathetic drama there could not be. But the picture must be filled in even to the most trivial detail, and we see the poor wretch taking his daily exercise among the prisoners awaiting their trial, attired in "a suit of shabby grey," trying to demean himself like a man and, trivial, but, from the artist's point of view, important detail, with a cricket cap on his head. There is a world of pathos and lines of unspoken tragedy in that cricket cap worn by a man whose days are numbered, who never will play a game again and whose mind must be occupied with thoughts far removed from sport and amusement save perhaps when they may revert to happy days spent with bat and ball, and which will never recur again. But though his step be jaunty, the oppression of his impending doom is on him,

We can see that prison yard, the circle of convicts pacing the melancholy round at ordered intervals and with measured tread, and the strong man, full of life and vigour looking up at God's blue sky and drinking in the air with greedy lungs. We can see the author of the poem, the erstwhile social favourite, in his convict garb walking

and his horror as he receives the information muttered by some fellow-prisoner through closed lips that

In words, the simplicity and intensity of which are sublime, he tells us of how the news affected him—

That apostrophe to the Redeemer is a revelation in itself coming from a man who is enduring his own mortal agony, but his particular sorrows fade into insignificance and are forgotten in the presence of a fellow-creature's crucifixion—

Already he is purified by his months of trial and tribulation, and he can enter sympathetically into the sorrows of others and share their burden.

He now understands the reason of the jaunty step and the defiant manner, he himself has tried to flee from his thoughts.

He realises the meaning of that "wistful look" towards the vaulted canopy of heaven.

The man had killed the thing he loved.

It has been objected that making sword rhyme with word is a makeshift, but surely it is patent to anyone with any artistic sense whatever that this forced rhyme avoids the danger of making the verse too facile, and, far from being a piece of slovenly writing, is the well-thought-out scheme of a perfect master of his craft. It is one of those stupid objections that superficial critics are so apt to raise when utterly devoid themselves of any sense of proportion or fitness.

The idea that all men, young or old, kill the thing they love is not only original but it is a very fine flight of metaphor—there is a whole sermon in the conception, and Wilde elaborates the theme—

It is as we read these lines that our thoughts are immediately directed to "The Dream of Eugene Aram," that incomparable masterpiece of another poet, who likewise was looked upon as a mere jester whose work should not be treated seriously, but who has left us three of the finest and most deeply moving poems in the English language. There is a striking resemblance in the wording between the two poems, but without disparaging Hood's work there can be no possible doubt as to which is the greater and more noble achievement.

Another stanza elaborates the theme still further and the fact is recorded that though every man kills the thing he loves, yet death is not always meted out to him.

Within these grim prison walls all the horrible details of execution obtrude themselves upon the wretched captive. He has tasted the horrors of solitary confinement, of being spied on night and day by grim, taciturn warders who, at frequent intervals, slide back the panel in the door to observe through the grated opening that the prisoner is all right. So he can feel all the torture that a man under sentence of death must go through at having to

The ceaseless watch that is kept on the poor wretch lest he should be tempted, given the opportunity, to "rob the prison of its prey" by doing violence on himself, the whole grim ceremonial of the carrying out of the law's decree are conjured up by him. He pictures the doomed man awakened from sleep by the entrance of the Sheriff, and the Governor of the Gaol accompanied by the "shivering Chaplain robed in white." He dwells on the hurried toilet, the putting on of the convict dress for the last time whilst the doctor takes professional stock of every nervous symptom. It is to be hoped that the lines descriptive of the doctor are purely imaginative—one must hope, for the credit of the medical profession, that it has no foundation in personal experience. Then there is the awful thirst that tortures the victim and another introduction of an apparently trivial detail, "the gardener's gloves" worn by the hangman. But the detail is not trivial, its introduction adds to the ghastliness of the scene. The reading of the Burial Service over a man yet living is another realistic touch that serves its purpose. With him we can enter into the agony of the condemned wretch as he prays

Wilde proceeds with the strict narrative. He tells us how for six weeks that Guardsman walked the prison yard still wearing the same suit and his head covered with the same incongruous headgear.

Still does he cast yearning glances at the sky,

But the man is no coward, he does not wring his hands and bemoan his fate, he merely kept his eyes on the sun "and drank the morning air."

The other convicts, forgetful of themselves and their crimes, watch with silent amazement "The man who had to swing." He still carries himself bravely and they can hardly realise that he will so soon be swept into eternity; and then a perfectly mediæval note is struck—

There we have the true spirit of the old ballads. The comparison between the oak and elm in the spring putting forth their leaves, and the gaunt, bare timber of the gibbet with its burden of dead human fruit is a highly imaginative and artistic piece of fantasy, though possibly a poem of Villon's was in Wilde's mind at the time of writing.

He gives us in the next stanza a picture of the murderer with noose adjusted to his neck, taking his last look upon the world, and the drop suggests another finely imaged comparison to him—

and goes on so for another two lines before he brings in the antithesis—

The almost morbid fascination the sight of this man with his foot in the grave exercises over him is undiminished, till one day he misses him and knows that he is standing "In black dock's dreadful pen." He himself had been through that dread ordeal and his spirit goes out to him whom he had seen daily for a brief space without ever holding commune with him.