Part 1

TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 442 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

Oscar Wilde in Outline

Charles J. Finger

HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS

Copyright 1923, Haldeman-Julius Company.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

OSCAR WILDE IN OUTLINE

One fiery-coloured moment of great life! And then--how barren the nations’ praise! How vain the trump of Glory! Bitter thorns Were in that laurel leaf, whose toothed barbs Burned and bit deep till fire and red flame Seemed to feed full upon my brain, and make The garden a bare desert. With wild hands I strove to tear it from my bleeding brow, But all in vain; and with a dolorous cry That paled the lingering stars before their time, I waked at last, and saw the timorous dawn Peer with grey face into my darkened room, And would have deemed it a mere idle dream But for this restless pain that gnaws my heart, And the red wounds of thorns upon my brow.

--_Translation from the Polish of Madame Modjeska by Oscar Wilde._

THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE

Thou knowest all; I seek in vain What lands to till or sow with seed-- The land is black with briar and weed, Nor cares for falling tears or rain.

Thou knowest all; I sit and wait With blinded eyes and hands that fail, Till the last lifting of the veil And the first opening of the gate.

Thou knowest all; I cannot see. I trust I shall not live in vain, I know that we shall meet again In some divine eternity.

Men in general often find it hard to dissociate the work of artists from the circumstances of their lives. Let a company fall to talking of Villon, and it is a safe bet that before long someone will drag in the incident of his having wandered very close to the gallows. Talk of Baudelaire, and we are prone to forget, for a moment, his _Flowers of Evil_, to recall that he painted his hair green. Of Dowson, we remember that he was a pot house drunkard and overlook his _Impenitentia Ultima_. Sometimes it seems, indeed, as though more truth was in the saying that the evil that men do lives after them and the good is often interr’d with their bones, than the reverse. Certainly Oscar Wilde’s place in literature would have been decided long ago but for the distortion caused by circumstances in his life. But, as the mists clear, certain points stand out. It seems very definitely decided that as a poet he flew on wings too feeble to reach the clear, cold heights of Parnassus, two poems only being marked for distinction. _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ and _The Sphinx_. As a writer of fiction he will probably be forgotten, or at best, remembered by one book, as is Charles Brockden Brown, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ living as a literary curiosity as _Wieland_ lives, or as Beckford’s _Vathek_ lives, a thing at once odd and curious. As literary critic Wilde cannot rank with Hazlitt or Sainte-Beuve. As dramatist, doubtless, his fame is secure, and as essayist he will not be forgotten.

His friend, M. Andre Gide, has told us that Wilde said his novels and stories were written as the result of wagers made. That is hard to believe. Too plainly both novels and stories bear the earmarks of Wilde the stylist. His novel, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, approaches too nearly his expressed ideal, his desire to write a tale that should be of the wondrous beauty of a Persian rug. If Wilde wrote either novel or story on a wager, he must have wagered with himself. For Oscar Wilde took himself far too seriously to hang his art on a hair, to stake his literary reputation on the casting of a die. Indeed, he took himself and his art more seriously than he took the world, and that to his own undoing.

In another place I have shown how Wilde was influenced, how his life’s path was pulled out of its calculated orbit because of his feminine soul, and how heredity swayed his acts. Of that last he was well aware, has, indeed, confessed to the world more than once and especially in a passage in _The Critic as Artist_:

Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative life. It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of the Fates, and the most terrible. It is the ONLY one of the Gods whose real name we know.

The feminine soul naturally had its influence, gave his literary work a tendency, a direction. To say that it did so seems so obvious as almost to be platitudinous. With that feminine soul he could never have written a _Call of the Wild_, for instance, nor could he have written a _Walden_, because he was physically and mentally incapable of living a life of adventure as Jack London lived, or of scaling life down to the bare bone as Thoreau did. The fact is that Wilde himself was a contradiction, this giant of a man with the feminine soul was the sport of the gods, and that the spirit of contradiction entered into his writings is everywhere apparent in the written page.

Another thing the feminine soul did for him. Because of that inner urge, he was filled with a burning desire to be admired, and therefore wrote much for the pyrotechnical effect. In a word, he loved to show off, to say and write things calculated to startle. You have exactly the same spirit manifest in Chesterton, in Belloc, too, but to lesser degree. But in Wilde, that self-satisfied strutting, that peacock exhibition of brilliant parts is very obvious, indeed.

Added to the spirit of contradiction and the pavonic display, there was, in Wilde, a strong spirit of partizanship. That accounts for his proclamation of himself as a kind of John the Baptist for Charles Baudelaire. Indeed, for a time, the Baudelairean influence colored all that he wrote and he outdid his master in ornateness. The same spirit of partizanship led him to out-Pater Pater. He conceived it to be a worthy mission to acquaint the stolid British public with Platonic teachings, especially as relating to affection between men. That, of course, was as impossible a task and as hopeless as it would be to attempt to grow banana trees in Greenland. However, Wilde worked valiantly in his cause and, because of ignorance, and some wilful distortion and misrepresentation, much that he wrote in all sincerity later in his life plagued him.

As final ingredients there may be cited his opposition to the commercialism and the philistinism of his day which he shared in company with John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, and his real desire to cultivate the capacity for refined enjoyment of the beautiful in art and literature, an outcropping of his partizanship of Walter Pater.

THE SPIRIT OF CONTRADICTION

In some respects Wilde was like a clever debater who takes keen delight in flouting the opposition. He was of that sort who, privately granting the conclusions of his opponent, will deliberately beat about the bush in an effort to discover entirely new reasons, spiritedly rejecting all those advanced by the other side. Chesterton is of the same stripe. To such men to be destructive, to dazzle, to astound, is meat and drink. Of all pleasures, there is none to interest them as does the game of conversational entanglements. At whatever cost, they must score off of the opposition, be that opposition an individual, the public, custom or convention. Nor do they come unscathed from the battle, for prejudices and widely held beliefs are very solid things to butt against. Not with entire impunity may anyone attack what men have imbibed with their mother’s milk. Conventions and customs are results of ages of experience and to modify them with changing circumstances is, at the best, a slow task.

By way of instance of the argument contradictory and provoking, let us take a passage from _The Importance of Being Earnest_. It runs: “The modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.” Reading that, your average man who belongs to a fraternal order, who subscribes to charity funds, who rushes to fountain pen when a begging list is thrust before him, is shocked. “What!” he exclaims, “would this fellow abolish sympathy? would he weaken personal love and human affection? Does he scorn the little child whose mother clung to it until it sunk into its grave? My dear, old mother who----” and so on. There would be sentimentalities, and, at the end, Wilde would stand condemned as a cold callous anti-Christ.

But without trying to read anything into what Wilde has written except that which was actually there, reading carefully and accepting it as the result of his own thought and experience, we find much of value. We remember that Wilde had pondered long on hereditary influences, was fully aware that he came from a failing stock and inherited fatal weaknesses. He had also said something anent the stupidity of holding that marriage was an institution determined by an omniscient divinity and if anything was made in heaven it was divorce, not marriage. Putting these together we have, not a cold and callous piece of impudence, but an idea which, if pondered, we find leads to the belief that society would do well to regard as an offense against itself the mating of undesirables from whom might spring unhealthy branches, or those prone to weaknesses or disease. Approached from another direction the teaching looks sound enough and we embrace it, calling it the gospel of Eugenics. Certainly, a couple having married and finding in the course of time that their union was unfavorable, unpromising as to their mutual happiness, would, most certainly, do well to separate, for of all creatures, who so unhappy as children of a joyless union? Hence Wilde’s “Divorces are made in heaven.” Hence, also, his scornful contempt for those who spend efforts on the result of those social ills which we see in the sick. After all, it is not vastly removed from Christ’s swift answer to the sentimentalist: “Let the dead bury the dead.” The Wilde idea closely touches Nietzsche’s. There is little time to waste on failures. Man is in a state of transition and must be surpassed. The human race has a long march before it. Which leads to another apparently contradictory statement, another solid truth: “Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” Of course it is, although shallow or thoughtless people denounced Wilde as a stirrer up of trouble when the saying was quoted by socialists and organizers of the unemployed. Had Wilde said, “It is the duty of every Englishman to be progressive,” the platitude would have been hailed with delight, and he might have basked in the concentrated smiles of the black-coated million. But he chose the argument contradictory and shocked with a truth. The unthinking saw in the saying, not a very ordinary remark, but a gospel of discontent calculated to make men vicious and improvident, anarchical and cruel.

Take another instance of the argument contradictory, one from his essay, _The Decay of the Art of Lying_, which enraged many on this side of the Atlantic. Here it is:

The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.

The book of collected essays, be it said, is called _Intentions_. Now Wilde’s intention in the passage quoted, in the entire essay in fact, was to register a condemnation of the idiotic habit of pestiferous puritans in forever trying to tack a “moral lesson” to a work of art. And the desire to do that is distinctly an American vice. Not more than two weeks ago I came across an instance in which a school teacher had set his pupil the task of writing an essay with this as subject: “What moral lesson do we get from Robert Louis Stevenson’s _Treasure Island_?” Now it must be clear to any thinking man that Stevenson had no more idea of trying to convey a moral lesson in that glorious tale than he had of advocating murder and piracy. Healthy minds read for pleasure and not for moral profit, and no sane boy rushes out to murder his grandmother because he has read the life of Nero. But our moralists are forever trying to turn the world into a loveless place, a hell in which each and every one is expected to be forever in a state of awful spiritual anguish, imagining themselves to be reprobate, shaken with religious doubt. The dark and cruel fanaticism of the uplifter would rob both youth and man of joy, and the world would be, had the moral-lesson monger his way, a duller, blanker, grayer place every day. The uplifter would fasten upon us a blighting, spiritual tyranny. On young America, then, the meddlers made an early start. Washington, the national hero, must be portrayed first and foremost as inhuman, a something not of the world in which all men are liars. But at bottom, Wilde was driving home the salutory lesson that art is, must be, independent of morality: must, assuredly, follow its destiny quite independent of moral purpose.

From quite another point of view, from a common sense point of view, we may come to a realization of the folly of painting our national heroes as monsters of virtue--as Charles Grandisons, all correct and precise, and finicking. To endow our Lincolns and Washingtons with middle class respectability is to belittle them. The picture of them is unconvincing, as the picture of men without faults always is. Your sensible European knows better than to set up a moral scarecrow with all bad spots painted out, and loves his Nelson none the less because of the Lady Hamilton affair, approves of his Dickens while admitting he loved his glass, had a golden opinion of the late King Edward, although he had his _affaires_.

“The crude commercialism of America,” that Wilde denounced time and time again, seems to be something that we are only now coming to realize. Thoreau denounced it, of course; also did Emerson, but theirs were voices in the wilderness. Today the cry is being taken up everywhere. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, John Hall Wheelock and a dozen others are calling upon men to see something more than the mere piling up of dollars in life. It is being realized that we are, as a nation, sadly under-educated, that we have overlooked something of the highest import when we have overlooked real self-culture. Wilde’s words, once considered odd, now no longer have the appearance of oddity.

The development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself--a rare type in our time, I admit, but still one occasionally to be met with--you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.

And in another place in the same essay, _The Critic as Artist_:

Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant section of the community among whom he cast his lot, can seriously claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment about any one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people deserve their doom.

To say that “we live in an age in which people are so industrious as to be stupid” has a ring of contradiction, especially to a people taught to sing with Dr. Watts:

How doth the busy little bee Improve each shining hour,

but, after all, what have we in the paragraph but a very honest admission that in life, too much is often sacrificed to that _eclat_ of success, that too many signally fail to see that there is such a thing as losing a life while trying to gain it, that in the chase for supremacy or for wealth, the finer things are often missed. And you know, and I know, and we all know that men are overworked and under-educated, and that there is a certain culture which modern education cannot supply. The position taken by Wilde is quite tenable to those who have been fortunate enough to read Matthew Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_. Nor is it a new truth that Wilde gives, but, on the contrary, a very old one brilliantly stated. It is the tale told by Aesop, the tale of the dog crossing the bridge with a bone in its mouth. The shadow of notoriety is grasped at and the bond of really desirable things lost forever. It is the viewpoint indicated by that sturdy individualist Sumner that the man who makes the most of himself and does his best in his sphere, is far more valuable in the long run than the philanthropist who runs about with a scheme which would set the world straight if everyone would accept it. Wilde, in his oblique way, was getting the truth home that a man is a bundle of possibilities and that it behooves each and every man to find his bent, to chart his course true to some Polaris. And, moreover, each and every one must find his compulsion in himself. “Become what thou art,” said Nietzsche.

One thing more seems necessary to say in this connection anent the crude commercialism of America and its materializing spirit. For generations we have not only hammered away at the moral lesson, but have made the mistake of setting up a kind of god of social ambition, of domination, telling the young that with this, that and the other quality encouraged, great will be the material reward. The governmentship of the state, the presidency of the country, we have insisted, would be the goal within the reach of everyone, the height to which all should aspire, the prize within each grasp. That, of course, is pernicious nonsense, and not only nonsense but senseless social ambition. The stupidity of it may best be realized by imagining an employer inept enough to tell his hands that each of them, by being punctual and accurate, would have the management of the concern within his grasp. Apart from the untruthfulness of that because of the possibility of several developing the required qualities to the same degree, consider the foolishness. For, it is perfectly obvious that a manager of, we will say, a scrap iron business, having discovered a good man at the handles of the electric hoist, would certainly keep that man in his position and not advance him through the auditing department and so on the road to the management. No wise manager would spoil an excellent hoist man to make an indifferent bookkeeper. To do that would be a step towards disintegration. In other words, everyone in authority in the business world aims at the development of the individual and not to the inculcation of social ambition. Nationally, the same idea should be pursued on the ground that “where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly lowered.” In a passage in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ we find the same idea:

The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked.

Without individual self-development, insists Wilde, a society, a nation, must become an empty thing, a thing all front, like a Scandinavian troll. In the play _A Woman of No Importance_ Wilde, emphasizing the point, puts a searing speech into the mouth of his character Hester Worsley:

You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how to live--you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life’s secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dread thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.

Yes, there was a spirit of contradiction in Oscar Wilde and he delighted in awakening opposition, but looked at properly we find much that is inexorably logical beneath what seems to be tricksy humor. He made his hearers writhe while they smiled, and the writhing was salutary.

WILDE’S SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP