Part 2
As I have said, Wilde’s writings are tinged with Baudelaire, a man of strong convictions and with a very definite attitude to art and to life, who has been made a symbol of perversity and decadence. But let that pass for the time. Granted that Charles Baudelaire had made excursions into strange dream lands by way of the opium and hashish door, it is not for us to damn any more than to deify. What engages us at this moment is Baudelaire’s poetic creed and its influence upon Oscar Wilde. Baldly translated, I give the Baudelairean poetic creed thus: “Poetry ... poetry has no other aim than itself; it cannot have any other aim, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, as that which will have been written only for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to say--be it understood--that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result may not be to raise men above vulgar interests. That would evidently be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a moral aim, he has diminished his poetical power, and it is not imprudent to wager that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, under pain of death or degradation, assimilate itself to science or to morals. It has not truth for its object, it has only itself.”
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this does not mean that there is a predilection for things immoral, a delight in depravity and in ugliness. It simply means what should be a self evident truth, a truth accepted by all reasonable men; that art runs its course independently of morality just as it runs independently of science or of political economy; that wise men do not look for a moral lesson in works of art, should, indeed, accept poetry just as they accept music. Who, hearing a Beethoven sonata, would search for the lesson in it? Who so foolish as to seek a moral sentiment in Rubinstein’s _Kammenoi-Ostrow_? Wilde’s way of stating his artistic creed was very similar to Baudelaire’s. Thus:
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
I wrote, a few paragraphs back, that Baudelaire had become a kind of symbol. A word of explanation is due. Just as Hogarth chose to picture a side of life which others of his time were either too blind, or too squeamish, or too cowardly, or too conventional minded to attempt, pictures that showed the beast in man, the human being as Yahoo and Struldbrug, pictures a man debauched, dissipated, degraded and filthy, so has Baudelaire sung of the unwholesome things which are part of our artificial life--of vice, and crime, and corruption. Very engagingly too he dabbles in things esoteric and diabolical. Take that little prose poem, _The Generous Player_--a tale in which the chief character sells his soul to the devil on condition that he shall be free from boredom for the remainder of his days, but, after the compact is made, begins to doubt with horror whether his satanic majesty will keep his word. So, to reassure himself, he prays in semi-slumber: “My God; Lord my God! Let it be that the Devil keep his word.” It is a queer tale and there are others akin to it, but each must read for himself, must try to understand the peculiar attraction for, not only the diabolical, but the loathsome, the morbid, the criminal and the lewd had for the Frenchman. Of course, the more Baudelaire was attacked for his supposed immorality the more extravagant he became. Still, he was a great poet and a master of the word.
Unfortunately, somehow, we are inclined to overlook the fact that it is not Frenchmen alone who have pictured the horrible. We forget Morrison with his _Tales of Mean Streets_, Caradoc Evans with his stories of sordid poverty and crime in the Welsh hill-country, Thomas Burke and his dock-land sketches. But pass all that. Enamored of Baudelaire, Wilde’s work became affected just as Swinburne’s work was by the same influence, and, in another branch of art, Aubrey Beardsley’s. But let us not overlook the fact that there is everywhere manifested a vast interest in the odd and the bizarre, in the occult and the fantastic. That peculiar interest accounts for the popularity of others besides those whose names I have mentioned; Poe, for instance, and Ambrose Bierce, and Zola, and Gautier and De Maupassant. It accounted for the vast interest which, as Frank Harris tells us, was manifested in Wilde’s poem, _The Harlot’s House_, as a poem slight enough, but as a picture very attractive, as all forbidden things are attractive.
We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot’s house.
Inside, above the din and fray, We heard the loud musicians play The “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons, Slim silhouetted skeletons Went sidling through the slow quadrille.
They took each other by the hand, And danced a stately saraband; Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing.
Then, turning to my love, I said, “The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.”
Baudelaire, and Wilde as well, sometimes ran _fanti_, just as men in arguments are intoxicated with their own verbosity. So we find Wilde in the warmth of his partizanship not only couching a lance for Baudelaire, but handling edged swords, to be wounded later with his own weapons. Thus:
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about chastity and it may be that it is to the shame of Magdalen, and not to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.--_The Critic as Artist._
That, which played a great part in Wilde’s trial, is apparently a kind of advocacy of the M. Fr. Paulhan point of view, (_Le Nouveau Mysticisme_, page 94) the Decadent philosophy dished up and watered for British consumption. Baudelaire had said that “the vulgar sought goodness as an end,” and Wilde had this:
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.--_The Critic as Artist._
Instances might be multiplied, but enough has been said to show that Wilde not only depended for effects upon a manifestation of his spirit of contradiction, but somewhat suffered in his art because of his partizanship. Still, of his originality there can be no doubt and a partizan is not necessarily a plagiarist.
As to the charge of plagiarism, while others have charged Wilde with the literary sin, it remained for his former friend, Lord Alfred Douglas, to be the most bitter in denunciation. “His (Wilde’s) sonnets are, for the most part, Miltonic in their effects; the metre and method of _In Memoriam_ are used in the greater number of his lyrics; and he used the metre which Tennyson sealed to himself for all time even in _The Sphinx_, which is his great set work; while in such pieces as _Charmides_, _Panthea_, _Humanitad_ and _The Burden of Itys_ he borrowed the grave pipe of Matthew Arnold.” Writing of the poem _Le Mer_, Douglas says: “The bird is Wilde, the plumage and call are Tennyson’s to a fault.” Again, “While Wilde arranges the stanzas as though they consisted of two lines, they really consist of Tennyson’s four ... Tennyson’s suns as well as Tennyson’s stanza!” In another place Douglas writes: “I have not space to enter into great detail with regard to those lyrics of Wilde which are not flatly Tennysonian. There are about twenty of them, and they include a cheap imitation of _La Belle Dame sans Merci_, a flagrant copy of Hood’s lines beginning ‘Take her up tenderly’--(Douglas refers to the poem _The Bridge of Sighs_)--and sundry pieces which are childishly reminiscent of Mrs. Browning, William Morris and even Jean Ingelow.... Wilde was an over-sedulous ape, so over-sedulous, in fact, that he is careful to emphasize and exaggerate the very faults and defects of his masters.”
Douglas is bitter as gall and, like the gallant Michael Monahan, I prefer to quote him with the sonnet he wrote on learning of the death of Oscar Wilde:
I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face All radiant and unshadowed of distress. And as of old, in music measureless, I heard his golden voice and marked him trace Under the common thing the hidden grace, And conjure wonder out of emptiness, Till mean things put on beauty like a dress, And all the world was an enchanted place. And then methought outside a fast-locked gate I mourned the loss of unrecorded words, Forgotten tales and mysteries half said, Wonders that might have been articulate, And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds, And so I woke and knew that he was dead!
It leaves a sweeter taste in the mouth.
AS FICTION WRITER
Possessed with the spirit of contradiction, obsessed with the Baudelairean diabolism, Wilde tried his hand at fiction with curious results. Be it remembered that he was one of those odd and lucky individuals in whom bubble up at all times plots and ideas and situations capable of being used in the making of stories. Such minds see not only the thing before them, a man and a woman, we will say, walking towards one another over a bridge, but with a leap into a strange world of possibilities or probabilities, there is conjured up within them a thousand visions of things odd and fantastic, which might happen. It is not even correct to say that they are men of great imagination--they are more than that. They are, in a respect, tortured men, men whose minds project them into all kinds of situations. They themselves die a thousand deaths, suffer a thousand sorrows and pains, are torn with a thousand griefs. You see that kind of character in Charles Dickens who is always on the verge of tears or laughter, enjoying life, actually enjoying it with Micawber, with Pickwick, with Sam Weller, with Cap’n Cuttle, with the Crummeles: suffering with Oliver Twist, with Sidney Carton, with his little Nell, with his Tom Pinch. Such men live the lives that they portray and there is a vast gulf separating them from those writers who artistically contrive their characters but keep themselves apart from them as a Creator is apart from his creatures. Thackeray for instance, who will paint for you a Beatrix, a Henry Esmond, a Harry Warrington, a Madam Bernstein, a Captain Costigan, but who will step down as it were, among his audience, and comment upon the characters upon the stage; sometimes, indeed, interrupt his narrative to point a moral. Of that sort too was Trollope: of the other sort was George Eliot. Yet, in both cases, in the case of Dickens as well as in the case of Thackeray, with George Eliot as with Trollope, you have accurate pictures of life and of society, and the prejudices, the motives, the ambitions, the form and construction of the mind of the fictional personages are as evident to the reader as if he lived in their very presence.
Accepting Dickens and Thackeray as examples, we see Wilde with that peculiar constitution of mind which made him prone to identify himself with his characters, but, again, he had that streak of perversity in him which refused to allow the characters he imagined to act a rational way or to live in a rational world. There was in him that childish and destructive habit of destroying his own toys, the habit we see in Chesterton who paints pictures perfectly credible in his Auberons and Barkers and Quins, but sets them to doing fantastic tricks, standing on their heads, running about in queer disguises and undertaking to do things that would, in a sane society, promptly land them in the lunatic asylum. And, of course, with the trick of perversity, Wilde had that Baudelairean bent.
With what has been said kept in mind, consider Wilde’s story, _Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime_, which appeared in the _Court and Society Review_ in 1887 and in book form in 1891. In the story you have a mimic world that is a faithful reflection of the contemporary world with its lords and ladies and society folk of wealth, hobnobbing with poets, socialists, nihilists, sceptics and odd characters. To verify the truth of his picture of the reception at Bentick house, one has but to turn to the pages of the newspapers of the day, the society journals rather, and mark the names of those in the public eye: Lady Jeune, William Morris, Prince Kropotkine, Burne Jones, Labouchere, the Positivist crowd with Frederic Harrison and his friends, the theosophists with Madam Blavatsky and Sinnett, the agnostics with Annie Besant and Stewart Ross and Dr. Marsh; others too, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw, Belfort Bax, Walter Crane. Such a gathering is hardly possible in America where there is no democracy, but, instead, an aristocracy of wealth. It was, and is, quite possible in the older country in which there is a real democracy, where two impulses are present, a respect for tradition and for visible authority and a regard for precedent on the one hand, and on the other a regard for certain abstract principles and a strong sense of the value of individual judgment. Between an organized aristocracy and an organic people things are balanced and the triumph of one does not develop into despotism, nor does the triumph of the other result in sullen mob rule. So, as I say, the picture of the reception is perfectly credible and Wilde paints well, as well as Dickens paints when he tells us of the belfry in _The Chimes_, or of Fountain Court in his _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
But now mark the Wilde who twists things, who, in a stage set for things as they are, chooses, in his contradictory spirit, to bring in events as they are not at all apt to be.
One of his characters is a palmist and to him goes the hero, Lord Arthur Savile. The palmist, Mr. Podgers, tells his client that his fate is read--that he is to become a murderer. Now see the odd kink, the paradox. Lord Savile, being about to marry, finds his mind occupied with the prediction. So, since it is decreed that he must do murder, the sooner it is done and out of the way, the better. There is a kind of Benvenuto Cellini touch here, the Cellini who when at work in his shop finds his brain on fire because a fellow has annoyed him, so rushes out dagger in hand to stab him and have done with it; the Cellini who finding himself filled with amatory desire while at work, satisfies himself with his model and gets to work again. So Wilde’s Lord Savile. To him it does not very much matter who the victim is, so he tries to poison an aunt and fails, then attempts to kill an uncle with an infernal machine. Disgusted with his ill success he takes a walk along the Thames embankment to ponder, when his eyes light upon the palmist leaning on the parapet with folded arms, gazing into the black depth. Then:
In a moment he had seized Mr. Podgers by the legs and flung him into the Thames. There was a coarse oath, a heavy splash, and all was still. Lord Arthur looked anxiously over, but could see nothing of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an eddy of moonlit water. After a time it sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible. Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky misshapen figure striking out for the staircase of the bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realized the decree of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and Sybil’s name came to his lips.
You see the kink, or course. A murder with no cause. A murder and no remorse. The victim rather a scarecrow kind of figure. And you see also, the Baudelairean gesture properly watered for English consumption. Bear in mind, too, the quotation made a few pages ago from _The Critic as Artist_, relating to sin as an essential element of progress.
Of course, the story is all tricksy fooling and certainly not worth while. It is thin stuff, poor stuff, unworthy stuff and all this largely because insincere and imitative. One seems to see Wilde starting seriously enough, to break off at a tangent with a discordant burst of laughter. But here is a point to consider. Had Wilde been accused of murder, and placed on trial, what hidden tendency think you, would have been discovered by a keen lawyer in the book? There’s matter for thought there.
We pass to the longer story, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. In this, Wilde tried to do something new, putting indeed, into the mouth of one of his characters his ideal: “to write a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal.” He did, or attempted more, endeavoring to break away from the English tradition and write a novel with no love interest as motive. A task glorious enough to be sure, for, as every thoughtful man must have realized, the Anglo-Saxon is not obsessed with sex. The acquisition of a woman is by no means the greatest thing in life, nor is it the thing that absorbs a man. Marriage is a mere incident. Other things occupy his mind far more than sex: business, for example, and art, and ambition.
Now the story thread of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is slight enough. A picture has been painted by Dorian’s friend, and, while the subject of the picture retains his youth and beauty, the picture ages, the face on the canvas reflecting the life of the man, showing the stigmata of a life of folly, of vice, of lust, of hypocrisy. The discovery of the change is thus described:
“You won’t? Then I must do it myself,” said the young man; and he tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him. There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely marred that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiseled nostrils and from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed to recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left hand corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire.
Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. “My God! if it is true,” he exclaimed, “and this is what you have done with your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you to be!” He held the light up again to the canvas, and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.
A mere extract, of course, robs the scene of its vitality, but still, Wilde does not stir in the reader the passion of horror that a true artist should. Compare the scene with that never-to-be-forgotten page in Conrad’s _Secret Agent_ where the woman thrusts the carving knife into the heart of her husband, or the latter part of _Le Père Goriot_ where Balzac bruises the reader’s heart as he tells of the torture of anguish; or the picture in Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ where Steyne is knocked down. The truth is that Wilde, as Ross told Blunt, was forever thinking of his style, and when a man has his pose in mind, he is not very apt to lay the lash on heavily. Machen, in his _Hieroglyphics_, has had much to say on the ecstasy of writers, much that is well worth reading, and he proves his point to the hilt. That ecstasy, Wilde lacked. Within him were no eternal tempests. Never could he say with Byron, “I have written from the fulness of my mind, from passion, from impulse, from many motives but not from their sweet voices.” Wilde did write for “sweet voices” and, consequently he lacked much that a writer of fiction requires. Turn to the passage in the _Secret Agent_, which I have mentioned, read it and compare it with this, the death of Dorian Gray. Wilde seems sluggish, uninterested, aloof.