Part 3

Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the half clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying, and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.

After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the balcony. The windows yielded easily; the bolts were old.

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

The most patient of readers is surfeited in the book with long, descriptive, catalogue-like passages telling of the fantastic pursuits of Dorian Gray, a literary trick evidently imitative of certain French writers--Barres, Huysmans and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. Indeed, in places, the character Dorian Gray is strongly reminiscent of the character Des Essientes who “with his vaporizers injected into his room an essence formed of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, ess. boquet....” There is much more of it in the pages of _A Rebours_. As I say, Wilde proved himself to be very imitative. You must read his ninth chapter, but a single quotation will give some idea:

And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.

Dorian Gray collects many things, plays with many things, to chase away his _ennui_: musical instruments, jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical vestments, and there are long catalogues in the case of each one similar to that given above in relation to perfumes. There are pages, especially in the ninth chapter that remind the reader of nothing more than a great storehouse with Wilde standing before jumbled piles, picking this thing after that in the manner of a suave auctioneer and commenting upon each article quite oblivious of the fact that his hearers yawn, and that no real business is being done.

There is, all through the book, the Baudelairean influence. Dorian Gray becomes very like the owls of Baudelaire sitting in a row, in his moods of inactivity. Nor is the Baudelairean interest in crime and criminals unimitated. Dorian ponders over strange things: over Gian Maria who used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was

“covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto; Petro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sextus IV., whose beauty was equaled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve her at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome, as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup of emerald, and in honor of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI., who had so wildly adored his brother’s wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images of Love and Death and Madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jeweled cap and acanthus-like curls, Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.”

The truth is, that in the character Dorian Gray, Wilde portrayed not a normal man, but one who comes very near the border line of being what Krafft-Ebing would have termed a degenerate. Certainly he shows a moral insensibility, a lack of proper judgment and ethical ideas. His egoistic ambition is unlimited and he is full of a sentimentality that is shallow cant. The book made a sensation and estimates of it ranged from the zenith to nadir. There were those who extolled it and those who damned it, just as there were those that extolled and others that damned _Jurgen_ and _Ulysses_, as there were those that raised Rossetti to the skies and others who charged him with all sorts of artistic sins and said things anent the extolling of fleshliness as the distinct and supreme end of pictorial and poetic art.

The thing that is rare and valuable in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is the vivid coloring, the effect of an atmosphere of expensive and highly artificial life and cultured luxury; the florid and poetic style. He depicts a highly artificial life and idealizes it. He portrays a quite impossible world, as impossible as the world of pastoral poetry where meadows were inhabited by youths and maidens who guided sheep and carried beribboned crooks, and conversed in rhymed iambic octosyllables, and danced and sang. For, in your experience doubtless as in mine, never has man talked to man, off of a chautauquan platform, like this:

“Let us go and sit in the shade,” said Lord Henry. “Parker has brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare you will be quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again. You really must not let yourself become sunburned. It would be very unbecoming to you.”

“What does it matter?” cried Dorian, laughing, as he sat down on the seat at the end of the garden.

“It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray.”

“Why?”

“Because you have now the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.”

“I don’t feel that, Lord Henry.”

“No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so?... You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius--is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sun-light, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile.

“People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

But Wilde was idealizing, making deliberately an untrue, but charming picture--doing indeed in another way what old Izaak Walton did in his _Compleat Angler_, or what John Fletcher did in his _Faithful Shepherdess_.

As for the vivid coloring of which I spoke, read this:

“The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge windows, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive, and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.”

You see from that what Wilde meant when he made his character express a wish to write a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet. I think that in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, Wilde started with the Persian carpet in his mind’s eye, but sometimes lapsed into the carelessness of a wool sack maker. He is not innocent of passages suggestive of the transpontine drama. But that we overlook in sheer delight at his joy in magnificence.

A last word on _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. It appeared at the end of a time when the English world was full of books with a purpose, such books as Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_, Edna Lyell’s sentimental agnosticism, Grant Allen’s _Woman Who Did_, and, at the same time, there was a lively stream of Zola translations, much energetic, realistic stuff very comparable with the work of Sherwood Anderson of our day. To go further, there was much of the kind of fiction, conventionally unconventional on the order of the present day Ben Hecht. There was George Moore, too. The strictly conventional had Hall Caine, Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, writers of the stripe of Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton Porter. Oscar Wilde struck a path away from all that kind of thing and swung towards a modified romanticism, a something that should not be literary photography. His attempt was rather to lead away from the morass of realism into the valley of idealism. You get the idea somewhat in the Shakespearean lesson that

Nature is made better by no mean, But Nature makes that mean; so o’er that art, Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art That Nature makes.... This is an art Which does mend Nature--change it rather: but The art itself is Nature.

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:

“To you who wrote The Happy Prince, The sweetest tale of modern time...”

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.