Part 5

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:

the very world, which is the world Of all of us, the place where in the end We find our happiness, or not at all. (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:

SYMPHONY IN YELLOW

An omnibus across the bridge Crawls like a yellow butterfly, And, here and there, a passer-by Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay Are moved against the shadowy wharf, And, like a yellow silken scarf, The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade And flutter from the Temple elms, And at my feet the pale green Thames Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

A slight enough thing, but full of interest and spirit. Your man who loses himself in verse based on legendary lore or mysticism, understands and enjoys that. It means something to him. For the same reason Wilde’s _Ballad of Reading Gaol_ interests and excites, almost like an adventure story, combining simplicity and beauty in a way that is altogether satisfying. Mark how a concrete image is called up by a short descriptive passage.

I walked, with other souls in pain, Within another ring, And was wondering if the man had done A great or little thing, When a voice behind me whispered low, “_That fellow’s got to swing_.”

And mark the dramatic appeal of this:

A prison wall was round us both, Two outcast men we were: The world had thrust us from its heart, And God from out His care: And the iron gin that waits for Sin Had caught us in its snare.

And twice a day he smoked his pipe, And drank his quart of beer: His soul was resolute, and held No hiding-place for fear; He often said that he was glad The hangman’s hands were near.

But why he said so strange a thing No warder dared to ask: For he to whom a watcher’s doom Is given as his task, Must set a lock upon his lips, And make his face a mask.

He gets very close there to the heart of the common man, as close as James Stephens indeed, with his _What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub_.

The truth of the matter is that under pain, the artificial Wilde vanished and his poetry became something other than pretence and artifice. I say that, because Douglas has told us that up to the time of his imprisonment, Wilde had “held that style was everything, and feeling nothing; that poetry should be removed as well from material actuality as from the actuality of the spirit, and that no great poet had ever in his greatest moments been other than sincere.” (Page 209, Oscar Wilde and Myself.) And of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, Douglas writes, “(in it) we have a sustained poem of sublimated actuality and of a breadth and sweep and poignancy such as had never before been attained in this line. The emotional appeal is ... quite legitimate and ... the established tradition as to what is fitting and comely in a poem of this nature is not outraged or transgressed.”

Another great poem grew out of his prison life. I refer to the long letter, made into a book by Mr. Ross and entitled _De Profundis_, for a poem, a prose poem, it is. It would be better to mention in this place that _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ was not composed until Wilde had left prison. _De Profundis_, however, was written within stone walls. In another place quotation has been made of Blunt’s Diaries in which Ross is quoted as having said that it is impossible to tell how much of _De Profundis_ is sincere repentance, and how much the result of self pity. Be that as it may, it is very certain that the spirit of the man was bitter in his solitude, that his egoism fell away from him at times. But it is absurd to expect that punishment and imprisonment and disgrace could change the man himself. If he had that feminine soul, he had it. It was part of him, and he could not get away from it, prison or no prison. But he could know in his own heart that he was not as he should have liked to be, that his life’s ideal was other than his life’s path. In other words, he realized, as we all realize, that while his eyes were fixed on the stars, his feet were firmly planted in the mud, and for that fact he was very sorry indeed. Not only sorry, but rebellious that things were as they were, and, as Wilde said, the mood of rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and shuts out the air of heaven. The mood rebellious and the mood penitential cannot sit side by side in the same heart. Penitence presupposes submission and gratitude for gifts bestowed, and Wilde felt no gratitude to the fates that had, at his birth, dropped into his veins the one drop of black blood which colored his life. Destiny is omnipotent, and destiny had given Wilde the feminine soul. Doubtless, had Wilde been what he wished to be, in his better moments, he would have sat with august divinities. But neither Wilde, nor you, nor I, have it in our powers to command the winds that would waft us to the Islands of the Blest.

Transcriber’s Notes

- Italics represented with surrounding _underscores_.

- Small caps converted to ALL CAPS.

- Obvious typographic and grammatical errors silently corrected.

- Variations in hyphenation kept as in the original.

- p. 37: Corrected "a course oath" to "a coarse oath".

- p. 68: Corrected “It is the father of competition is the waste as well as the destruction of energy.” To “It is the father of competition, and competition is the waste, as well as the destruction, of energy.”