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OSCAR WILDE
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
ARTHUR RANSOME
LONDON
MARTIN SECKER
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET
ADELPHI
MCMXII
[Illustration: Oscar Wilde. from the Painting by Harper Pennington now
in the possession of Robert Ross. Esq.]
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
BOHEMIA IN LONDON (Sketches and Essays), 1907
A HISTORY OF STORY-TELLING, 1909
EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1910
THE HOOFMARKS OF THE FAUN, 1911
ETC.
Copyright reserved in all countries signatory to the
Berne Convention. The copyright of this book in
Russia is the property of the Scorpion Press, Moscow
TO
ROBERT ROSS
NOTE
I wish to thank Mr. Robert Ross, Wilde's literary executor, who has
helped me in every possible way, allowed me to read many of the letters
that Wilde addressed to him, and given much time out of a very busy life
to the verification, from documents in his possession, of the
biographical facts included in my book. I wish to thank Mr. Walter
Ledger for much interesting information, and for the sight of many rare
editions of Wilde's books that made possible the correction of several
bibliographical errors into which I had fallen. I wish to thank Mr.
Martin Secker for putting at my disposal his collection of late
nineteenth-century literature. I wish to thank an anonymous author for
lending me the proof-sheets of a forthcoming book, which will contain a
full and accurate account of the legal proceedings for and against
Wilde. Many of those who knew Wilde have helped me, by letter or in
conversation, with valuable reminiscence. I would thank, particularly,
M. Paul Fort, M. Remy de Gourmont, M. Stuart Merrill, and Mr. Reginald
Turner.
The texts of Wilde's books that I have used throughout are these:
Messrs. Methuen's limited edition of the works, and the five shilling
edition issued by the same firm; Mr. Charles Carrington's edition of
_The Picture of Dorian Gray_; Mr. A. L. Humphreys' edition of _The Soul
of Man under Socialism_; Mr. David Nutt's edition of _The Happy Prince
and other Tales_. To these, as to the best, and in some cases the only,
editions easily accessible, I must refer my readers. Much accurate
observation is to be found in M. Andre Gide's "Oscar Wilde," published
by the Mercure de France, and the result of much laborious and useful
research is embodied in Mr. Stuart Mason's "Bibliography of the Poems of
Oscar Wilde," published by Mr. Grant Richards. Permission to include
many quotations has been granted by Messrs. Methuen and Co., and Mr.
Robert Ross.
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 13
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY 27
POEMS 36
AESTHETICISM 59
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE 80
INTENTIONS 104
THE THEATRE 130
DISASTER 153
DE PROFUNDIS 157
1897-1900 178
AFTERTHOUGHT 201
I
INTRODUCTORY
Gilbert, in 'The Critic as Artist,' complains that "we are overrun by a
set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house
along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave
as mutes. But we won't talk about them," he continues. "They are the
mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one and the
ashes to another, but the soul is out of their reach." That is not a
warning lightly to be disregarded. No stirring up of dust and ashes is
excusable, and none but brutish minds delight in mud-pies mixed with
blood. I had no body-snatching ambition. Impatient of such criticism of
Wilde as saw a law-court in _The House of Pomegranates_, and heard the
clink of handcuffs in the flowing music of _Intentions_, I wished, at
first, to write a book on Wilde's work in which no mention of the man or
his tragedy should have a place. I remembered that he thought
Wainewright, the poisoner and essayist, too lately dead[1] to be
treated in "that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe
so many charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian
Renaissance." To-day it is Wilde who is too near us to be seen without a
blurring of perspectives. Some day it will be possible to write of him
with the ecstatic acquiescence that Nietzsche calls _Amor Fati_, as we
write of Caesar Borgia sinning in purple, Cleopatra sinning in gold, and
Roberto Greene hastening his end by drab iniquity and grey repentance.
But not yet. He only died a dozen years ago. I planned an artificial
ignorance that should throw him to a distance where his books alone
would represent him.
I was wrong, of course. Such wilful evasion would have been foolish in a
contemporary critic of Shelley, worse than foolish in a critic of Wilde.
An artist is unable to do everything for us. He gives us his work as a
locked casket. Sometimes the wards are very simple and all the world
have keys to fit; sometimes they are intricate and subtle, and the
casket is only to be opened by a few, though all may taste imperfectly
the precious essences distilling through the hinges. Sometimes, when our
knowledge of an artist and of the conditions under which he wrote have
been entirely forgotten, there are no keys, and the work of art remains
a closed casket, like much early poetry, of which we can only say that
it is cunningly made and that it has a secret. Why do we try to pierce
the obscurity that surrounds the life of Shakespeare if not because an
intenser (I might say a more accurate) enjoyment of his writings may be
given us by a fuller knowledge of the existence out of which he wrote?
It is for this that we study the Elizabethan theatre, and print upon our
minds a picture of the projecting stage, the gallants smoking pipes and
straddling their stools, the flag waving from above the tiled roof. We
would understand his technique, but, still more, while we lack directer
evidence, we would use these hints about the furniture of his mind's eye
in moments of composition. Writers of Wordsworth's generation realized,
at least subconsciously, that a work of art is not independent of
knowledge. They tried to help us by printing at the head of a poem
information about the circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells
us that a sonnet was composed "on Westminster Bridge," or "suggested by
Mr. Westell's views of the caves, etc., in Yorkshire," he is trying to
ease for us the task of aesthetic reproduction to which his poem is a
stimulus. There is a crudity about such obvious assistance, and it
would be quite insufficient without the knowledge on which we draw
unconsciously as we read. But the crudity of those pitiable little
scraps of proffered information is not so remarkable as that of the
presumptuous attempt to read a book as if it had fallen like manna from
heaven, and that of the gross dullness of perception that can allow a
man to demand of a poem or a picture that it shall itself compel him
fully to understand it. To gain the privilege of a just appreciation of
a man's books (if, indeed, such an appreciation is possible) we must
know what place they took in his life, and handle the rough material
that dictated even their most ethereal tissue. In the case of such a
writer as Wilde, whose books are the by-products of a life more
important than they in his own eyes, it is not only legitimate but
necessary for understanding to look at books and life together as at a
portrait of an artist by himself, and to read, as well as we may,
between the touches of the brush. It is not that there is profit in
trying to turn works of art into biographical data, though that may be a
fascinating pastime. It is that biographical data cannot do other than
assist us in our understanding of the works of art.
In any case, leaving on one side this question, admittedly subject to
debate, it would have been ridiculous to study the writings alone of a
man who said, not without truth, that he put his genius into his life,
keeping only his talent for his books. I therefore changed my original
intention, and, while concerned throughout with Wilde as artist and
critic rather than as criminal, read his biographers and talked with his
friends that I might be so far from forgetting as continually to
perceive behind the books the spectacle of the man, vividly living his
life and filling it as completely as he filled his works with his
strange and brilliant personality.
It is too easy to talk glibly of the choice between life and literature.
No choice can be made between them. The whole is greater than its part,
and literature is at once the child and the stimulus of life,
inseparable from it. But, beside art, life has other activities, all of
which aspire to the self-consciousness that art makes possible. The
artist himself, for all his gift of tongues, is not blinded by the
descending light to the plastic qualities of the existence that fires
his words and is itself intensified by his speech. He, too, moves in
walled town or on the green earth, and has a little time in which to
build two memories, one for his fellows, and another, a secret diary, to
carry with him when he dies. In his life, his books or pictures or
brave harmonies of music are but moments, notes of colour in a
composition vital to himself. And when we speak so carelessly of a
choice between life and literature, we do not mean a choice. We only
compare the vividness of a man's whole life, as we perceive it, with
that of those portions of it that he spent in books. Sometimes we wonder
which is more alive. In Wilde's case we compare a row of volumes,
themselves remarkable, with a life that was the occupation of an agile
and vivid personality for which a cloistered converse with itself was
not enough, a personality that loved the lights and the bustle, the eyes
and ears of the world, and the applause that does not have to wait for
print.
Wilde was a kind of Wainewright, to whom his own life was very
important. He saw art as self-expression and life as self-development.
He felt that his life was material on which to practise his powers of
creation, and handled it and brooded over it like a sculptor planning to
make a dancing figure out of a pellet of clay. Even after its
catastrophe he was still able to speak of his life as of a work of art,
as if he had seen it from outside. Indeed, to a surprising extent, he
had been a spectator of his own tragedy. In building his life his strong
sense of the picturesque was not without admirable material, and he was
able to face the street with a decorative and entertaining facade,
which, unlike those of the palaces in Genoa, was not contradicted by
dullness within. He made men see him as something of a dandy among
authors, an amateur of letters in contrast with the professional maker
of books and plays. If he wrote books he did not allow people to presume
upon the fact, but retained the status of a gentleman. At the Court of
Queen Joan of Naples he would have been a rival to Boccaccio, himself an
adventurer. At the Court of James he would have crossed "Characters"
with Sir Thomas Overbury. In an earlier reign he would have corresponded
in sonnets with Sir Philip Sidney, played with Euphuism, been very kind
to Jonson at the presentation of a masque, and never set foot in The
Mermaid. Later, Anthony Hamilton might have been his friend, or with the
Earl of Rochester he might have walked up Long Acre to belabour the
watch without dirtying the fine lace of his sleeves. In no age would he
have been a writer of the study. He talked and wrote only to show that
he could write. His writings are mostly vindications of the belief he
had in them while still unwritten. It pleased him to pretend that his
plays were written for wagers.
After making imaginary backgrounds for him, let us give him his own.
This man, who would perhaps have found a perfect setting for himself in
the Italy of the Renaissance, was born in 1854. Leigh Hunt, De Quincey,
and Macaulay were alive. Wordsworth had only been dead four years.
Tennyson was writing "Maud" and "The Idylls of the King." Borrow was
wandering in wild Wales and finishing "The Romany Rye." Browning was
preparing "Men and Women" for the press. Dickens was the novelist of the
day, and had half a dozen books yet to write. Thackeray was busy on "The
Newcomes." Matthew Arnold was publishing his "Poems." FitzGerald was
working underground in the mine from which he was to extract the roses
of Omar. Ruskin had just published "Stones of Venice," was arranging to
buy the work of a young man called Rossetti, helping with the Working
Men's College, and writing a pamphlet on the Crystal Palace. William
Morris, younger even than Rossetti, was an undergraduate at Oxford,
rhyming nightly, and exclaiming that, if this was poetry, it was very
easy.
It is characteristic of great men that, born out of their time, they
should come to represent it. Victor Hugo, in 1830, was a young man
irreverently trying to overturn established tradition. He had to pack a
theatre with his friends to save his play from being hissed. Now,
looking back on that time, his enemies seem to have faded away, tired
ghosts, and he to be alone upon the stage laying about him on backs of
air. So far was the Elizabethan age from a true appreciation of
Shakespeare that Webster could patronise him with praise of "his happy
and copious industry." Shakespeare was a busy little dramatist, working
away on the fringe of the great light cast by the effulgent majesty of
Elizabeth. To-day Shakespeare divides with his queen the honour of
naming the years they lived in. The nineties, the early nineties when
Wilde's talent was in full fruition, seem now, at least in literature,
to be coloured by the personality of Wilde and the movement foolishly
called Decadent. But in the nineties, when Wilde was writing, he had a
very few silent friends and a very great number of vociferous enemies.
His books were laughed at, his poetry parodied, his person not kindly
caricatured, and, even when his plays won popular applause, this
hostility against him was only smothered, not choked. His disaster
ungagged it, and few men have been sent to perdition with a louder cry
of hounds behind them.
There was relief as well as hostility in the cry. Wilde had meant a
foreign ideal, and one not too easy to follow. If he were right, then
his detractors were wrong, and there was joy in the voices of those who
taunted, pointing to the Old Bailey, "that is where the artistic life
leads a man." There was also shown a curious inability to distinguish
between the destruction of a man's body and the extinction of his mind's
produce. When Wilde was sent to prison the spokesmen of the nineties
were pleased to shout, "We have heard the last of him." To make sure of
that they should have used the fires of Savonarola as well as the cell
of Raleigh. They should have burnt his books as well as shutting up the
writer. That sentence, so frequently iterated, that "No more would be
heard of him," showed a remarkable error in valuation of his powers.
There was surprise in England when _Salome_ was played in Paris while
its author was in prison. It seemed impossible that a man who had been
sent to gaol for such offences as his could be an artist honoured out of
his own country. Only after his death, upon the appearance of _De
Profundis_, and translations of his writings into French, German,
Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian, did popular
opinion recognize (if it has yet recognized) that the Old Bailey, the
public disgrace and the imprisonment were only circumstances in Wilde's
private tragedy that would have been terrible even without them, and
that they were no guarantee of the worthlessness of what he wrote.
So far were Wilde's name and influence from ending with his personal
disaster that they are daily gathering weight. Whether his writings are
perfectly successful or not, they altered in some degree the course of
literature in his time, and are still an active power when the wind has
long blown away the dust of newspaper criticism with which they were
received. It is already clear that Wilde has an historical importance
too easily underestimated. His indirect influence is incalculable, for
his attitude in writing gave literature new standards of valuation, and
men are writing under their influence who would indignantly deny that
their work was in any way dictated by Wilde.
A personality as vivid as his, exercised at once through books and in
direct but perhaps less intimate social intercourse, cannot suddenly be
wiped away like a picture on a slate. No man's life was crossed by
Wilde's without experiencing a change. Men lived more vividly in his
presence, and talked better than themselves. No common man lives and
dies without altering, to some extent, the life about him and so the
history of the world. How much wider is their influence who live their
lives like flames, hurrying to death through their own enjoyment and
expenditure alike of their bodies and their brains. "Pard-like spirits,
beautiful and swift" are sufficiently rare and notable to be ensured
against oblivion.
His personality was stronger than his will. When, as he often did, he
set himself to imitation, he could not prevent himself from leaving his
mark upon the counterfeit. He stole freely, but often mounted other
men's jewels so well that they are better in his work than in their own.
It is impossible to dismiss even his early poetry as without
significance. He left no form of literature exactly as he found it. He
brought back to the English stage a spirit of comedy that had been for
many years in mourning. He wrote a romantic play which necessitated a
new manner of production, and may be considered the starting-point of
the revolution in stage-management that, happily, is still proceeding.
He showed both in practice and theory the possibilities of creation open
to the critic. He found a new use for dialogue, and brought to England a
new variety of the novel. His work continually upset accepted canons and
received views. It placed, for example, the apparently settled question
of sincerity in a new obscurity, and the distinction between decoration
and realism in a new light. One of the tests of novelty and beauty is
that they should be a little out at elbows in an old aesthetic. Wilde
sets the subtlest problems before us, and I shall not be wasting time in
posing them and showing that his work has at least this quality of what
is beautiful and new, that it is impossible to apply to it definitions
that were sufficient before it. It will be necessary in considering his
writing, as I hope to do, to digress again and again from book, or play,
or poem into the abstract regions of speculation. Only so will it be
possible to appreciate this man whose name was to have disappeared in
1895, whose work is likely to preserve that name long after oblivion has
swallowed the well-intentioned prophets of its extinction.
Even so, however carefully I may discuss alike his work and the abstract
and technical questions that it raises; however carefully I may gather
evidence of his overflowing richness of personality, I shall not be able
to make a complete and worthy portrait of the man. There are people,
mostly of the generation before my own (though the youngest of us may
come to it), who make a practice of suggesting our entire ignorance of a
subject by demanding that we shall define it in a few words. "Say what
you think of him in a sentence." If I could do that, do you think I
should be going to the labour of writing a book? One cannot define in a
sentence a man whom it has taken God several millions of years to make.
In a dozen chapters it is no less impossible. The utmost one can do, and
that only with due humility, is to make an essay in definition.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] He died in 1852. Wilde wrote in 1888.
II
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
"The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the
great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent
monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal
knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost
for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it
might be told, it is no longer known. The delicate features of the mind,
the nice discriminations of character, and the minute peculiarities of
conduct, are soon obliterated; and it is surely better that caprice,
obstinacy, frolick, and folly, however they might delight in the
description, should be silently forgotten, than that, by wanton
merriment and unseasonable detection, a pang should be given to a widow,
a daughter, a brother, or a friend. As the process of these narratives
is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself
_walking upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished_, and
coming to the time of which it will be proper rather to say _nothing
that is false, than all that is true_" (Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of
Addison").
Before proceeding to the main business of the book, an examination of
Wilde's work, I wish to set before myself and my readers a summary
biography which may hereafter be useful for our reference. Much of the
life of Wilde is so bound up with his work as to be incapable of
separate treatment; but, on the other hand, dates clog a page, and facts
do not always enjoy their just value when dovetailed into criticism. In
this chapter I shall set down the facts of Wilde's parentage and
education, up to the time when it becomes possible and advisable to
speak of his life and his work together. Thenceforward, I shall do
little more than note the dates of events and publications (reserving to
myself the right of repeating them when I find it convenient), and make,
as it were, a skeleton that shall gather flesh from the ensuing pages of
the book.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, at
21, Westland Row, Dublin. His father was William Wilde, knighted in
1864, a celebrated oculist and aurist, a man of great intellectual
activity and uncertain temper, a runner after girls, with a lusty
enjoyment of life, and a delight in falling stars and thunderstorms.
His mother, whose maiden name was Elgee, was a clever woman, who, when
very young, writing as "Speranza" in a revolutionary paper, had tried to
rouse Irishmen to the storming of Dublin Castle. She read Latin and
Greek, but was ready to suffer fools for the sake of social adulation.
She was clever enough to enjoy astonishing the _bourgeois_, but her
cleverness seldom carried her further. When Wilde was born, she was
twenty-eight and her husband thirty-nine. They were people of
consideration in Dublin. His schoolfellows did not have to ask Wilde who
his father was. It is said, that before Wilde's birth, his mother had
hoped for a girl. He was a second son. His elder brother, William,
became a journalist in London, and died in 1899. He had a sister, Isola,
younger than himself, who died in childhood. Her death suggested the
poem 'Requiescat.' To him, as to De Quincey, a sister brought the idea
of mortality. There are exceptions to that fine rule of Hazlitt's
brother: "No young man believes he shall ever die." De Quincey looking
across his sister's death-bed through an open window on a summer day,
and Wilde, thinking of
"All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust,"
felt the fingers of death before their time. Like most of Wilde's early
melodies, his lament is sung to a borrowed lyre, but the thing is so
sweet that it seems ungracious to remember its indebtedness to Hood.[2]
Both Sir William and Lady Wilde busied themselves in collecting
folk-lore. Wilde in boyhood travelled with his father to visit ruins and
gather superstitions. His childhood must have had a plentiful mythology.
Wilde and his brother were not excluded from the extravagant
conversations of their mother's _salon_. Any precocity they showed was
encouraged, if only by that curious atmosphere of agile cleverness.
There are no valuable anecdotes of his childhood, but it is said that
his mother always thought that Oscar was less brilliant than her elder
son.
When he was eleven he was sent to the Portora Royal School at
Enniskillen, where he behaved well, did not particularly distinguish
himself, did not play games, read a great deal, and was very bad at
mathematics. In the holidays he travelled with his mother in France.
Leaving Portora in 1873, he went with a scholarship to Trinity College,
Dublin, where, in 1874, he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. In
the same year he left Dublin for Oxford, matriculating at Magdalen and
taking a scholarship. In 1876 he took a First Class in Classical
Moderations, always a sufficient proof of sound learning, and, in 1878,
he took a First Class in Literae Humaniores. In 1877 he travelled in
Italy and went to Greece with Professor Mahaffy. This experience had
great influence on his attitude towards art, filled the classical
dictionary with life, and made the figures of mythology so luminous that
he was tempted to overwork them. In 1878 he read the Newdigate Prize
Poem in the Sheldonian Theatre.
On leaving Oxford he brought to London a small income, a determination
to conquer the town, and a reputation as a talker. He took rooms in the
Adelphi. He adopted a fantastic costume to emphasize his personality,
and, perhaps to excuse it, spoke of the ugliness of modern dress. In
three years he had won the recognition of Punch, which, thenceforward,
caricatured him several times a month.
In 1881 he published his first book, a volume of poems, discussed in the
next chapter. Five editions of it were immediately sold. His costume and
identification with the aesthetic movement of that time determined his
selection as a lecturer in America. The promoters of his tour there
were, however, anxious to help not the aesthetic movement but the success
of a play that laughed at it. He went to America in 1882, and again in
1883, on the latter occasion to see the production of _Vera_. On his
return from the first visit he went to Paris, where he finished _The
Duchess of Padua_, which was not published till 1908. In 1891 it was
produced in New York, when twenty copies were printed for the actors and
for private circulation. It is likely that in 1883, while in Paris, he
began _The Sphinx_, upon which he worked at various periods before its
publication in 1894.
Returning to England, he took rooms in Charles Street, Haymarket, and
lectured in the provinces. In 1884 he married Constance Mary Lloyd, who
brought him enough money to enable him to take No. 16 Tite Street,
Chelsea, which was his home until 1895. He wrote for a number of
periodical newspapers, and, for two years, edited The Woman's World.
In 1885 'The Truth of Masks' appeared as 'Shakespeare and Stage Costume'
in The Nineteenth Century. In 1886 he began that course of conduct that
was to lead to his downfall in 1895. In 1887 he published 'Lord Arthur
Savile's Crime,' 'The Canterville Ghost,' 'The Sphinx without a
Secret,' and 'The Model Millionaire,' which were issued together in
1891. In 1888 he published _The Happy Prince and other Tales_. In 1889
'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.' appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. 'Pen,
Pencil and Poison' appeared in The Fortnightly Review in 1889, 'The
Decay of Lying' in The Nineteenth Century in the same year, and 'The
Critic as Artist' in The Nineteenth Century in 1890. _A House of
Pomegranates_ and _Intentions_, in which these three essays were
reprinted with 'The Truth of Masks,' were published in 1891. In the same
year 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' appeared in The Fortnightly
Review. _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ appeared in Lippincott's Magazine
in 1890. The Preface was published separately in The Fortnightly Review
in 1891. He added several chapters, and _The Portrait of Dorian Gray_
was published in book form in 1891. Much of his time was spent in Paris,
and there, before the end of the year, he wrote _Salome_. In 1892 that
play was prohibited by the Censor when Madame Sarah Bernhardt had begun
to rehearse it for production at the Palace Theatre. It was first
produced in Paris, at the Theatre de L'Oeuvre, in 1896. _Lady
Windermere's Fan_ was produced on February 20, 1892, by Mr. George
Alexander at the St. James's Theatre. _A Woman of No Importance_ was
produced on April 19, 1893, by Mr. H. Beerbohm Tree at the Haymarket
Theatre, where, on January 3, 1895, he produced _An Ideal Husband_. On
February 14, 1895, Mr. George Alexander produced _The Importance of
Being Earnest_ at the St. James's.
With the production of these plays Wilde became not only a caricatured
celebrity but a popular success. He lived extravagantly. In 1895 the
applause was turned to execration, when he lost in a prosecution for
criminal libel that he brought against the Marquis of Queensberry, and
was himself arrested on a more serious charge. The jury disagreed, and
he was released on bail, perhaps in the hope that he would leave the
country. He waited the re-trial, was convicted, and sentenced to two
years' imprisonment with hard labour, which sentence he served. Towards
the end of his time in prison he wrote the letter from which _De
Profundis_ (published in 1905) is extracted. After his release he went
to Berneval-sur-mer, near Dieppe, where he began _The Ballad of Reading
Gaol_, which he revised in Naples and Paris, and published
pseudonymously in 1898. He also wrote two letters on prison abuses,
which were published in The Daily Chronicle on May 28, 1897, and March
24, 1898. He lived in Italy, Switzerland and France. He died in Paris on
November 30, 1900. He was buried on December 3 in the Bagneux Cemetery.
On July 20, 1909, his remains were moved to Pere Lachaise.
FOOTNOTE:
[2]
"Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!"
III
POEMS
It is a relief to turn from a list of bibliographical and biographical
dates to the May-day colouring of a young man's first book; to forget
for a moment the suffering that is nearly twenty years ahead, and to
think of "undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and of
studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and
musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its linked
long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one solemnly
sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be
written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far more
rhyme than reason." It is too easy to forget this note in Wilde's
personality, that he sounded again and again, and that was not cracked
even by the terrible experiences whose symbol was imprisonment. To the
end of his life Wilde retained the enthusiasm, the power of self-abandon
to a moment of emotion, the delight in difficult beauty, in accomplished
loveliness, that made his Oxford years so happy a memory, and give his
first book a savour quite independent of its poetical value.
Ballade and villanelle, rondeau and triolet, the names of these French
forms were enough to set the key for a young craftsman's reverie. But
the university at that time was full of lively influences. Walter
Pater's "Renaissance" had not long left the press. Its author, that
grave man, was to be met in his panelled rooms, ready to advise, to
point the way to rare books, and to talk of the secrets of his art.
Pater in those days was a new classic, the private possession of those
young men who found his books "the holy writ of beauty." The new
classics of the generation before--Tennyson and Arnold and Browning--had
not yet faded into that false antiquity that follows swift upon the
heels of popular recognition. The scholar gipsy had not long been given
his place in the mythology of "Oxford riders blithe," and the trees in
Bagley Wood were still a little tremulous at his presence. Browning's
"The Ring and the Book" had been published ten years before. Queen
Victoria's approval of Tennyson may have somewhat marred him in the eyes
of youthful seekers after subtlety, but the early poems offered a
pleasant opportunity for discriminating appreciation. It was not very
long since Swinburne "had set his age on fire by a volume of very
perfect and very poisonous poetry." Morris, the first edition of whose
"Defence of Guenevere," though published in 1857, was not exhausted till
thirteen years later, was a master not yet so widely admired as to deny
to his disciples the delight of a personal and almost daring loyalty.
Rossetti's was a still more powerful influence.
All these factors must be remembered in any attempt to reconstruct the
atmosphere in which Wilde wrote his early poems. Nor must we forget that
when Wilde entered that atmosphere as an undergraduate he had an unusual
training behind him. He had known another university, and carried away
from it a gold medal for Greek. He was an Irishman whose nationality had
been momentarily intensified by his revolutionary mother and his own
name. And, perhaps still more important, he was a very youthful
cosmopolitan, had been often abroad, knew a good deal of French poetry,
and had been able to date one of his earliest poems from that
light-hearted Avignon where the Popes once held their court, and whence
the dancing on the broken bridge has sent a merry song throughout the
world.
It is curious to see this young lover of Theophile Gautier and old
intricate rhyme-forms, winning the Newdigate Prize for a poem in
decasyllabic couplets on a set subject. Many bad and a few good poets
have won that prize, and it constitutes, I suppose, a sort of academic
recognition that a man writes verse. Wilde was always pleased with
recognition, of whatever quality, and was, perhaps, induced to compete
on finding himself curiously favoured by the subject chosen for the
year, which happened to be _Ravenna_. He had visited Ravenna on his way
to Greece in the previous long vacation, and so was equipped with
memories denied to his rivals. He saw the city "across the sedge and
mire," when they could only see her on the map. He knew "the lonely
pillar, rising on the plain" where Gaston de Foix had died. And, in
Italian woods, he had actually watched, hoping to see and hear
"Some goat-foot Pan make merry minstrelsy
Amid the reeds! some startled Dryad-maid
In girlish flight! or lurking in the glade,
The soft brown limbs, the wanton treacherous face
Of woodland god!"
The wordy piece of rhetoric that was published after winning him the
prize is enriched by some pictorial effects that are almost effects of
poetry. But the best that can or need be said of the whole is, that it
is an admirable prize poem.
Three years later he published his first book.
_Poems_, bound in white vellum, decorated with gold, and beautifully
printed, contains work done before and after _Ravenna_. The most obvious
quality of this work, and that which is most easily and most often
emphasized, is its richness in imitations. But there is more in it than
that. It is full of variations on other men's music, but they are
variations to which the personality of the virtuoso has given a certain
uniformity. Wilde played the sedulous ape with sufficient
self-consciousness and sufficient failure to show that he might himself
be somebody. His emulative practice of his art asks for a closer
consideration than that usually given to it. Let me borrow an admirable
phrase from M. Remy de Gourmont, and say that a "dissociation of ideas"
is necessary in thinking of imitation. To describe a young poet's work
as derivative is not the same thing as to condemn it. All work is
derivative more or less, and to pour indiscriminate contempt on Wilde's
imitations because they are imitations, is to betray a lamentable
ignorance of the history of poetry. There is no need too seriously to
defend this early work. Wilde's reputation can stand without or even in
spite of it. But it is worth while to notice that the worst it suggests
is that young poets should be very careful to be bad critics, since they
always do ill if they imitate the best contemporary models. They do
better to copy poetasters, whom they must believe to be Miltons. When
Coleridge admires Bowles, makes forty transcriptions from his poems for
distribution among his friends, and imitates him as wholeheartedly as he
can, he will but gain in comparison with his original. There is nothing
in the master strong enough to impose itself upon the pupil. When Keats,
full of admiration, imitates Leigh Hunt, he is not very heavily impeded
in his search for Keats. But when Wilde blows the horn of Morris, an
echo from that Norseman's lungs throws out of harmony the notes of his
disciple. When he touches Rossetti's lute his melody is blurred by the
thrum of the strings that the Italian's fingers have so lately left. In
fifty years' time it will, perhaps, be safe to imitate Swinburne. It is
not so at present.
Even in springing from the ground of prose into the air of song, it is
wise to choose ground that age has worn or that is not itself
remarkable. When Coleridge reads Purchas--
"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing
sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile
Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfule Streames, and all sorts of
beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous
house of pleasure"----
and rewrites it--
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills.
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery"----
he works a true magic, bringing two out of one, and setting beside
Purchas something that we can independently enjoy. Purchas died so long
ago. He and Coleridge have different worlds behind them. But when Wilde
remembers a passage in his favourite book, written not a dozen years
before, and asks why he should not make personal to himself the
description of the manifold life of Mona Lisa, that ends, "all this has
been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes"; when he prefixes two
verses of explanation to a rhymed elaboration of that sentence--
"But all this crowded life has been to thee
No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell
Of viols, or the music of the sea
That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell"----
he only puts it out of drawing. It is impossible to avoid a comparison,
because Pater and Wilde are so close together, alike in time and
feeling.
'Eleutheria,' a section at the beginning of the book, includes a number
of discreet sacrifices on the altar of Milton. Here Wilde does much
better. Some of these exercises, which are among the most interesting he
wrote, suggest a new view of the morale of imitation. With Wilde in this
mood, imitation (to use one of those renewals of popular sayings that
were the playthings of his mind), was the sincerest form of parody. Now
parody is a branch of criticism. The critics of the music-hall stage are
those favourite comedians who imitate their fellow-actors. Lewis Carroll
is a negligible critic neither of Longfellow nor of Tennyson. Parody's
criticism is too often facile, seeking applause by the readiest means,
holding up to ridicule rather than to examination faults rather than
excellences, exaggerating tricks of manner and concerning itself not at
all with personality. Wilde's parodies are at once more valuable and
more sincere. He tries to catch not only the letter but the spirit, and
does indeed present a clearer view of Milton than is contained in many
academic essays. An accusation of mere plagiary is made impossible by
his openness. He writes a sonnet on Milton, a sonnet on Louis Napoleon,
and then, matching even the title of his model, a sonnet on the Massacre
of the Christians in Bulgaria. Let me print the sonnet "On the Late
Massacre in Piedmont":--
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold;
Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not: in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
An hundredfold, who having learned thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
And then Wilde's:--
"Christ, dost thou live indeed? or are thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was thy Rising only dreamed by Her
Whose love of thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men's groans,
The priests who call upon thy name are slain,
Dost thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show thy might,
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!"
This is a very different thing from the blind plagiary of those who
cannot see their own way, and are themselves surprised to find that they
have stolen. In their case, mistrust of their own powers is
justifiable. But here, when the young poet, as an exercise--indeed as
more than an exercise--catches the accent of Milton in words that
deliberately set the doubtful faith of our day beside the noble
assurance of the Puritans, and show by implication what that absolute
belief meant to Milton, we are in the presence not of flattery, but of
criticism, of exact appreciation. On the next page is the sonnet
'Quantum Mutata,' with the lines:--
"Witness the men of Piedmont, chiefest care
Of Cromwell, when with impotent despair
The Pontiff in his painted portico
Trembled before our stern ambassadors";
and the suggestion, certainly not personal to Wilde, but chosen for its
fitness to the poet of whom he is thinking--
"that Luxury
With barren merchandise piles up the gate
Where noble thoughts and deeds should enter by:
Else might we still be Milton's heritors."
If we were to take this view of the character of Wilde's imitations it
would be an easy task to run through most of the book, showing how
carefully he acknowledges his indebtedness to Arnold, to Swinburne, to
Morris, much as a creative critic like Walter Pater courteously sets the
name of Pico della Mirandola, or of Sir Thomas Browne, at the head of a
piece of his own writing of which they have been less the occasion than
the chosen keynote. But there is no need.
It is more important to the student of Wilde to notice that the book had
a popular success, and a success in no way due to any praise from the
contemporary critics who, naturally enough, were unable to consider
_Poems_ as the first book of a great man, could not review it in the
light of his later writings, and attacked it wholeheartedly, perhaps
because they were flattered by the ease with which they detected its
openly-acknowledged borrowings. Five editions were sold immediately, and
this not very trustworthy success increased or confirmed Wilde's
confidence in himself. The readiness of the public to throw their
opinion in the critics' teeth was partly due, I think, to precisely
those qualities for which the book was attacked. Much of this unusual
eagerness of ordinary people to buy poetry, a commodity that they seldom
think worth money, may be attributed to the curiosity which Wilde had
contrived to stimulate by carefully calculated eccentricity. But such
curiosity would be more easily satisfied by the sight of the man than by
the reading of his poems. It is hardly enough to explain the sale of
five editions of a book of verse. I think we may look for another reason
of the book's popularity in the fact that Wilde, so far from inventing
a new poetry, happened to summarize in himself the poetry of his time.
He made himself, as it were, the representative poet of his period, a
middleman between the muses and the public. People who had heard of
Rossetti and Swinburne, but never read them, were able to recover their
self-respect by purchasing Wilde.
And this leads us back to the book. All the defects of this young man's
verse became qualities that contributed to its popular success. It was
imitative: it summed up a period of poetry. It was overweighted with
allusion: nothing could be more poetical in the ears of readers not
trained by an austere Bowyer to a distrust of Pierian springs, lutes,
lyres, Pegasus, and Hippocrene.
"In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre?
Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse. Your nurse's daughter,
you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister pump, I suppose."
(Coleridge on Bowyer, in the "Biographia Literaria.")
The presence in verse of certain names of places and persons has come to
be taken as implicit evidence of poetry. Where Venus is, there must
poetry be; Helicon, Narcissus, Endymion (after Keats), and a score of
others have become a sort of poetical counters that careless eyes do not
distinguish from the sterling coin. Wilde makes full use of them, and,
perhaps, trusting to the capital letters to carry them through,
frequently decorates his verse with names of similar character not yet
so hackneyed as to be immediately recognized as poetry. This kind of
allusion flatters the reader's learning. Sometimes he brings colour into
his verse by the use of a reference that must be unintelligible to a
large part of his audience, and seems quite irrelevant to those who take
the trouble to follow it, and have not the good fortune to hit upon the
correct clue. For example, in 'The New Helen':--
"Alas, alas, thou wilt not tarry here,
But, like that bird, the servant of the sun,
Who flies before the north wind and the night,
So wilt thou fly our evil land and drear,
Back to the tower of thine old delight,
And the red lips of young Euphorion."
Now that, though not poetry, is a pleasant piece of colour. But, leaving
aside the question of the bird, the servant of the sun, itself not easy
to resolve, young Euphorion, who has served Wilde's verse well enough in
having scarlet lips, is more than a little puzzling. Wilde probably
remembers Part II of Goethe's "Faust." Achilles and Helen are said, as
ghosts, to have had a child called Euphorion, but Goethe makes him the
son of Faust and Helen, named in the legend Justus Faust. He leaps from
earth when "scarcely called to life," and "out of the deep" invites his
mother to follow him not to any "tower of old delight," but to "the
gloomy realm." The reference is wilful, but Euphorion is a wonderful
name.
Sometimes, indeed, the verse gains nothing from such allusion. For
example, in the same poem:--
"Nay, thou wert hidden in that hollow hill
With one who is forgotten utterly,
_That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine_."
This is simply learning put in for its own sake by the young scholar
delighting in his knowledge of antiquity. The line that I have printed
in italics is no more than a riddle whose answer is Venus, sometimes
called Erycina (Erycina ridens) because she had a temple on Mount Eryx.
Wilde means that Helen was hidden with the spirit of beauty (Venus) now
shamefully neglected. He delighted in such riddles and disguised
references, and they certainly helped his less cultured readers to feel
that in reading him they were intimate with more poetry than they had
read. In 'The Burden of Itys,' to take a last example, he says,
addressing the nightingale:--
"Light-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood!
If ever thou didst soothe with melody
One of that little clan, that brotherhood
Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany
More than the perfect sun of Raphael
And is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well."
Sir Piercie Shafton might choose such a method of referring to the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed, so far does Wilde carry his
ingenuity that we are reminded of the defects of that school of verse
that Johnson called the metaphysical, whose virtues are too generally
forgotten. He hears the wind in the trees as Palaestrina playing the
organ in Santa Maria on Easter Day. With half an echo of Browning he
describes a pike as "some mitred old bishop _in partibus_," and, with a
true seventeenth-century conceit, speaks of the early rose as "that
sweet repentance of the thorny briar."