intellectual substructure that could have infused into ornament and
elaboration the vitalizing breath of unity. Wilde was uncertain of
himself, and, in each one of the longer poems, rambled on, gathering
flowers that would have seemed better worth having if he had not had so
many of them. Doubtful of his aim in individual poems, he was doubtful
of his inclinations as a poet. Nothing could more clearly illustrate
this long wavering of his mind than a list of the poets whom he admired
sufficiently to imitate. I have mentioned Morris, Swinburne, Arnold, and
Rossetti; but these are not enough. In swift caprice he rifled a score
of orchards. He very honestly confesses in 'Amor Intellectualis' that
he had often "trod the vales of Castaly," sailed the sea "which the nine
Muses hold in empery," and never turned home unladen.
"Of which despoiled treasures these remain,
Sordello's passion, and the honeyed line
Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine
Driving his pampered jades, and more than these
The seven-fold vision of the Florentine,
And grave-browed Milton's solemn harmonies."
Milton, Dante, Marlowe, Keats, and Browning, with those I have already
named, and others, make up a goodly list of sufferers by this
lighthearted corsair's piracies. He built with their help a brilliant
coloured book, full of ingenuity, a boy's criticism of the objects of
his admiration, almost a rhymed dictionary of mythology, whose
incongruity is made apparent by those poems in which, leaving his
classics passionately aside, he went, like a scholar gipsy, to seek a
new accomplishment in the simplicity of folk-song.
Wilde's reputation as a poet does not rest on this first book, but on
half a dozen poems that include 'The Harlot's House,' 'A Symphony in
Yellow,' 'The Sphinx' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' and alone are
worthy of a place beside his work in prose. But, though poetry is rare
in it, it will presently be recognized that the first books of few men
are so rich in autobiography. We have seen that the book is an index to
his reading: let us see now how many indications it gives us of his
life.
Threaded through the book, between the longer poems, runs an itinerary
of his travels in Italy and Greece, written by a young man very
conscious of being a poet, and keenly sensible of what it was fitting he
should feel. In Italy, for example, he thought that he owed himself a
conversion to the Catholic faith:--
"Before yon field of trembling gold
Is garnered into dusty sheaves,
Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves
Flutter as birds adown the wold,
I may have run the glorious race,
And caught the torch while yet aflame,
And called upon the holy name
Of Him who now doth hide his face."
He wrote almost as a Catholic might write, and spoke of the Pope as "the
prisoned shepherd of the Church of God." But later, when
"The silver trumpets ran across the Dome:
The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome,"
he turned, as a Puritan might have turned, from the emblem,
triple-crowned, and clothed in red and white, of Christ's sovereignty,
to remember a passage in the gospels: "Foxes have holes, and birds of
the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."
He had a Calvinistic, half-shocked and half-exultant vision of his own
iniquity, this undergraduate of twenty-three:--
"My heart is as some famine-murdered land
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God's throne should stand."
Yet he took hope:--
"My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw,
Nathless I threw them as my final cast
Into the sea, and waited for the end.
When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw
From the black waters of my tortured past
The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!"
He had, in short, a religious experience, such as is known by most young
men. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was disturbed,
delightfully disturbed, by feeling that a religious experience was
possible to him. He went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato, forgot
the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a wholly voluntary repose in
Christianity.
He returned to Oxford, to win the Newdigate Prize in the next year, and
to remember, with something of a girl's adventurous regret for a lover
whom she has rejected, his Italian emotion. All this is written down in
'The Burden of Itys':--
"This English Thames is holier far than Rome,
Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea
Breaking across the woodland, with the foam
Of meadow-sweet and white anemone
To fleck their blue waves,--God is likelier there
Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks bear";
and, in a later stanza:--
"strange, a year ago
I knelt before some crimson Cardinal
Who bare the Host across the Esquiline,
And now--those common poppies in the wheat seem twice as fine."
'Panthea,' in language that suggests that he is looking for approval
from the eyes of Swinburne, describes his substitute for that refused
conversion. It is the creed of a young poet who finds the gods asleep,
and does not care, because of Darwin, Evolution, and the Law of the
Conservation of Energy.
"With beat of systole and of diastole
One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart,
And mighty waves of single Being roll
From nerveless germ to man, for we are part
Of every rock and bird and beast and hill,
One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill."
And:--
"From lower cells of waking life we pass
To full perfection; thus the world grows old:"
and:--
"This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil,
Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night,
Nothing is lost in Nature, all things live in Death's despite."
It is boy's thought, as serious as the sentimental dreaming of a girl.
There is no need to laugh at either. No young girl ever yet made a great
poem out of her inexperience, nor has any young man turned to great art
his hurried reading of the universe. But few great men have been without
such thoughts in youth, and the noblest women can remember girlish
dreams of an incredible unreality.
After taking his degree Wilde left Oxford and came to London to build up
that phantom of himself that helped to advertise him, and, at the same
time, to make his progress difficult. He dedicates a sonnet to 'My
Friend Henry Irving,' another to Sarah Bernhardt, and two to Ellen
Terry, 'Written at the Lyceum Theatre.' We have an impression of the
young man, more elaborately dressed than he can afford, paying
extravagant, delightful compliments, and quickly gaining the sort of
reputation that was given to gallants of an older time, who knew actors,
and had their seats on the stage.
Finally, and certainly most important in his own eyes, the book contains
a record of the love affair which, in a sense, balanced the abortive
religious experience. He fell in love with an actress, who found him
quite delightful, did not love him, let him love her for a summer, and
then told him not to waste his time. Wilde, as a young poet, probably
came to town prepared to fall in love, just as he had gone to Italy
prepared to be converted to Catholicism. His actress may have recognized
that this was so, and been ready, within reason, to play the part
assigned her. Through Wilde's magnificent phrasing there appears a
replica of the love affairs of how many boys with women wiser than
themselves and not without a sense of humour.
"Ah! hadst thou liked me less and loved me more,
Through all these summer days of joy and rain,
I had not now been sorrow's heritor,
Or stood a lackey in the House of Pain."
But he had not to grumble: he had been able to love her learnedly in
sonnets and gallantly in serenades. He had--
"Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed
The Love which moves the Sun and all the Stars!"
That was really all that he had needed, but an awakening critical
faculty told him that he won more pain than poetry.
"Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made
them bleed,
You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant and
enamelled mead."
He was disappointed, but the fault was not his, not his lady's, but due
only to impatience. He who wills to love has rhetoric in his feeling,
and, though he wrote--
"I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is
gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's
crown of bays,"
we cannot help thinking that we know better.
The book is the monument of Wilde's boyhood, and contains its history.
Perhaps that, though it may save it from oblivion, is the reason of its
failure. It is too immediate an attempt to translate life into
literature. Sometimes it even suggests that there has been an attempt to
make life simply for the purpose of transcribing it. Wilde disguised it
in elaboration, but it wears the mask with an ingenuous awkwardness. It
is so youthful. Indeed, the youth of the book is its justification, and
helps it to throw a flickering light upon his later work. For Wilde
never entirely lost his boyhood, and died, as he had mostly lived,
young. Five years after the publication of _Poems_ he wrote a letter in
which, catching exactly the mood of his undergraduate days of ten years
before, he said that he wished he could grave his sonnets on an ivory
tablet, since sonnets should always look well. That is the precise
sentiment of those who seek "to discover the proper temper in which a
triolet should be written." It was his whenever he wished. But, though
he could recapture the mood, and assume again the attitude, he did not
allow himself to imitate the work that mood and attitude had produced.
In that white vellum volume were harvested all the wild oats of the
intellect that he did not leave to later gleaners. He was free
thenceforth, and seldom again, until the magnificent confession _De
Profundis_, did he allow his experiences the use of the first person.[3]
He had done with the crude subjectivity of boyhood, whose capital "I"
seems so unreal beside the complete fusions of soul and body, manner and
material, that Art demands and that he was later to achieve.
FOOTNOTE:
[3] Except, of course, in the lectures. We must remember their
occasion, and that it never occurred to him to reprint them or count
them among his works.
IV
AESTHETICISM
"I never object," said Coleridge, "to a certain degree of
disputatiousness in a young man from the age of seventeen to that of
four or five and twenty, provided I find him always arguing on one side
of the question." Coleridge would seem to reserve legitimate dispute for
the very young, did we not remember that academic education began and
ended earlier in his day. Boys went to college at seventeen. I do not
think he would have objected to the disputatiousness of Wilde, although
he was well over twenty-five before he left the noisy field of argument,
if, indeed, he left it at all. Wilde, at least, would have pleased
Coleridge by arguing always on one side of the question, though it is
possible that Coleridge would not have recognized that that side was his
own. At Oxford, Wilde had already begun to count himself, if not an
inventor, at least an exponent of the aesthetic theories of life that
were then disturbing with fitful movements the stagnant surface of
British Philistinism. He did not plan a Pantisocracy, and would have
turned with fright from Coleridge's sturdy proposal to harden the bodies
of those accustomed to intellectual and sedentary labour until they were
fitted to share in the tilling of the soil. But he was discontented with
life as it was commonly lived, and had learnt to hope that it might be
beautified by being set among beautiful things. He had expressed a wish
that he could "live up to his blue china." His rooms in Magdalen,
panelled and hung with engravings chosen for their difference from the
pictures commonly affected, had been a centre of debate. His attitude
had caused discussion and public protest, for he rode but did not hunt,
did not play cricket, watched boat-races but did not go on the river,
and only once showed much physical activity, when he wheeled Ruskin's
barrow during the famous expedition of undergraduate navvies to make a
road on Hinksey Marsh.[4]
We shall, perhaps, be better able to understand the first period of
Wilde's public prominence, if we examine the origins of the movement of
which, by accident and inclination, he became the accepted protagonist.
Continental critics have noticed in his writings theories so closely
analogous to those of the French Symbolists that they find it difficult
not to believe that he was a disciple of that school, and, as it were,
an English representative of Mallarme's salon in the Rue de Rome. It is
true that, like the Symbolists, he sought intensity in art, and emphasis
of its potential at the expense of its kinetic qualities. But in this he
was English as well as French. Later in his life he was influenced by
Maeterlinck and by Huysmans, but, while he was at Oxford and for some
time after, he found his rules of art and life in the teaching of the
Pre-Raphaelites. That teaching represents a movement in the same
direction as the Symbolists, but a movement which, unlike the French,
came to be identified with a desire to bring ordinary life into harmony
with the intensity it demanded from art.
It is worth while to gain a clear perspective by discovering the
relation between such men as Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Ruskin,
and the cult of knee-breeches and chrysanthemums with which Punch and
"Patience" identified Wilde. This cult was not a sudden sporadic
flowering of strange blooms in the frail hands of a few undergraduates.
It had its origin in 1848, when the members of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood founded The Germ, an extraordinarily earnest little monthly
magazine, in which appeared Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," and etchings
by Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. Perhaps, indeed, it had an earlier
origin in the poetry of Keats, whose pure devotion to art for art's sake
foreshadowed the feeling of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, or in the
poetry of Blake, who, like them, emphasized the difference between the
Sons of David and the Philistines. But, if we go back so far, we must go
further and find still deeper roots for it in the great figures of the
Romantic Movement, in the figures who made that movement possible, in
Goethe, in Rousseau, in Ossian, in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry." Wilde, at least, saw back thus far into his spiritual ancestry.
But, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites,
refusing the abstract art whose beginnings are marked by the technical
skill of Raphael, finding in early Italian painting, whose spirit was
less hidden by clear and insistent letter, a vivifying principle, stood,
not only for a new kind of painting, but for a new attitude towards art
in general, and then for a new attitude towards life. They were
attacked, and Ruskin, who thought they were trying to realize a prophecy
of his own, came to aid them with eloquent defence. Their pictures were
sold but seldom exhibited, so that a kind of separateness, almost a
secrecy, came to belong to their admirers. The public in general looked
upon them as something aloof and mad. It happened, perhaps through the
accident of Miss Siddal and Mrs. William Morris so frequently sitting as
their models, perhaps because the ladies exemplified what was already
their ideal, that there came into many paintings what is best known as
the Pre-Raphaelite woman, long-necked, and pomegranate lipped. Nature,
as Wilde was never tired of insisting, is assiduous in her imitation of
art, and, when Sir Coutts Lindsay opened the Grosvenor Gallery for the
benefit of these artists and their admirers, there were, beside those on
the walls, a sufficient number of Pre-Raphaelite portraits walking about
in the flesh to justify the curiosity and amusement of the crowd. A
play, "The Colonel," of no great value, and the wholly delightful
"Patience," a comic opera by Gilbert with music by Sullivan, brought the
"green and yallery" gowns of the "Grosvenor Gallery" elect, with their
poets and flowers and feelings towards the intenser life, into a
charming masquerade. "Patience" was played at the Savoy with great
success. Mr. D'Oyly Carte, attempting to repeat this success in America,
perceived that Americans, being without a Grosvenor Gallery, missed much
of the humour of the play, and conceived the Napoleonic scheme of
sending over a specimen aesthete to show what "Patience" was laughing at.
This somewhat ignominious position was, with due diplomacy, offered to
Oscar Wilde, on account of his extravagance in dress,[5] and proudly
accepted by him on the wilful supposition that it was a fitting tribute
to his recently published _Poems_. That is how it came about that on
December 24, 1881, Wilde sailed for New York, to say that he was
disappointed in the Atlantic, to tell the Customs Officials that he had
nothing to declare except his genius, and to lecture throughout America
on "The English Renaissance of Art," "House Decoration," and "Art and
the Handicraftsman."
Youth and vanity helped to blind him to the rather humiliating reason of
his lecturing. He wanted the money, but was able to persuade himself
that he had really been chosen to represent the aesthetic movement to the
American people on account of his book of poems, and that, in any case,
he wanted to go to America to have _Vera_, a worthless melodrama he had
just written, put upon the stage. With his happy power of dramatizing
his position, a power he shared with Beau Brummel and picturesque
adventurers of lesser genius, he saw himself, almost immediately, as a
sort of combination of William Morris and John Ruskin, gifted more than
they with wit, beauty, and youth. He spoke of himself visiting the South
Kensington Museum on Saturday nights, "to see the handicraftsman, the
wood-worker, the glass-blower, and the worker in metals." He inspected
art-schools, and carried away, to show his audiences, brass dishes
beaten by little boys, and wooden bowls painted by little girls. He
began to take himself more and more seriously--no doubt Punch's
caricatures had helped him, and he was alone in America, far from the
facts--and was able to tell his listeners "how it first came to me at
all to create an artistic movement in England, a movement to show the
rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful
things they might create." By this time I have no doubt that he believed
with perfect good faith that the aesthetic movement was the work and aim
of his life. Only occasionally did he remember that he was living up to
"Patience." "You have listened to 'Patience' for a hundred nights," he
said, "and you have heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt, that
satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but
you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert." Once,
indeed, he allowed himself to remind his audience of the extravagances
at which that opera laughed, but then it was only to defend them with
all the solemnity of an apostle. "You have heard, I think, a few of you,
of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, and said
(I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men.
Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the
sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any
vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in
England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally
adapted for decorative art--the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the
precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire
and perfect joy." This seems insufferable now, and probably was so then,
but it is a proof of the perfection with which Wilde played the part his
stage-manager had assigned him.
There is much that is charming in the lectures, together with much that
is ridiculous, and some of the charm is in the folly. It is a very young
knight who fights with a lily on his helmet and a sunflower tied to his
spear-point. He has not perceived that the battle is at all difficult.
He does not try with slow argument to undermine the enemy's position,
but only says, quite cheerfully, that he would like to win. "When I was
at Leadville and reflected that all the shining silver that I saw
coming from the mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made me sad.
It should be made into something more permanent. The golden gates at
Florence are as beautiful to-day as when Michael Angelo saw them." He
does not ever come to blows, but only says how ready he is for battle.
"I have no respect," he quotes from Keats, "for the public, nor for
anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and
the principle of Beauty." And he shows that the great men are on his
side. In one lecture alone he appeals to Goethe, Rousseau, Scott,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Homer, Dante, Morris, Keats, Chaucer,
Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Swinburne, Tennyson,
Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Edgar Allan Poe, Phidias, Michael
Angelo, Sophocles, Milton, Fra Angelico, Rubens, Leopardi, Titian,
Giorgione, Hugo, Balzac, Shakespeare, Mazzini, Petrarch, Baudelaire,
Theocritus, and Gautier.
Indeed, his relation to the aesthetic movement of 1880 is not unlike that
of Gautier to the Romantic movement of 1830. Gautier, like Wilde, was
born into an army already on the march, and became its most violent
champion and exemplar. Gautier's crimson waistcoat balances Wilde's
knee-breeches. It would be possible to carry the comparison further, and
to find in _Dorian Gray_ a parallel to "Mademoiselle de Maupin." An
identical spirit presided over the writing of both these books. And it
would be easy to find in Wilde, at any rate before his release from
prison, an aloofness from ordinary life not at all unlike that of the
man who exclaimed, "Je suis un homme des temps homeriques;--le monde ou
je vis n'est pas le mien, et je ne comprends rien a la societe qui
m'entoure." I can imagine Gautier lecturing Americans in just such a
manner as Wilde's, and forgetting, but for his loyalty to Hugo, that he
had not invented Romanticism.
Wilde's lectures must have amused if they did not edify America. He
urged the miners to retain their high boots, their blouses, their
sombreros, when, with wealth in their pockets, they should return to the
abomination of civilization. Surprised audiences in the towns heard him
speak seriously of the stolid ugliness of the horse-hair sofa, and still
more seriously of stoves decorated with funeral urns in cast iron. He
begged them to realize the importance of a definite scheme of colour in
their rooms, and to use other kinds of jugs than one. In his
independence of the quarrels of his elders, he talked to them as Ruskin
might have talked, of the craftsman and his place in life, and, at the
same time, praised the Peacock Room and the room in blue and yellow
designed by that American whom Ruskin had accused of throwing a pot of
paint in the public's face. On one or two occasions Americans were rude
to him. But he spoke with such courtesy and such obvious benevolence
that more often they were content to pay their dollars, listen to him
attentively, stare at him curiously, and then go to see "Patience."
Wilde took their dollars, left the propagation of beautiful furniture
behind him, and went to Paris. He was tired of prophecy and ready to
take a new part in a new play. He had
"... touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay,"