the Champs Elysees, he "twitched his mantle" and threw it away, and with
it sunflower, lily, and knee-breeches, preferring a change of costume
with his change of part. He dressed now as a man of fashion, a dandy,
but not an aesthete. He even cut his hair. But the reputation he had made
swelled before him. He came to Paris, after his lecturing, in 1883, but,
as late as 1891, for those who had not seen him, Wilde "n'etait encore
que celui qui fumait des cigarettes a bout d'or et qui se promenait dans
les rues une fleur de tournesol a la main." He may even have encouraged
this reputation. Stuart Merrill, writing in La Plume, said: "Certains
cochers de hansom affirment meme l'avoir vu se promener, vers l'heure
des chats et des poetes, avec un lys enorme a la main. Oscar Wilde
recuse comme a regret leur temoignage en repondant que la legende est
souvent plus vraie que la realite." But in 1883 Wilde had had a surfeit
of lilies and sunflowers, and came to Paris as a poet, fashionably
dressed, with a number of white vellum volumes of verse to distribute
among those whose acquaintance he wished to secure.
He took rooms at the Hotel Voltaire, and saw most of the better known
people of the day. But, as always, he was not content to leave a part
half played. He was in Paris as a poet, and, if he was ready to receive
the poet's reward of admiration and homage, he was determined also to
earn it, to write poetry, and not to rest on what he had already
written. He was, at this time, impressed as much by Balzac's power of
work as by his genius, and his biographer tells us that, with a view to
imitating it, he wore, while working, a white robe with a hood, like the
dressing-gown in which Balzac sat up at night, drinking coffee and
creating his fiery world. He also walked out with an ivory stick, set
with turquoises, like the stick that pleased Balzac because it set the
town talking. At a later time he sought a similar adventitious aid to
industry in buying Carlyle's writing table. He felt, like Balzac, that
the special paraphernalia of work was likely to induce the proper
spirit. In these circumstances, in the Hotel Voltaire, he finished _The
Duchess of Padua_, and possibly either wrote or re-wrote _The Sphinx_.
_The Duchess of Padua_ is a play on the Elizabethan model of dark and
bloody tragedy. It is a sombre spectacle, marred by a constantly
shifting perspective. The folds of tragedy's cloak fall over an angular
figure, a little stiff in the joints, and the verse has the effect of
voluntary draping. It is the performance of a young man who has not yet
achieved the knowledge of the stage that was later to be his; the
performance of a young man who has not yet achieved a knowledge of
himself. It is better built than _Vera_ and more interesting, but it has
the faults of the 1881 volume of _Poems_, without the same excuse of
eager imitation and criticism. Here and there are lines of poetry that
seem now afraid and now defiant of the progress of the play. The poet
changes faces too often. He has all the Elizabethans at his back, and
writes like the young Shakespeare on one page, and on the next like
Shakespeare grown mature. His predilections are now for simplicity and
now for such overworked conceits as this:--
"GUIDO. Oh, how I love you!
See, I must steal the cuckoo's voice, and tell
This one tale over.
DUCHESS. Tell no other tale!
For, if that is the little cuckoo's song,
The nightingale is hoarse, and the loud lark
Has lost its music."
Wilde's weakness of grip on himself and his play is shown by the quite
purposeless inclusion of cumbersome, would-be-Shakespearian comic
relief:--
"THIRD CITIZEN. What think you of this young man who stuck the
knife into the Duke?
SECOND CITIZEN. Why, that he is a well-behaved, and a well-meaning,
and a well-favoured lad, and yet wicked in that he killed the Duke.
THIRD CITIZEN. 'Twas the first time he did it: maybe the law will
not be hard on him, as he did not do it before."
That is a specimen very favourable to the play, which contains yet
duller jokes. It is hard to believe that the same man who wrote them was
also the author of _Intentions_ and the inventor of Bunbury. But there
is no need to linger over _The Duchess of Padua_, which, though it has
moments of obscure power, Wilde did not, in later years, consider worthy
of himself.
There is some doubt as to the date of composition of _The Sphinx_. A
line and a half in it--
"I have hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn's gaudy liveries"--
not only suggest extreme youth in the writer, but occur in _Ravenna_.
Mr. Stuart Mason, in his admirable "Bibliography to the Poems of Oscar
Wilde," says that "altogether some dozen passages of _Ravenna_ are taken
more or less verbatim from poems published before 1878, while no
instance is found of lines in the Newdigate Prize Poem being repeated in
poems admittedly of later date, and this," he thinks, "seems fairly
strong proof that the lines in _The Sphinx_ (if not the whole poem)
antedate _Ravenna_." Mr. Ross says that Wilde told him the poem was
written at the Hotel Voltaire during an earlier visit in 1874. This
statement, he thinks, was an example of the poetic license in which
Wilde, like Shelley and other men of genius, was willing to indulge. Mr.
Sherard says positively that Wilde wrote _The Sphinx_ in 1883 at the
Hotel Voltaire. There seems to be no real reason why Wilde should not
have borrowed from _Ravenna_ on this, even if he did so on no other
occasion. He was always ready to seem younger than he was, and always
ready to use again a phrase that had pleased him, no matter where he had
used it before. In _The Duchess of Padua_, about whose date there is no
question, he even went so far as to use two lines from a sonnet that he
had previously addressed to Ellen Terry, and published in _Poems_:--
"O hair of gold, O crimson lips, O face
Made for the luring and the love of man!"
There is much in the poem itself that inclines me to trust Mr. Sherard's
memory of its date.
It is work more personal to Wilde than anything in _Poems_. The firm
mastery of its technique would, indeed, be overwhelming proof that it
was written after _The Duchess of Padua_ if it were not known that Wilde
spent some time in revising it in 1889. But revision cannot alter the
whole texture of a poem, and _The Sphinx_ is full of those decorative
effects that are rare in his very early work and give to much of his
matured writing its most noticeable quality. No one has suggested that
it was written later than 1883, so that we must explain the
extraordinary advance that it shows on _The Duchess of Padua_ as one of
those curious phenomena known to most artists: it often happens that,
in turning from one kind of work to another, as from dramatic writing
to poetry, men come quite suddenly on what seem to be revised and better
editions of themselves.
The kinetic base, the obvious framework, of _The Sphinx_ is an
apostrophe addressed by a student to a Sphinx that lies in his room,
perhaps a dream, perhaps a paperweight, an apostrophe that consists in
the enumeration of her possible lovers, and the final selection of one
of them as her supposed choice. It is a series rather than a whole,
though an effect of form and cumulative weight is given to it by a
carefully preserved monotony. In a firm, lava-like verse, the Sphinx's
paramours are stiffened to a bas-relief. The water-horse, the griffon,
the hawk-faced god, the mighty limbs of Ammon, are formed into a frieze
of reverie; they do not collaborate in a picture, but are left behind as
the dream goes on. It goes on, perhaps, just a little too long. So do
some of the finest rituals; and _The Sphinx_ is among the rare
incantations in our language. It is a piece of black magic. Of the
student who saw such things men might well say:--
"Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,"
but they could never continue:--
"For he on honey-dew hath fed,"
and, with whatever milk he had been nourished, they would be certain
that it was not that of Paradise.
"Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old, and all the while this
curious cat
Lies crouching on the Chinese mat with eyes of satin rimmed with
gold."
To paint the visions she inspires, Wilde ransacks the world for
magnificent colouring. He does not always secure magnificence in the
noblest way, but is satisfied with an opulence, rather of things than of
emotion, brought bodily into the verse and not suggested by the proud
stepping of the mind. Cleopatra's wine, ivory-bodied Antinous, the
crocodile with jewelled ears, metal-flanked gryphons, gilt-scaled
dragons,
"Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock-crystal breasts,"
the Ethiopian, "whose body was of polished jet," Pasht "who had green
beryls for her eyes," Horus,
"Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose high above his
hawk-faced head,
Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of Oreichalch,"
the marble limbs of Ammon, "on pearl and porphyry pedestalled," an ocean
emerald on his ivory breast--
"The merchants brought him steatite from Sidon in their painted
ships:
The meanest cup that touched his lips was fashioned from a
chrysolite----"
the lion's "long flanks of polished brass," the tiger's "amber
sides":--I think it is worth while to notice the mineral character of
all this imagery. It is as if a man were finding solace for his feverish
hands in the touch of cool hard stones, and at the same time,
stimulating his fever by the sexual excitement of contrast between the
over-sensitive and the utterly insensible.
Wilde had but a short respite from the trouble of keeping up a
reputation and an income. The American dollars were soon spent, and he
had to bring to an end his Balzacian industry, and the delightful
business of being a poet in Paris. He returned to London, where he took
rooms in Charles Street, Haymarket. He had to earn a livelihood, and
poverty and his own extravagance compelled him to do that which he most
disliked, to take up again a pose whose fascination he had exhausted. He
signed an agreement with a lecture agency, and toured through the
English provinces, repeating, as cheerfully as he could, the lectures he
had given in America.
NOTE ON WILDE AND WHISTLER
Both before and after his American lecturing tour Wilde was one of
the frequenters of Whistler's studio in Chelsea. He had an
unbounded admiration for this painter, whose conversation was no
less vivid than his work, and Whistler's attitude towards him was
not so cavalier as that he adopted to others among his admirers.
Wilde, in spite of his youth, had a reputation, and shared with
Whistler the applause of any company in which they were together.
In 1883, when Wilde was to lecture to the Academy Students, he
asked Whistler what he should say to them. Whistler sketched a
lecture for him, and Wilde used parts of it with success and repaid
him by a tremendous compliment. Two years later Whistler himself
lectured, and, for his "Ten O'Clock," re-appropriated some of the
material he had suggested to his friend. That is the origin of the
accusation, so often made, that Wilde built a reputation on
borrowed bons mots. In the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler, annoyed by
Wilde's lecturing on art, as he would have been by the lecturing of
any other man who was not himself a painter, held a veiled figure
of him up to ridicule, and threw a stone from a frail house in
jeering at his knee-breeches. "Costume is not dress. And the
wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste ..." Wilde
smilingly replied. Whistler feinted. Wilde parried. Whistler
thrust:--"What has Oscar in common with Art except that he dines at
our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding
that he peddles in the provinces? Oscar--the amiable,
irresponsible, esurient Oscar--with no more sense of a picture than
he has of the fit of a coat--has the courage of the opinions ... of
others!" Wilde answered that "with our James vulgarity begins at
home and should be allowed to stay there," and with that their
friendship was buried, like the hatchet, "in the side of the
enemy." Two years later, Wilde, with an indifference amusing in any
case and delightful if it was conscious, roused further protest by
using in "The Decay of Lying" the phrase, "the courage of the
opinions of others," that had been the sting of Whistler's
reproach. The letters on both sides may be read in "The Gentle Art
of Making Enemies." The whole story only makes it clear that Wilde
was better able to appreciate Whistler than Whistler to appreciate
a younger man, whose talent, no less brilliant, was entirely
different from his own. As Mr. Ross has pointed out, all Wilde's
best work was written after their friendship ceased.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] "The AEsthetic Movement in England," by Walter Hamilton.
[5] He wore at this time a velvet _beret_ on his head, his
shirts turned back with lace over his sleeves, puce velveteen
knickerbockers with buckles, and black silk stockings.
V
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE
On May 29, 1884, Oscar Wilde was married to Constance Mary Lloyd, the
daughter of a Dublin barrister. He settled with her in Chelsea. They had
two children, both boys, born respectively in 1885 and 1886. Wilde's
marriage was not felicitous, though he regretted it more for his wife's
sake than his own. It is said that Mrs. Wilde was rather cruelly made to
pose for Lady Henry Wotton in _Dorian Gray_, that "curious woman, whose
dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on
in a tempest.... She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in
being untidy ... looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all
night in the rain...." She was sentimental, pretty, well-meaning and
inefficient. She would have been very happy as the wife of an ornamental
minor poet, and it is possible that in marrying Wilde she mistook his
for such a character. It must be remembered that she married the author
of _Poems_ and the lecturer on the aesthetic movement. His development
puzzled her, made her feel inadequate, and so increased her inadequacy.
She became more a spectacle for Wilde than an influence upon him, and
was without the strength that might have prevented the disasters that
were to fall through him on herself. She had a passion for leaving
things alone, broken only by moments of interference badly timed. She
became one of those women whose Christian names their husbands, without
malice, preface with the epithets "poor dear." Her married life was no
less ineffectual than unhappy.
Wilde supplemented his wife's income by writing reviews of books for The
Pall Mall Gazette, and articles on the theatre for The Dramatic Review.
From the autumn of 1887 to that of 1889 he edited The Woman's World.
Little of this was wasted labour, though Wilde had no need to fillip his
invention by such practice as the writing of reviews provided.
Conversation was to him what diaries, note-books, and hack-work are to
so many others. But there is an ease in the essays of _Intentions_
wholly lacking in 'The Rise of Historical Criticism' and in the
lectures. It is impossible not to believe that in writing literary notes
in The Woman's World and reviews in The Pall Mall Gazette, he quickened
the turn of his wrist and sharpened the point of his rapier.
There is little of any great value in the volume of reviews collected
by his executor; little, that is to say, that raises them above the
level of reviews written by far less gifted men. Here and there are
fragments that he improved and used again in more lasting works. Here
and there are perfectly charming sentences, that show what sort of man
would be found if we could lift the mask of the reviewer. Throughout the
book are uncertain indications of the theories of art that were later to
be expounded in _Intentions_. But that is all. There is, however, an
historical interest in learning what Wilde thought of the writers of his
time. He railed at the shocking bad grammar of Professor Saintsbury, and
got an undergraduate enjoyment from laughing at Professor Mahaffy. When
he could, he piously drew attention to the works of his father and
mother. He was polite to his cousin, W. G. Wills, who had happened to be
delivered of an epic. Among greater men, he had excellent praise for
William Morris, a just appreciation of Pater, an enthusiasm for
Meredith, the expression of which he afterwards used in _Intentions_,
and a perspicuous criticism of Swinburne. The volume is full of clues to
the sources of the inessentials in his later work. The original of the
passage in _Dorian Gray_ on embroideries and tapestries is to be found
in a review of a book by Ernest Lefebure. The Starchild's curls "were
like the rings of the daffodil." This curious and delightful phrase may
be traced to a review of Morris' translation of the Odyssey, where Wilde
noticed the line,
"With the hair on his head crisp curling as the bloom of the
daffodil,"
and quoted another version published in 1665,
"Minerva renders him more tall and fair.
Curling in rings like daffodils his hair."
It would be possible to make a long list of such alibis.
Marriage and journalism slackened for a moment his ambition. He lectured
once or twice, though Whistler had almost succeeded in discrediting him
as an authority upon art. His reputation waned, and he was for some time
a young man with a brilliant past. Art seemed less worth while than it
had been, and he was ready to amuse himself with things that he thought
scarcely worth writing, things that required more cleverness than
temperament, and did not stretch his genius. It was in this mood that he
turned to narrative, and wrote the four stories which, published in
magazines in 1887, were collected into a volume in 1891. He had always
been accustomed to invent plots for other people, and to compose such
anecdotes as were needed to illustrate his conversation and to give it
an historical basis. Mr. Sherard says that he used to devise stories,
sometimes as many as six in a morning, for his brother William to write.
It occurred to him to write some of these tales himself, and, using the
conventions of the popular magazine fiction of his day, yet find means
to indulge his mind with the ingenious play in which it delighted. Three
of these tales need detain no student of Wilde. 'The Canterville Ghost'
is just so boisterous as to miss its balance, but, because it is about
Americans, is very popular in America. 'The Sphinx without a Secret'
betrays its secret in its title. 'The Model Millionaire' is an empty
little thing no better than the popular tales it tries to imitate. 'Lord
Arthur Savile's Crime,' however, is not only remarkable as an indication
of what Wilde was to do both as a dramatist and as a storyteller, but is
itself a delightful piece of buffoonery. Wilde is so serious. The
readers of The Family Herald are fond of Lords, and so the story begins
with a reception at Bentinck House, a delightful parody of the popular
descriptions of such a function. "It was certainly a wonderful medley of
people. Gorgeous peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals, popular
preachers brushed coat-tails with eminent sceptics, a perfect bevy of
bishops kept following a stout prima-donna from room to room, on the
staircase stood several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists, and it
was said that at one time the supper-room was absolutely crammed with
geniuses." There was a cheiromantist, and a Duchess, who, on learning
that he was present, "began looking about for a small tortoiseshell fan
and a very tattered lace shawl, so as to be ready to go at a moment's
notice." The plot is no less moral than simple. Lord Arthur Savile
learns from the palmist that at some period of his life it is decreed
that he shall commit a murder. Unwilling to marry while a potential
criminal, he sets about committing the murder at once, to get it over,
and be able to marry with the easy conscience of one who knows that his
duty has been satisfactorily performed. He tries to kill a charming aunt
with a sugared pill, and a benevolent uncle with an explosive clock,
and, failing in both these essays, "oppressed with the barrenness of
good intentions," walks miserably on the Embankment, where he finds Mr.
Podgers, the cheiromantist, observing the river. "A brilliant idea
flashed across him, and he stole softly up behind. In a moment he had
seized Mr. Podgers by the legs, and flung him into the Thames. There was
a coarse oath, a heavy splash, and all was still. Lord Arthur looked
anxiously over, but could see nothing of the cheiromantist but a tall
hat, pirouetting in an eddy of moonlit water. After a time it also sank,
and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible. Once he thought that he caught
sight of the bulky misshapen figure striking out for the staircase by
the bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it
turned out to be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from
behind a cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realised the
decree of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and Sybil's name
came to his lips." Like much of Wilde's work, this story is very clever
talk, an elaborated anecdote, told with flickering irony, a cigarette
now and again lifted to the lips. But, already, a dramatist is learning
to use this irony in dialogue, and a decorative artist is restraining
his buoyant cleverness, to use it for more subtle purposes. There is a
delicate description of dawn in Piccadilly, with the waggons on their
way to Covent Garden, white-smocked carters, and a boy with primroses in
a battered hat, riding a big grey horse--a promise of the fairy stories.
The vegetables against the sky are masses of jade, "masses of green jade
against the pink petals of some marvellous rose." And, too, over the
sudden death of Mr. Podgers "the moon peered through a mane of tawny
clouds, as if it were a lion's eye, and innumerable stars spangled the
hollow vault, like gold dust powdered on a purple dome."
_The Happy Prince and other Tales_, published in 1888, with pictures by
Jacomb Hood and Walter Crane, are very married stories. In reading them,
I cannot help feeling that Wilde wrote one of them as an experiment, to
show, I suppose, that he could have been Hans Andersen if he had liked,
and his wife importuned him to make a book of things so charming, so
good, and so true. He made the book, and there is one beautiful thing in
it, 'The Happy Prince,' which was, I suspect, the first he wrote. The
rest, except, perhaps, 'The Selfish Giant,' a delightful essay in
Christian legend, are tales whose morals are a little too obvious even
for grown-up people. Children are less willing to be made good. Wilde
was himself perfectly aware of his danger, and, no doubt, got some
pleasure out of saying so, at the end of the story called 'The Devoted
Friend': "'I am rather afraid that I have annoyed him,' answered the
Linnet. 'The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.' 'Ah! that
is always a very dangerous thing to do,' said the Duck. And I quite
agree with her." There is a moral in 'The Happy Prince,' but there is
this difference between that story and the others, that it is quite
clear that Wilde wanted to write it. It is Andersen, treated exactly as
Wilde treated Milton in the volume of 1881, only with more assurance,
and a greater certainty about his own contribution. We recognise Wilde
by the decorative effects that are scattered throughout the book. He
preferred a lyrical pattern to a prosaic perspective, and, even more
than his wit, his love of decoration is the distinguishing quality of
his work. Andersen might well have invented the story of the swallow who
died to repay the statue for jewelled eyes and gold-leaf mail given to
the poor of the town of which he had once been the Happy and unseeing
Prince, but he would never have let the swallow say: "The King is there
in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen and embalmed in
spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are
withered leaves." And only a swallow belonging to the author of _The
Sphinx_ would have said, "To-morrow 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 God Memnon. All night long he watches the
stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and
then he 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."