this time a book alone in English literature; a book of tales not
intended for the British child but for those grown-up people who shared
Wilde's own enjoyment of brilliant-coloured fantasy. He had learnt to
control his invention, although he did not choose to do without a tuning
fork. Andersen still struck the note to which Wilde sang, but Flaubert
had been his singing master, and the curious and beautiful tales
collected in _A House of Pomegranates_ are like what I imagine "The Snow
Queen" would have been, if it had been written by the author of "Saint
Julien l'Hospitalier." In 'The Infanta's Birthday,' where one of Goya's
grotesques dances before a painting by Velasquez, the flowers pass their
opinions on the dwarf quite in the Danish manner. In 'The Star-child':
"The Earth is going to be married, and this is her bridal dress,"
whispered the Turtle-doves to each other. "Their little pink feet were
quite frost-bitten, but they felt that it was their duty to take a
romantic view of the situation." That is surely written by the ghost of
Andersen's English translator. But 'The Star-child' ends with the firm,
aloof touch of Flaubert, who would not tolerate "quite": "Yet ruled he
not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his
testing, for after the space of three years, he died. And he who came
after him ruled evilly." I remember the end of "Herodias" on just such a
distant note: "Et tous les trois, ayant pris la tete de Iaokanaan, s'en
allerent du cote de la Galilee. Comme elle etait tres lourde, ils la
portaient alternativement." And the picture of the leper in this story
is almost a transcription of that in "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier": "Over
his face hung a cowl of grey linen, and through the eyelets his eyes
gleamed like red coals." And Flaubert: "Il etait enveloppe d'une toile
en lambeaux, la figure pareille a un masque de platre et les deux yeux
plus rouge que des charbons." I do not suggest that one is a copy of the
other; but I think that Wilde remembered that clay mask with gleaming
eyes, and mistook it for a creation of his own whose eyes shone through
a grey linen cowl.
It is hardly worth while so to carry the study of influence into detail.
Wilde wrote, with the pen of Flaubert, stories that might have been
imagined by Andersen, and sometimes one and sometimes the other touches
his hand. It is not impossible that Baudelaire was also present. But
all this does not much concern us, except that by subtraction we may
come to what we seek, which is the personal, elusive, but unmistakable
quality contributed by Wilde himself.
This is, secondarily, a round mellowness of voice, a smooth solidity of
suggested movement, a delight in magnificence; and, primarily, a
wonderful feeling for decorative effect. This last is Wilde's peculiar
contribution to literature. His contribution to thought, his exegesis of
the critical attitude, is another matter. But this feeling for
decoration, that made him see life itself as a tapestry of ordered and
beautiful movements caught in gold and dyed silk, that made him
incapable of realizing that life was not so, until at last it became too
strong and tore his canvas, was itself enough to prevent the picturesque
figure of the dandy from obliterating the artist in the minds of
posterity. It is scarcely twenty years since Wilde wrote his books, and,
in poetry as well as in prose, their influence is already becoming so
common as not to be recognized. The historian of the period will have to
trace what he may call "The Decorative Movement in Literature" to the
works of Wilde, and through them to the Pre-Raphaelite pictures and
poems, whose ideals he so fantastically misrepresents.
I have implied a distinction between decoration and realism that I have
not clearly defined. This distinction is not, though it has often been
held to be, a distinction between two different kinds of art, between
which runs a sharp dividing line. It is rather a recognition of opposite
ends of a scale, like the recognition of heat and cold, both degrees of
temperature, but without intrinsic superiority one over the other. In
painting we thus distinguish between the attempt to imitate and the
willingness (not the intention) to suggest nature. This distinction is
best expressed in the old simile of the window and the wall. Some
pictures represent a pattern on a wall: some pictures represent a vision
through a window. In some we look at the canvas: in others we look
through the frame. Some are decorative: some are realistic. Many
painters have wished that their pictures should not be found wanting
when compared with the pictures of similar subjects that each spectator
paints with the brushes and palette of his own brain. Sometimes this
desire has been carried so far as to preclude all others. Painters do
not usually read Berkeley, and there have been some who forgot that
there was no such thing as a world outside their brains, and cared only
to be recognised as faithful portrait-painters of nature: that is to
say, of what all spectators see, or can see, by training their
observation. There have been critics, too, like Ruskin, who have chosen
to compare painters by their fidelity to this external and observable
nature. But painters have other things to do than photograph, other
things to do than to select from what a camera would represent.
Sometimes the idea of imitation fades away, and they are willing, no
more, to suggest lilies by a convention, and to distort even the human
figure, while they concern themselves with harmonies in which the shapes
of flower or figure sound merely incidental notes. We must not forget
that these are extremes in a single scale, and that all painting is to
some extent realistic, to some extent decorative. Its extremes are
wholly imitative in aim, and dull, and wholly conventional in aim, and
empty. We call the two aims realism and decoration for our convenience.
In literature it is possible to trace a similar double aim, separate
from but analogous to the duality in speech that we shall have to
examine in a later chapter. There are books subservient to what we call
reality, and books for which reality is no more than an excuse, books
that follow nature, and books that cast nature into their own mould,
and, delighting in no accidental harmonies, bend nature to the patterns
that please them, and heighten or lower her colours for their private
purposes of beautiful creation. Even in music we can trace these
tendencies: there is music that humbly follows the moods of man, and
music whose serenely indifferent patterns compel the dancing attendance
of those moods.
We have observed in _The Sphinx_ the decorative character of Wilde's
work. These tales provide the best examples of it that are to be found
in his prose. To the woodcutters looking down from the forest, the Earth
seemed "like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold."
The young fisherman speaks to the witch of his "_painted_ boat," and his
author is no less aloof from realism. When the young fisherman forgets
his nets and his cunning, as he listens to the sweet voice of the
mermaid, Wilde writes: "Vermilion finned and with eyes of bossy gold,
the tunnies went by in shoals, but he heeded them not." Now that is a
picture that the young fisherman could not see. Nor can we see it,
unless the fisherman is a figure on a tapestry, sewn in stitches of
bright-coloured thread. Above him three undulating lines are waves, and
between them four tunnies, twisting unanimous tails, show their
vermilion fins and their eyes of gilded metal, skilfully bedded in the
canvas.
Wilde, always perfectly self-conscious, was not unaware of this
difference between his own writing and that of most of his
contemporaries. When _Dorian Gray_ was attacked for immorality, Wilde
wrote, in a letter to a paper: "My story is an essay on decorative art.
It reacts against the brutality of plain realism." _The Picture of
Dorian Gray_ was written for publication in a magazine. Seven chapters
were added to it to make it long enough for publication as a novel,
because those who buy books, like those who buy pictures, are unable to
distinguish between size and quality, and imagine that value depends
upon area. The preface was written to answer assailants of the morality
of the story in its first form, and included only when it was printed as
a book. These circumstances partly explain the lack of proportion, and
of cohesion, that mars, though it does not spoil, the first French novel
to be written in the English language. England has a traditional
novel-form with which even the greatest students of human comedy and
tragedy square their work. In France there is no such tradition, with
the result that the novel is a plastic form, moulded in the most various
ways by the most various minds. After all, it is a question of name, and
it is impossible without elaborate and tedious qualification to discuss
classifications of literature. They should not be made, or they should
be made differently, for, at present, they deal only with superficial
resemblances, depending, sometimes, upon nothing more essential than the
price for which a book is sold. They have, however, a distinct influence
upon production. In France, Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint Antoine,"
that wonderful dream in which so many strange dialogues are overheard,
Remy de Gourmont's "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," that delightful speculative
mirage, and Huysmans' "A Rebours," that phantasmagoria of intellectual
experience, are all included in publishers' lists of novels and sold as
such. Publishers in England are not so catholic. Whatever the reason may
be, economical, depending upon the publisher, traditional, depending on
the writer, Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was the first novel for
many years to be written in England with that freedom in choice of
matter and manner that has for a long time been in no way extraordinary
in France. It has, so far, had no successor free as itself from the
enforced interest in a love affair, to which we have grown so mournfully
accustomed.
The story of the book is a fantastic invention like that of Balzac's "Le
Peau de Chagrin," in which the scrap of skin from a wild ass shrinks
with each wish of its possessor. The picture of Dorian Gray, painted by
his friend, ages with the lines of cruelty, lust and hypocrisy that
should mar its ever-youthful subject. He, remaining as beautiful as when
at twenty-one he had inspired the painter with a masterpiece, walks in
the ways of men, sullying his soul, whose bodily reflection records
neither his age nor his sins. It is the sort of invention that would
have pleased Hawthorne, and the book itself is written with the marked
ethical sympathy that Wilde, in his preface, denounced as "an
unpardonable mannerism of style." Perhaps the reason why it was so
loudly accused of immorality was that in the popular mind luxury and sin
are closely allied, and the unpardonable mannerism that made him preach,
in a parable, against the one, did not hide his whole-hearted delight in
describing the other.
The preface, inspired by the hostility the book aroused, is an essay not
in the gentle art of making enemies, but in that of annoying them when
made. If his critics tell him that his book leers with the eyes of
foulness and dribbles with the lips of prurience, Wilde replies, with an
ambiguity as disturbing as his smile, that "it is the spectator, and not
life, that art really mirrors," and again that "the highest, as the
lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography." His arrows are not
angrily tipped with poison, but are not for that the less displeasing to
those against whom they are directed. They are weighted not with anger
but with aesthetic theory. They are so far separate from the story that
they are best discussed with the essays of _Intentions_.
There are a few strange books that share the magic of some names, like
Cornelius Agrippa, Raymond Lully, and Paracelsus, names that possibly
mean more to us before than after we have investigated the works and
personalities that lie behind them. These books are mysterious and kept,
like mysteries, for peculiar moods. They are not books for every day,
nor even for every night. We keep them for rare moments, as we keep in a
lacquer cabinet some crystal-shrined thread of subtle perfume, or some
curious gem, to be a solace in a mood that does not often recur, or,
perhaps, to be an instrument in its evocation. _Dorian Gray_, for all
its faults, is such a book. It is unbalanced; and that is a fault. It is
a mosaic hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and
took and used in his work whatever scrap of jasper, or porphyry or
broken flint was put into his hand; and that is not a virtue. But in it
there is an individual essence, a private perfume, a colour whose secret
has been lost. There are moods whose consciousness that essence,
perfume, colour, is needed to intensify.
There is little need to discuss the minutiae of the book; to point out
that its sayings occur in Wilde's plays, poems, reviews and dialogues;
that it is, as it were, an epitome of his wit before and after the fact;
that the eleventh chapter is a wonderful condensation of a main theme in
"A Rebours," like an impression of a concerto rendered by a virtuoso
upon a violin. There is no need to emphasize Wilde's delight in colour
and fastidious luxury, as well as in a most amusing kind of dandyism: in
the opening scene the studio curtains are of tussore silk, the dust is
golden that dances in the sunlight, tea is poured from a fluted Georgian
urn, there is a heavy scent of roses, the blossoms of the laburnum are
honey-coloured as well as honey-sweet, Lord Henry Wotton reclines on a
divan of Persian saddlebags, and taps "the toe of his patent-leather
boot with a tasselled ebony cane." There is no need to point out any of
these things, but they help to justify what I have already said, and to
define the indefinable character of the book. Lord Henry Wotton would
have liked to write "a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian
carpet, and as unreal." Wilde tried to write it, and very nearly
succeeded.
* * * * *
Wilde's second period of swift development began towards the end of
1888. This, perhaps, explains the sentence in 'Pen, Pencil, and
Poison'--"One can fancy an intense personality being created out of
sin." His personality was, certainly, intensified when he became an
habitual devotee of the vice for which he was imprisoned. He had first
experimented in that vice in 1886; his experiments became a habit in
1889, and in that year he published 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison' and 'The
Decay of Lying,' revised _The Sphinx_, and wrote some, at least, of the
stories in _A House of Pomegranates_; these were immediately followed by
'The Critic as Artist' and _Salome_.
These things are among his best work. It is possible that a
consciousness of separation from the common life of men is a sufficient
explanation of an increased vividness in a man's self, a heightened
ardour of production. Is Wilde's exceptional activity in those years to
be attributed to an eagerness to justify himself by other men's
admiration, of which he had never been careless? Was he eager to bring
mankind to his side? "It is the spectator, not life, that art really
mirrors." This sentence must now be applied to himself, when we consider
_The Portrait of Mr. W. H._ That narrative, now printed at the end of
_Lord Arthur Savile's Crime_, and first published in Blackwood's
Magazine in 1889, is an essay in criticism.
Wilde read something of himself into Shakespeare's sonnets, and, in
reading, became fascinated by a theory that he was unable to prove.
Where another man would, perhaps, have written a short, serious essay,
and whistled his theory down the wind that carries the dead leaves of
Shakespeare's commentators, Wilde tosses it as a belief between three
brains, and allows it to unfold itself as the background to a story. The
three brains are the narrator, Cyril Graham, and Erskine. Graham
discovers the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets in a boy-actor called Will
Hughes, and by diligent examination of internal evidence, almost
persuades Erskine to believe him. Erskine, however, demands a proof, and
Graham finds one for him in a portrait of Will Hughes nailed to an old
wooden chest. Erskine is persuaded, but discovers that the picture is a
forgery, whereupon Graham, explaining that he had only had it made for
Erskine's satisfaction, leaves the picture to his friend, protests that
the forgery in no way invalidates the theory, and kills himself as a
proof of his good faith. Erskine, disbelieving, tells all this to the
narrator, who instantly sets to work on the sonnets, finds a quantity of
further evidence, but none that sets beyond question the existence in
Elizabethan times of a boy-actor called William Hughes. He writes
Erskine a letter of passionate reasoning, that, while persuading
Erskine, wipes away his own belief. He finds that he has become an
infidel to the theory of which he has been a successful advocate. It was
a favourite idea of Wilde's, and the motive of _La Sainte Courtisane_,
that to slough off a belief like a snake's skin, one has only to convert
someone else to it. I need not further analyse the story, which is
merely the mechanism that Wilde used for the display of the evidence to
which he desired to draw attention.
It would be impossible to build an airier castle in Spain than this of
the imaginary William Hughes; impossible, too, to build one so
delightfully designed. The prose and the reasoning seem things of ivory,
Indian-carved, through which the rarest wind of criticism may freely
blow and carry delicate scents away without disturbing the yet more
delicate fabric. Wilde assumes that Shakespeare addressed the sonnets to
William Hughes, and, that assumption granted (though there is no William
Hughes to be found), colours his theory with an abundance of persuasive
touches, to strengthen what is, at first, only a courtesy belief. Though
all his argument is special pleading, Wilde contrives to make you feel
that counsel knows, though he cannot prove, that his client is in the
right. The evidence is only for the jury. You are inclined to interrupt
him with the exclamation that you are already convinced. But it is a
pleasure to listen to him, so you let him go on. After all, "brute
reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It
is like hitting below the intellect." Wilde's _Portrait of Mr. W. H._ is
more than a refutable theory, a charming piece of speculation. It is an
illustration of the critic as artist, a foretaste of _Intentions_. It is
better than 'The Truth of Masks,' as good as 'The Decay of Lying.' Yet
it was not printed in that book, where it might well have had a place.
The reason for this is not uninteresting. Wilde did not intend to
reprint it as it stood. The theory beneath that delicate brain-play had
a lasting fascination for him, and, with its proofs, grew in his mind
till it overbalanced Cyril Graham and doubting Erskine. He re-wrote it
at greater length, after delays. When he was arrested, the publishers,
who had already announced it as a forthcoming book, returned it to his
house, whence it disappeared on the day of the enforced sale of his
effects. It has never been recovered.
VI
INTENTIONS
Mrs. Malaprop classes paradoxes with Greek, Hebrew, simony and fluxions
as inflammatory branches of learning, and, in _De Profundis_, Wilde
says: "What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity
became to me in the realm of passion." Paradox and perversity were
matches to set fire to his thought and his dreams. But paradox is not in
itself different from direct speech. It is made by the statement of a
result and the omission of the steps of reasoning by which that result
has been achieved. When somebody accused Jean Moreas, that brilliant
Greek, of being paradoxical, he replied: "I do not know what paradox is;
I believe it is the name which imbeciles give to the truth." Wilde might
have made a similar answer, and perhaps did. His paradoxes are only
unfamiliar truths. Those of them that were thought the wildest are
already becoming obvious, for unfamiliarity is a temporal quality like
flowers in a road: when a multitude has passed that way the flowers are
trodden out of sight. Paradox is, however, a proof of vitality and
adventurous thought, and these things are sometimes the companions of
charm. Unfamiliar truth was, at first, the most noticeable
characteristic of Wilde's _Intentions_, but, though paradox may fade to
commonplace, "age cannot wither nor custom stale" the fresh and debonair
personality that keeps the book alive, tossing thoughts like roses, and
playing with them in happiness of heart.
There is something of the undergraduate about the book. Its pages might
be reprinted from a college magazine in which a genius was stretching
youthful limbs, instead of from such staid and respectable reviews as
The Fortnightly and The Nineteenth Century. It belongs to the days when
the most natural thing in life is to talk until "the dusky night rides
down the sky," and the pale morning light mocks at our yellow lamp.
Indeed, I think that such freshness and vivacity of writing is the gift
of those authors only who are also talkers. They are accustomed to see
their sentences in company, not in solitude. They give them a pleasing
strut and swagger and teach them to make graceful entries and exits
neither too ceremonious nor yet disorderly. Their sentences are men of
the world, and of a world where the passport to success is charm. It is
not so with lecturers or preachers, whose office puts them in a
different category. But men who talk for their own enjoyment and that of
those who listen to them are less likely than the others to compose by
eye instead of by ear. It is actually difficult to read Wilde in
silence. His sentences lift the voice as well as the thoughts of their
writer from the printed page.
Wilde loved speech for its own sake, and nothing could be more
characteristic of his gift than his choice of that old and inexhaustible
form that Plato, Lucian, Erasmus and Landor, to name only a few, have
turned to such different purposes. Dialogue is at once personal and
impersonal. "By its means he (the thinker) can both reveal and conceal
himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its
means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it us
in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all
the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues
that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and
really illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous
afterthoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and
yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance." Nothing could
better describe Wilde's own essays in dialogue.