production. It was only offered to Sarah Bernhardt when she asked Wilde
why he had not written a play for her. The stage-directions, I am told,
set almost insoluble problems to the manager, whose ideas are limited by
the conventions of the modern theatre. The final speech of Salome is of
a length that demands, if abridgment is to be avoided, a consummate
actress and an audience in a state of extraordinary tension. But, since
the play induces such a tension, the lack of an actress can hardly be
urged as a blemish on its technique. And since, when the play is
produced it is extremely successful, we can only rejoice that it has
shown, if only accidentally, the inadequacy of once accepted dogmas of
theatrical presentation. An appeal to the populace is not good
criticism, but no badly built play can show such a record of success as
_Salome_. Mr. Ross will, I am sure, allow me to use some of the heavy
fire of facts with which he answered those critics who spoke of the play
as having been "dragged from obscurity" when it was produced in England
in 1905. "In 1901, within a year of the author's death, it was produced
in Berlin; from that moment it has held the European stage. It has run
for a longer consecutive period in Germany than any play by any
Englishman, not excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity has extended to
all countries where it is not prohibited. It is performed throughout
Europe, Asia, and America. It is played even in Yiddish."
But before discussing the play itself let me set down the facts on both
sides of the mild controversy over the writing of it in French. Wilde
had talked of the play for some time before he wrote it, and talked of
it chiefly in Paris. Frenchmen had applauded the fragments he recited.
It was to them that he wished to show it when completed. This is the
reason why it shares with "Vathek" and "The Grammont Memoirs" the
distinction of being a work written in French by an English-speaking man
of genius. It has been suggested that the language made it possible, but
_La Sainte Courtisane_ is enough to show that it could have been written
in English. There are slight disagreements over Wilde's knowledge of
French. M. Andre Gide says that "he knew French admirably, but pretended
to have to look for the words for which he meant his listeners to wait.
He had almost no accent, or at most only what it pleased him to retain
to give a new and strange aspect to his words." On the other hand, M.
Stuart Merrill writes of his speaking French with a fantasy that,
pleasant enough in conversation, would have produced a deplorable
impression in the theatre. For example, Wilde ended one of his stories
with "Et puis, alors, le roi il est mouru."
These pieces of evidence must be remembered when we consider the
composition of _Salome_. Mr. Ross says: "The play was passed for press
by no less a writer than Marcel Schwob, whose letter to the Paris
publisher, returning the proofs and mentioning two or three slight
alterations, is still in my possession. Marcel Schwob told me some years
afterwards that he thought it would have spoiled the spontaneity and
character of Wilde's style if he had tried to harmonize it with the
diction demanded by the French Academy." M. Merrill says: "Un jour Wilde
me remit son drame qu'il avait ecrit tres rapidement, de premier jet, en
francais, et me demanda d'en corriger les erreurs manifestes. Ce ne fut
pas chose facile de faire accepter a Wilde toutes mes corrections.... Je
me rappelle que la plupart des tirades de ses personnages commencaient
par l'expletif: _enfin!_ En ai-je assez biffe, des _enfin!_ Mais je
m'apercus bientot que le bon Wilde n'avait en mon gout qu'une confiance
relative, et je le recommandai aux soins de Rette. Celui-ci continua mon
travail de correction et d'emendation. Mais Wilde finit par se mefier de
Rette autant que de moi, et ce fut Pierre Louys qui donna le dernier
coup de lime au texte de _Salome_." In comment, I shall do no more than
notice that the play was written in 1891, and not published till 1893.
The two stories do not necessarily contradict each other, for Marcel
Schwob did not suggest that he saw the manuscript, and M. Merrill's
reminiscence is concerned with _Salome_ long before it was sent to the
printers.
The question is not one of any great importance. It is sufficient for
our purpose to observe that the French of _Salome_, whether as Wilde
wrote it or as it survived the emendations of his friends, is very
simple in construction. Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea,
did not use the finer subtleties of the language in which she loved
Iokanaan. A perusal of Maeterlinck's "Les Sept Princesses" had taught
her to use a speech whose power depends on its simplicity. She, Herod,
Herodias and all their entourage, speak like children who have had a
French nurse. Their speech is made of short sentences, direct assertions
and negations, that run like pages beside the progress of the play. They
show, these short sentences, what is happening, the more forcefully,
because they are themselves aloof from it and busied with their own
concerns. For example:--
"_Herode._ Qu'est-ce que cela me fait qu'elle danse ou non? Cela ne
me fait rien. Je suis heureux ce soir. Je suis tres heureux. Jamais
je n'ai ete si heureux.
_Le premier soldat._ Il a l'air sombre, le tetrarque. N'est-ce pas
qu'il a l'air sombre?
_Le second soldat._ Il a l'air sombre."
The effect of the play is won by the cumulative weight of these short
contradictory sentences, that fall like continual drops of water on a
stone, never argue, are never loud enough to be quarrelsome, and
sometimes amuse themselves by reflecting, as if in a box of mirrors, a
single object in a hundred ways. The moon is translated into many moods.
For the page of Herodias she is a dead woman coming from the tomb to
look for dead men. Salome's lover sees her as a little dancing princess,
with yellow veil and silver feet. For Salome she is a little piece of
money, cold, chaste, a virgin. The page of Herodias sees her again as a
dead woman, covering herself with a winding-sheet, and when the young
Syrian dies, laments that, knowing she was seeking a dead man, he had
not hidden his friend in a cavern where she could not see him. Herod
finds her an hysterical woman seeking lovers everywhere, naked, and
refusing to be veiled by the clouds. Herodias finds that the moon
resembles the moon, and that is all. Then in the eyes of Herod she
becomes red in accordance with the prophecy, and Herodias replies,
jeering, "And the Kings of the Earth have fear." And finally, when
Salome is speaking to the head, when all is over but her death, Herod
cries aloud that the moon should be put out with the torches and the
stars, because he begins to be afraid.
The drama, reflected in these images of the moon that show the changing
colours of the minds that look at her, is thrown inward, and must be
read between the lines. Rather than describe the strength of an emotion,
or show it in immediate action, Wilde shows what it compels its
possessor to disregard. Salome answers the question of the young Syrian
with irrelevant remarks, because she is obsessed by the mole's eyes of
her stepfather. When Iokanaan speaks, and the young Syrian suggests that
she should go into the garden in her litter, she replies simply, "Il dit
des choses monstrueuses a propos de ma mere, n'est-ce pas?" When he
kills himself, on account of her words to the prophet, and falls before
her feet, she does not see him. The page laments, and a soldier tells
her of what has happened before her eyes:--
"_Le premier soldat._ Princesse, le jeune capitaine vient de se
tuer.
_Salome._ Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche, Iokanaan."
This is potential as opposed to kinetic drama, and expresses itself not
in action, but in being unmoved by action. It is an expression of the
aspiration towards purely potential speech characteristic of the French
symbolists, and of all who seek "a literature in which the visible world
is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream." It was,
perhaps, the fear that such drama of the mind would be impossible on the
stage that made Maeterlinck write as sub-title to a book of plays,
"Little Dramas for Marionettes." For the speech maps out by avoidance
what is really said, and whereas some plays would lose little by being
acted in dumb show, these appeal less to the eye than to the ear.
In writing _Salome_, however, Wilde did not neglect the wonderful visual
sense of the theatre that was, later, to suggest to him the appearance
on the stage of Jack in mourning for his non-existent brother. He was
able to see the play from the point of view of the audience, and refused
no means of intensifying its effect. When Salome is leaning over the
cistern, listening for the death of Iokanaan, he does not allow the
executioner to come up with the head. The man would have shared the
attention of the audience, and made the head a piece of meat. Instead:
"Un grand bras noir, le bras du bourreau, sort de la citerne apportant
sur un bouclier d'argent la tete d'Iokanaan. Salome la saisit. Herode se
cache le visage avec son manteau. Herodias sourit et s'evente. Les
Nazareens s'agenouillent et commencent a prier." The head, like a
dramatic moment, isolated upon the stage, compels a group of
characteristic actions. Its appearance is a significant speech. The
strength of the emotion in the play blinds many to the beauty without
which it would be worthless. Salome's lust, wreaking itself on dead lips
because it was denied them living, is, indeed, a powerful demon to
subdue to the service of beauty. And the prurient, who are most
intimately moved by it, make up most of those who cannot see beyond it.
But this emotion is but part of a larger harmony, which, though still
more powerful, is not allowed to confuse the delicate, careful fingering
of the artist. Control is never lost, and, when the play is done, when
we return to it in our waking dreams, we return to that elevation only
given by the beautiful, undisturbed by the vividness, the clearness with
which we realise the motive of passion playing its part in that deeper
motive of doom, that fills the room in which we read, or the theatre in
which we listen, with the beating of the wings of the angel of death.
VIII
DISASTER
Before the success of the plays, Wilde had been an adventurer on thin
ice, exhibiting a brave superiority to fortune, but painfully conscious
that his income was far smaller than that on which it was possible to
live with the happy extravagance that was natural to him. He had been
born with the ghost of a silver spoon in his mouth, but had never been
able to materialize it. It was his right to live luxuriously, since that
task was one that he was peculiarly fitted to perform. Some carelessness
in the inviting of his fairy godmothers, some inattention on the part of
the presiding gods, had denied him that right. When the success of the
plays suddenly raised his income to several thousands of pounds a year,
he lost no time in living up to and above it. Some of his extravagances
were of the simplest, most childish kind. He over-fed, like a schoolboy
in a tuckshop with an unexpected sovereign in his hand. Flowers he had
always worn, hansom-cabs he had always used, but now he bought the most
expensive button-holes, and kept his cab waiting all day. His
friendships became proportionately costly, for he denied nothing to
those he liked, and some of them never forgot to ask. He hurriedly
ruined himself with prosperity, like the poor man in the fairy tale,
whose wish for all the gold in the world was granted by a mischievous
destiny.
The success of the plays and the extravagance that it permitted placed
him in so strong a light of public attention that he could do nothing in
secret. He became one of those people whose celebrity lends a savour to
gossip. Scandal borrowed wings from the knowledge that it had a
beginning in truth. In 1889, before the maleficent flood of gold was
poured upon him, he had become accustomed to indulge the vice that,
openly alluded to in the days and verses of Catullus, is generally
abhorred and hidden in our own. He had been in youth a runner after
girls, but, as a man, he ceased to take any interest in women. In the
moment of his success, when many were ready to throw themselves at his
feet, one, perhaps, of the reasons of his power was his own indifference
to his conquests. Many excuses have been made for him. It has been
suggested, for example, that in his absorption in antiquity he allowed
himself to forget that he was not living in it. But Wilde was not a
scholar with a rampart of books between himself and the present. Our
business here is scientific, not apologetic, and such evidence as we
have shows that the vice needs none but a pathological explanation. It
was a disease, a malady of the brain, not the necessary consequence of a
delight in classical literature. Opulence permitted its utmost
development, but did not create it. Opulence did, however, make it
noticeable, and prepared the circumstances in which it was publicly
punished.
Wilde had always been laughed at, and, even before the facts of his
conduct were generally known, the laughter was coloured by dislike. A
book that was written by a small, prehensile mind, gifted with a limber
cleverness, enables us to see him through the eyes of the early
nineties. This book, "The Green Carnation," is a limited but faithful
caricature. Wilde was accused of having written it, but
characteristically replied: "I invented that magnificent flower. But
with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely
beautiful name, I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The
flower is a work of art. The book is not." Here, as in the matter of
"Patience," he could not forgo the perversity of lending colour to other
people's parodies of himself. "The Green Carnation" shows us Esme
Amarinth and a youthful patrician who models himself upon him expounding
the art of being self-consciously foolish, wearing green carnations,
and teaching choir-boys to sing a catch about "rose-white youth" in the
presence of the widow of a strong and silent British soldier. Lady Locke
thinks that England has changed, and though fascinated by Amarinth's
under-study, does not marry him, for fear her "soldier's son," a stout
Jehu of the governess-cart, should learn from him a soul-destroying and
effeminate love of carnations pickled in arsenic. This book is like a
clever statue, brightly painted, of Britannia refusing the advances of
the aesthete. The aesthete is made to look rather a fool; and so is
Britannia. Such sections of the public as took pleasure in it thought
Wilde a peculiarly arrogant coxcomb, a disconcerting and polished reply
to the Victorian tradition of muscular manhood in which they had long
been secure. They were ready to rejoice in his discomfiture, and their
hostility to Wilde spread swiftly and gave a quality of triumph to the
delight of all classes as soon as he was arrested.
An elaborate account of the various trials would in no way serve the
purpose of this book. It is sufficient to say that on May 25, 1895, he
was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour.
IX
DE PROFUNDIS
The book called _De Profundis_, first published in 1905, five years
after Wilde's death, is not printed as it was written, but is composed
of passages from a long letter whose complete publication would be
impossible in this generation. The passages were selected and put
together by Mr. Robert Ross with a skill that it is impossible
sufficiently to admire. The letter, a manuscript of "eighty
close-written pages on twenty folio sheets," was not addressed to Mr.
Ross but to a man to whom Wilde felt that he owed some, at least, of the
circumstances of his public disgrace. It was begun as a rebuke of this
friend, whose actions, even subsequent to the trials, had been such as
to cause Wilde considerable pain. It was not delivered to him, but given
to Mr. Ross by Wilde, who also gave instructions as to its partial
publication.
It is not often possible to detect the original intention of rebuke in
the published portions of _De Profundis_. I suppose that as Wilde
pointed out his friend's share in his disaster, and set down on paper
what that disaster was, he came to examine its ulterior effect on his
own mind, for those pages that are open to us contain such an
examination. He is in prison, and is at pains to realize exactly what
this means to him: where he is unchanged, where he has lost, and where
and how he has gained. He would draw up a profit and loss account, of
the loaves that are sustenance for the body and the flowers of the white
narcissus that are food for the soul, and in this way give himself
courage to face the world with the knowledge that he had kept his soul
alive. He will discover where he stands with regard to Christianity, and
where with regard to Flaubert. A critic and artist, he will realize
himself among masterpieces, and discover what is altered in the
personality for whose notation he has been accustomed to use his
criticism of works of art. "To the artist, expression is the only mode
under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead."
Wilde's life in prison was lived on two planes. Only one of them is
represented in _De Profundis_. In writing that letter he was able to
pick up the frayed threads of his intellectual existence, to find that
some were gold and some were crimson, and to learn that whatever else he
might have lost he had not lost his lordship over words. The existence
whose threads he thus collected was not that which was at the moment
determining the further development of his character. It was an
aftermath of that summer of the intellect that had given him
_Intentions_. Instead of the debonair personality of an Ernest or a
Gilbert, he painted now a no less ideal vision of himself in
circumstances similar to those that now surrounded him.
Behind this imaginary and as it were dramatic life was another in which
he shared the days and the day's business of his fellow convicts.
"We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors
And cleaned the shining rails:
And rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails."
There was the routine of the prison, the daily walk for one hour round a
circular path, watched by warders, inside a wall that hid all but the
sky and the topmost branches of a tree, upon whose bare twigs, buds, and
green and ruddy leaves, the prisoners depended for news of the
magnificent passage of the seasons. These daily walks, like all the work
of the prison, took place in silence, broken only by the warders' words
of command delivered in the raucous voice that tradition has dictated.
As speech is the greatest of man's privileges, so its deprivation is the
least bearable of his punishments. During the daily walks even those
convicts who in other things are obedient to the prison discipline,
learn to speak without a perceptible motion of the lips. For six weeks
Wilde walked in silence, but one evening at the end of that time, he
heard the man walking behind him say: "Oscar Wilde, I am sorry for you.
It must be worse for you than for us." He nearly fainted, and replied:
"No; it's the same for all of us." In this way he made the
acquaintanceship of his fellows. One by one he talked with all of them,
and these scraps of conversation, he told M. Andre Gide, made his life
so far tolerable that he lost his first desire of killing himself. "The
only humanizing influence in prison is the prisoners," he wrote after he
came out. Except in the matter of permission to write (a permission not
granted until near the end of his term, and then only on the
recommendation of the doctor), the prison discipline was in no way
relaxed for Wilde. He slept on a plank bed. He did not, like
Wainewright, remain "a gentleman," and share a cell with a bricklayer
and a sweep, neither of whom ever offered him the brush. He cleaned out
his cell, polished his tin drinking cup, turned the crank, and picked
the oakum like the rest.
Echoes of these things are heard in _De Profundis_, but if, as Wilde
had, we have made ourselves
"Misers of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage,"
it is not in what books say but in their style that we look for the
secrets of their writers. And it is impossible not to notice that the
character of Wilde's prose in this book is not very different from that
in _Intentions_. He observed changes in himself, and foresaw others, but
the real alteration of his point of view was not accomplished until he
came out of prison. In gaol he was in retreat, like a man who has gone
into a monastery. The world was still the world that he had left, and
not until he was again free did he realize more vividly than by
speculation how different his life was to be, and across what a gulf he
would look back at the existence that had been broken off by his
disaster. His artistic attitude had not yet been changed.
It is for this reason that the book raises so easily a question dear to
those who prefer praising or blaming to understanding. Is it sincere?
they ask. Is it possible that a man who felt such things sincerely could
write of his feelings in such mellifluous prose? Is it sincere? they
ask, with particular insistence, pointing to the character of Wilde's
life after leaving prison as a proof that it was not. And if not, what
then? Why then, they say, it is worthless.
"Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold
A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least
That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs!
What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;
And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel-pipes of wretched straw."