may recognize it, and yet the ugly, conscientious noise of their
scrannel-pipes is no nearer than _De Profundis_ to the sincerity they
admire. Sincerity, in the sense that they give to that word, does not
exist in art. "What people call insincerity is simply a method by which
we can multiply our personalities." That sentence, from the mouth of one
of the personalities that Wilde was able to assume, explains the obvious
variety of his work. It throws also no dubious light upon the general
nature of art. For in art no attitude is insincere whose result is
beautiful, and no attitude is possible whose result may not be
beautiful. All depends on the artist and on the depth and abandon of his
insincerity. For art tolerates many contradictions, but a work of art
tolerates none. The man who takes an attitude and is unable to sustain
it, who smirks at the audience, who plays as it were the traitor to his
own choice, can produce nothing but what is ugly, since, like him, it
will contain a contradiction. But the man who chooses an attitude, and
preserves it consistently in any work of art, is thereby fulfilling a
condition of beauty. He may make a lovely thing, and then, taking
another attitude, may contradict himself in a thing of no less
loveliness. Repentance like that in _De Profundis_ is a guarantee of a
moment of humility, but not of a life of reform. Shakespeare wrote
Hamlet's soliloquy and also Juliet's murmuring from the balcony. Yet he
was not always in love, nor always melancholy with inaction. We are
accustomed to insincerity in play-writing, and do not expect each
character, fool or wise, young or old, to represent its author. We
allow, as, for an obvious example, in Restoration comedy, plays to be
written from a standpoint that their authors could not possibly maintain
in private life. In poetry also, we do not consider Browning insincere
because he speaks now for Lippo Lippi, and now for Andrea del Sarto. In
novels we allow Fielding to write "Jonathan Wild" as a satirist, and
"Joseph Andrews" as a comic romancer, and we are not shocked when he
relishes in imagination deeds that as a magistrate he would be bound to
censure. I think we have to learn that all fine literature is dramatic.
No man pours from his mouth in any single speech all the roses and the
vomit that would represent his soul. Men speak and hold their peace.
They make and their hands are still. And many moods flit by while they
are silent, and myriad souls agitate the blood in the veins of those
motionless hands. The artist is he who, remembering this mood or that,
can hold it fast and maintain it long enough for the making of a work of
art. We do not ask him to retain it further. The shaping of his mood in
words or in clay has already changed his personality. The writer of a
mad song need not gibber in the streets. Golden phrases lose none of
their magnificence if he who made them wears plain homespun when we meet
him in the marketplace. He has been a king for a moment, and given us
his kingship for ever. We can ask no more.
Wilde, perhaps more than other men, insisted on the dramatic character
of his work. In considering any of it we should remember those sentences
in the last paragraph of 'The Truth of Masks':--"Not that I agree with
everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I
entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint,
and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything." I am not sure that
this confession does not spoil 'The Truth of Masks.' It is perilously
like an aside; but Wilde was sufficiently subtle to have chosen a mood
which such an aside would illustrate rather than contradict. In
considering his work, we must remember, first, that all work is
dramatic, true to an individual mood only; and, secondly, that Wilde,
more clearly conscious of this than most artists, was better able to
take advantage of it. He was freed from those qualms of conscience which
made Swinburne glad to differentiate his earlier from his later work by
saying:--"In my next work it should be superfluous to say that there is
no touch of dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion." This sentence,
that denies together what is universal and what does not exist (since
you cannot imagine an emotion without feeling it) points to no blemish
in Swinburne's work, but only to a discomfort of mind that some of it
must have caused him. From this discomfort Wilde was free. He had many
tuning-forks, and distrusted none of them because it happened to be
pitched differently from another.
There is no doubt that, when _De Profundis_ was finished, Wilde regarded
it as a document of historical value, as a veracious confession. This
is clear from the tone in which he wrote of it to Mr. Ross:--"I don't
defend my conduct. I explain it. Also there are in my letter certain
passages which deal with my mental development in prison, and the
inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards
life that has taken place; and I want you and others who still stand by
me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I
hope to face the world." Those sentences certainly let us see the
attitude that Wilde hoped to induce in his readers, but, if we would
turn to Wilde himself, and, careless of the beauty of the work, pry past
it to discover the private feelings of the author, we must take them not
as a statement of the truth, but, seeking the truth, take that statement
into account. That statement, the published _De Profundis_, those
unpublished portions of the letter which, probably, will never be read
in our lifetime, the whole of Wilde's works, the whole of his life, the
character of that person to whom he was immediately writing, the
character of those other friends by whom he desired to be read, the
character which, without deliberate choice, he had himself grown
accustomed to present to them: we must know all these things, and be
able to weigh them exactly, and balance them justly against each other.
Have I not said enough to show that it is a vain task to seek for the
absolute truth in such a matter, and that we are better and more
hopefully employed when we concern ourselves simply with a wonderful
piece of literature dictated by certain conditions that we admit are
impossible accurately to discover?
In pointing out that the details of Wilde's life in prison did not
affect the manner of his thought, but only provided him with fresh
material, I do not wish to suggest that prison was unimportant to him.
It might have been. He might, in revolt against it, have made it no more
than a hideous accident, stunting his nature by not refusing to allow it
to assimilate the black bread that had been thrown to it as well as the
sweetened cakes. If he had been earlier released, as he said, this might
have happened. He was not released, and revolt was changed to
acceptance, and, at last, he was able to say, as he had hoped, that
society's sending him to prison ranked with his father's sending him to
Oxford, as a turning point in his life. But that is a question for the
next chapter, for imprisonment did not radically alter him until he was
again in the world.
In prison, however, the anaesthetic of magnificent living was denied him,
and he turned to magnificent thought, recovering the power that had
been his before popular success had narrowed his horizon.
"Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it
Into impossible things, unlikely ends;
And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire
Grow large as all the regions of thy soul."[6]
In 1894 he had known the possible, and achieved it in _The Importance of
Being Earnest_. But in 1889 he had been trying far beyond it, and now
again, in prison, he found his desires growing far beyond the possible,
and covering the regions of his soul. He needed an idea that should make
this bread-and-water existence one with that of wine and lilies, an idea
that should make it possible for him to conceive his life as a whole,
and, in the conception, make it so.
In _De Profundis_ he tries to make his friend realize what he has
scarcely realized himself; the depth of his fall, the twilight in his
cell, the twilight in his heart, the nature of suffering, the nature of
the sorrow that does not allow itself to be forgotten. He writes
passages so poignant as to blind us to their beauty, for sorrow is no
less sorrow when it walks in purple than when in rags it lies in the
dust. Then, after showing the ruins of his life, he paints a picture, no
less poignant, of himself rebuilding that broken edifice with those
things that he has hitherto rejected. He has learnt, he tells himself,
the value of pain and the virtue of humility. He has once believed that
pain was a blemish on creation, and that the sobbing of a child made the
gods hide their faces for shame. He now believes that suffering is a
means for the purification of the spirit, a fire through which vessels
of clay must pass to their perfection. And, for humility, he discovers
that there is no defiance so lofty as that of self-accusation. He has
been told to forget who he is; life in prison almost compels him to
rebellion; but he has learnt that only by remembering his identity, by
shifting to his own shoulders the burden of his disaster, and by an
absolute acceptance of all that has happened in and to him, will he be
able to win the pride that humility confers and that rebellion makes
impossible.
This purpose, to give his life the unity he demanded from a poem; these
motives, of suffering and humility, run waveringly through _De
Profundis_, carrying with them here and there fragments of mournful
experience. Through them he came to contemplate Christ, not only as a
type of humility and suffering, but also as an example of one whose life
was a work of art. In such books as _De Profundis_, the continuous
wandering speech of a mind following itself, some paragraphs seem to
withdraw themselves a little, as the keynotes of the rest. Such
paragraphs are, I think, those in which he wrote of Christ as the
supreme artist, of Christ's influence on art, and of his philosophy as
Wilde interpreted it. These paragraphs have seemed blasphemous to some
and unreasonable to others. I cannot consider them more blasphemous than
a Madonna and Child by Murillo, or a Christ and his Father by Milton, or
more unreasonable than those persons who are unable to perceive that
religion, no less than the Sabbath, was made for man, and not for the
delectation of the Almighty.
Man makes God in his own image, or as he would like himself to be, and,
as man's image changes, so is his God continually recast. Wilde's
prose-poem of the artist and the bronze is the story of the making and
remaking of religion. The Christ of the Roman slaves who escaped from
their masters' rods to worship their God in cellars was indeed a Man of
Sorrows, who found in misery and low estate the means of creating
loveliness. As they hoped, he promised, and each labourer's penny was
minted with the superscription he had himself designed. With the
renaissance of joy came new Christs. One taught the Irish monks to build
their wattled cells. Another, delighting in richness no less than in
simplicity, designed the stone lacework of the French cathedrals. Later,
the sombre, fiery Calvin saw a divinity of black and scarlet. Milton's
God conceived humanity as an epic, whose conclusion must neither be
hurried nor delayed. There have been Gods of war and Gods of peace,
changing with man's desires. It is for that reason that we are warned to
make no graven images, lest we should commit ourselves to a God of a
single mood. It was quite natural that the Christ whom Wilde saw, as he
sat on the wooden bench in his cell and turned the pages of his Greek
Testament, should be a Christ who showed that in all the acts of his
life there had been hope, a Christ who perceived "the enormous
importance of living completely for the moment," swept aside the tyranny
of orthodoxy, and "regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves
beautiful holy things and modes of perfection."
Wilde expresses his conception with incomparable wit and charm. When he
speaks of Christ's love of the sinner, he remarks that "the conversion
of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great
achievement." On Christ's view that "one should not bother too much over
affairs," he comments, "the birds didn't, why should man?" And again:
"The beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy. I cannot
conceive a better reason for his being sent there. The people who work
for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as
much reward as those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun.
Why shouldn't they? Probably no one deserved anything." And I cannot
refrain from reminding myself by writing it down, of his beautiful
comparison of the Greek Testament with the version that endless
repetition without choice of occasion has made an empty noise in our
ears: "When one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of
lilies out of some narrow and dark house." It pleased him to accept the
not generally received view of some scholars, that Greek was the
language actually spoken by Christ, and that [Greek: tetelestai][7] was
indeed his last word and not a mere translation of a similar expression
in a Nazarene dialect of Aramaic.
But Wilde's study of the gospels had left him more than a handful of
phrases, and these chance flowers must not blind us to the garden of
thought in which they grew. Among the subjects on which he planned to
write was "Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life."
This essay was never written, but Wilde had made it almost unnecessary
by those suggestive paragraphs in the letter to his friend.
Christ, for him, was a supreme artist, who chose to build a beautiful
thing in life instead of in marble or song. Marble and song are to the
artist means of living, indeed the medium of the highest life of which
he is capable. Christ essayed the more difficult task of giving life
itself the unity and the loveliness that another might have given stone
or melody. And this beautiful and complete life, more moving in its
completeness than that of any of the gods of Greece, who "in spite of
the white and red of their fair fleet limbs were not really what they
appeared to be," was at once a work of art and the life of an artist.
Christ, Wilde saw, cared more for intensity than for magnificence, for
the soul more than raiment. His teaching was not one of the refusal of
experience, but of self-development. He set personality above
possessions, and told his followers to forgive their enemies, for their
own sake, not because their enemies wished to be forgiven; it is very
annoying to be forgiven. "But," says Wilde, "while Christ did not say to
men 'Live for others,' he pointed out that there was no difference at
all between the lives of others and one's own life." And it is this
truth that marks the difference between ancient and modern art. In
reading ancient critics of ancient art, we perceive that their view of
the tragedies whose performance they were privileged to see in the open
amphitheatres of Greece was narrower than ours. Theirs was the spectacle
of a good man or a good woman at odds with tragic circumstance. We have
made tragic circumstance human, and, though we walk with Christ to
Calvary, we also wash trembling hands with Pontius Pilate.
It is just this widened sympathy, this vitalization of other things in a
story besides the hero that divides what is called romantic from what is
called classical art. To Greek tragedy there was a background of the
Fates; but nobody sympathized with them. In whatever is classical as
opposed to romantic in modern art, we shall find a background of Fates
with whom nobody sympathizes, in whom nobody believes. But all the world
was alive to St. Francis. Shakespeare is myriad-mouthed as well as
myriad-minded. Daffodils are alive for him no less than kings, and Iago
is a man no less than Othello. And in all art that springs from the
spirit, thought Wilde, "wherever there is a romantic movement in art,
there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ."
Wilde, thinking in prison of Christianity in art, saw through the stone
walls the cathedral at Chartres in the blue morning mist, Dante and
Virgil walking in hell, the painted ship of the ancient mariner idly
rocking upon the painted ocean, Juliet leaning from her balcony, Pierre
Vidal flying as a wolf before the hounds, the irises of Baudelaire, the
bird-song of Verlaine, the breaking heart of Russian storytelling,
Tannhauser in the Venusberg, and all the flowers and children who have
laughed in a wind of song.
For the mind, as for love,
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."
Wilde had all the art of the world before him as he wrote. Seldom in his
life did his thought move more magnificently and with greater wealth of
illustration than in the cell where, in a perpetual twilight, his mind
alone could illumine itself, and in its own light pursue that game of
thinking whose essential it is to be free and harmonious.[8] Its
harmonies are those of agreement with its own character, like the
harmonies of art. Its freedom is that of the consistent representation
of the character chosen by the thinker. In _De Profundis_ Wilde wrote
as harmoniously and freely as if his life were spent in conversation
instead of in silence, in looking at books and pictures instead of in
shredding oakum or in swinging the handle of a crank.
It is impossible too firmly to emphasize the division between the
texture of the life in _De Profundis_ and that of Wilde's life in
prison, a division not only needing explanation but explicable in the
light of later events. When he left prison he wrote _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_. Now that ballad would have been obscured or enriched by a
silver cobweb of scarcely perceptible sensations if it had been written
before or during his imprisonment. Wilde could not then have suffered
some of the harsh and crude effects that are harmonious with its
character and necessary to its success. The newly-learnt insensibility,
that allowed him to use in the ballad emotions that once he would have
carefully guarded himself from perceiving, had been taught him in
prison. In prison his nerves had been so jangled that they responded
only to a violent agitation, so jarred that a delicate touch left them
silent. But at the time of the writing of _De Profundis_ these janglings
and jarrings were too immediate to affect him. They disappeared like
print held too close to the eye. He escaped from them as he wrote, for
he wrote from memory. While the events were happening, had just
happened, and might happen again, that produced the insensibility
without which he could not have secured the broad and violent effects of
his later work, he returned, in writing, to an earlier life. When he
took up his pen, it was as if none of these things were, unless as
material for the use of an aloof and conscious artist. He was outside
the prison as he wrote, and only saw as if in vision the tall man, with
roughened hands, who had once been "King of life," and now was writing
in a cell.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] From _The Sale of St. Thomas_. By Lascelles Abercrombie.
[7] [Greek: KATA IOANNEN], XIX, 30.
[8] "L'exercice de la pensee est un jeu, mais il faut que ce
jeu soit libre et harmonieux."--REMY DE GOURMONT.
X
1897-1900
"All trials," wrote Wilde, "are trials for one's life, just as all
sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The
first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back
to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two
years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me,
has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just
alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret
valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night
with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling,
and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my
hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me
whole."
He asked too much, both from Nature and from himself. Society would
indeed have none of him, as he had foreseen, but Nature could only
harbour for a moment this liver in great cities who had told her that
her use was to illustrate quotations from the poets, and had said that
he preferred to have her captive on his walls in the canvases of Corot
and of Constable, than to live in her cruder landscapes. He had never
intended to make too elaborate an advance to her. He had learnt from
Stevenson's letters that that ingenious man had "merely extended the
sphere of the artificial by taking to digging." He knew that reading
Baudelaire in a cafe would be more natural to him than an agricultural
existence. He was determined, however, not to return to the
extravagances of his life before prison, and he hoped that the country
would help him to keep this resolve. He was to learn that "one merely
wanders round and round within the circle of one's personality." When he
left prison he did not know that one must keep moving, but hoped to
choose a pleasant point in his personality, and stay there.
Released from prison on May 19, 1897, he crossed the Channel to Dieppe,
where he stayed for some days, and drove about with Mr. Robert Ross and
Mr. Reginald Turner, examining the surrounding villages, most of which
seemed uninhabitable. At the end of a week he took rooms in the inn at
the little hamlet of Berneval.
Here, for the first time, he lost his power of turning life into
tapestry. Alone in his cell he had written the magnificent pageant of
_De Profundis_, a pageant of purple and fine linen, though he who wrote
it wore the coarse cloth of convict dress. Set suddenly in the world
again, he was cut off more sharply from his former existence than ever
he had been cut off in prison. He became blithe and smiling, like a
child who has had no past. He bathed, and was amused at the simplicity
of his experience, which he laughingly attributed to having attended
Mass and so not bathing as a pagan.... "I was not tempted by either
Sirens or Mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I
really think this is a remarkable thing. In my Neronian days the sea was
always full of Tritons blowing conches, and other unpleasant things. Now
it is quite different." "Prison has completely changed me," he said to
M. Andre Gide, who visited him at Berneval; "I counted on it for that."
He spoke with disparagement of a man who urged him to take up his former
life, a thing, he said, which one must never do. "Ma vie est comme un
oeuvre d'art; un artiste ne recommence jamais deux fois la meme chose
... ou bien c'est qu'il n'avait pas reussi. Ma vie d'avant la prison a
ete aussi reussie que possible. Maintenant c'est une chose achevee." He
felt that a continuation of a life that had, as it were, ended in
prison, would be like adding a sixth act and a happy ending to a
tragedy, a deed repulsive to an artist, who finds it hard enough to
bear when murdered Caesar doffs his wig and smiles upon the audience that
has witnessed the agony of his death. He did not wish to appear in Paris
until he had had time to lay aside the costume he had worn in the play
that, he was glad to think, was now concluded. He did not wish to be
received as a released convict, but as the author of a new work of art.
"If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob
malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the
tongue of scorn by the roots." For the moment, at any rate, he was
content in the country, and asked M. Gide to send him a Life of St.
Francis.
"If I live in Paris," he wrote, "I may be doomed to things I don't
desire. I am afraid of big towns. Here I get up at 7.30.... I am happy
all day. I go to bed at 10 o'clock. I am frightened of Paris.... I want
to live here." He visited the little chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse, and
persuaded the cure to celebrate Mass there. He made friends with a
farmer and urged him to adopt three children. He found that the
customs-officers were bored, and lent them the novels of Dumas pere. And
on the day of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee he entertained forty children
from the school with their master so successfully that for days after
they cheered when he passed: "Vive Monsieur Melmoth[9] et la Reine
d'Angleterre." In his first enthusiasm for Berneval he wished to build a
house there, and did, indeed, take a chalet for the season, giving Mr.
Ross, through whom his allowance passed, all sorts of amusing reasons
for doing so, and for hurrying on the necessary preliminaries. He
planned the arrangement of the house with something of the impatient
delight of a student furnishing his first independent rooms. He asked
for his pictures, and for Japanese gold paper that should provide a
fitting background for lithographs by Rothenstein and Shannon. The
Chalet Bourgeat was ready for habitation on June 21. A month later he
wrote of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_: "The poem is nearly finished.
Some of the verses are awfully good."
He had left prison with an improved physique, and, now that he was able
to work, there was hope that he would not risk the loss of it by leaving
this life of comparative simplicity. Suddenly, however, he flung aside
his plans and resolutions, desperately explaining that his folly was
inevitable. The iterated entreaty of a man whose friendship had already
cost him more than it was worth, and a newly-felt loneliness at
Berneval, destroyed his resolution. He became restless and went to
Rouen, where it rained and he was miserable; then back to Dieppe; a few
days later, with his poem still unfinished, he was in Naples sharing a
momentary magnificence with the friend whose conduct he had condemned,
whose influence he had feared.
* * * * *
I have particularly noticed the change in his mental attitude that
became apparent at Berneval, because I think that it throws light on the
character of the work he did after leaving prison, so markedly different
from that of _De Profundis_, or _Intentions_, or _The Sphinx_, or any
other of the delightful designs it had pleased him to embroider. What is
remarkable in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, apart from its strength, or
its violence of emotion, is a change in the quality of Wilde's language.
A distinction between decoration and realism, though it immediately
suggests itself, is too blunt to enable us to state clearly a change in
Wilde's writing that it is impossible to overlook. We require a more
sensitive instrument, and must seek it in a definition of literature, a
formula that is concerned with the actual medium that literature
employs.