of physical science. Energy is described by physicists as kinetic and
potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted. Potential energy is
force that a body is in a position to exert. Applying these terms to
language, without attempting too strict an analogy, I wish to define the
medium of literature as a combination of kinetic with potential speech.
There is no such thing in literature as speech purely kinetic or purely
potential. Purely kinetic speech is prose, not good prose, not
literature, but colourless prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of
prose that M. Jourdain discovered he had been speaking all his life. It
says things. An example of purely potential speech may be found in
music. I do not think it can be made with words, though we can give our
minds a taste of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic
incantation, or a poem in a language that we do not understand. The
proportion between kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the
combination vary with different poems and with the poetry of different
ages.
Let me take an example of fine poetry, and show that it does perform in
itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the first stanza
of Blake's "The Tiger":--
"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four
lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The
kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed tiger
of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and on either
side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the phosphorescence
of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear.[10]
Let me now apply this formula of kinetic and potential speech to a
definition of the change in Wilde's aims as a writer, that is
illustrated by _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. I have said that the
proportion between kinetic and potential speech varies with different
poems and the poetry of different ages. The poets of the eighteenth
century, for example, cared greatly for kinetic speech, though the white
fire of their better work shows that they were fortunately prevented
from its invariable achievement. The Symbolists of the nineteenth
century cared greatly for potential speech. "Nommer un objet," said
Mallarme, "c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poeme
qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu a peu. Le suggerer, voila le
reve." Mallarme, indeed, went so far as to work over a poem, destroying
where he could its kinetic speech, its direct statement, in the effort
to make it purely potential. He is not intelligible, except where he
failed in this. Wilde grew up with the Symbolists, and under the
influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. His criticism of pictures accurately
reflects his aims as a writer. The critic, he says, will turn from
pictures that are too intelligible that "do not stir the imagination but
set definite bounds to it"; "he will turn from them to such works as
make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle
quality of suggestion, and seem to tell us that even from them there is
an escape into a wider world." He will have none of "those obvious modes
of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it
become dumb and sterile." He recognized suggestion or, as I prefer to
say, potentiality, in pictures that were decorations rather than
anecdotes, and, in his preference of potential over kinetic speech, made
his own work decorative rather than realistic. Decoration was for him a
mode of potentiality. Like the Symbolists, he had a sort of contempt for
kinetic speech, because while it obviously preponderates in the kind of
writing that he considered bad, he did not perceive that it is also
essential in the writing that he admitted to be good. This view was
intimately connected with his character, and before he could write a
poem whose kinetic was comparable to its potential power he had to
change completely his attitude towards life. He could not, without doing
violence to himself, have written _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ before
his imprisonment.
Such an alteration in his attitude became apparent when he was released:
not before. And he then proceeded to write a poem whose potentiality was
not won at the expense of directness. The difference between the work he
did before and after his release is the same, though not so exaggerated,
as that between Mallarme and the eighteenth-century poets. The later
work falls midway between these two extremes. It is writing that
depends, far more nearly than anything he had yet done, in verse, upon
its actual statements. _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ is not more
powerfully suggestive than _The Sphinx_, but what it says, its
translatable element, is more important to its effect than the catalogue
of the Sphinx's lovers.
We can more accurately observe this change of attitude if we examine the
early version of the ballad. This version, as it is now printed by the
side of that originally published, represents the poem as it was when
Wilde wrote to say that it was nearly finished. It is probably very
like what the poem would have been if he had not broken short his stay
at Berneval. The momentary retaste of his former life at Naples gave him
the more decorative verses that were then added, and the contrast
between the two moods made possible his disregard of the beliefs he once
had held concerning the evil effect of a message on a work of art. At
the same time, he realized at Naples how far he had departed from his
old standards, and added a certain recklessness to his already altered
equipment. For example, he had written at Berneval one stanza of direct
statement that he had afterwards deleted with others from the first
version that he sent to England:--
"The Governor was strong upon
The Regulation Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the chaplain called
And left a little tract."
At Naples he replaced it. He admits, in a letter to Mr. Ross, that "the
poetry is not good," and says, "I have put 'The Governor was strict upon
the Regulation Act'--I now think that strong is better. The verse is
meant to be colloquial--G. R. Sims at best--and when one is going for a
coarse effect, one had better be coarse. So please restore 'strong.'" I
think that nothing could more clearly illustrate the difference between
Wilde as artist before and after he was released. The change was
radical, and appeared not only in the medium of his work but in its
intention. He had once said that nothing was sadder in the history of
literature than the career of Charles Reade, who, after writing "The
Cloister and the Hearth," "wasted the rest of his life in a foolish
attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our
convict prisons." Now, he cheerfully labelled his ballad, "Poetry and
Propaganda," and admitted that though the poem should end with the fifth
canto, he had something to say and must therefore go on a little longer.
He had once written for his own admiration, and, to his disadvantage,
for that of people he might meet at dinner. He now wished to publish his
ballad in one of the more widely read newspapers, to reach the sort of
people who had shared his life in gaol. He had become anxious to speak
and to be heard, and was no longer content to make and to be admired.
Little trace of the friction of change is left in the poem. It is true
that in certain lights a reader may perceive that he is examining a
palimpsest, and wonder what manner of writer he was whose writing is
obliterated. But there is an energy in the ballad that swings even the
more obvious propaganda into the powerful motion of the poetry. Nowhere
else in Wilde's work is there such a feeling of tense muscles, of
difficult, because passionate, articulation. And this was the effect
that he was willing to achieve. The blemishes on the poem, its moments
of bad verse, its metaphors only half conceived (like the filling of an
urn that has long been broken) scarcely mar the impression. It is felt
that a relaxed watchfulness is due to the effort of reticence. I know of
no other poem that so intensifies our horror of mortality. Beside it
Wordsworth's sonnets on Capital Punishment debate with aloof,
respectable philosophy the expediency of taking blood for blood, and
suggest the palliatives with which a tender heart may soothe the pain of
its acquiescence. Even Villon, who, like Wilde, had been in prison, and,
unlike Wilde, had been himself under sentence of death, is infinitely
less actual. He sees only after death: the gibbet, the row of corpses,
their heads hanging, the eyes picked from their sockets by the crows, a
row of blackened, sun-dried bodies swinging in wind and rain. He sees
that, and thinks it a pitiful spectacle, but his only prayer is
"qu'enfer n'ayt de nous la maistrie!" For Wilde it is life that matters.
After it, who knows? A pall of burning lime, a barren spot where might
be roses. But he lives an hundred times life's last moments, and
multiplies the agony of the man who dies in the hearts of all those
others who feel with him how frail is their own perilous hold.
* * * * *
Wilde's two letters to The Daily Chronicle, 'On the Case of Warder
Martin,' and 'On Prison Reform,' show just such a change in his attitude
towards social questions as that which the ballad shows in his attitude
towards poetry. I have not, so far, said anything of _The Soul of Man
under Socialism_, and I left undiscussed the consciousness of social
problems that is apparent in some of the fairy tales. It seemed better
to consider these things later in the book, when it should be possible
to compare his attitudes towards the social system before and after he
had come in conflict with it.
At the beginning of his career he had written republican poetry, but had
prefaced it with the avowal:--
"Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes
See nothing save their own unlovely woe,
Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know,--
But that the roar of thy Democracies,
Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies,
Mirror my wildest passions like the sea
And give my rage a brother----!"
But for this, he says, nations might be wronged and he remain unmoved,
"... and yet, and yet,
These Christs that die upon the barricades,
God knows it I am with them, in some things."
For several years this double attitude persisted, though, as Wilde left
boyhood he left also the rage and the passions, if he had ever had them,
that could only be mirrored by turbulent oceans and fiery revolutions.
He was, however, increasingly troubled by the knowledge that he could
not accept the comfortable belief of Dr. Pangloss, that this is the best
of all possible worlds. If he had lived among the poor, he would,
perhaps, have amused them by pointing out the undeserved misery of the
rich. As he happened, mostly, to live among the rich, he stimulated
their enjoyment of their position by reminding them of the insecurity of
their tenure, of the existence of the poor, and of the inadequacy of the
means adopted to eliminate them. At that time in England many charitable
movements, now institutions, had only lately started upon their curious
careers, and, as Wilde pointed out, men "tried to solve the problem of
poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a
very advanced school, by amusing the poor." Wilde suggested no remedies,
but used his own clear perception of the difficulty, and the uneasiness
of other people's minds, as a background for much delightful
conversation, and for such stories as that of 'The Young King,' who sees
in dreams the pain that is hidden in the pearl that the diver has
brought for his sceptre, the toil woven into the golden tissues of his
robes, and the blood that fills with light the rubies of his crown.
Yet Wilde was not without a personal stake in the solution of the
problem, for, though he lived among the rich, he was himself one of the
poor. He had not had enough money to write as he pleased and when he
pleased. He had had to lecture, to write in newspapers, and to edit a
magazine for women. Perhaps the solution of the problem of poverty would
also solve that of unpopular art and of the cakes and wine of the
unpopular artist. I cannot easily understand the extraordinary position
that, I am told, _The Soul of Man_ has taken in the literature of
revolution. It does, it is true, say many just things of the poor, as
for example, its rebuke of thrift: "Man should not be ready to show that
he can live like a badly fed animal." It upholds agitators. It praises
the ingratitude of those to whom is given only a little of what is their
own. But the essay as a whole is scarcely at all concerned with popular
revolt. It is concerned less with socialism than with individualism.
"The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of
Socialism, is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us
from that sordid necessity of living for others which in the present
condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact,
scarcely anyone at all escapes." Wilde had not escaped himself. "Under
Socialism," he says, "all this will, of course, be altered." There is no
need to estimate the precise quality of the irony in that "of course."
If Socialism meant the ruling of the people by the people, Wilde
disliked it, as a new form of an old tyranny. He took it simply as an
hypothesis of free food for everybody and the abolition of property.
Rich and poor alike, he supposed, were to sell all they had and give ...
to the state. He was interested solely in the development of
personality, which, he thought, was hindered by the existence of private
property, whether possessed or not possessed, a plus or a minus
quantity. "Socialism itself," he says, "will be of value simply because
it will lead to Individualism," an individualism now difficult and rare,
because it consists in the free development of personality that
property, plus or minus, makes almost impossible except in special
cases. That seems to me to be a very different Socialism from that of
the people who, accepting greedily the sops thrown to Cerberus in the
course of the essay, are willing to accept the whole as a manifesto of
social revolution. Wilde keeps aloof from rich and poor alike, and,
throughout a long paper, more carelessly written than most of his, is
simply speculating upon what art can gain by social reform, and of what
kind that reform must be, if art is not to be left in a worse case than
before it. The essay is like notes from half a dozen charming, and, at
that time, daring talks, thrown together, and loosely brought into some
sort of unity by a frail connecting thread.
In its airy distance from practical politics, nothing could be more
dissimilar than _The Soul of Man_ from the two letters to The Daily
Chronicle. While he lived in it, Wilde had been able to disguise, at
least sometimes, his lack of independence from society. When society put
him in prison he was face to face with that unpleasing fact. From being
the subject of ironical discussion, society and its reform became most
powerful and insistent realities. The poor were no longer people whose
unlovely woe he did not like to remember, but men whom he had met, men
from whom he had received kindness when he, like them, was "in trouble."
Reform was no longer a vague idea with possibilities at once dangerous
and delightful, but concrete, and with an immediate end. It was
concerned not with the development of individuality, but with saving
from disaster one poor man who had disobeyed regulations in giving a
biscuit to a starving child, and many poor men from sleeping
unnecessarily in an atmosphere of decaying excreta. _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_ was poetry and propaganda; the two letters scarcely
troubled about anything but their urgent purpose, though Wilde was
incapable of writing sentences that should not be dignified and urbane.
A beggar had been allowed into the Palace of Art, and would not be
denied.
* * * * *
Soon after Wilde left Berneval for Naples, those who controlled the
allowance that enabled him to live with his friend purposely stopped it.
His friend, as soon as there was no money, left him. "It was," said
Wilde, "a most bitter experience in a bitter life." He went to Paris. In
February 1898, the ballad, that he had not been able to sell to a
newspaper, was published as a book. In March The Daily Chronicle printed
the second of the letters on prison abuses. He wrote nothing else after
he left prison, but revised _The Importance of Being Earnest_ and _An
Ideal Husband_ for publication, and supervised the French translation
of the ballad made by M. Davray, who, as he pointed out, had not had the
advantage of imprisonment, and was consequently puzzled to find
equivalents to some of the words. He suggested the plot of a play that
another man wrote. There was talk of his adapting a French play for the
English stage; but nothing came of it. He complained that he found it
"not easy to recapture the artistic mood of detachment from the activity
of life." He often left Paris. In December, 1898, he went to Napoule,
and in the following spring to Switzerland.
His work was done, and, after the writing of the ballad, he was impotent
of any sustained effort, whether in life or in literature. He lost,
however, little of his intellectual activity, and none of his power of
enjoyment. When he was in Rome in the spring of 1900, he learnt how to
use a photographic camera, and took innumerable photographs with a most
childlike enthusiasm. He was blessed by the Pope, not once only but
seven times. His pleasure in watching the ceremonies of the Church
recalled the year when, as an Oxford undergraduate, he had half-hoped,
half-feared to find salvation, or, at least, a religious experience.
In May he returned to Paris, where his life cannot but have been
humiliating to one who had been "le Roi de la vie." Many doors were
closed to him and others he was too proud to enter. He spent days and
nights in cafes, drank too much, and wasted his conversation on students
who treated him without respect. He had sufficient money, but his
extravagances often left him penniless. M. Stuart Merrill has a note
from him asking for a very little sum, "afin de finir ma semaine." He
was not starving, as has been suggested, nor was he entirely deserted by
his friends, though most of the French writers ignored in misfortune the
man they had worshipped in success. M. Paul Fort, almost the only French
poet of whom in his last illness Wilde spoke with affection, spent much
time with him, and remembers him not outwardly unhappy, less capable
than he had been of concealing his depths, and interested in everything,
like a child. Another Frenchman who saw him during these months thought
him dazed, like a man who has had a blow on the head. The two opinions
are not contradictory. They represent a man whose power of will has been
suddenly taken from him. Wilde no longer picked and chose; he no longer,
a critic in life as in art, directed his doings with intention and
self-knowledge. He could no longer dominate life and twist her to the
patterns he desired, but was become flotsam in a stream now obviously
much stronger than himself. He could smile as he drifted, but he could
not stop.
As the year went on, he fell ill, and though he rallied more than once,
and never lost the brilliance and clarity of his intellect except in
delirium, he grew steadily worse. His death was hurried by his inability
to give up the drinking to which he had become accustomed. It was
directly due to meningitis, the legacy of an attack of tertiary
syphilis. For some months he had increasingly painful headaches. On
October 10, he was operated upon. He rallied after the operation, and, a
fortnight later, was in a condition to talk with wit and charm, as, for
example, when he said that he was dying beyond his means. On October 29,
he got up and went to a cafe. On the 30th, he was less well, though he
drove in the Bois. Throughout November he grew steadily weaker, and was
often hysterical and delirious. Specialists were called in consultation
but could do little more than label the manner of his death. On November
29, a priest, brought by Mr. Robert Ross, baptized him into the Catholic
Church, and administered extreme unction.
The following account of his last hours is taken from a letter written
by Mr. Ross to a friend, ten days after Wilde's death. Mr. Reginald
Turner had nursed Wilde for some time before his death and, with Mr.
Ross and the proprietor of the hotel,[11] was present when he died.
"About five-thirty in the morning (November 30) a complete change came
over him, the lines of the face altered, and I believe what is called
the death-rattle began, but I had never heard anything like it before,
it sounded like the horrible turning of a crank, and it never ceased
until the end. His eyes did not respond to the light test any longer.
Foam and blood came continually from his mouth.... From one o'clock we
did not leave the room, the painful noise from the throat became louder
and louder. (We) destroyed letters to keep ourselves from breaking down.
The two nurses were out and the proprietor of the hotel had come up to
take their place; at 1.45 the time of his breathing altered. I went to
the bedside and held his hand, his pulse began to flutter. He heaved a
deep sigh, the only natural one I had heard since I arrived, the limbs
seemed to stretch involuntarily, the breathing became fainter, he passed
at ten minutes to two exactly."
On December 3, 1900, Oscar Wilde was buried in the Cemetery of Bagneux.
On July 20, 1909, his remains were moved to Pere Lachaise.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] After he left prison he took the name of Sebastian
Melmoth.
[10] For a longer but still inadequate discussion of the
question, see an article in "The Oxford and Cambridge Review" for
October, 1911.
[11] Hotel d'Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux Arts.
XI
AFTERTHOUGHT
Wilde has been dead for nearly a dozen years. Already the more swiftly
fading colours of his work are vanishing; already critics who fix their
eyes on that departing brilliance are helping his books into the neglect
that often precedes and invariably follows popularity. His life is
already midway between fact and legend, between realism and glamour. His
life and his books alternately illumine and obscure each other. The
mutilated _De Profundis_ is given a biographical importance that it does
not, in its present state, possess, and the scarlet and drab contrasts
of his tattered tapestry of existence blind the eyes of people who would
otherwise read his books.
* * * * *
There is a word, often applied to Wilde in his lifetime, that has, since
his death, been used to justify a careless neglect of his work. That
word is "pose." In all such popular characterizations there is hidden a
distorted morsel of truth. Such a morsel of truth is hidden here. We
need not examine the dull envy of brilliance, the envy felt by timid
persons of a man who dared to display the hopes and the intentions that
were making holiday within him, the envy that used that word as a
reproach, and sought to veil the fact that it was a confession. But we
shall do well to discover what it was beside that envy that made the
word applicable to Wilde.
Wilde "posed" as an aesthete. He was an aesthete. He "posed" as brilliant.
He was brilliant. He "posed" as cultured. He was cultured. The quality
in him to which that word was applied was not pretence, though that was
willingly suggested, but display. Wilde let people see, as soon as he
could, and in any way that was possible, who and what he was or wished
to be. No bushel hid his lamp. He arranged it where it could best be
seen, and beat drums before it to summon the spectators. He had every
quality of a charlatan, except one: the inability to keep his promises.
Wilde promised nothing that he could not perform. But, because he
promised so loudly, he earned the scorn of those whom charlatans do not
outwit. He has even met with the scorn of charlatans, who cannot
understand why he made so much noise when he really could do what he
promised.