Wilde's career, and were not without an indirect echo and repetition in
his books, were partly due to the self-consciousness that was among his
most valuable assets. He knew himself, and he knew his worth, and,
conscious of an intellectual pre-eminence over most of his fellows,
assumed its recognition, and was in a hurry to bring the facts level
with his assumption. He had, more than most men, a dramatic conception
of himself. "There is a fatality," says the painter of Dorian Gray,
"about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality
that seems to dog the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be
different from one's fellows." Wilde was always profoundly conscious of
his own "physical and intellectual distinction," not with the almost
scornful consciousness of Poe, but with a deprecating pride and a sense
of what was due to it from himself and from others. Wilde's "pose"--call
it what you will--is easily adopted by talent since Wilde created it
with genius. Its origin was a sense of the possession of genius, of
being distinct from the rest of the world. Poe emphasized this
distinction by looking at people from a distance. Wilde emphasized it by
charming them, with a kind of desperate generosity. He knew that he had
largesse to scatter, and not till the end of his life did he begin to
feel that he had wasted it, that in him a vivid personality had passed
through the world and was not leaving behind it a worthy memorial. This
was not the common regret at having been unable to accomplish things. It
was a regret at leaving insufficient proof of a power of accomplishment
that he did not doubt, but had never exerted to the uttermost. In
thinking of the virtuosity of Wilde's manner, a thing not at all common
in English literature, we must remember the consciousness of power that
wrapped his days in a bright light, served him sometimes as a mantle of
invisibility, and made him loved and hated with equal vehemence. His
tasks were always too easy for him. He never strained for achievement,
and nothing requires more generosity to forgive than success without
effort.
This consciousness of his power excused in him an extravagance that in a
lesser man would have been laughable. He would have it recognised at all
costs, for confirmation's sake. He needed admiration at once, from the
world, from England, from London, from any small company in which he
happened to be. The same desires whose gratification earned him the
epithet "poseur," made him expend in conversation energies that would
have multiplied many times the volume if not the value of his writings.
He pawned much of himself to the moment, and was never able to redeem
it.
He leaves three things behind him, a legend, his conversation, and his
works. The legend will be that of a beautiful boy, so gifted that all
things were possible to him, so brilliant that in middle age men still
thought him young, stepping through imaginary fields of lilies and
poisonous irises, and finding the flowers turned suddenly to dung, and
his feet caught in a quagmire not only poisonous but ugly. It will
include the less intimate horror of a further punishment, an
imprisonment without the glamour of murder, as with Wainewright, or that
of burglary, as with Deacon Brodie, but a hideous publication to the
world of the sordid transformation of those imagined flowers. The lives
of Villon and of a few saints can alone show such swift passage from
opulence to wretchedness, from ease to danger, from the world to a cell.
We are not here concerned to blame or palliate the deeds that made this
catastrophe possible, but only to remark that to Wilde himself, in
comparison with the life of his intellect, they probably seemed
infinitely unimportant and insignificant. The life of the thinker is in
thought, of the artist in art. He feels it almost unfair that mere
actions should be forced into a position where they have power over his
destiny. As time goes on, the legend will, no doubt, be modified. It is
too dramatic to be easily forgotten.
In earlier chapters I have spoken of the conversational quality of
Wilde's prose, but not, so far, of his conversation, which, to some of
those who knew him best, seemed more valuable than the echo of it in his
books. It varied at different periods and in different companies. More
than one writer has described it, and the descriptions do not agree.
With an audience that he thought stupid he was startling, said
extravagant things and asked impossible questions. With another, he
would trace an idea through history, filling out the facts he needed for
his argument with bright pageants of colour, like the paragraphs of
_Intentions_. At one dinner-table he discoursed; at another he told
stories. Wilde "ne causait pas; il contait," says M. Gide. He spoke in
parables, and, as he was an artist, he made more of the parables than of
their meanings. An idea of this fairy-tale talk may be gathered from his
_Poems in Prose_. These things, among the most wonderful that Wilde
wrote, are said to be less beautiful in their elaborate form than as he
told them over the dinner-table, suggested by the talk that passed. They
are certainly a little heavy with gold and precious stones. They are
wistful, like princesses in fairy-tales who look out on the world from
under their crowns, when other children toss their hair in the wind. But
we may well fail to imagine the conversation in which such anecdotes
could have a part, not as excrescences but one in texture with the rest.
No other English talker has talked in this style, and the Queen
Scheherazada did not surpass it when she talked to save her life. Beside
Lamb's stuttered jests, Hazlitt's incisions, Coleridge's billowy
eloquence, Wilde's tapestried speech must be set among the regrettable
things of which time has carelessly deprived us. I have heard it said
that Wilde talked for effect. The peacock spreads his tail in burning
blue and gold against the emerald lawn, and as Whistler made a room of
it, so Wilde made conversation. He talked less to say than to make, and
his manner is suggested by his own description of the talk of Lord Henry
Wotton in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_:--
"He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and
transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with
fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on,
soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and
catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her
wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the
hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled
before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge
press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round
her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over
the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary
improvisation."
Wilde improvised like that. A metaphor would suddenly grow more
important in his eyes than the idea that had called it into being. The
idea would vanish in the picture; the picture would elaborate itself and
become story, and then, dissolving like a pattern in a kaleidoscope,
turn to idea again, and allow him to continue on his way. Wilde talked
tapestries, as he wrote them. He saw his conversation, and made other
men see it. They thought him a magician.
And now that mouth is closed, from which, as from Alain Chartier's, "so
many golden words have proceeded." Death has given the kiss of the Lady
Anne of Brittany, and the glittering words are blown away, or fallen in
the pages of other men's books to gild a meagre ground. In fifty years'
time the last of those who heard him speak will be old men and dull of
memory, or garrulous with tedious invention. The talk is gone. Wilde
had no Boswell. All that largesse of genius has been carried away and
spent, or thrown away and forgotten. A talker is like an actor. It is
only possible to say, he was wonderful on such an evening, or on such
another, and, as time goes on and this becomes matter of hearsay, why,
it is as if his achievement had never been. For the flowers of his talk
bloom only in dead men's memories, and have been buried with their
skulls.
Wilde's talk is gone, but its effects remain in the conversational ease
of his prose, and in the mental attitude that his writings perpetuate.
The talker is, almost of necessity, a dilettante, a man who delights in,
but is not the slave of, his subject of the moment. The existence of the
dilettante is changeful and playful, resembling the bee-like,
sweet-seeking pilgrimage of the critic, but quite distinct from it.
Conversation fosters criticism and dilettantism alike, and these are
Wilde's most noticeable characteristics. I have already insisted,
perhaps too often, on the critical attitude of his work. He insisted on
it himself. Much in his poetry and in his tales is imitative criticism,
his dialogues are critical, the subject of the best of them is "the
critic as artist," and he did not call _Dorian Gray_ a story, but "an
essay on decorative art." I have not insisted on the dilettantism that
made even his multiform criticism a by-product rather than the object of
his life, and allowed it to look for applause, and to reflect his
conversation instead of letting his conversation borrow from its less
fleeting radiance. Wilde's work is distinguished from the greatest in
this: it is not overheard.
Wilde provides us with the rare spectacle of a man most of whose powers
are those of a spectator, a connoisseur, a man for whom pictures are
painted and books written, the perfect collaborator for whom the artist
hopes in his heart; the spectacle of such a man, delighting in the
delicacies of life no less than in those of art, and yet able to turn
the pleasures of the dilettante and the amateur into the motives of the
artist. In some ages, when talk has been more highly valued than in
ours, he would have been ready to let his criticism die in the air: he
would have been content that all who knew him should credit him with the
power of doing wonderful things if he chose, and with the preference of
touching with the tips of his fingers the baked and painted figurine
over the modelling of it in cold and sticky clay. Such credit is not to
be had in our time, and he had to take the clay in his fingers and prove
his mastery. Besides, he had not the money that would have let him live
at ease among blue china, books wonderfully bound, and men and women as
strange as the moods it would have pleased him to induce. If he had been
rich, I think it possible that he would have been a des Esseintes or a
Dorian Gray, and left nothing but a legend and a poem or two, and a few
curiosities of luxury to find their way into the sale-rooms.
Wilde preserved, even in those of his writings that cost him most
dearly, a feeling of recreation. His books are those of a wonderfully
gifted and accomplished man who is an author only in his moments of
leisure. Only one comparison is possible, and that is with Horace
Walpole; but Wilde's was infinitely the richer intellect. Walpole is
weighted by his distinction. Wilde wears his like a flower. Walpole is
without breadth, or depth, and equals only as a gossip Wilde's
enchanting freedom as a juggler with ideas. Wilde was indolent and knew
it. Indolence was, perhaps, the only sin that stared him in the face as
he lay dying, for it was the only one that he had committed with a bad
conscience. It had lessened his achievement, and left its marks on what
he had done. Even in his best work he is sometimes ready to secure an
effect too easily. "Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning,"
may be regarded as an example of such effects. Much of his work fails;
much of it has faded, but _Intentions_, _The Sphinx_, _The Ballad of
Reading Gaol_, _Salome_, _The Importance of Being Earnest_, one or two
of the fairy tales, and _De Profundis_, are surely enough with which to
challenge the attention of posterity.
These things were the toys of a critical spirit, of a critic as artist,
of a critic who took up first one and then another form of art, and
played with it almost idly, one and then another form of thought, and
gave it wings for the pleasure of seeing it in the light; of a man of
action with the eyes of a child; of a man of contemplation curious of
all the secrets of life, not only of those that serve an end; of a
virtuoso with a distaste for the obvious and a delight in disguising
subtlety behind a mask of the very obvious that he disliked. His love
for the delicate and the rare brought him into the power of things that
are vulgar and coarse. His attempt to weave his life as a tapestry
clothed him in a soiled and unbeautiful reality. Even this he was able
to subdue. Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He touched nothing that he
did not decorate. He touched nothing that he did not turn into a
decoration.
I do not care to prophesy which in particular of these decorations, of
these friezes and tapestries of vision and thought, will enjoy that
prolongation of life, insignificant in the eternal progress of time,
which, for us, seems immortality. Art is, perhaps, our only method of
putting off death's victory, but what does it matter to us if the books
that feed the intellectual life of our generation are stones to the next
and manna to the generation after that? Of this, at least, we may be
sure: whether remembered or no, the works that move us now will have an
echo that cannot be denied them, unheard but still disturbing, or,
perhaps, carefully listened for and picked out, among the myriad roaring
of posterity along the furthest and least imaginable corridors of time.
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_Uniform with this Volume._
EDGAR ALLAN POE
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
ARTHUR RANSOME
"This very interesting study."
TIMES.
"This book describes Poe's sad and extremely lonely life, with all its
pride and morbidness, and it also gives a subtle and clear analysis of
his brilliant gifts."
STANDARD.
"Mr. Arthur Ransome has given us a workmanlike and readable book."
CHRONICLE.
"The study is thorough and conscientious, and as entertaining as a whole
as it is in parts provocative."
SATURDAY REVIEW.
"Always interesting, often ingenious, sometimes brilliantly written."
NATION.
"Prefaced with a biographical account which is quite one of the best
sketches of Poe's oddly vagabond life that we have in English."
PALL MALL GAZETTE.
"It is possible that the grace and charm of Mr. Ransome's style may
deceive some as to the serious import of his work; but it seems clear to
us that in his critical study of Poe, Mr. Ransome has made a potent but
mysterious person much more truthfully visible than before; and, in the
larger matters, has shown himself one of the present time's most vital
and original writers on philosophic criticism, one in whom the right
instincts are mated with an enthusiastic and careful precision of
analysis."
LIVERPOOL COURIER.
_Uniform with this Volume._
THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK
A CRITICAL STUDY
BY
A. MARTIN FREEMAN
"Mr. Freeman's study will be eagerly welcomed. He deals with all
Peacock's known writings, giving analysis of each; and he writes with a
freshness, a searching clearness and thoroughness delightful in these
days of so much slovenly, slipshod criticism. He sends one to Peacock,
and thereby does the best service a critic of Peacock can do."
EVENING STANDARD.
"It is distinguished and critical, and captures the atmosphere of
Peacock."
OBSERVER.
"We recommend it to Peacockians, and also to those who would become
such; it reveals him better than any anthology could.... The book
contains biography and criticism in a manner quite sufficient to equip
the casual reader with a knowledge of the man and his books."
WORLD.
"Mr. Freeman's monograph recounts all that is known about the
circumstances of Peacock's career, and it contains also a good deal of
acute criticism of his writings. It gives us many clues to
interpretation, and helps us to understand the whimsical characteristics
of a man who had a magic pen, and who was nothing if not original."
STANDARD.