OSCAR WILDE: THE LAST PHASE
The singularity of Oscar Wilde has puzzled writers since his death
quite as much as it puzzled the public during the startled years of his
wonderful visit to these glimpses of Philistia; for after all that has
been written about him we are no nearer a convincing interpretation of
his character than we were during the great silence which immediately
followed his trial and imprisonment. Robert H. Sherard’s _Oscar
Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship_, throws the clear light
of sincerity and eloquence upon his own and his subject’s capacity
for friendship, but little more than that; André Gide has created a
delightful, literary miniature which must always hang on the line in
any gallery of studies of Oscar Wilde, but his work is portraiture
rather than interpretation. For the rest, we have to be content with
such indications of character as may be obtained from the numerous
critical essays which have been published during the last few years,
notable among them being Arthur Ransome’s fine study, and the always
wise commentations of Wilde’s literary executor and editor, Robert
Ross, and the notes and collectanea of Stuart Mason. But whatever
ultimate definition his character may assume in future biography, and
however difficult such definition may be, it is not so hard to define
Oscar Wilde’s position and influence during the last decade of the
nineteenth century, and what proved to be as well the last decade of
his own life.
[Illustration: OSCAR WILDE (1895)
_From the Photograph by Ellis & Walery_]
In the year 1889 Oscar Wilde might have passed away without creating
any further comment than that which is accorded an eccentric poet
who has succeeded in drawing attention to himself and his work by
certain audacities of costume and opinion. His first phase was over,
and he had become an outmoded apostle of an æstheticism which had
already taken the place of a whimsically remembered fad, a fad which,
even then, almost retained its only significance through the medium
of Gilbert and Sullivan’s satirical opera, _Patience_. He was
the man who had evoked merriment by announcing a desire to live up to
his blue-and-white china; he was the man who had created a sort of
good-humoured indignation by expressing displeasure with the Atlantic
Ocean: “I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic,” he had confessed.
“It is not so majestic as I expected”; and whose later dissatisfaction
with Niagara Falls convinced the United States of America of his
flippancy: “I was disappointed with Niagara. Most people must be
disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the
sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest if not
the keenest disappointments in American married life.” These sayings
were beginning to be remembered dimly, along with the picturesque
memories of a plum-coloured velveteen knickerbocker suit and a famous
stroll down Bond Street as a form of æsthetic propaganda by example.
This memory also was aided by W. S. Gilbert:
“_If you walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In your mediæval hand...._”
But certain encounters with Whistler, in which Oscar Wilde felt the
sting of the Butterfly, were remembered more distinctly and with
more satisfaction, with the result that, besides being outmoded, he
became soiled by the charge of plagiarism. “I wish I had said that,”
he remarked once, approving of one of Whistler’s witticisms. “You
will, Oscar; you will!” was the reply. And still more emphatic, the
great painter had said on another occasion: “Oscar has the courage of
the opinions ... of others!” The fact was that the brilliant Oxford
graduate had not yet fulfilled the promise of his youth, of his
first book, and of his own witty audacity. He had achieved notoriety
without fame, and literary reputation without a sufficient means of
livelihood, and so small was his position in letters that, from 1887
to 1889, we find him eking out a living by editing _The Woman’s
World_ for Messrs Cassell & Co.
His successes during this period were chiefly in the realms of
friendship, and of this the public knew nothing. Publicly he was
treated with amiable contempt: he was a social jester, an intellectual
buffoon, a _poseur_; food for the self-righteous laughter of the
Philistines; fair quarry for the wits of _Punch_, who did not miss
their chance. Yet during the very years he was controlling editorial
destinies which were more than foreign to his genius, he was taking the
final preparatory steps towards the attractive and sometimes splendid
literary outburst of his last decade. During 1885 and 1890 his unripe
genius was feeling its way ever surer and surer towards that mastery
of technique and increasing thoughtfulness which afterwards displayed
themselves. This was a period of transition and co-ordination. Oscar
Wilde was evolving out of one _bizarrerie_ and passing into
another. And in this evolution he was not only shedding plumes borrowed
from Walter Pater, Swinburne and Whistler, he was retaining such of
them as suited his needs and making them definitely his own. But,
further than that, he was shedding his purely British masters and
allowing himself to fall more directly under the influence of a new
set of masters in France, where he was always at home, and where he
had played the “sedulous ape” to Balzac some years earlier. From time
to time during these years he had polished and engraved and added to
the luxuriant imagery of that masterpiece of baroque poetry, _The
Sphinx_, which was published in 1894 in a beautiful format with
decorations by Charles Ricketts. Essays like “The Truth of Masks”
and “Shakespeare and Stage Costume” appeared in the pages of _The
Nineteenth Century_ in 1885; in other publications appeared such
stories as “The Sphinx without a Secret,” “The Canterville Ghost”
and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” and in 1888 he issued _The Happy
Prince and Other Tales_. “Pen, Pencil and Poison” appeared in _The
Fortnightly Review_ in 1889, and in the same year _The Nineteenth
Century_ published the first of his two great colloquies, _The
Decay of Lying_. In all of these stories and essays his style was
conquering its weaknesses and achieving the undeniable distinction
which made him the chief force of the renaissance of the early
Nineties. In 1890 his finest colloquy, “The Critic as Artist,” appeared
in _The Nineteenth Century_. Several of the above-named essays and
tales went to the making of two of his most important books, _The
House of Pomegranates_ and _Intentions_, both of which appeared
in the first year of the Nineties, and in the same year he published in
book form the complete version of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_,
thirteen chapters of which had appeared serially in _Lippincott’s
Monthly Magazine_ in the previous year.
Thus, with the dawn of the Eighteen Nineties, Oscar Wilde came into his
own. _The House of Pomegranates_ alone was sufficient to establish
his reputation as an artist, but the insouciant attitude of the
paradoxical philosopher revealed in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_
and _Intentions_ stung waning interest in the whilom apostle of
beauty to renewed activity. Shaking off the astonishing reputation
which had won him early notoriety as the posturing advertiser of
himself by virtue of the ideas of others, he arose co-ordinate and
resplendent, an individual and an influence. He translated himself out
of a subject for anecdote into a subject for discussion. And whilst
not entirely abandoning that art of personality which had brought
him notoriety as a conversationalist and dandy in _salon_ and
drawing-room and at the dinner-table, he transmuted the personality
thus cultivated into the more enduring art of literature, and that
brought him fame of which notoriety is but the base metal. For many
years he had looked to the theatre as a further means of expression
and financial gain, and he had tried his ’prentice hand on the drama
with _Vera: or the Nihilists_ in 1882, which was produced
unsuccessfully in America in 1883, and with _The Duchess of
Padua_, written for Mary Anderson and rejected by her about the same
time, and produced without encouraging results in New York in 1891.
There were also two other early plays, _A Florentine Tragedy_,
a fragment only of which remains, and _The Woman Covered with
Jewels_, which seems to have been entirely lost. The failure of
these works to make any sort of impression involves no reflection on
the public, as they are the veriest stuff of the beginner and imitator;
echoes of Sardou and Scribe; romantic costume plays inspired by the
theatre rather than by life, and possessing none of the signs of that
skilled craftsmanship upon which the merely stage-carpentered play
must necessarily depend. But with that change in the whole trend of
his genius which heralded the first year of the Nineties came a change
also in his skill as a playwright. In 1891 he wrote _Salomé_ in
French, afterwards translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas and
published by the Bodley Head, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley,
in 1894. This play would have been produced at the Palace Theatre
in 1892 with Madame Sarah Bernhardt in the cast, had not the censor
intervened. Oscar Wilde achieved his first dramatic success with
_Lady Windermere’s Fan_, produced by George Alexander at the St
James’s Theatre, on 20th February 1892. The success was immediate. Next
year Herbert Beerbohm Tree produced _A Woman of No Importance_ at
the Haymarket Theatre before even more enthusiastic audiences. In 1895
_An Ideal Husband_ was produced at the same theatre in January,
and, in February, _The Importance of Being Earnest_ was produced
at the St James’s.
Oscar Wilde had now reached the age of forty-one and the height of
his fame and power. “The man who can dominate a London dinner-table
can dominate the world,” he had said. He had dominated many a London
dinner-table; he now dominated the London stage. He was a monarch
in his own sphere, rich, famous, popular; looked up to as a master
by the younger generation, courted by the fashionable world, loaded
with commissions by theatrical managers, interviewed, paragraphed and
pictured by the Press, and envied by the envious and the incompetent.
All the flattery and luxury of success were his, and his luxuriant
and applause-loving nature appeared to revel in the glittering surf
of conquest like a joyous bather in a sunny sea. But it was only a
partial victory. The apparent capitulation of the upper and middle
classes was illusory, and even the man in the street who heard about
him and wondered was moved by an uneasy suspicion that all was
not well. For, in spite of the flattery and the amusement, Oscar
Wilde never succeeded in winning popular respect. His intellectual
playfulness destroyed popular faith in his sincerity, and the British
people have still to learn that one can be as serious in one’s play
with ideas as in one’s play with a football. The danger of his position
was all the more serious because those who were ready to laugh with
him were never tired of laughing at him. This showed that lack of
confidence which is the most fertile ground of suspicion, and Wilde
was always suspected in this country even before the rumours which
culminated in his trial and imprisonment began to filter through the
higher strata of society to the lower. It sufficed that he was strange
and clever and seemingly happy and indifferent to public opinion.
This popular suspicion is summarised clearly, and with the sort of
disrespect from which he never escaped even in his hour of triumph,
in an article in _Pearson’s Weekly_ for 27th May 1893, written
immediately after the success of _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ and _A
Woman of No Importance_:
“Where he does excel is in affectation. His mode of life, his
manner of speech, his dress, his views, his work, are all masses
of affectation. Affectation has become a second nature to him,
and it would probably now be utterly impossible for him to
revert to the original Oscar that lies beneath it all. In fact,
probably none of his friends have ever had an opportunity of
finding out what manner of man the real Oscar is.... So long as
he remains an amiable eccentricity and the producer of amusing
trifles, however, one cannot be seriously angry with him. So
far, it has never occurred to any reasonable person to take him
seriously, and the storms of ridicule to which he has exposed
himself have prevented his becoming a real nuisance. For the
present, however, we may content ourselves with the reflection
that there is no serious danger to be apprehended to the State
from the vagaries of a butterfly.”
The above may be taken as a fair example of the attitude of the popular
Press towards Oscar Wilde, and the same sentiments were expressed,
varying only in degrees of literary polish, in many directions, even at
a time when the new spirit of comedy he had introduced into the British
theatre was giving unbounded delight to a vast throng of fashionable
playgoers; for these plays had not to create audiences for themselves,
like the plays of Bernard Shaw; they were immediately acclaimed, and
Wilde at once took rank with popular playwrights like Sydney Grundy and
Pinero.
There were of course many who admired him; and he always inspired
friendship among his intimates. All who have written of him during his
earlier period and during the early days of his triumph refer to his
joyous and resplendent personality, his fine scholarship, his splendid
manners and conversational gifts, his good humour and his lavish
generosity. André Gide gives us many glimpses of Wilde both before and
after his downfall, one of which reveals him as table-talker:
“I had heard him talked about at Stéphane Mallarmé’s house,
where he was described as a brilliant conversationalist, and
I expressed a wish to know him, little hoping that I should
ever do so. A happy chance, or rather a friend, gave me the
opportunity, and to him I made known my desire. Wilde was
invited to dinner. It was at a restaurant. We were a party
of four, but three of us were content to listen. Wilde did
not converse--he told tales. During the whole meal he hardly
stopped. He spoke in a slow, musical tone, and his very voice
was wonderful. He knew French almost perfectly, but pretended,
now and then, to hesitate for a word to which he wanted to call
our attention. He had scarcely any accent, at least only what
it pleased him to affect when it might give a somewhat new or
strange appearance to a word--for instance, he used purposely
to pronounce _scepticisme_ as _skepticisme_. The
stories he told us without a break that evening were not of his
best. Uncertain of his audience, he was testing us, for, in
his wisdom, or perhaps in his folly, he never betrayed himself
into saying anything which he thought would not be to the taste
of his hearers; so he doled out food to each according to his
appetite. Those who expected nothing from him got nothing, or
only a little light froth, and as at first he used to give
himself up to the task of amusing, many of those who thought
they knew him will have known him only as the amuser.”
With the progress of his triumph as a successful playwright, his
friends observed a coarsening of his appearance and character, and
he lost his powers of conversation. Robert H. Sherard met him during
the Christmas season of 1894 and described his appearance as bloated.
His face seemed to have lost its spiritual beauty, and he was oozing
with material prosperity. At this time serious rumours about his
private life and habits became more persistent in both London and
Paris, and countenance was lent to them by the publication of _The
Green Carnation_, which, although making no direct charge, hinted
at strange sins. Oscar Wilde knew that his conduct must lead to
catastrophe, although many of his friends believed in his innocence
to the end. André Gide met him in Algiers just before the catastrophe
happened. Wilde explained that he was fleeing from art:
“He spoke of returning to London, as a well-known peer was
insulting him, challenging him, and taunting him with running
away.
“‘But if you go back what will happen?’ I asked him. ‘Do you
know the risk you are running?’
“‘It is best never to know,’ he answered. ‘My friends are
extraordinary--they beg me to be careful. Careful? But how can I
be careful? That would be a backward step. I must go on as far
as possible. I cannot go much further. Something is bound to
happen ... something else.’
“Here he broke off, and the next day he left for England.”
Almost immediately after his arrival he brought an action for criminal
libel against the Marquis of Queensberry and, upon losing the case,
was arrested, and charged under the 11th Section of the Criminal Law
Amendment Act, and sentenced to two years’ penal servitude. During
his imprisonment he wrote _De Profundis_, in the form of a long
letter, addressed but not delivered, to Lord Alfred Douglas, a part
of which was published in 1905, and after his release he wrote _The
Ballad of Reading Gaol_, published, under a pseudonym, “C. 3. 3.”
(his prison number), by Leonard Smithers, and he contributed two
letters on the conditions of prison life, “The Cruelties of Prison
Life,” and “Don’t Read this if you Want to be Happy To-day,” to _The
Daily Chronicle_ in 1897 and 1898. These were his last writings.
After leaving prison he lived for a while, under the assumed name of
“Sebastian Melmoth,” at the Hôtel de la Plage, and later at the Villa
Bourget, Berneval-sur-Mer, near Dieppe, where he wrote _The Ballad
of Reading Gaol_, and the prison letters, and where he contemplated
writing a play called _Ahab and Jezebel_. This play he hoped
would be his passport to the world again. But a new restlessness
overcame him, and all his good resolutions turned to dust. For a while
he travelled, visiting Italy, the south of France and Switzerland,
eventually settling in Paris, where he died, in poverty and a penitent
Catholic, on 30th November 1900. He was buried in the Bagneux Cemetery,
but on 20th July 1909 his remains were removed to Père Lachaise.
It is too soon, perhaps, even now, to set a final value upon the work
of Oscar Wilde. Time, although not an infallible critic, is already
winnowing the chaff from the grain, and almost with the passing of
each year we are better able to recognise the more permanent essences
of his literary remains. It is inevitable in his case, where the
glamour of personality added so significantly to the character of his
work, that Time should insist upon being something more than a casual
arbiter. In proof of this the recollection of so much futile criticism
of Wilde cannot be overlooked. Both the man and his work have suffered
depreciations which amount to defamation, and appraisals which can only
be described as silly. But finally he would seem in many instances
to have suffered more at the hands of his friends than his enemies.
There have been, to be sure, several wise estimations of his genius,
even in this country, notably those of Arthur Ransome and the not
altogether unprovocative essay of Arthur Symons, entitled “An Artist in
Attitudes”; and the various prefaces and notes contributed by Robert
Ross to certain of the volumes in the complete edition of the works
are, of course, of great value. But, as the incidents associated with
the life and times of Wilde recede further into the background of the
mental picture which inevitably forms itself about any judgment of his
work, we shall be able to obtain a less biased view. Even then, our
perspective may be wrong, for this difficulty of personality is not
only dominant, but it may be essential.
The personality of Oscar Wilde, luxuriant, piquant and insolent as
it was, is sufficiently emphatic to compel attention so long as
interest in his ideas or his works survives. Indeed, it may never be
quite possible to separate such a man from such work. It is certainly
impossible to do so now. With many writers, perhaps the majority, it
requires no effort to forget the author in the book, because literature
has effectually absorbed personality, or all that was distinctive
of the author’s personality. With Oscar Wilde it is otherwise. His
books can never be the abstract and brief chronicles of himself; for,
admittedly on his part, and recognisably on the part of others, he
put even more distinction into his life than he did into his art. Not
always the worthier part of himself; for that often, and more often
in his last phase, was reserved for his books. But there is little
doubt that the complete Oscar Wilde was the living and bewildering
personality which rounded itself off and blotted itself out in a
tragedy which was all the more nihilistic because of its abortive
attempt at recuperation--an attempt which immortalised itself in the
repentant sincerity of _De Profundis_, but almost immediately fell
forward into an anti-climax of tragedy more pitiful than the first.
So far as we are able to judge, and with the aid of winnowing Time, it
is already possible to single out the small contribution made by Oscar
Wilde to poetry. The bulk of his poetry is negligible. It represents
little more than the ardent outpourings of a young man still deeply
indebted to his masters. One or two lyrics will certainly survive in
the anthologies of the future, but if Wilde were dependent upon his
verses for future acceptance his place would be among the minor poets.
There is, however, a reservation to be made even here, as there is in
almost every generalisation about this elusive personality; he wrote
three poems, two towards the close of his earlier period, _The
Harlot’s House_ and _The Sphinx_, and one near the close of his
life, _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, which bear every indication of
permanence. The two former will appeal to those who respond to strange
and exotic emotions, the latter to those who are moved by the broader
current of average human feeling. His last poem, and last work, does
not reveal merely Oscar Wilde’s acceptance of a realistic attitude,
it reveals what might have been, had he lived to pursue the matter
further, conversion to a natural and human acceptation of life. The
sense of simplicity in art which previously he had been content to
use as a refuge for the deliberately complex, as a sort of intensive
culture for modern bewilderment, is now used with even greater effect
in the cause of the most obvious of human emotions--pity:
“I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
‘_That fellow’s got to swing._’”
There is none of the old earnest insincerity in this poem, and only
occasionally does the poet fall back into the old _bizarrerie_.
Had _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ been written a hundred years ago,
it would have been printed as a broadside and sold in the streets by
the balladmongers; it is so common as that, and so great as that. But
there is nothing common, and nothing great, in the universal sense,
about the two earlier poems. These are distinguished only as the
expressions of unusual vision and unusual mood; they are decadent in
so far as they express emotions that are sterile and perverse. They
are decadent in the sense that Baudelaire was decadent, from whom they
inherit almost everything save the English in which they are framed.
But few will doubt their claim to a place in a curious artistic niche.
_The Sphinx_, a masterly fantasy of bemused artificiality, is
really a poetic design, an arabesque depending for effect upon hidden
rhymes and upon strange fancies, expressing sensations which have
hitherto been enshrined in art rather than in life:
“Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver in some stagnant
lake,
Your tongue is like some scarlet snake that dances to fantastic
tunes,
Your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your black throat is like
the hole
Left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic tapestries.”
Similarly, _The Harlot’s House_ interprets a mood that is so
sinister and impish and unusual as to express disease rather than
health:
“Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.
Then turning to my love, I said,
‘The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.’
But she--she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.”
Wilde developed this abnormal attitude towards life in _The Picture
of Dorian Gray_ and in _Salomé_, and in each of these prose
works he endeavours, often with success, to stimulate feelings that
are usually suppressed, by means of what is strange and rare in art
and luxury. It is not the plot that you think about whilst reading
_Salomé_, but the obvious desire of the author to tune the senses
and the mind to a preposterous key:
“I have jewels hidden in this place--jewels that your mother
even has never seen; jewels that are marvellous. I have a collar
of pearls, set in four rows. They are like unto moons chained
with rays of silver. They are like fifty moons caught in a
golden net. On the ivory of her breast a queen has worn it.
Thou shalt be as fair as a queen when thou wearest it. I have
amethysts of two kinds, one that is black like wine, and one
that is red like wine which has been coloured with water. I have
topazes yellow as are the eyes of tigers, and topazes that are
pink as the eyes of a wood-pigeon, and green topazes that are as
the eyes of cats. I have opals that burn always, with an icelike
flame, opals that make sad men’s minds, and are fearful of the
shadows. I have onyxes like the eyeballs of a dead woman. I have
moonstones that change when the moon changes, and are wan when
they see the sun. I have sapphires big like eggs, and as blue
as blue flowers. The sea wanders within them and the moon comes
never to trouble the blue of their waves. I have chrysolites
and beryls and chrysoprases and rubies. I have sardonyx and
hyacinth stones, and stones of chalcedony, and I will give them
all to you, all, and other things will I add to them. The King
of the Indies has but even now sent me four fans fashioned from
the feathers of parrots, and the King of Numidia a garment of
ostrich feathers. I have a crystal, into which it is not lawful
for a woman to look, nor may young men behold it until they
have been beaten with rods. In a coffer of nacre I have three
wondrous turquoises. He who wears them on his forehead can
imagine things which are not, and he who carries them in his
hand can make women sterile. These are great treasures above
all price. They are treasures without price. But this is not
all. In an ebony coffer I have two cups of amber, that are like
apples of gold. If an enemy pour poison into these cups they
become like an apple of silver. In a coffer encrusted with amber
I have sandals encrusted with glass. I have mantles that have
been brought from the land of the Seres, and bracelets decked
about with carbuncles and with jade that came from the city of
Euphrates.... What desirest thou more than this, Salomé? Tell me
the thing that thou desirest, and I will give it thee. All that
thou askest I will give thee, save one thing. I will give thee
all that is mine, save one life. I will give the mantle of the
High Priest. I will give thee the veil of the sanctuary.”
The mere naming of jewels and treasures in a highly wrought prose-poem
might in itself be as innocent as one of Walt Whitman’s catalogues
of implements, but even removed from its context there is something
unusual and even sinister about Herod’s offerings to Salomé. The whole
work is coloured by a hunger for sensation that has all the sterility
of an excessive civilisation.
In the essays collected in the book called _Intentions_, Oscar
Wilde has let us into the secret which produced these works. That
secret is an attempt to push Gautier’s idea of art for art’s sake,
and Whistler’s idea of art as Nature’s exemplar, to their logical
conclusions. He outdoes his masters with the obvious intention of
going one better. Throughout the whole of his life he was filled with
a boyish enthusiasm which took the form of self-delight. “His attitude
was dramatic,” says Arthur Symons, “and the whole man was not so much
a personality as an attitude. Without being a sage, he maintained the
attitude of a sage; without being a poet, he maintained the attitude
of a poet; without being an artist he maintained the attitude of an
artist.” It is certainly true that his intellect was dramatic, and it
is equally true that he was fond of adopting attitudes, but it is far
from true to name three of his favourite attitudes and to say that
these began and ended in the mere posture. For Oscar Wilde was both
poet and sage and artist. He may not have been a great poet, he may not
have been a great sage, he may not, which is more doubtful, have been
a great artist, but the fact remains that the attitudes representing
those faculties and adopted by him were the symbols of demonstrable
phases of his genius. Whilst always longing to express himself in
literary forms, and knowing himself to be capable of doing so, he found
it easier to express himself through the living personality. Writing
bored him, and those who knew him are agreed that he did not put the
best of himself into his work. “It is personalities,” he said, “not
principles, that move the age.”
Throughout the whole of his life he tried to live up, not to his
blue-and-white china, but to an idea of personality; and the whole of
his philosophy is concerned with an attempt to prove that personality,
even though it destroy itself, should be the final work of art. Indeed,
in his opinion, art itself was nothing but the medium of personality.
His attitudes thus become details in the art of personality. If they
had no basis in fact, Oscar Wilde would have been no more than an actor
playing a part in a work of art, but although he played, played at
intellectual dandy, much as a boy will play at pirates, he was playing
a part in the drama of life; and he adopted the attitude of dandy in
response to as real an emotion at least as that which inspires a boy
to adopt the attitude of pirate. What he seemed to be doing all the
time was translating life into art through himself. His books were
but incidents in this process. He always valued life more than art,
and only appreciated the latter when its reflex action contributed
something to his sensations; but because he had thought himself into
the position of one who transmutes life into art, he fell into the
error of imagining art to be more important than life. And art for him
was not only those formal and plastic things which we call the fine
arts; it embraced all luxurious artificialities. “All art is quite
useless,” he said. Such an attitude was in itself artificial; but with
Oscar Wilde this artificialism lacked any progressive element: it was
sufficient in itself; in short, it ended in itself, and not in any
addition to personal power. Oscar Wilde never, for instance, dreamt of
evolving into a god; he dreamt of evolving into a master of sensation,
a harp responding luxuriously to every impression. This he became, or
rather, this he always was, and it explained the many quite consistent
charges of plagiarism that were always being brought against him, and
it may explain his insensate plunge into forbidden sin, his conversion
and his relapse. He lived for the mood, but whatever that mood brought
him, whether it was the ideas of others or the perversities of what
is impish in life, he made them his own. What he stole from Whistler,
Pater, Balzac, Gautier and Baudelaire, whilst remaining recognisably
derivative, had added unto them something which their originals did
not possess. He mixed pure wines, as it were, and created a new
complex beverage, not perhaps for quaffing, but a sort of liqueur, or,
rather, a cocktail, with a piquant and original flavour not ashamed of
acknowledging the flavours of its constituents.
This, then, was in reality an attitude towards life, and not an
empty pose. I do not think that Oscar Wilde had any hope of finding
anything absolute; he was born far too late in the nineteenth century
for that. He had no purpose in life save play. He was the playboy of
the Nineties; and, like the hero of John Millington Synge’s drama,
he was subject to the intimidation of flattery. Naturally inclined
to go one better than his master, he was also inclined to please his
admirers and astonish his enemies by going one better than himself,
and as this one better generally meant in his later life one more
extravagance, one further abandonment, it resulted, from the point
of view of convention, in his going always one worse. Repetition of
this whim turned perversity into a habit, and the growing taunt of
those who knew or suspected his serious perversions drove him into
the final perversion of deliberately courting tragedy, much as the
mouse is charmed back into the clutches of the cat after it has
apparently been given a loophole of retreat. It would not have been
cowardice if Oscar Wilde had escaped while he had the chance, and it
was not bravery that made him blind to that chance; he was bemused
by his own attitude. Afterwards, he learnt the meaning of pain, and
he arrived at a conclusion similar to that of Nietzsche. But it was
not until afterwards. And although he found consolation in Christian
mysticism whilst in prison, and again on his deathbed, we shall never
know with what subtle joy he permitted his own destruction during the
intervening period. Looked at from such a point of view, his books help
in explaining the man. The best of them, _Intentions_, _The House of
Pomegranates_, _The Importance of Being Earnest_, _The Soul of Man_,
_The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, _De Profundis_, and a handful of epigrams
and short parables which he called _Prose Poems_, must, it seems to
me, take a definite place in English literature as the expression and
explanation of the type Wilde represented.
This type was not created by Oscar Wilde: it was very general
throughout Europe at the close of the last century, and he represented
only one version of it. Probably to himself he imagined himself to
approximate somewhat to the cynical idlers of his plays: Lord Goring
in _An Ideal Husband_, Lord Darlington in _Lady Windermere’s
Fan_, Lord Illingworth in _A Woman of No Importance_ and
Algernon Moncrieff in _The Importance of Being Earnest_ may be
partial portraits of the sort of personal impression their author
imagined he was creating in the fashionable world. But he drew fuller
portraits of himself in his novel. Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray
represent two sides of Oscar Wilde; they are both experimenters in
life, both epicureans and both seeking salvation by testing life even
to destruction. _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is really a moral
tale, and that also is characteristic of the genius of Oscar Wilde,
for at no period of his life had he the courage of his amorality. He
was always haunted by the still small voice which broke bounds and
expressed itself freely in _De Profundis_. And whilst reading his
books, or listening to his plays, one cannot help feeling that their
very playfulness is but the cloak of tragedy. The decadent, weary with
known joys and yearning for new sensations, perpetually being rebuked
by the clammy hand of exhausted desire, must needs laugh. Oscar Wilde
laughed, and made us laugh, not by his wit so much as by his humour,
that humour which dances over his plays and epigrams with the flutter
of sheet lightning, compelling response where response is possible,
but always inconsequent and always defying analysis. It reached its
height in _The Importance of Being Earnest_, a comedy so novel,
so irresistibly amusing and so perfect in its way that discussion of
it ends in futility, like an attempt to explain the bouquet of old
Cognac or the iridescence of opals. It is the moonshine of genius. The
still small voice in him, of which his lambent humour is the mask,
is stronger in _The Soul of Man_ and _The Ballad of Reading
Gaol_, and it is quite possible that had he lived the even life
that he began to live on the bleak coast of Normandy after his release
from prison, this underlying strain in his character would have turned
him into a social reformer. His harrowing letters on prison conditions
point to some such destiny especially when associated with his
philosophic dash into the realm of Socialism. As it was, such humane
zeal as he possessed ended on the one side in sublime pity and on the
other in the dream of a Utopia for dandies.
Dandy of intellect, dandy of manners, dandy of dress, Oscar Wilde
strutted through the first half of the Nineties and staggered through
the last. So pleased was he with himself, so interested was he in the
pageant of life, that he devoted his genius, in so far as it could be
public, to telling people all about it. His genius expressed itself
best in stories and conversation, and he was always the centre of each.
The best things in his plays are the conversations: the flippancies
of dandies and the garrulities of delightful shameless dowagers. His
best essays are colloquies; those that are not depend for effect
upon epigrams and aphorisms, originally dropped by himself in the
dining-rooms and _salons_ of London and Paris. When he was not
conversing he was telling stories, and these stories, perhaps, the
_Prose Poems_, _The House of Pomegranates_ and _The Happy
Prince_, will outlive even his wittiest paradox. _Salomé_ is
more a story, a “prose-poem,” than a play, and it is more, to use for
once the method of inversion in which he delighted, an epigram than a
story. One can imagine the glee with which Oscar Wilde worked up to the
anti-climax, to the moment after Salomé has kissed the dead mouth of
Jokanaan, and Herod has turned round and said: “Kill that woman.” One
can taste his own delight whilst writing the final stage instruction:
“The soldiers run forward and crush beneath their shields Salomé,
daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judæa.” But more easily still can one
imagine this remarkable man for ever telling himself an eternal tale in
which he himself is hero.