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The Trial of Oscar Wilde
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No 184
The Trial
of
Oscar Wilde
FROM THE SHORTHAND REPORTS
Then gently scan your brither man,
Still gentler, sister woman,
Though they may gang a' kennin' wrang,
To step aside is human.
ROBT. BURNS.
PARIS
PRIVATELY PRINTED
1906
PREFACE
"_It is wrong for us during the greater part of the time to handle these
questions with timidity and false shame, and to surround them with
reticence and mystery. Matters relating to sexual life ought to be studied
without the introduction of moral prepossessions or of preconceived ideas.
False shame is as hateful as frivolity. It is a matter of pressing concern
to rid ourself of the old prejudice that we "sully our pens" by touching
upon facts of this class. It is necessary at all costs to put aside our
moral, esthetic, or religious personality, to regard facts of this nature
merely as natural phenomena, with impartiality and a certain elevation of
mind._"
PREFACE
_I blame equally as much those who take it upon themselves to praise
man, as those who make it their business to blame him, together with
others who think that he should be perpetually amused; and only those
can I approve who seek for truth with tear-filled eyes._
PASCAL.
In "_De Profundis_," that harmonious and last expression of the perfect
artist, Wilde seems, in a single page to have concentrated in guise of
supreme confession, all the pain and passion that stirred and sobbed in
his soul.
"_This New Life, as through my love of Dante I like sometimes to call it,
is of course no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of
development, and evolution, of my former life. I remember when I was at
Oxford saying to one of my friends as we were strolling round Magdalen's
narrow bird-haunted walks one morning in the year before I took my degree,
that I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the
world, and that I was going out into the world with that passion in my
soul. And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that
I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the
sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and
its gloom. Failure, disgrace, poverty, sorrow, despair, suffering, tears
even, the broken words that come from lips in pain, remorse that makes one
walk on thorns, conscience that condemns, self-abasement that punishes,
the misery that puts ashes on its head, the anguish that chooses
sack-cloth for its raiment and into its own drink puts gall:--all these
were things of which I was afraid. And as I had determined to know nothing
of them, I was forced to taste each of them in turn, to feed on them, to
have for a season, indeed no other food at all._"
Further on, he tells us that his dominant desire was to seek refuge in the
deepest shade of the garden, for his mouth was full of the bitterness of
the dead-sea fruit that he had tasted, adding that this tomb-like aroma
was the befitting and necessary outcome of his preceding life of error.
We are inclined to think he deceived himself.
The day wherein he was at last compelled to face the horror of his
tragical destiny his soul was tried beyond endurance. He strode
deliberately, as he himself assures us, towards the gloomiest nook of the
garden, inwardly trembling perhaps, but proud notwithstanding ... hoping
against hope that the sun's rays would seek him out even there ... or in
other words, that he would not cease to live that _Bios theoretikos_,
which he held to be the greatest ideal.
"_From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and
self-centred, and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no
arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness._"
We all know what arrows struck him, arrows that he himself had sharpened,
and that Society had not forgotten to tip with poison.
"Neither his own heedlessness nor the envious and hypocritical anger of
his enemies, nor the snobbish cruelty of social reprobation were the true
cause of his misfortunes. It was he himself who, after a time of horrible
anguish, consented to his punishment, with a sort of supercilious disdain
for the weakness of human will, and out of a certain regard and unhealthy
curiosity for the sportfulness of fate. Here was a voluptuary seeking for
torture and desiring pain after having wallowed in every sensual
pleasure.... Could such conduct have been due to aught else but sheer
madness?"
The true debauchee has no such object. He seeks only for pleasure and
discounts beforehand the conditions that Life dictates for the same; the
conditions laid down containing no guarantee that the pleasure will be
actually grasped except only in promise and anticipation. Later, too proud
to acknowledge his cruel disappointment, he will gravely assure us that
the bitterness left in the bottom of the goblet whose wine he has quaffed,
has indeed the sweet taste that he sought after. Certain minds are
satisfied with the fantasmagoria of their intelligence, whereas the
voluptuary finds happiness only in the pleasure of realisation. In his
heart he concocts for himself a prodigious mixture of sorrow and of joy,
of suffering and of ecstacy, but the great world, wotting naught of this
secret alchemy and judging only according to the facts which lie upon the
surface, slices down to the same level, with the same stupid knife, the
strange, beautiful flower, as well as the evil weed that grew apace.
Remy de Gourmont said of the famous author, Paul Adam, that he was "a
magnificent spectacle." Wilde may be pronounced a painful problem. He
seems to escape literary criticism in order to fall under the keen
scalping knife of the analytical moralist, by the paradoxical fact of his
apparently imperious purpose to hew out and fashion forth his life as a
work of art.
"Save here and there, in _Intentions_ and in his poems, the _Poem of
Reading Gaol_, nothing of his soul has he thrown into his books; he seemed
to desire, one can almost postulate as a certainty, the stupendous tragedy
that blasted his life. From the abyss where his flesh groaned in misery,
his conscience hovered above him contemplating his woeful state whilst he
thus became the spectator of his own death-throes."[1]
That is the reason why he stirs us so deeply.
Those who might be tempted to search in his work for an echo however
feeble, of a new message to mankind, will be grievously disappointed. The
technical cleverness of Wilde is undeniable, but the magnificent dress in
which he has clothed it appears to us to have been borrowed. He has
brought us neither remedy nor poison; he leads us nowhere, but at the same
time we are conscious that he has been everywhere. No companion of ours is
he, but all the companions we hold dear he has known. True he sat at the
feet of the wise men of Greece in the Gardens of Academus, but the
eurythmy of their gests fascinated him more than the soberness of their
doctrines. Dante he followed in all his subterranean travels and
peregrinations, but all that he has to relate to us after his frightful
journeyings is merely an ecstatic description of the highly-wrought
scenery that he had witnessed.
"I packed all my genius, said he, into my life, I have put only my talent
into my works." Unfaithful to the principle which he learnedly deduced in
_Intentions_, viz: that the undivided soul of a writer should incorporate
itself in his work, even as Shakespeare pushing aside the "_impulses that
stirred so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer
them to realize their energy, not on the lower plane of actual life, where
they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect, but
on that of the imaginative plane of art_," ... he came to confound the
intensity of feeling with the calmness of beauty. Possessed of a mind of
rare culture, he nevertheless only evoked, when he touched Art, harmonious
vibrations perhaps, but vibrations which others, after all said and done,
had already created before him. He succeeded in producing nothing more
than a splendid and incomparable echo. The most that can be said is that
the music he had in his soul he kept there, living all the time a crowded,
ostentatious life, and distinguishing himself as a superlative
conversationalist. Be this as it may, posterity cannot judge us according
to those possibilities of our nature which were never developed. However
numerous may be the testimonies in our favour, she cannot pronounce
excepting on the works, or at least, the materials left by the workman. It
is this which renders so precarious the actor's fleeting glory, as it
likewise dissipates the golden halo that hovers over the brilliant Society
_causeur_. Nothing remains of Mallarme excepting a few cunningly wrought
verses, inferior to the clearer and more profound poems of his great
master, Baudelaire. Of Wilde nothing will remain beyond his written works
which are vastly inferior to his brilliant epigrammatic conversation.
In our days, the master of repartee and the after-dinner speaker is
fore-doomed to forgetfulness, for he always stands alone, and to gain
applause has to talk down to and flatter lower-class audiences. No writer
of blood-curdling melodramas, no weaver of newspaper novels is obliged to
lower his talent so much as the professional wit. If the genius of
Mallarme was obscured by the flatterers that surrounded him, how much more
was Wilde's talent overclouded by the would-be witty, shoddy-elegant, and
cheaply-poetical society hangers-on, who covered him with incense? One of
his devoted literary courtezans, who has written a life of Wilde, which
is nothing more than a rhapsodidal panegyric of his intimacy with the
poet, tells us that the first attempts of the sparkling conversationalist
were not at all successful in Paris drawing-rooms. In the house of Victor
Hugo seeing he had to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others
among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He
succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most
sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and
sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen he
succeeded only in gaining a reputation for artificiality.
We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated
tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of
tenderness for everything in nature.
"It is true that Mallarme has not written much, but all he has done is
valuable. Some of his verses are most beautiful whilst Wilde seemed never
to finish anything. The works of the English aesthete are very
interesting, because they characterize his epoch; his pages are useful
from a documentary point of view, but are not extraordinary from a
literary standpoint. In the _Duchess of Padua_, he imitates Hugo and
Sardou; the _Picture of Dorian Grey_ was inspired by Huysmans;
_Intentions_ is a _vade-mecum_ of symbolism, and all the ideas contained
therein are to be found in Mallarme and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. As for
Wilde's poetry, it closely follows the lines laid down by Swinburne. His
most original composition is _Poems in Prose_. They give a correct idea of
his home-chat, but not when he was at his best; that no doubt, is because
the art of talking must always be inferior to any form of literary
composition. Thoughts properly set forth in print after due correction
must always be more charming than a finely sketched idea hurriedly
enunciated when conversing with a few disciples. In ordinary table-talk we
meet nothing more than ghosts of new-born ideas fore-doomed to perish. The
jokes of a wit seldom survive the speaker. When we quote the epigrams of
Wilde, it is as if we were exhibiting in a glass case, a collection of
beautiful butterflies, whose wings have lost the brilliancy of their once
gaudy colours. Lively talk pleases, because of the man who utters it, and
we are impressed also by the gestures which accompany his frothy
discourse. What remains of the sprightly quips and anecdotes of such
celebrated _hommes d'esprit_, as Scholl, Becque, Barbey d'Aurevilly! Some
stories of the XVIIIth. century have been transmitted to us by Chamfort,
but only because he carefully remodelled them by the aid of his clever
pen."[2]
These opinions of Rebell questionable though they may be, show us plainly
something of the charm and the weakness of Wilde.
A perfect artist desiring to leave his mark on the temple-columns of Fame
must not live among his fellow men ambitious to taste the bitterness and
the sweetness alike of every caress of existence, but submit himself
pitilessly to the thraldom of the writing desk. Some authors may produce
masterpieces amidst the busy throng; but there are others who lose all
power of creation unless they shut themselves up for a time and live
severely by rote. When Wilde was dragging out a wretched life in the
sordid room of a cheap, furnished hotel, where he eventually died, did he
ever remember while reading Balzac by the flickering light of his one
candle that the great master of French literature often sought solitude
and wrestled for eighteen hours at a stretch with the demon of severe
toil? Did he ever repeat the doleful wail of the Author of _La Comedie
Humaine_ who was sometimes heard to exclaim in sad tones: "_I ought not
to have done that.... I ought to have put black on white, black on
white...._"
Few experiments are really necessary for the literary creator who seeks to
analyse the stuff of which Life is composed in order to dissolve for us
all its elements and demonstrate its ever-present underlying essence. The
romance writer must stand away from the crowd, if only for a time, and
reflect deeply upon what he has seen and heard. The power of thought, to
be free and fruitful, cannot flourish without the strength of ascetism. We
must yield to that law which decrees that action may not be the
twin-sister of dreams. Those who live a life of pleasure can only give us
colourless falsehoods when they try to depict sincerity of feeling. The
confessions of sensualists resemble volcanic ashes.
Wilde himself gives us the key to his errors and his weakness:
"_Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is
nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its
curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one cannot wear over one's face a
mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and
making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshappen
dreams. There are poisons so subtle that to know their properties one has
to sicken of them. There are maladies so strange that one has to pass
through them if one seeks to understand their nature. And yet what a great
reward one receives! How wonderful the whole world becomes to one! To note
the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional, coloured life of the
intellect--to observe where they meet, and where they separate, at what
point they are in unison and at what point they are in discord--there is a
delight in that! What matter what the cost is? One can never pay too high
a price for any sensation._"[3]
The brain becomes dulled at this sport, which it would be illusory to call
a study. He who uses his intellect to serve only his sensuality can
produce nothing elaborate but what is artificial. Such is the dilemma of
Wilde, whose collections of writings is like a painted stage-scene, mere
garish canvas, behind which there is never anything substantial.
"When I first saw Wilde, he had not yet been seared by the brand of
general reprobation. Often I changed my opinion of him, but at first I
felt the enthusiasm which young literary aspirants always feel for those
who have made their mark; then the law-suit took place, followed by the
dramatic thunderclap of a criminal prosecution; and my soul revolted as
if some great iniquity had been consummated. Later on, it seemed to me
that the man of fashion had swallowed up the literary god, his baggage
seemed light, and his brilliant butterfly-life had perhaps been of more
importance to him than the small pile of volumes bearing his name.
"To-day, I seem clearly to understand what sort of a man he
was--extraordinary beyond a doubt; but never has artificial sentiment been
so cunningly mingled with seemingly natural simplicity and pulsating
pleasure in one and the same man."[4]
"_I must say to myself that I ruined myself and that nobody great or small
can be ruined except by his own hand. I am quite ready to say so. I am
trying to say so, though they may not think it at the present moment. This
pitiless indictment I bring without pity against myself. Terrible as was
what the world did to me, what I did to myself was far more terrible
still._
_I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my
age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and
had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position
in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually
discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long
after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different.
I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure,
but his relations were the passion of his age and its weariness of
passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital
issue, of larger scope._
_The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into
long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a_
flaneur, _a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller
natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius,
and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the
heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new
sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity
became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady,
or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took
pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little
action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore
what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on
the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain
of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I
ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute
humility._"[5]
This confession of irreparable defeat while being exceedingly dolorous, is
unfortunately, rendered still further painful by other pages which
contradict it, and almost tempt us to doubt its sincerity, in spite of the
fact that Wilde was always sincere for those who knew how to read between
the lines and enter into his spirit.
"There is no doubt that he was truly a most extraordinary man, endowed
with striking originality, but a man who at the same time took more than
uncommon care to hide his gifts under a cloak bought in some conventional
bazaar which made a point of keeping abreast with the fashions of the
day."[6]
What brought about his downfall was the mad idea that possessed him of the
possibility of employing in the service of noble aspirations all, without
exception, all the passions that moved and agitated his human soul.
Everyone of us is, no doubt, peopled at times with mysterious spirits,
ephemeral apparitions, which like the wild beasts that Christ long ago
cast out of the Gadarene swine, tear themselves to pieces in internecine
warfare. It is with such soldiers as these, who very seldom obey the
superior orders of the higher intellect, or desert and rebel against us at
the opportune moment, that we are called upon to withstand the onslaught
of a thousand enemies. Wilde made the grand mistake of trying to
understand them all. He believed that they were capable of adapting
themselves to that powerful instinct which animated him, and which
directed him, wherever he wandered or wherever he went, towards the spirit
of Beauty. This error lasted long enough perhaps to convince him of the
power that was born in him, but unfortunately, the revelation of his error
came too late.
My object in this preface is not to write the life of Wilde.
I have only to do with the Writer, for the Man is yet too much alive and
his wounds have scarcely ceased bleeding! In the presence of still living
sorrow, crimson-tinged, respect commands us to stand bareheaded; before
the scarred face of woe the voice is dumb; we should, above all, endeavour
rather to ignore the accidents that thrust themselves into a life and try
to discover the great, calm soul, beautiful in its melancholy, which
though pained and suffering, has never ceased to be nobly inspired. To
prove that this was true in the case of Wilde, we may have recourse to
some of those who knew him well and who form a great "cloud of witnesses,"
testifying to the veracity of the things we have laid down.
Mr. Arthur Symons, a keen and large-minded critic, a friend of Wilde's,
and an elegant and forcible writer to boot, in his recent volume:
"_Studies in Prose and Verse_," characterizes Wilde as a "poet of
attitudes," and we cannot do better than quote a few lines from the fine
article which he consecrated to our author:
"_When the "Ballad of Reading Gaol" was published, he said, it seemed to
some people that such a return to, or so startling a first acquaintance
with, real things, was precisely what was most required to bring into
relation, both with life and art an extraordinary talent so little in
relation with matters of common experience, so fantastically alone in a
region of intellectual abstractions. In this poem, where a style formed on
other lines seems startled at finding itself used for such new purposes,
we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last, pity and terror
have come in their own person, and no longer as puppets in a play. In its
sight, human life has always been something acted on the stage; a comedy
in which it is the wise man's part to sit aside and laugh, but in which he
may also disdainfully take part, as in a carnival, under any mask. The
unbiassed, scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a burden,
comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh, and it has worn and looked
behind so many masks that there is nothing left desirable in illusion.
Having seen, as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so
partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way, it has come at
length to discover morality in the only way left possible, for itself.
And, like most of those who, having "thought themselves weary," have made
the adventure of putting thought into action, it has had to discover it
sorrowfully, at its own incalculable expense. And now, having become so
newly acquainted with what is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the
arrangement of human affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme,
and taken, on the one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more
than their just valuation, in matters of art. It is that odd instinct of
the intellect, the necessity of carrying things to their furthest point of
development, to be more logical than either life or art, two very wayward
and illogical things, in which conclusions do not always follow from
premises._
_His intellect was dramatic, and the whole man was not so much a
personality as an attitude...._
_And it was precisely in his attitudes that he was most sincere. They
represented his intentions; they stood for the better, unrealised part of
himself. Thus his attitude, towards life and towards art, was untouched by
his conduct; his perfectly just and essentially dignified assertion of the
artist's place in the world of thought and the place of beauty in the
material world being in nowise invalidated by his own failure to create
pure beauty or to become a quite honest artist. A talent so vividly at
work as to be almost genius was incessantly urging him into action, mental
action._
_Realising as he did, that it is possible to be very watchfully cognisant
of that "quality of our moments as they pass," and so shape them after
one's own ideal much more continuously and consciously than most people
have ever thought of trying to do, he made for himself many souls, souls
of intricate pattern and elaborate colour, webbed into infinite tiny
cells, each the home of a strange perfume, perhaps a poison. "Every soul
had its own secret, and was secluded from the soul which had gone before
it or was to come after it. And this showman of souls was not always aware
that he was juggling with real things, for to him they were no more than
the coloured glass balls which the juggler keeps in the air, catching them
one after another. For the most part the souls were content to be
playthings; now and again they took a malicious revenge, and became so
real that even the juggler was aware of it. But when they became too real
he had to go on throwing them into the air and catching them, even though
the skill of the game had lost its interest for him. But as he never lost
his self-possession, his audience, the world, did not see the
difference._"[7]
Thus not wishing to live for himself, Wilde was surprised into living
mainly for others, and his ever-present desire to astonish was one of the
prime causes that led to his overthrow. Yet, in spite of this, what riches
of the mind, one easily divines him to possess, if for a moment we peer
beyond the mobile curtain of his paradoxes. Those who listened to him,
this modern St. Chrysostom, on whose lips there was ever an ambiguous
smile, could not fail to see that he spoke to himself, was occupied in
translating that which was passing in his mind, trying in a sense, to
ravish his auditors and plunge them even into greater, though only
ephemeral, ravishment, whilst ushering them into an absolutely unreal and
immaterial kingdom of capricious fantasy, and they will remember that he
was sometimes astonishingly profound and grave, and always charming,
paradoxical, and eloquent. His mind constantly dwelt upon the questions of
Art and Aesthetics. In _Intentions_ he laid down serious problems, which
in themselves bore every appearance of contradiction, and which any
attempt to resolve would, at the outset, appear puerile and ambitious.
For instance:--Is lying a fundamental principle of Art, that is to say, of
every art?
Is it possible for there to be perfect concordance between a finely
ordered and pure life, and the worship of Beauty; or, are we to consider
such a consummation as utterly impossible and chimerical?
Must there be a permanent and necessary divorce between Ethics and
Aesthetics?
Ought we, beneath the flowery mask of a borrowed smile, allow ourselves to
be carried away by all the waves of instinct?
The art of Criticism, is it superior to Art? The Interpreter can he be
superior to the creator? Must we modify the profound axiom, "to understand
is to equal," not by reducing it to that other axiom, more profound
perhaps, "to understand is to achieve," but by modifying it with that,
which, at the first glance looks at least passingly strange "to understand
is to surpass?"
Such are the questions which Wilde postulated in _Intentions_ and worked
out with great audacity, but with no higher object than to win admiration,
and all this with the indifferent suppleness of a conjuror of words.
_Intentions_ is a study of artificial genius, culture, and instinct, and,
for this reason, it forms a most curious production. In itself it can
hardly be termed a magistral work, inasmuch as all the theories enunciated
in it are, at least, twenty years old, and appear to us to-day quite worn
out and decrepit. As much may be said, also, for the theories put forward
by our young, contemporaneous artists who undertake to discuss all things
in Heaven and Earth, and whose vapourings on Life, Nature, Social Art and
other things--especially other things--are no more guaranteed against
mortality than the doctrines above specified. Let them remember, in
reading Wilde's work, that their Aesthetical doctrines will soon become as
antiquated, and that it is no bid for lasting fame to write flashy novels,
pretty verses, high-flown or realistic dramas, pessimistic or optimistic
plays, imbued with Schopenhaurian and Nitzschien principles, since the
crying need of the time is for sincere work. All the doctrines ever
invented are mere tittle-tattle, only fit to amuse brainless ladies
wanting in beauty, or minds stricken with positive sterility.
It is not inexact that in _Intentions_ one meets with a profound truth
now and again, but the dressing of it is so paradoxical that we run a risk
of misinterpreting all that may animate it of genuine fitness and
sincerity.
Wilde may truly be denominated the last representative of that English art
of the XIXth. century, which beginning with Shelley, continuing with the
Pre-Raphaelites and culminating with the American painter, Whistler,
endeavours purposely to set forth an ideal and elegant expression of the
world.
The mistake of these men lies in the belief that Art was made for Life;
whereas it is, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary. Life has no other
value, except as subject-matter, for poet and painter. These are excentric
theories, certainly, but then, what on earth, does it matter about
theories? Do not they serve the great artist to make his genius more
puissant, and enable him to concentrate all his forces in the same
direction by uniting instead of scattering them? With, or in spite of his
theories, Shelley wrote his poems and Whistler painted his pictures; if
their aesthetic basis was bad, one, at least, cannot pretend that it was
dangerous, since it enabled them to accomplish their masterpieces. Wilde,
unfortunately, was an aesthete before he was a poet, and produced his works
somewhat in the spirit of bravado. He had been told that he could not
create aught of good: the reply, triumphant and crushing was, the _Picture
of Dorian Grey_. He is a literary problem; and in considering him, we are
struck with the unwarranted corruption, by his acquaintances, of a fine
artistic sensibility.
The fashionable drawing-rooms of the West-End brought about his downfall,
or rather, and it amounts to the same thing: his frank and undisguised
desire to please and to dazzle them proved his undoing. Possibly the same
misfortune would have overtaken Merimee, had it not been for his lofty and
vigorous intelligence; as it was, he lost more than once, most precious
time in composing "_Chambres bleues_," when he was undoubtedly capable of
producing another "_Colomba_," and other variations of "_Vases
etrusques_."
With all this, let us be thoroughly just; _Intentions_ is far from
containing anything but mere paradoxes. Those that we find there are at
any rate of very diverse kinds. Some are pure verbal amusements, and may
be thrust aside after the moment's attention that they snatched from our
surprise. Others belong to a nobler family of ideas and awaken in us the
lasting and fecund astonishment of the paradox which is born sound and
healthy, because it concerns a new truth. Into the mental landscape,
these paradoxes introduce that sudden change of perspective, which forces
the mind to rise or to descend, and thus causes us to discover other
horizons. What a grievous error would it be on our part not to feel
something of that immense and exhaustive love of beauty which haunted the
soul of Wilde until the bitter end? However artificial his work may appear
at the first glance, there is still sufficient left of the man which was
incomparable. We instinctively feel that he belonged to the chosen race of
those upon whom the "spirit of the hour" had laid his magic wand, and who
give forth at the cunning touch of the Magician some of the finest notes
of which our stunted human nature is capable. Men thus endowed, enjoy the
rare privilege of being unable to proffer a single word, without our
perceiving however confusedly, the splendid harmony of an almost universal
accompaniment of ideas. The choir, their eyes fixed upon the eyes of the
master-musician, follows his inspired gestures with jealous care, and
seeks to interpret his every nod and movement.
None but an artist could have written the admirable pages on Shakespeare,
Greek Art, and other elevated themes that are to be found in the works of
Oscar Wilde.
More than an artist was he, who noted down the suggestive thought: that
the humility of the matter of a work of art is an element of culture. If
therefore, we hear him exclaim that "thought is a sickness," we must bear
in mind that this is simply an analysis of the phrase: "_We live in a
period whose reading is too vast to allow it to become wise, and which
thinks too much to be beautiful._"
Our eyes can no longer penetrate the esoteric meaning of the statues of
the olden times, beautiful with glorified animality, and which have alas,
become for us little more than the tongue-tied offspring of the inspiring
god Pan, dead beyond all hope of rebirth. Our brains have become stupified
through the heaviness of the flesh, and this, perhaps, because we have
treated the flesh as a slave.
"_The worship of the senses, wrote Wilde, has often, and with much
justice, been decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about
passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they
are conscious of sharing with the less highly-organised forms of
existence. But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been
understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because
the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by
pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of
which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic._"[8]
In these lines, we may perhaps find the key of a certain metamorphosis in
the poet's life, before Circe, that terrible sorceress, had passed his
way.
"_Who knows not Circe,
The daughter of the Sun, whose charmed cup
Whoever tasted lost his upright shape,
And downward fell into a grovelling swine?_"
(_Milton: Comus, 50-53._)
The infant King of Rome, we are told, looking out from a window of the
Louvre one day, at the muddy street where young children were
playing,--sad in the midst of a perfumed and divinely flattering
court,--cried out: "I too, would like to roll myself in that beautiful
mud." We are inclined to think from a sentimental outlook, that Wilde also
had the same morbid desire; but, he was worth better things; and there
were times in his life when serene aspirations moved his heart before he
sat down to the festive board of Sin.
He had a pronounced tendency towards the _discipulat_; used to question
youths about their studies and their mind, showing as much interest in
them as a spiritual confessor, inebriating himself with their enthusiasm,
and surrounding himself more and more with a medley of different friends.
A vigorous pagan, ardent, intoxicated with souvenirs of Antiquity,
heart-sick of his worldly successes, he dreamed perhaps of living over
again:
_Ces heroeiques jours ou les jeunes pensees
Allaient chercher leur miel aux levres d'un Platon._
But this _artificiel de l'art_ was, although he wotted it not, a man who
rioted in the good things of life. He sought to inculcate in himself a
quiet spirit which believes itself invulnerable.
"_And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that
perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to
whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the
ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the
soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being
an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer
experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thoughts, acts
or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the
uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile._"[9]
This passage shows us a state of things very far removed from the old
dream of antiquity.
He forgot, alas! the puritanism and sublime discourses of Diotime, which
have been so finely pictured for us by Plato, to wallow in the orgies of
the Island of Capria.
Before that Criminal Court, where he vainly struggled so as "not to appear
naked before men," we hear him proclaim what he had himself desired and
perhaps attained.
What interpretation, asked the judge, can you give us of the verse:
_I am the Love which dares not tell its name_
"The Love referred to," replied Wilde, "is that which exists between a man
of mature years and a young man; the love of David and of Jonathan. It is
the same love that Plato made the basis of his philosophy; it is that love
which is sung in the Sonnets of Shakespeare and of Michael-Angelo; it is a
profound spiritual affection, as pure as it is perfect. It is beautiful,
pure and noble; it is intellectual, the love of a man possessing full
experience of life, and of a young man full of all the joy and all the
hope of the future."
There in that struggle in the midst of thick darkness, this must have
been the cry of his tormented soul, a breath of pure air as he passed, a
perfumed memory ... then there came a few arrow flights badly winged which
only wounded his own heart.
He defended himself in an indifferent way according to some people,
although it must be admitted that he gave the answers that were necessary
and becoming, and, in some cases, compelled his judges, who were no better
than the mouth-pieces of the crowd, to confess the hatred that the worship
of beauty had inspired.
"However strange may have been his attitude, that attitude could not have
been indifferent to anyone. Those who have been fortunate enough to laugh
at the portrait that Rene Boylesve has drawn of the aesthete in his fine
novel "Le Parfum des Iles Borromees," would find it difficult to make a
mock of the man who accepted with superb disinterestedness, the torture
that he knew beforehand the judges would inevitably inflict upon him.
Although he may not have been a great poet, although the pretext of his
equivocal mode of living was taken to condemn him, we cannot lose sight of
the art and of the literary craftsman that were condemned at the same time
with him."[10]
_We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its
periodical fits of morality. In general, elopements, divorces, and family
quarrels, pass with little notice. We read the scandal, talk about it for
a day, and forget it. But once in six or seven years our virtue becomes
outrageous. We cannot suffer the laws of religion and decency to be
violated. We must make a stand against vice. We must teach libertines that
the English people appreciate the importance of domestic ties. Accordingly
some unfortunate man, in no respect more depraved than hundreds whose
offences have been treated with lenity, is singled out as an expiatory
sacrifice. If he has children, they are to be taken from him. If he has a
profession, he is to be driven from it. He is cut by the higher orders,
and hissed by the lower. He is, in truth, a sort of whipping-boy, by whose
vicarious agonies all the other transgressors of the same class are, it is
supposed, sufficiently chastised._[11]
This bitter denunciation of English mock-modesty by the brilliant Essayist
rests upon thoroughly justifiable grounds. Once again in the dolorous
history of humanity, the grotesque farce was enacted of chasing forth the
scapegoat into the wilderness to bear away the sins of the people. But, in
this instance, the unhappy creature was not only laden with the sins of
the tribe; a heavier burden still had been added to all the others: the
fearful burden of the mad, unreasoned hatred of the sinners. Indeed he,
whose share in the general load of sin was the greatest, sought to add
more hatred than all the others to the great fardel under which the victim
staggered, and believing himself so much the more innocent that the
abjection of the unfortunate wretch was complete, would have been glad had
it been in his power to help even the public hangman in the execution of
his nefarious task. We have observed that through some diabolical strain
in human nature, the evil joy which creates scandal and gives rise to a
man's downfall, increases in intensity if the victim happens to be a man
of superior rank and talent.
_On voit briller au fond des prunelles haineuses,
L'orgueil mysterieux de souiller la Beaute._
How great must have been the delighted intoxication of numberless weak
minds when they were impelled, in the midst of a silence that braver and
clearer spirits dared not break, to screech out vociferations against Art
and Thought, denouncing these as the accomplices of the momentary
aberrations of him who erstwhile worshipped at their shrine. Here in
France at least, men knew better how to restrain themselves, and there
were even a few courageous wielders of talented pens who did not hesitate
to use their abilities in favour of their Anglo-Saxon colleague. Hugues
Rebell published in the _Mercure de France_ that _Defense d'Oscar Wilde_,
the calm and tempered logic of which is still fresh to many minds. A
number of writers and artists even held a meeting of protestation; but, of
course, all this had not the slightest effect on the judicial position of
Wilde. It was generally felt that the ferocious outcry raised against the
unhappy man "who had been found out" was because that man was a poet, and
not so much because he had gone counter to the manners of his time.
Amongst all the mingled shouting and laughter, the arguments for and the
arguments against, the voice of one man was heard stentorian and clear
above all the rest, that voice belonged to Octave Mirbeau, a puissant
master of the French tongue, and a brilliant writer and dramatist. The
following lines of suppressed anger and large-minded charity emanated from
his pen:
"_A great deal has been heard about the paradoxes of Oscar Wilde upon Art,
Beauty, Conscience and Life! Paradoxes they were, it is true, and we know
that some laid themselves open to the charge of exaggeration, and vaulted
over the threshold of the Forbidden. But after all, what is a paradox if
not, for the most part of the time, the exaltation of an idea in a
striking and superior form? As soon as an idea overleaps the low-level of
ordinary popular understanding, having ceased to drag behind it the
ignoble stumps gathered in the swamps of middle-class morality, and seeks
with strong, steadfast wing, to attain the lofty heights of Philosophy,
Literature or Art, we at once stigmatize it as a paradox, because, unable
ourselves to follow it into those regions which are inaccessible to us,
through the weakness of our organs, and we make haste to scotch it and put
it under ban by flinging after it curse-laden cries of blame and
contempt._
_And yet, strange as it may seem, progress cannot be made save by way of
paradox, whilst much vaunted common sense--the prized virtue of the
imbecile--perpetuates the humdrum routine of daily life. The truth is, we
refuse to allow anyone to come and outrage our intellectual sluggishness,
or our morality, ready-made like second-hand clothes in a dealer's shop,
or the stupid security of our sheepish preconceptions._
_Looked at squarely, that was the veritable crime in the minds of those
who sat in judgment on Oscar Wilde._
_They could not forgive him for being a thinker, and a man of superior
intellect--and for that self-same reason eminently dangerous to other men.
Wilde is young and has a future before him, and he has proved by the
strong and charming works which he has already given us that he can still
do much more in the cause of Beauty and Art. Must we not then admit that
it is an abominable thing to risk the killing of something far above all
laws, and all morality: the spirit of beauty, for the sake of repressing
acts which are not really punishable_ per se.
_For laws change and morality becomes transformed with the transformations
of time, with the changeing of latitude and longitude, but beauty remains
immaculate, and sheds her light far over the centuries that she alone can
rescue from obscurity._"
With these magnificent words of one of the great masters of French prose,
we would gladly terminate the present study; but it remains for us to cite
the following from the pen of our lately deceased friend, Hugues Rebell,
who possessed not only acumen and erudition, but employed a brilliant
style and ready wit in the expression of his thoughts:
"Will a day ever come, wrote he, when the deeds of men will be no more
judged in the name of religion and morality, but from the point of view of
their social importance? When the misdemeanours of a man of wit and of
genius, or a clever, elegant man of fashion, shall no longer be judged by
the same law as that which condemns a stolid navvy or a dockyard hand? Far
from believing in our much belauded progress, I am inclined alas, to think
that we are really far behind our forefathers in tolerance, and above all
in the ideas that govern our idea of social equality. The downfall of the
sentiment of hierarchy seriously compromises the existence of some of the
best men amongst us. It is not crime merely which is tracked and hounded
down, but all that strays aside for a moment from every-day habits and
customs. So-and-so, because he is not like other people inspires aversion,
even horror on the part of those who take off their hats most respectfully
to the successful swindler; and whilst the Police complacently allow the
perpetration in our great cities of robberies and murders, they make a
raid on the unfortunate bookseller who happens to have stowed away
carefully in his back-shop, a few illustrations where the high deeds and
gestures of Venus are too faithfully reproduced. These paltry persecutions
would only serve to bring a smile to our lips were it not that everyone is
more or less exposed to their arbitrary measures. Men are far less free
to-day than they formerly were, because they are too much dominated by a
large number of ignorant and groundless prejudices. Ferocious gaolers
fetter and imprison their minds for their greater overthrow; no longer do
they believe in God, whilst giving implicit faith to vain Science which,
making small account of the great diversity of character and temperament
amongst human beings, holds up for unique example, a healthy and virtuous
individual who never had any real existence except in the imagination of
fools; and whilst no longer following any of the old religions, they
submit themselves with equanimity to the condemnation of so-called Human
Justice, which more often than not is radically venal, and impresses them
far more than did in olden times, the ex-communicating _bulls_ of Popes
who had usurped the authority of God."
As for the sentence of hard labour passed upon Wilde, a description would
fail to convey to the inexperienced reader a full idea of its barbarous
severity. Sir Edward Clarke, the counsel for the defense, gave
substantially the following reply to the representative of a Paris
newspaper:
"My opinion is that Oscar Wilde will work out his sentence. He has
received the heaviest punishment that it was possible to inflict upon him.
You cannot possibly form any notion of the extreme severity of "hard
labour" which is implacable in its _regime_ of absorbing and exigent
regularity.
"Oscar Wilde, who wore his hair long like the esthete he was, was obliged
to undergo the indignity of having it cut close, and wearing the
sack-cloth suit bearing the broad-arrow mark of the convict. Thrust into a
small narrow cell with only a bed, or rather a wooden plank in guise of a
bed, for all his furniture,--a bed without a matress, and with a bolster
made of wood, this talented man was made to pass the long weary months of
his martyrdom.