Thou knowest all; I seek in vain
What lands to till or sow with seed--
The land is black with briar and weed,
Nor cares for falling tears or rain.
Thou knowest all; I sit and wait
With blinded eyes and hands that fail,
Till the last lifting of the veil
And the first opening of the gate.
Thou knowest all; I cannot see.
I trust I shall not live in vain,
I know that we shall meet again
In some divine eternity.
Men in general often find it hard to dissociate the work of artists
from the circumstances of their lives. Let a company fall to talking
of Villon, and it is a safe bet that before long someone will drag in
the incident of his having wandered very close to the gallows. Talk of
Baudelaire, and we are prone to forget, for a moment, his _Flowers of
Evil_, to recall that he painted his hair green. Of Dowson, we remember
that he was a pot house drunkard and overlook his _Impenitentia
Ultima_. Sometimes it seems, indeed, as though more truth was in the
saying that the evil that men do lives after them and the good is
often interr’d with their bones, than the reverse. Certainly Oscar
Wilde’s place in literature would have been decided long ago but for
the distortion caused by circumstances in his life. But, as the mists
clear, certain points stand out. It seems very definitely decided
that as a poet he flew on wings too feeble to reach the clear, cold
heights of Parnassus, two poems only being marked for distinction.
_The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ and _The Sphinx_. As a writer of fiction
he will probably be forgotten, or at best, remembered by one book, as
is Charles Brockden Brown, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ living as a
literary curiosity as _Wieland_ lives, or as Beckford’s _Vathek_ lives,
a thing at once odd and curious. As literary critic Wilde cannot rank
with Hazlitt or Sainte-Beuve. As dramatist, doubtless, his fame is
secure, and as essayist he will not be forgotten.
His friend, M. Andre Gide, has told us that Wilde said his novels and
stories were written as the result of wagers made. That is hard to
believe. Too plainly both novels and stories bear the earmarks of Wilde
the stylist. His novel, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, approaches too
nearly his expressed ideal, his desire to write a tale that should be
of the wondrous beauty of a Persian rug. If Wilde wrote either novel or
story on a wager, he must have wagered with himself. For Oscar Wilde
took himself far too seriously to hang his art on a hair, to stake his
literary reputation on the casting of a die. Indeed, he took himself
and his art more seriously than he took the world, and that to his own
undoing.
In another place I have shown how Wilde was influenced, how his
life’s path was pulled out of its calculated orbit because of his
feminine soul, and how heredity swayed his acts. Of that last he was
well aware, has, indeed, confessed to the world more than once and
especially in a passage in _The Critic as Artist_:
Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for the contemplative
life. It has shown us that we are never less free than when we try
to act. It has hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and
written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom. We may not watch
it, for it is within us. We may not see it, save in a mirror that
mirrors the soul. It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of
the Fates, and the most terrible. It is the ONLY one of the Gods
whose real name we know.
The feminine soul naturally had its influence, gave his literary work
a tendency, a direction. To say that it did so seems so obvious as
almost to be platitudinous. With that feminine soul he could never have
written a _Call of the Wild_, for instance, nor could he have written
a _Walden_, because he was physically and mentally incapable of living
a life of adventure as Jack London lived, or of scaling life down to
the bare bone as Thoreau did. The fact is that Wilde himself was a
contradiction, this giant of a man with the feminine soul was the sport
of the gods, and that the spirit of contradiction entered into his
writings is everywhere apparent in the written page.
Another thing the feminine soul did for him. Because of that inner
urge, he was filled with a burning desire to be admired, and therefore
wrote much for the pyrotechnical effect. In a word, he loved to show
off, to say and write things calculated to startle. You have exactly
the same spirit manifest in Chesterton, in Belloc, too, but to lesser
degree. But in Wilde, that self-satisfied strutting, that peacock
exhibition of brilliant parts is very obvious, indeed.
Added to the spirit of contradiction and the pavonic display, there
was, in Wilde, a strong spirit of partizanship. That accounts for his
proclamation of himself as a kind of John the Baptist for Charles
Baudelaire. Indeed, for a time, the Baudelairean influence colored all
that he wrote and he outdid his master in ornateness. The same spirit
of partizanship led him to out-Pater Pater. He conceived it to be a
worthy mission to acquaint the stolid British public with Platonic
teachings, especially as relating to affection between men. That,
of course, was as impossible a task and as hopeless as it would be
to attempt to grow banana trees in Greenland. However, Wilde worked
valiantly in his cause and, because of ignorance, and some wilful
distortion and misrepresentation, much that he wrote in all sincerity
later in his life plagued him.
As final ingredients there may be cited his opposition to the
commercialism and the philistinism of his day which he shared in
company with John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, and his real desire to
cultivate the capacity for refined enjoyment of the beautiful in art
and literature, an outcropping of his partizanship of Walter Pater.