In some respects Wilde was like a clever debater who takes keen delight
in flouting the opposition. He was of that sort who, privately granting
the conclusions of his opponent, will deliberately beat about the bush
in an effort to discover entirely new reasons, spiritedly rejecting all
those advanced by the other side. Chesterton is of the same stripe. To
such men to be destructive, to dazzle, to astound, is meat and drink.
Of all pleasures, there is none to interest them as does the game of
conversational entanglements. At whatever cost, they must score off of
the opposition, be that opposition an individual, the public, custom or
convention. Nor do they come unscathed from the battle, for prejudices
and widely held beliefs are very solid things to butt against. Not
with entire impunity may anyone attack what men have imbibed with
their mother’s milk. Conventions and customs are results of ages of
experience and to modify them with changing circumstances is, at the
best, a slow task.
By way of instance of the argument contradictory and provoking, let us
take a passage from _The Importance of Being Earnest_. It runs: “The
modern sympathy with invalids is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly
a thing to be encouraged in others.” Reading that, your average man
who belongs to a fraternal order, who subscribes to charity funds,
who rushes to fountain pen when a begging list is thrust before him,
is shocked. “What!” he exclaims, “would this fellow abolish sympathy?
would he weaken personal love and human affection? Does he scorn the
little child whose mother clung to it until it sunk into its grave? My
dear, old mother who----” and so on. There would be sentimentalities,
and, at the end, Wilde would stand condemned as a cold callous
anti-Christ.
But without trying to read anything into what Wilde has written except
that which was actually there, reading carefully and accepting it as
the result of his own thought and experience, we find much of value.
We remember that Wilde had pondered long on hereditary influences,
was fully aware that he came from a failing stock and inherited fatal
weaknesses. He had also said something anent the stupidity of holding
that marriage was an institution determined by an omniscient divinity
and if anything was made in heaven it was divorce, not marriage.
Putting these together we have, not a cold and callous piece of
impudence, but an idea which, if pondered, we find leads to the belief
that society would do well to regard as an offense against itself the
mating of undesirables from whom might spring unhealthy branches,
or those prone to weaknesses or disease. Approached from another
direction the teaching looks sound enough and we embrace it, calling it
the gospel of Eugenics. Certainly, a couple having married and finding
in the course of time that their union was unfavorable, unpromising as
to their mutual happiness, would, most certainly, do well to separate,
for of all creatures, who so unhappy as children of a joyless union?
Hence Wilde’s “Divorces are made in heaven.” Hence, also, his scornful
contempt for those who spend efforts on the result of those social
ills which we see in the sick. After all, it is not vastly removed
from Christ’s swift answer to the sentimentalist: “Let the dead bury
the dead.” The Wilde idea closely touches Nietzsche’s. There is little
time to waste on failures. Man is in a state of transition and must
be surpassed. The human race has a long march before it. Which leads
to another apparently contradictory statement, another solid truth:
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” Of
course it is, although shallow or thoughtless people denounced Wilde as
a stirrer up of trouble when the saying was quoted by socialists and
organizers of the unemployed. Had Wilde said, “It is the duty of every
Englishman to be progressive,” the platitude would have been hailed
with delight, and he might have basked in the concentrated smiles of
the black-coated million. But he chose the argument contradictory and
shocked with a truth. The unthinking saw in the saying, not a very
ordinary remark, but a gospel of discontent calculated to make men
vicious and improvident, anarchical and cruel.
Take another instance of the argument contradictory, one from his
essay, _The Decay of the Art of Lying_, which enraged many on this side
of the Atlantic. Here it is:
The crude commercialism of America, its materializing spirit,
its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of
imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due
to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who
according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie,
and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington
and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of
time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature.
The book of collected essays, be it said, is called _Intentions_. Now
Wilde’s intention in the passage quoted, in the entire essay in fact,
was to register a condemnation of the idiotic habit of pestiferous
puritans in forever trying to tack a “moral lesson” to a work of art.
And the desire to do that is distinctly an American vice. Not more
than two weeks ago I came across an instance in which a school teacher
had set his pupil the task of writing an essay with this as subject:
“What moral lesson do we get from Robert Louis Stevenson’s _Treasure
Island_?” Now it must be clear to any thinking man that Stevenson
had no more idea of trying to convey a moral lesson in that glorious
tale than he had of advocating murder and piracy. Healthy minds read
for pleasure and not for moral profit, and no sane boy rushes out to
murder his grandmother because he has read the life of Nero. But our
moralists are forever trying to turn the world into a loveless place, a
hell in which each and every one is expected to be forever in a state
of awful spiritual anguish, imagining themselves to be reprobate,
shaken with religious doubt. The dark and cruel fanaticism of the
uplifter would rob both youth and man of joy, and the world would be,
had the moral-lesson monger his way, a duller, blanker, grayer place
every day. The uplifter would fasten upon us a blighting, spiritual
tyranny. On young America, then, the meddlers made an early start.
Washington, the national hero, must be portrayed first and foremost as
inhuman, a something not of the world in which all men are liars. But
at bottom, Wilde was driving home the salutory lesson that art is, must
be, independent of morality: must, assuredly, follow its destiny quite
independent of moral purpose.
From quite another point of view, from a common sense point of view,
we may come to a realization of the folly of painting our national
heroes as monsters of virtue--as Charles Grandisons, all correct and
precise, and finicking. To endow our Lincolns and Washingtons with
middle class respectability is to belittle them. The picture of them
is unconvincing, as the picture of men without faults always is. Your
sensible European knows better than to set up a moral scarecrow with
all bad spots painted out, and loves his Nelson none the less because
of the Lady Hamilton affair, approves of his Dickens while admitting he
loved his glass, had a golden opinion of the late King Edward, although
he had his _affaires_.
“The crude commercialism of America,” that Wilde denounced time
and time again, seems to be something that we are only now coming
to realize. Thoreau denounced it, of course; also did Emerson, but
theirs were voices in the wilderness. Today the cry is being taken up
everywhere. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, John Hall Wheelock and a
dozen others are calling upon men to see something more than the mere
piling up of dollars in life. It is being realized that we are, as a
nation, sadly under-educated, that we have overlooked something of
the highest import when we have overlooked real self-culture. Wilde’s
words, once considered odd, now no longer have the appearance of oddity.
The development of the race depends on the development of the
individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the
intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately
lost. If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in
educating himself--a rare type in our time, I admit, but still
one occasionally to be met with--you rise from table richer, and
conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified
your days.
And in another place in the same essay, _The Critic as Artist_:
Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of actual existence,
noisy politician, or brawling social reformer, or poor
narrow-minded priest blinded by the sufferings of that unimportant
section of the community among whom he cast his lot, can seriously
claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual judgment
about any one thing? Each of the professions means a prejudice. The
necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in
the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which
people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid. And,
harsh though it may sound, I cannot help saying that such people
deserve their doom.
To say that “we live in an age in which people are so industrious as to
be stupid” has a ring of contradiction, especially to a people taught
to sing with Dr. Watts:
How doth the busy little bee
Improve each shining hour,
but, after all, what have we in the paragraph but a very honest
admission that in life, too much is often sacrificed to that _eclat_
of success, that too many signally fail to see that there is such a
thing as losing a life while trying to gain it, that in the chase
for supremacy or for wealth, the finer things are often missed. And
you know, and I know, and we all know that men are overworked and
under-educated, and that there is a certain culture which modern
education cannot supply. The position taken by Wilde is quite tenable
to those who have been fortunate enough to read Matthew Arnold’s
_Literature and Dogma_. Nor is it a new truth that Wilde gives, but, on
the contrary, a very old one brilliantly stated. It is the tale told
by Aesop, the tale of the dog crossing the bridge with a bone in its
mouth. The shadow of notoriety is grasped at and the bond of really
desirable things lost forever. It is the viewpoint indicated by that
sturdy individualist Sumner that the man who makes the most of himself
and does his best in his sphere, is far more valuable in the long run
than the philanthropist who runs about with a scheme which would set
the world straight if everyone would accept it. Wilde, in his oblique
way, was getting the truth home that a man is a bundle of possibilities
and that it behooves each and every man to find his bent, to chart his
course true to some Polaris. And, moreover, each and every one must
find his compulsion in himself. “Become what thou art,” said Nietzsche.
One thing more seems necessary to say in this connection anent the
crude commercialism of America and its materializing spirit. For
generations we have not only hammered away at the moral lesson,
but have made the mistake of setting up a kind of god of social
ambition, of domination, telling the young that with this, that and
the other quality encouraged, great will be the material reward. The
governmentship of the state, the presidency of the country, we have
insisted, would be the goal within the reach of everyone, the height
to which all should aspire, the prize within each grasp. That, of
course, is pernicious nonsense, and not only nonsense but senseless
social ambition. The stupidity of it may best be realized by imagining
an employer inept enough to tell his hands that each of them, by
being punctual and accurate, would have the management of the concern
within his grasp. Apart from the untruthfulness of that because of the
possibility of several developing the required qualities to the same
degree, consider the foolishness. For, it is perfectly obvious that a
manager of, we will say, a scrap iron business, having discovered a
good man at the handles of the electric hoist, would certainly keep
that man in his position and not advance him through the auditing
department and so on the road to the management. No wise manager would
spoil an excellent hoist man to make an indifferent bookkeeper. To do
that would be a step towards disintegration. In other words, everyone
in authority in the business world aims at the development of the
individual and not to the inculcation of social ambition. Nationally,
the same idea should be pursued on the ground that “where self-culture
has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly
lowered.” In a passage in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ we find the same
idea:
The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature
perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid
of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all
duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course they are
charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their
own souls starve, and are naked.
Without individual self-development, insists Wilde, a society,
a nation, must become an empty thing, a thing all front, like a
Scandinavian troll. In the play _A Woman of No Importance_ Wilde,
emphasizing the point, puts a searing speech into the mouth of his
character Hester Worsley:
You rich people in England, you don’t know how you are living. How
could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the
good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do,
on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you
throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a
season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how
to live--you don’t even know that. You love the beauty that you
can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and
do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty
of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life’s secret.
Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It
has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper
in purple. It sits like a dread thing smeared with gold. It is all
wrong, all wrong.
Yes, there was a spirit of contradiction in Oscar Wilde and he
delighted in awakening opposition, but looked at properly we find much
that is inexorably logical beneath what seems to be tricksy humor.
He made his hearers writhe while they smiled, and the writhing was
salutary.