As I have said, Wilde’s writings are tinged with Baudelaire, a man of
strong convictions and with a very definite attitude to art and to
life, who has been made a symbol of perversity and decadence. But
let that pass for the time. Granted that Charles Baudelaire had made
excursions into strange dream lands by way of the opium and hashish
door, it is not for us to damn any more than to deify. What engages
us at this moment is Baudelaire’s poetic creed and its influence upon
Oscar Wilde. Baldly translated, I give the Baudelairean poetic creed
thus: “Poetry ... poetry has no other aim than itself; it cannot
have any other aim, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly
worthy of the name of poem, as that which will have been written
only for the pleasure of writing a poem. I do not wish to say--be it
understood--that poetry may not ennoble morals, that its final result
may not be to raise men above vulgar interests. That would evidently
be an absurdity. I say that, if the poet has pursued a moral aim, he
has diminished his poetical power, and it is not imprudent to wager
that his work will be bad. Poetry cannot, under pain of death or
degradation, assimilate itself to science or to morals. It has not
truth for its object, it has only itself.”
It cannot be too strongly emphasized that this does not mean that there
is a predilection for things immoral, a delight in depravity and in
ugliness. It simply means what should be a self evident truth, a truth
accepted by all reasonable men; that art runs its course independently
of morality just as it runs independently of science or of political
economy; that wise men do not look for a moral lesson in works of art,
should, indeed, accept poetry just as they accept music. Who, hearing
a Beethoven sonata, would search for the lesson in it? Who so foolish
as to seek a moral sentiment in Rubinstein’s _Kammenoi-Ostrow_? Wilde’s
way of stating his artistic creed was very similar to Baudelaire’s.
Thus:
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon
eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes
are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing. To
morals belong the lower and less intellectual spheres.
I wrote, a few paragraphs back, that Baudelaire had become a kind of
symbol. A word of explanation is due. Just as Hogarth chose to picture
a side of life which others of his time were either too blind, or too
squeamish, or too cowardly, or too conventional minded to attempt,
pictures that showed the beast in man, the human being as Yahoo and
Struldbrug, pictures a man debauched, dissipated, degraded and
filthy, so has Baudelaire sung of the unwholesome things which are
part of our artificial life--of vice, and crime, and corruption. Very
engagingly too he dabbles in things esoteric and diabolical. Take that
little prose poem, _The Generous Player_--a tale in which the chief
character sells his soul to the devil on condition that he shall be
free from boredom for the remainder of his days, but, after the compact
is made, begins to doubt with horror whether his satanic majesty will
keep his word. So, to reassure himself, he prays in semi-slumber: “My
God; Lord my God! Let it be that the Devil keep his word.” It is a
queer tale and there are others akin to it, but each must read for
himself, must try to understand the peculiar attraction for, not only
the diabolical, but the loathsome, the morbid, the criminal and the
lewd had for the Frenchman. Of course, the more Baudelaire was attacked
for his supposed immorality the more extravagant he became. Still, he
was a great poet and a master of the word.
Unfortunately, somehow, we are inclined to overlook the fact that
it is not Frenchmen alone who have pictured the horrible. We forget
Morrison with his _Tales of Mean Streets_, Caradoc Evans with his
stories of sordid poverty and crime in the Welsh hill-country, Thomas
Burke and his dock-land sketches. But pass all that. Enamored of
Baudelaire, Wilde’s work became affected just as Swinburne’s work
was by the same influence, and, in another branch of art, Aubrey
Beardsley’s. But let us not overlook the fact that there is everywhere
manifested a vast interest in the odd and the bizarre, in the occult
and the fantastic. That peculiar interest accounts for the popularity
of others besides those whose names I have mentioned; Poe, for
instance, and Ambrose Bierce, and Zola, and Gautier and De Maupassant.
It accounted for the vast interest which, as Frank Harris tells us,
was manifested in Wilde’s poem, _The Harlot’s House_, as a poem slight
enough, but as a picture very attractive, as all forbidden things are
attractive.
We caught the tread of dancing feet,
We loitered down the moonlit street,
And stopped beneath the harlot’s house.
Inside, above the din and fray,
We heard the loud musicians play
The “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss.
Like strange mechanical grotesques,
Making fantastic arabesques,
The shadows raced across the blind.
We watched the ghostly dancers spin
To sound of horn and violin,
Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.
Like wire-pulled automatons,
Slim silhouetted skeletons
Went sidling through the slow quadrille.
They took each other by the hand,
And danced a stately saraband;
Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.
Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.
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.”
Baudelaire, and Wilde as well, sometimes ran _fanti_, just as men
in arguments are intoxicated with their own verbosity. So we find
Wilde in the warmth of his partizanship not only couching a lance for
Baudelaire, but handling edged swords, to be wounded later with his
own weapons. Thus:
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it
the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colorless. By its
curiosity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its
intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony
of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality,
it is one with the higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What
are the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little about
chastity and it may be that it is to the shame of Magdalen, and not
to their own purity, that the Lucretias of modern life owe their
freedom from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion it
makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a
multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty
of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly
proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged
in instinct before we become fine. Self-denial is simply a method
by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival
of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain
which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and
which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars
in the land. Virtues! Who knows what the virtues are? Not you.
Not I. Not any one. It is well for our vanity that we slay the
criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we
had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint
goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his
harvest.--_The Critic as Artist._
That, which played a great part in Wilde’s trial, is apparently a
kind of advocacy of the M. Fr. Paulhan point of view, (_Le Nouveau
Mysticisme_, page 94) the Decadent philosophy dished up and watered
for British consumption. Baudelaire had said that “the vulgar sought
goodness as an end,” and Wilde had this:
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is
obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid
terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low
passion for middle-class respectability.--_The Critic as Artist._
Instances might be multiplied, but enough has been said to show that
Wilde not only depended for effects upon a manifestation of his spirit
of contradiction, but somewhat suffered in his art because of his
partizanship. Still, of his originality there can be no doubt and a
partizan is not necessarily a plagiarist.
As to the charge of plagiarism, while others have charged Wilde with
the literary sin, it remained for his former friend, Lord Alfred
Douglas, to be the most bitter in denunciation. “His (Wilde’s) sonnets
are, for the most part, Miltonic in their effects; the metre and
method of _In Memoriam_ are used in the greater number of his lyrics;
and he used the metre which Tennyson sealed to himself for all time
even in _The Sphinx_, which is his great set work; while in such
pieces as _Charmides_, _Panthea_, _Humanitad_ and _The Burden of Itys_
he borrowed the grave pipe of Matthew Arnold.” Writing of the poem
_Le Mer_, Douglas says: “The bird is Wilde, the plumage and call are
Tennyson’s to a fault.” Again, “While Wilde arranges the stanzas as
though they consisted of two lines, they really consist of Tennyson’s
four ... Tennyson’s suns as well as Tennyson’s stanza!” In another
place Douglas writes: “I have not space to enter into great detail
with regard to those lyrics of Wilde which are not flatly Tennysonian.
There are about twenty of them, and they include a cheap imitation of
_La Belle Dame sans Merci_, a flagrant copy of Hood’s lines beginning
‘Take her up tenderly’--(Douglas refers to the poem _The Bridge of
Sighs_)--and sundry pieces which are childishly reminiscent of Mrs.
Browning, William Morris and even Jean Ingelow.... Wilde was an
over-sedulous ape, so over-sedulous, in fact, that he is careful to
emphasize and exaggerate the very faults and defects of his masters.”
Douglas is bitter as gall and, like the gallant Michael Monahan, I
prefer to quote him with the sonnet he wrote on learning of the death
of Oscar Wilde:
I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face
All radiant and unshadowed of distress.
And as of old, in music measureless,
I heard his golden voice and marked him trace
Under the common thing the hidden grace,
And conjure wonder out of emptiness,
Till mean things put on beauty like a dress,
And all the world was an enchanted place.
And then methought outside a fast-locked gate
I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,
Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,
Wonders that might have been articulate,
And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds,
And so I woke and knew that he was dead!
It leaves a sweeter taste in the mouth.