Possessed with the spirit of contradiction, obsessed with the
Baudelairean diabolism, Wilde tried his hand at fiction with curious
results. Be it remembered that he was one of those odd and lucky
individuals in whom bubble up at all times plots and ideas and
situations capable of being used in the making of stories. Such
minds see not only the thing before them, a man and a woman, we will
say, walking towards one another over a bridge, but with a leap into
a strange world of possibilities or probabilities, there is conjured
up within them a thousand visions of things odd and fantastic, which
might happen. It is not even correct to say that they are men of great
imagination--they are more than that. They are, in a respect, tortured
men, men whose minds project them into all kinds of situations. They
themselves die a thousand deaths, suffer a thousand sorrows and pains,
are torn with a thousand griefs. You see that kind of character in
Charles Dickens who is always on the verge of tears or laughter,
enjoying life, actually enjoying it with Micawber, with Pickwick, with
Sam Weller, with Cap’n Cuttle, with the Crummeles: suffering with
Oliver Twist, with Sidney Carton, with his little Nell, with his Tom
Pinch. Such men live the lives that they portray and there is a vast
gulf separating them from those writers who artistically contrive
their characters but keep themselves apart from them as a Creator is
apart from his creatures. Thackeray for instance, who will paint for
you a Beatrix, a Henry Esmond, a Harry Warrington, a Madam Bernstein,
a Captain Costigan, but who will step down as it were, among his
audience, and comment upon the characters upon the stage; sometimes,
indeed, interrupt his narrative to point a moral. Of that sort too was
Trollope: of the other sort was George Eliot. Yet, in both cases, in
the case of Dickens as well as in the case of Thackeray, with George
Eliot as with Trollope, you have accurate pictures of life and of
society, and the prejudices, the motives, the ambitions, the form and
construction of the mind of the fictional personages are as evident to
the reader as if he lived in their very presence.
Accepting Dickens and Thackeray as examples, we see Wilde with that
peculiar constitution of mind which made him prone to identify himself
with his characters, but, again, he had that streak of perversity in
him which refused to allow the characters he imagined to act a rational
way or to live in a rational world. There was in him that childish
and destructive habit of destroying his own toys, the habit we see in
Chesterton who paints pictures perfectly credible in his Auberons and
Barkers and Quins, but sets them to doing fantastic tricks, standing
on their heads, running about in queer disguises and undertaking to do
things that would, in a sane society, promptly land them in the lunatic
asylum. And, of course, with the trick of perversity, Wilde had that
Baudelairean bent.
With what has been said kept in mind, consider Wilde’s story, _Lord
Arthur Savile’s Crime_, which appeared in the _Court and Society
Review_ in 1887 and in book form in 1891. In the story you have a mimic
world that is a faithful reflection of the contemporary world with its
lords and ladies and society folk of wealth, hobnobbing with poets,
socialists, nihilists, sceptics and odd characters. To verify the truth
of his picture of the reception at Bentick house, one has but to turn
to the pages of the newspapers of the day, the society journals rather,
and mark the names of those in the public eye: Lady Jeune, William
Morris, Prince Kropotkine, Burne Jones, Labouchere, the Positivist
crowd with Frederic Harrison and his friends, the theosophists with
Madam Blavatsky and Sinnett, the agnostics with Annie Besant and
Stewart Ross and Dr. Marsh; others too, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard
Shaw, Belfort Bax, Walter Crane. Such a gathering is hardly possible in
America where there is no democracy, but, instead, an aristocracy of
wealth. It was, and is, quite possible in the older country in which
there is a real democracy, where two impulses are present, a respect
for tradition and for visible authority and a regard for precedent on
the one hand, and on the other a regard for certain abstract principles
and a strong sense of the value of individual judgment. Between an
organized aristocracy and an organic people things are balanced and the
triumph of one does not develop into despotism, nor does the triumph
of the other result in sullen mob rule. So, as I say, the picture of
the reception is perfectly credible and Wilde paints well, as well as
Dickens paints when he tells us of the belfry in _The Chimes_, or of
Fountain Court in his _Martin Chuzzlewit_.
But now mark the Wilde who twists things, who, in a stage set for
things as they are, chooses, in his contradictory spirit, to bring in
events as they are not at all apt to be.
One of his characters is a palmist and to him goes the hero, Lord
Arthur Savile. The palmist, Mr. Podgers, tells his client that his fate
is read--that he is to become a murderer. Now see the odd kink, the
paradox. Lord Savile, being about to marry, finds his mind occupied
with the prediction. So, since it is decreed that he must do murder,
the sooner it is done and out of the way, the better. There is a kind
of Benvenuto Cellini touch here, the Cellini who when at work in
his shop finds his brain on fire because a fellow has annoyed him,
so rushes out dagger in hand to stab him and have done with it; the
Cellini who finding himself filled with amatory desire while at work,
satisfies himself with his model and gets to work again. So Wilde’s
Lord Savile. To him it does not very much matter who the victim is, so
he tries to poison an aunt and fails, then attempts to kill an uncle
with an infernal machine. Disgusted with his ill success he takes a
walk along the Thames embankment to ponder, when his eyes light upon
the palmist leaning on the parapet with folded arms, gazing into the
black depth. Then:
In a moment he had seized Mr. Podgers by the legs and flung him
into the Thames. There was a coarse oath, a heavy splash, and all
was still. Lord Arthur looked anxiously over, but could see nothing
of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an eddy of
moonlit water. After a time it sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers
was visible. Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky
misshapen figure striking out for the staircase of the bridge, and
a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to
be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a
cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realized the decree
of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and Sybil’s name came
to his lips.
You see the kink, or course. A murder with no cause. A murder and
no remorse. The victim rather a scarecrow kind of figure. And you
see also, the Baudelairean gesture properly watered for English
consumption. Bear in mind, too, the quotation made a few pages ago from
_The Critic as Artist_, relating to sin as an essential element of
progress.
Of course, the story is all tricksy fooling and certainly not worth
while. It is thin stuff, poor stuff, unworthy stuff and all this
largely because insincere and imitative. One seems to see Wilde
starting seriously enough, to break off at a tangent with a discordant
burst of laughter. But here is a point to consider. Had Wilde been
accused of murder, and placed on trial, what hidden tendency think you,
would have been discovered by a keen lawyer in the book? There’s matter
for thought there.
We pass to the longer story, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. In this,
Wilde tried to do something new, putting indeed, into the mouth of
one of his characters his ideal: “to write a novel that would be as
lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal.” He did, or attempted
more, endeavoring to break away from the English tradition and write
a novel with no love interest as motive. A task glorious enough to be
sure, for, as every thoughtful man must have realized, the Anglo-Saxon
is not obsessed with sex. The acquisition of a woman is by no means
the greatest thing in life, nor is it the thing that absorbs a man.
Marriage is a mere incident. Other things occupy his mind far more than
sex: business, for example, and art, and ambition.
Now the story thread of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is slight enough.
A picture has been painted by Dorian’s friend, and, while the subject
of the picture retains his youth and beauty, the picture ages, the
face on the canvas reflecting the life of the man, showing the stigmata
of a life of folly, of vice, of lust, of hypocrisy. The discovery of
the change is thus described:
“You won’t? Then I must do it myself,” said the young man; and he
tore the curtain from its rod, and flung it on the ground.
An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s lips as he saw in
the dim light the hideous thing on the canvas leering at him.
There was something in its expression that filled him with disgust
and loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own face that he
was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely
marred that marvelous beauty. There was still some gold in the
thinning hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The sodden
eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the noble
curves had not yet passed entirely away from chiseled nostrils and
from plastic throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done
it? He seemed to recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his
own design. The idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized
the lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the left hand
corner was his own name, traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble satire.
Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed at it. “My God!
if it is true,” he exclaimed, “and this is what you have done with
your life, why, you must be worse even than those who talk against
you fancy you to be!” He held the light up again to the canvas,
and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed, and as
he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness
and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life
the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting
of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.
A mere extract, of course, robs the scene of its vitality, but still,
Wilde does not stir in the reader the passion of horror that a true
artist should. Compare the scene with that never-to-be-forgotten page
in Conrad’s _Secret Agent_ where the woman thrusts the carving knife
into the heart of her husband, or the latter part of _Le Père Goriot_
where Balzac bruises the reader’s heart as he tells of the torture of
anguish; or the picture in Thackeray’s _Vanity Fair_ where Steyne is
knocked down. The truth is that Wilde, as Ross told Blunt, was forever
thinking of his style, and when a man has his pose in mind, he is not
very apt to lay the lash on heavily. Machen, in his _Hieroglyphics_,
has had much to say on the ecstasy of writers, much that is well worth
reading, and he proves his point to the hilt. That ecstasy, Wilde
lacked. Within him were no eternal tempests. Never could he say with
Byron, “I have written from the fulness of my mind, from passion, from
impulse, from many motives but not from their sweet voices.” Wilde did
write for “sweet voices” and, consequently he lacked much that a writer
of fiction requires. Turn to the passage in the _Secret Agent_, which I
have mentioned, read it and compare it with this, the death of Dorian
Gray. Wilde seems sluggish, uninterested, aloof.
Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the half clad domestics
were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was
crying, and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.
After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of
the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no
reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly
trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on
to the balcony. The windows yielded easily; the bolts were old.
When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid
portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the
wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was
a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was
withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they
had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
The most patient of readers is surfeited in the book with long,
descriptive, catalogue-like passages telling of the fantastic pursuits
of Dorian Gray, a literary trick evidently imitative of certain
French writers--Barres, Huysmans and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. Indeed,
in places, the character Dorian Gray is strongly reminiscent of the
character Des Essientes who “with his vaporizers injected into his
room an essence formed of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, ess.
boquet....” There is much more of it in the pages of _A Rebours_. As I
say, Wilde proved himself to be very imitative. You must read his ninth
chapter, but a single quotation will give some idea:
And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their
manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils, and burning odorous
gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that
had not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself
to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in
frankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred
one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead
romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that
stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real
psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of
sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic
balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens of
hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able
to expel melancholy from the soul.
Dorian Gray collects many things, plays with many things, to chase away
his _ennui_: musical instruments, jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical
vestments, and there are long catalogues in the case of each one
similar to that given above in relation to perfumes. There are pages,
especially in the ninth chapter that remind the reader of nothing more
than a great storehouse with Wilde standing before jumbled piles,
picking this thing after that in the manner of a suave auctioneer and
commenting upon each article quite oblivious of the fact that his
hearers yawn, and that no real business is being done.
There is, all through the book, the Baudelairean influence. Dorian Gray
becomes very like the owls of Baudelaire sitting in a row, in his moods
of inactivity. Nor is the Baudelairean interest in crime and criminals
unimitated. Dorian ponders over strange things: over Gian Maria who
used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was
“covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on
his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him, and his mantle
stained with the blood of Perotto; Petro Riario, the young Cardinal
Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sextus IV., whose
beauty was equaled only by his debauchery, and who received Leonora
of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with
nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve her at
the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be
cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red
blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the fiend, as was
reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling
with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took
the name of Innocent, and into whose torpid veins the blood of
three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta,
the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was
burned at Rome, as the enemy of God and man, who strangled
Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a cup
of emerald, and in honor of a shameful passion built a pagan church
for Christian worship; Charles VI., who had so wildly adored his
brother’s wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that
was coming on him, and who could only be soothed by Saracen cards
painted with the images of Love and Death and Madness; and, in his
trimmed jerkin and jeweled cap and acanthus-like curls, Grifonetto
Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his
page, and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the
yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose
but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.”
The truth is, that in the character Dorian Gray, Wilde portrayed not
a normal man, but one who comes very near the border line of being
what Krafft-Ebing would have termed a degenerate. Certainly he shows a
moral insensibility, a lack of proper judgment and ethical ideas. His
egoistic ambition is unlimited and he is full of a sentimentality that
is shallow cant. The book made a sensation and estimates of it ranged
from the zenith to nadir. There were those who extolled it and those
who damned it, just as there were those that extolled and others that
damned _Jurgen_ and _Ulysses_, as there were those that raised Rossetti
to the skies and others who charged him with all sorts of artistic sins
and said things anent the extolling of fleshliness as the distinct and
supreme end of pictorial and poetic art.
The thing that is rare and valuable in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is
the vivid coloring, the effect of an atmosphere of expensive and highly
artificial life and cultured luxury; the florid and poetic style.
He depicts a highly artificial life and idealizes it. He portrays
a quite impossible world, as impossible as the world of pastoral
poetry where meadows were inhabited by youths and maidens who guided
sheep and carried beribboned crooks, and conversed in rhymed iambic
octosyllables, and danced and sang. For, in your experience doubtless
as in mine, never has man talked to man, off of a chautauquan platform,
like this:
“Let us go and sit in the shade,” said Lord Henry. “Parker has
brought out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare
you will be quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again.
You really must not let yourself become sunburned. It would be very
unbecoming to you.”
“What does it matter?” cried Dorian, laughing, as he sat down on
the seat at the end of the garden.
“It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray.”
“Why?”
“Because you have now the most marvelous youth, and youth is the
one thing worth having.”
“I don’t feel that, Lord Henry.”
“No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled
and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and
passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it,
you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.
Will it always be so?... You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr.
Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius--is
higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one
of the great facts of the world, like sun-light, or spring-time, or
the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon.
It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It
makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost
it you won’t smile.
“People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be
so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty
is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not
judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible,
not the invisible.”
But Wilde was idealizing, making deliberately an untrue, but charming
picture--doing indeed in another way what old Izaak Walton did in
his _Compleat Angler_, or what John Fletcher did in his _Faithful
Shepherdess_.
As for the vivid coloring of which I spoke, read this:
“The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the
light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came
through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was
lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored
blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly
able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and
now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted
across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front
of the huge windows, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect,
and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in
an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of
swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering
their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with
monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early
June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive,
and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant
organ.”
You see from that what Wilde meant when he made his character express
a wish to write a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet.
I think that in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, Wilde started with
the Persian carpet in his mind’s eye, but sometimes lapsed into the
carelessness of a wool sack maker. He is not innocent of passages
suggestive of the transpontine drama. But that we overlook in sheer
delight at his joy in magnificence.
A last word on _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. It appeared at the end of
a time when the English world was full of books with a purpose, such
books as Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_, Edna Lyell’s sentimental
agnosticism, Grant Allen’s _Woman Who Did_, and, at the same time,
there was a lively stream of Zola translations, much energetic,
realistic stuff very comparable with the work of Sherwood Anderson
of our day. To go further, there was much of the kind of fiction,
conventionally unconventional on the order of the present day Ben
Hecht. There was George Moore, too. The strictly conventional had
Hall Caine, Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, writers of the stripe
of Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton Porter. Oscar Wilde struck a
path away from all that kind of thing and swung towards a modified
romanticism, a something that should not be literary photography. His
attempt was rather to lead away from the morass of realism into the
valley of idealism. You get the idea somewhat in the Shakespearean
lesson that
Nature is made better by no mean,
But Nature makes that mean; so o’er that art,
Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes.... This is an art
Which does mend Nature--change it rather: but
The art itself is Nature.
So we come to the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, the best by far of which
is _The Happy Prince_. These naturally gave Wilde full scope for his
passion for color and luxury and decorative effects. But Wilde’s fairy
tales were fairy tales for grown ups and not for children. Indeed, it
is safe to say that for small folk who are in the Grimm’s Fairy Tale
age, they do not stand the test of reading aloud--the only test in a
children’s book. Oliver Goldsmith observed wittily that Dr. Johnson
made his little fish talk like great whales. Oscar Wilde made his fairy
animals and creatures talk like Oscar Wilde. Try this on a child and
observe the effect. “Tomorrow my friends will fly up to the Second
Cataract. The river horse couches there among the bulrushes and on
a great granite throne sits the great God Memnon. All night long he
watches the stars, and when the morning star shines, he utters one cry
of joy and then is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the
water’s edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar
is louder than the roar of the Cataract.”
It would be waste of space to spend words on what children do, and
do not, appreciate. Had Wilde sought a guide, he could have taken
none better than his contemporary, Walter Crane. One careful study of
Walter Crane’s illustrations to Grimm’s household stories, the picture
of the Sleeping Beauty for example, would have been sufficient. But
Wilde was not writing for children, nor had he the faculty of doing
so. What Wilde cared about was his style--consideration of that filled
his horizon. Besides, his fairy tales carried altogether too obvious
a moral lesson. Children demand simplicity, and simplicity and Oscar
Wilde were ever strangers. The single tale, _The Happy Prince_, be it
said, is in altogether a different category. Wilde must have written
it because he wished to write it. Turning to the bibliography of Oscar
Wilde, I find that in every case, when fellow authors have written
about the book of fairy tales, there has been mention of _The Happy
Prince_. Walter Pater mentions it in a letter dated June 12th, to Oscar
Wilde: it is mentioned in a poem printed in the Harliquinade; Thomas
Hutchinson has a dedication to Oscar Wilde in his Jolts and Jingles:
“To you who wrote The Happy Prince,
The sweetest tale of modern time...”
Next appeared _The House of Pomegranates_, dedicated to Mrs. Wilde, a
book of tales frankly written for grown up folk in whom the love of
Romance is not dead. It was not a financial success and the stock was
sold off as a remainder. Wrote Wilde to the editor of the Pall Mall
Gazette: “... in building this House of Pomegranates, I had about as
much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the
British public.” In another letter he compares his situation as writer
of fairy tales with Andersen’s, saying that the true admirer of fairy
tales was to be found “not in the nursery, but on Parnassus.”
True, equally with Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde might have
written fairy stories because it pleased him to do so, but between
the method of the two men there was a gulf of difference. Andersen
wrote because he wanted to, but he wanted to do things that would
please children. Wilde wrote because he wanted to, but he wanted to
do things that would please himself. The fuss aesthetic is the one
thing that fairies will not put up with, the atmosphere that destroys
credibility. Wilde’s fantastic creatures were sophisticated rather
than simple, often self-conscious, like precocious children, hot house
beings eager for applause of their elders. Andersen’s fairy folk were
simple, dream-creatures that could stand cold water and clear air
and sunshine. In Wilde there is elegance always, but never rascally
gaiety. In Andersen there is quiet unobtrusiveness, never cleverness
nor facetiousness.