The critic of the critics was himself a critic. Whether he modified his
work to suit his editors, or whether he was of the kindly sympathetic
nature of a Michael Monahan or a William Marion Reedy is impossible to
say, but certain it is that the Wilde of the criticisms is altogether
a different being from the Wilde of the satirical epigram. You find
very little of the Wilde perversities and idiosyncrasies, certainly
none of the Hazlitt waspishness nor any of the Mencken bluntness. Now
and then there are discovered occasional touches of tenderness as in
his criticism of William Morris’s _House of the Wolfings_, (_Pall
Mall Gazette_, March 2nd, 1889) and again in the review of W. B.
Yeats’ _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_, written for the
magazine of which Wilde was editor, the _Woman’s World_, February,
1889. There is a geniality almost equal to that of Charles Lamb or
of Leigh Hunt somewhat evident. “As we read Mr. Morris’s story (The
Wolfings) with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative
and descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and
adventurous themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from
the ignoble fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day.
We breathe a purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind
of poetical quality of its own, and was simple, stately and complete.”
Certainly, Wilde as critic sought to be just, was at pains to write
frankly, vividly, accurately as possible. As critic he was thoroughly
in earnest. The clever smartness we discover in him in his plays is
absent in his critical work.
I think that the very real Wilde was revealed in a little essay,
a writing that appeared in _The Speaker_, February 8th, 1890. It
deals with a translation of the works of Chuang Tzu as made by Mr.
Herbert Giles, British Consul at Tamsui. With the Chinaman, Wilde was
sympathetic. The idea pleased him that all modes of government are
wrong, that they are unscientific because of their tendency to alter
the natural environment of men; immoral because they interfere with
the individual. In the essay there is a ring of Edmund Burke with his
“the thing, government, the thing itself, is the abuse.” It pleased
Wilde immensely to find that the sage born in the fourth century before
Christ denounced the uplifter, because trying to make others good was
as foolish an occupation as “beating a drum in a forest to find a
fugitive.” Wilde found a man after his heart in the philosopher who
declared against chattering about clever men, and lauding good men,
and, what was worse, deifying powerful men. Then there is this by
Wilde, talking about the accumulation of wealth, which, he says, Chuang
Tzu denounces as eloquently as Mr. Hyndman. Wilde agrees with the
philosopher, or at any rate, interprets him approvingly.
“The accumulation of wealth is to him the origin of evil. It
makes the strong violent and the weak dishonest. It creates the
petty thief and puts him in a bamboo cage. It creates the big
thief and sets him on a throne of white jade. It is the father
of competition, and competition is the waste, as well as the
destruction, of energy. The order of nature is rest, repetition and
peace. Weariness and war are the results of an artificial society
based upon capital; and the richer the society gets, the more
thoroughly bankrupt it is, for it has neither sufficient rewards
for the good nor sufficient punishment for the wicked. There is
also this to be remembered--that the prizes of the world degrade a
man as much as the world’s punishments. The age is rotten with the
worship of success. As for education, true wisdom can neither be
learnt nor taught. It is a spiritual state to which he who lives
in harmony with nature attains. Knowledge is shallow if we compare
it with the extent of the unknown, and only the unknowable is of
value. Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue
cleverer than others.”
Compare that with the passage in _The Critic As Artist_, a speech that
Wilde puts into the mouth of Gilbert:
_Ernest._ We exist, then, to do nothing?
_Gilbert._ It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is
limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him
who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age, are at
once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and
too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations
about life in exchange for life itself. To us the “citta divina”
is colorless, and the “fruitio Dei” without meaning. Metaphysics
do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of
date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes
“the spectator of all time and of all existence” is not really an
ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter
it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts
of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by
Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They
have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.
And in another place, later, in the same essay:
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct,
and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism,
is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
The great majority of people, being fully aware of this, rank
themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that
elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly
against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question
that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational
animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in
accordance with the dictates of reason.
Certainly, the philosophy of Chuang Tzu impressed Wilde greatly,
influenced him more than has been generally thought, and, in fact, the
philosophical basis of the greater part of the essay _The Critic As
Artist_ rests on that of the Chinese mystic, with a decided substratum
of Boehme. Boehme, certainly. The idea of self-surrender that Boehme
promulgated, you find everywhere in Wilde, like a recurring golden
thread in a tapestry. There is the Boehme “to-be” for which one will is
necessary; for the “becoming,” two. So Wilde:
Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for
its aim not _doing_ but _being_, and not _being_ merely, but
_becoming_--that is what the critical spirit can give us.
The mystery of it is that Wilde should have so intermixed in his
own life and philosophy the self-surrender of Boehme with the
self-assertion of Nietzsche. That he did so is not to be denied--to
attempt to explain how it so came to be is impossible. But then, who
can explain another? Who can understand or explain himself? The truth
is that Wilde, like everyone else, was a bundle of vain strivings, as
Thoreau put it. Wilde, like everyone else, gathered together his things
to make a bridge to the moon and wound up by making something like a
woodshed of the material. So do we all. Man’s reach certainly does
exceed his grasp. Browning said much there in a half dozen words.
Of course, there are _Sententiae_, little impatiences, sympathetic
critic though he was. “Most modern novels are more remarkable for
their crime than for their culture.” “Though the Psalm of Life be
shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it good poetry.”
“Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature,
and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.”
“Such novels as ---- are possibly more easy to write than to read.” “There
seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.”
“It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not
national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he
loves rather than to the land he lives in. The Muses care so little for
geography!”--but as critic of literature Wilde was eminently fair and
just, pointing out the good in writers so vastly apart as Walt Whitman,
Pater, Yeats, Blunt, Matthew Arnold; dropping his own prejudices,
getting inside the skins of those whose work he found to be worthy.