Perhaps Wilde was to the fashionable of London much as the robust
Henry Fielding was to the literary world when Samuel Richardson
wrote _Clarissa Harlowe_. He had to shock the polite world out
of its terrible complacency. For there were such proper waxen
figures as Samuel Smiles and Martin Farquahar Tupper cooing, and
there were many who modeled their conduct upon the example of Sir
Charles Grandison--milk and water men, sanctified prigs, pious and
irreproachable gentlemen in whose mouths butter would not melt. To be
respectable was the one virtue, and tender sensibilities were shocked
when Shaw wore a woolen shirt and when Morris solemnly sat on his silk
hat. Yet, there must have been a secret delight in scandal. Turning
over the newspapers of the day we find prominence given to items with
salacious base. For instance, the crimes of Jack the Ripper, the
Charles Dilke divorce case, the Parnell-O’Shea tangle, Stead’s Maiden
Tribute of Modern Babylon. The fascination of murder held them as now.
Quiet men and women found something of vast interest in reading reports
of acts of violence, in living in imagination unrestrained lives.
But, the record of crime had been left to inept hands. To be sure in
novels, action hinged upon crime, but in novels criminals were always
black, lost souls who bore the brand of Cain on their brows, had no
single redeeming trait and went their way for a time certain of being
laid by the heels. It was, then, a tremendous and daring conception of
Oscar Wilde to take a wholesale murderer as the subject of an essay,
but he did so and produced a most interesting piece of work conceived
in graceful vein in his _Pen, Pencil and Poison_--the story of Thomas
Griffiths Wainewright. The subject of the essay has been confused with
another murderer, Henry Wainwright, also an educated man with literary
tastes, familiar with the actors and poets of his day, but the last
named murderer was but a clumsy fellow compared with Wilde’s hero.
The late Max Nordau in his book _Degeneration_ has found, stupidly
enough, evidence of a love for “immorality” in Wilde because of the
essay, tearing from the context certain passages and adducing them
as proof of Wilde’s diabolism. One paragraph is truly amusing in its
ingenuousness. I quote from page 320:
“Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In
a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith
Wainewright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of
several people, he says: ‘He was a forger of no mean or ordinary
capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without
a rival in this or any age.’ ‘This remarkable man, so powerful
with pen and pencil, and poison.’ ‘He sought to find expression by
pen or poison.’ ‘When a friend reproached him with the murder of
Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Yes; it
was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”’ ‘His
crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked.’ ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea
that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’
“He cultivates incidently a slight mysticism in colours. ‘He,’
Wainewright, ‘had that curious love of green which in individuals
is always the sign of subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations
is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence, of morals.’”
That, of course, is sheer stupidity. We do not denounce Charles
Dickens because he told the story of Bill Sikes, of the Artful Dodger,
of Fagin, nor do we shudder at the name of Conrad because he ended
_Victory_ as he did. Doubtless, Max Nordau, on similar grounds to those
on which he condemned Wilde and Ibsen and Nietzsche as degenerates,
might have found cause to place the Bible on his index expurgatoris.
The fact is that Oscar Wilde wrote a fine essay on the murderer and
not perhaps so much because he was a murderer, as that he was one of
those extraordinary men who failed to become what he bade to be, and
was the friend and companion of such men as Charles Lamb, Dickens,
Macready and Hablot Browne. Perhaps Wilde had in mind his own case,
certainly there are prophetic passages and there is for example a
parallel existing between the incident told by Gide when he met Wilde
in connection with Wainewright.
While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came
across him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of
London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they
suddenly caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiant
stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was “horrified to recognize a
man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he
had dined.”
Look at the essay on Wainewright as the picture of a man who tortures
himself, a man of taste and sensibility at whose heart the worm of
misery gnawed constantly, a man sickened with secret maladies, a man
with brain on fire who moved among his fellows with a smiling face,
fearing at every moment the knocking at the gate which would mean his
doom--read the essay with all that in mind and you will be rightly
attuned for the pleasure. No show mannikin, no machine of creaking wood
has Wilde in his Wainewright, but a living thing, a frightened thing, a
tormented thing, a vice ridden thing. You feel the daily fear that must
have been in the murderer’s heart though Wilde does not play on the
vulgar emotions, displaying remorse crudely as Dickens does in his tale
of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit. But, in some mysterious manner, Wilde
makes his reader sense a melancholy, just as Beethoven makes us sense
a melancholy in that immortal passage of his seventh symphony when the
stringed instruments sob in the bass.
Here is Wilde’s picture of the man in the midst of the things that he
loved:
And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the
delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted
figures and the faint ΚΑΛΟΕ finely traced upon its side, and behind
it hangs an engraving of the “Delphic Sibyl” of Michael Angelo,
or of the “Pastoral” of Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine
majolica, and here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the
table lies a book of Hours “cased in a cover of solid silver gilt,
wrought with quaint devices and studded with small brilliants and
rubies,” and close by it “squats a little ugly monster, a Lar,
perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily.” Some
dark antique bronzes contrast “with the pale gleam of two noble
_Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other molded in
wax.” He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
_bonbonniere_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
“brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,” his citron morocco
letter-case and his “pomona-green” chair.
One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts
and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning
over his fine collection of Marc Antonios, and his Turner’s “Liber
Studiorum,” of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with
a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, “the head of
Alexander on an onyx of two strata,” or “that superb _altissimo
relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.”
And again, in a charming passage:
Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and
his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale
lemon-colored kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded
by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while
his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave
him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different
from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw
him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. “Amongst the
company, all literary men, sat a murderer,” he tells us, and he
goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated
the face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with
intellectual interest across the table at the young writer beneath
whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much
unaffected sensibility, and speculates on “what sudden growth of
another interest,” would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was
even then guilty.
In that last sentence, the reference to the “terrible sin” of which
he knew himself to be guilty, I cannot but see a subtle reference to
himself. Indeed, Wilde seems to be constantly projecting himself,
giving hints as it were, of what might be, just as a child guilty of
some misdemeanor, will make veiled references to its plight yet, at
the same time, do all that is possible to avoid discovery. Here is a
passage in which, writing of Wainewright, he surely describes himself:
His delicately strung organization, however indifferent it might
have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly
sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing that mars
and maims human life.
Again:
Like Baudelaire, he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier,
he was fascinated by that “sweet marble monster” of both sexes that
we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.
And this too, which is Wilde to a T:
Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to
any man of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of
Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school
_Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have invented. He also saw that
it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public
interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic
articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had
for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and
in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly
notes for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the
least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most
obvious influence. A publicist, now-a-days, is a man who bores the
community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.
Perhaps too there is an apologia in another passage:
This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
literary London, and made so brilliant a _debut_ in life and
letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew
Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many
of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is,
indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of
art and nature was a mere pretense and assumption, and others have
denied to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or
at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is
nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true
basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists.
But it is neither safe nor wise to theorize too much, though, to be
sure, more than one of us feel strongly inclined to say of Wilde as he
said of Wainewright:
The moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection
that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required.
Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero,
or scolding Tiberius or censuring Cæsar Borgia. These personages
have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with
terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not
in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them.
They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither
art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.
Wilde’s two essays, _The Decay of Lying_ and _The Critic as Artist_ I
have referred to several times in the course of this essay, and also
in another booklet, _The Tragic Story of Oscar Wilde_. In much, both
essays are complementary to his _Art and Decoration_: the themes wind
in and out like the theme in a fugue. There are inconsistencies, there
is sometimes flippancy and there is much of utmost exquisite polish.
But always--style--style that becomes sometimes pavonic display.
Witness, from the _Decay of the Art of Lying_:
The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like
the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvelous tale, and fantasy _La Chimere_,
dances around it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned
voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are
all bored to death with the common-place character of modern
fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings.
And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall
all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of
wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will
change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth
and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do
on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were
actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places,
and the phœnix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We
shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the
toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand
in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing
of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and
that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But
before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.
Of course, it must be admitted that there is truth in those who
complain that Wilde advocated no system of morality which could
console, raise or satisfy men. But to do that was not Wilde’s mission.
He was no moralist--made, indeed, his art his religion and deals with,
as Wordsworth said:
the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all.
(Prelude xl, 142.)
but his world, like the world of the Pre-Raphaelites, was confessedly a
falsehood, a world other than that which we see. That art, or poetry,
could go on to take in things other than of fairy land, could deal
with such things as sky-scrapers, fire vomiting factories, machinery,
as it does in the hands of Carl Sandburg, was unthinkable to Wilde
as it would have been unthinkable to Ruskin. But then, Wilde found
things to love which would have been altogether strange to his men of
Greece--mountain mists, brown fogs, clefts in rocks. So, pondering,
we get into deep water. The idea of truth as conceived by the artist
and the idea as conceived by the religious mind.... religion born of
faith and art born of perception.... religion growing out of a soil of
disillusion, art growing out of joy of life....