The words he once used about himself--"I am a symbolic figure"
--remain to this day the most significant thing that can be said of
Oscar Wilde.
It is given to very few men of talent, this peculiar privilege--this
privilege of being greater in what might be called the _shadow of
their personality_ than in any actual literary or artistic achievement
--and Wilde possesses it in a degree second to none.
"My genius is in my life," he said on another occasion, and the
words are literally and most fatally true.
In the confused controversies of the present age it is difficult to
disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side
with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider
and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called
the Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob;
that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding,
at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most
stupid brutality.
It would be hardly a true statement to say that the Renaissance
referred to--this modern Renaissance, not less formidable than the
historic revolt which bears that name--is an insurrection of free
spirits against Christianity. It is much rather a reversion to a humane
and classic reasonableness as opposed to mob-stupidity and
middle-class philistinism--things which only the blundering of centuries of
popular misapprehension could associate with the sublime and the
imaginative figure of Christ.
It is altogether a mistake to assume that in "De Profundis" Wilde
retracted his classic protest and bowed his head once more in the
house of Rimmon.
What he did was to salute, in the name of the aesthetic freedom he
represented, those enduring elements of human loveliness and
beauty in that figure which three hundred years of hypocritical
puritanism have proved unable to tarnish. What creates the peculiar
savagery of hatred which his name has still the power to conjure up
among the enemies of civilisation has little to do with the ambiguous
causes of his final downfall. These, of course, gave him up, bound
hand and foot, into their hands. But these, though the overt excuse of
their rancour, are far from being its real motive-force. To reach that
we must look to the nature of the formidable weapon which it was
his habit, in season and out of season, to use against this mob-rule--I
mean his sense of humour.
The stupid middle-class obscurantism, so alien to all humane
reasonableness, which, in our Anglo-Saxon communities, masquerades
under the cloak of a passionate and imaginative religion,
is more sensitive to ridicule than to any other form of attack,
and Wilde attacked it mercilessly with a ridicule that cut to the bone.
They are not by any means of equal value, these epigrams of his,
with which he defended intelligence against stupidity and classical
light against Gothic darkness.
They are not as humorous as Voltaire's. They are not as
philosophical as Goethe's. Compared with the aphorisms of these
masters they are light and frivolous. But for this very reason perhaps,
they serve the great cause--the cause of humane and enlightened
civilisation--better in our age of vulgar mob-rule than more
recondite "logoi."
They pierce the hide of the thickest and dullest; they startle and
bewilder the brains of the most crass and the most insensitive. And it
is just because they do this that Wilde is so cordially feared and
hated. It was, one cannot help feeling, the presence in him of a
shrewd vein of sheer boyish bravado, mingled--one might go even
as far as that--with a dash of incorrigible worldliness in his own
temper, that made his hits so effective and wounding.
It is interesting, with this in mind, to compare Wilde's witticisms
with those of Matthew Arnold or Bernard Shaw. The reason that
Wilde's lash cuts deeper than either of these other champions of
rational humanism, is that he goes, with more classical clearness,
straight to the root of the matter.
The author of "Thyrsis" was not himself free from a certain
melancholy hankering after "categorical imperatives," and beneath
the cap and bells of his theological fooling, Shaw is, of course, as
gravely moralistic as any puritan could wish.
Neither of these--neither the ironical schoolmaster nor the farcical
clown of our Renaissance of intelligence--could exchange ideas with
Pericles, say, or Caesar, without betraying a puritanical fussiness
that would grievously bewilder the lucid minds of those great men.
The philosophy of Wilde's aesthetic revolt against our degraded
mob-ridden conscience was borrowed from Walter Pater, but
whereas that shy and subtle spirit moved darkly and mysteriously
aside from all contact with the vulgar herd, Wilde, full of gay and
wanton pride in his sacred mission, lost no opportunity of flaunting
his classic orthodoxy in the face of the heretical mob.
Since the death of Wilde, the brunt of the battle for the spiritual
liberties of the race has been borne by the sterner and more
formidable figure of Nietzsche; but the vein of high and terrible
imagination in this great poet of the Superman sets him much closer
to the company of the saints and mystics than to that of the
instinctive children of the pagan ideal.
Oscar Wilde's name has become a sort of rallying cry to all those
writers and artists who suffer, in one degree or another, from the
persecution of the mob--of the mob goaded on to blind brutality by
the crafty incentives of those conspirators of reaction whose interest
lies in keeping the people enslaved. This has come about, in a large
measure, as much by the renown of his defects as by reason of his
fine quality.
The majority of men of talent lack the spirit and the gall to defy the
enemy on equal terms. But Wilde while possessing nobler faculties
had an undeniable vein in him of sheer youthful insolence. To the
impertinence of society he could oppose the impertinence of the
artist, and to the effrontery of the world he could offer the effrontery
of genius.
The power of personality, transcending any actual literary
achievement, is what remains in the mind when one has done
reading him, and this very faculty--of communicating to us, who
never saw him or heard him speak, the vivid impact of his
overbearing presence--is itself evidence of a rare kind of genius. It is
even a little ironical that he, above all men the punctilious and
precious literary craftsman, should ultimately dominate us not so
much by the magic of his art as by the spell of his wilful and wanton
individuality, and the situation is heightened still further by the
extraordinary variety of his works and their amazing perfection in
their different spheres.
One might easily conceive an artist capable of producing so
clean-cut and crystalline a comedy as "The Importance of Being Earnest,"
and so finished and flawless a tragedy as "Salome," disappearing
quite out of sight, in the manner so commended by Flaubert, behind
the shining objectivity of his flawless creations. But so far from
disappearing, Oscar Wilde manages to emphasise himself and his
imposing presence only the more startlingly and flagrantly, the more
the gem-like images he projects harden and glitter.
Astoundingly versatile as he was--capable of producing in "Reading
Gaol" the best tragic ballad since "The Ancient Mariner," and in
"Intentions" one of the best critical expositions of the open secret of
art ever written at all--he never permits us for a second to lose touch
with the wayward and resplendent figure, so full, for all its bravado,
of a certain disarming childishness, of his own defiant personality.
And the fact remains that, perfect in their various kinds though these
works of his are, they would never appeal to us as they do, and
Oscar Wilde would never be to us what he is, if it were not for the
predominance of this personal touch.
I sometimes catch myself wondering what my own feeling would be
as to the value of these things--of the "Soul of Man," for instance, or
"Intentions," or the Comedies, or the Poems--if the unthinkable
thing could be done, and the emergence of this irresistible figure
from behind it all could be drastically eliminated. I find myself
conscious, at these times, of a faint disturbing doubt; as though after
all, in spite of their jewel-like perfection, these wonderful and varied
achievements were not quite the real thing, were not altogether in
the "supreme manner." There seems to me--at the moments when
this doubt arises--something too self-consciously (how shall I put it?)
_artistic_ about these performances, something strained and forced
and far-fetched, which separates them from the large inevitable
utterances of classic genius.
I am ready to confess that I am not sure that this feeling is a matter
of personal predilection or whether it has the larger and graver
weight behind it of the traditional instincts of humanity, instincts out
of which spring our only permanent judgments. What I feel at any
rate is this: that there is an absence in Wilde's writings of that large
cool spaciousness, produced by the magical influence of earth and
sky and sea, of which one is always conscious in the greater masters.
"No gentleman," he is said to have remarked once, "ever looks out
of the window"; and it is precisely this "never looking out of the
window" that produces his most serious limitations.
In one respect I must acknowledge myself grateful to Wilde, even
for this very avoidance of what might be called the "magical"
element in things. His clear-cut palpable images, carved, as one so
often feels, in ebony or ivory or gold, offer an admirable relief, like
the laying of one's hand upon pieces of Hellenic statuary, after
wandering among the vague mists and "beached margents."
Certainly if all that one saw when one "looked out of the window"
were Irish fairies with dim hair drifting down pallid rivers, there
would be some reason for drawing the curtains close and toying in
the lamp-light with cameo-carved profiles of Antinous and
Cleopatra!
But nature has more to give us than the elfish fantasies, charming as
these may be, of Celtic legend--more to give us than those "brown
fauns" and "hoofed Centaurs" and milk-white peacocks, which
Wilde loves to paint with his Tiepolo-like brush. The dew of the
morning does not fall less lightly because real autumns bring it, nor
does the "wide aerial landscape" of our human wayfaring show less
fair, or its ancient antagonist the "salt estranging sea" less terrible,
because these require no legendary art to endow them with mystery.
Plausible and full of significance as these honeyed arguments in
"Intentions" are--and fruitful as they are in affording us weapons
wherewith to defend ourselves from the mob--it is still well, it is still
necessary, to place against them the great Da Vinci saying, "Nature
is the Mistress of the higher intelligences."
Wilde must be held responsible--along with others of his epoch--for
the encouragement of that deplorable modern heresy which finds in
bric-à-brac and what are called "objets d'art" a disproportionate
monopoly of the beauty and wonder of the world. One turns a little
wearily at last from the silver mirrors and purple masks. One turns
to the great winds that issue forth out of the caverns of the night.
One turns to the sun and to the rain, which fall upon the common
grass.
However! It is not a wise procedure to demand from a writer virtues
and qualities completely out of his rôle. In our particular race there
is far more danger of the beauty and significance of art--together
with all its subtler and less normal symbols--perishing under crude
and sentimental Nature-worship, than of their being granted too
large a place in our crowded house of thought.
After all, the art which Wilde assures us adds so richly to Nature, "is
an art which Nature makes." They are not lovers of what is rarest
and finest in our human civilisation who would suppress everything
which deviates from the common track.
Who has given these people--these middle-class minds with their
dull intelligences--the right to decide what is natural or unnatural in
the presence of the vast tumultuous forces, wonderful and terrible,
of the life-stream which surrounds us?
The mad smouldering lust which gives a sort of under-song of
surging passion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is as
much an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of that
sentence in "De Profundis"--"Behind joy and laughter there may be
a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is
always sorrow."
What, beneath all his bravado and his paradoxes, Wilde really
sought, was the enjoyment of passionate and absorbing emotion, and
no one who hungers and thirsts after this--be he "as sensual as the
brutish sting itself"--can fail in the end to touch, if only fleetingly
with his lips, the waters of that river of passion which, by a miracle
of faith if not by a supreme creation of art, Humanity has caused to
issue forth from the wounded flesh of the ideal.
It is in his "Soul of Man"--perhaps the wisest and most eloquent
revolutionary tract ever written--that Wilde frees himself most
completely from the superficial eccentricities of his aesthetic pose,
and indicates his recognition of a beauty in life, far transcending
Tyrian dyes and carved cameos and frankincense and satin-wood
and moon-stones and "Silks from Samarcand."
It is impossible to read this noble defence of the natural distinction
and high dignity of our human days when freed from the slavery of
what is called "working for a living," without feeling that the boyish
bravado of his insolent wit is based upon a deep and universal
emotion. What we note here is an affiliation in revolt between the
artist and the masses. And this affiliation indicates that the
hideousness of our industrial system is far more offensive than any
ancient despotism or slave-owning tyranny to the natural passion for
light and air and leisure and freedom in the heart of man.
That Oscar Wilde, the most extreme of individualists, the most
unscrupulous of self-asserters, the pampered darling of every kind of
sophisticated luxury, should thus lift up his voice on behalf of the
wage-earners, is an indication that a state of society which seems
proper and inevitable to dull and narrow minds is, when confronted,
not with any mere abstract theory of Justice or Political rights, but
with the natural human craving for life and beauty, found to be an
outrage and an insult.
Oscar Wilde by pointing his derisive finger at what the gross
intelligence of our commercial mob calls the "honourableness of
work" has done more to clear our minds of cant than many
revolutionary speeches.
An age which breeds a world of uninteresting people whose only
purpose in life is working for their living is condemned on the face
of it. And it is just here that the association between your artist and
your "labouring man" becomes physiologically evident. The
labourer shows quite clearly that he regards his labour as a
degradation, a burden, an interruption to life, a necessary evil.
The rôle of the capitalist-hired preacher is to condemn him for this
and to regret the departure from the scene of that imaginary and
extremely ridiculous figure, the worker who "took pleasure in his
work." If there ever have been such people, they ought, as Wilde
says, to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Any person who
enjoys being turned into a machine for the best part of his days and
regards it with pride, is no better than a blackleg or a scab--not a
"scab" in regard to a little company of strikers, but a "scab" in regard
to the human race; for he is one who denies that life in itself, life
with all its emotional, intellectual and imaginative possibilities, can
be endured without the gross, coarsening, dulling "anaesthetic" of
money-making toil.
This is the word that the social revolution wanted--the word so much
more to the point than discourses upon justice and equality and
charity. And it is precisely here that the wage-earners of our present
system are in harmony with the "intellectuals."
The "wage-earners," or those among them who have in them
something more than the souls of scabs, despise and loathe their
enforced labour. The artist also despises the second-rate tasks set
him by the stupidity and bad taste of his middle-class masters.
The only persons in the community who are really happy in their
life's work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial
_ruffians_ whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances
one is swamped by--as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity--in
the streets of all our modern cities.
Oscar Wilde is perfectly right. We are living in an age when the
world for the first time in its history is literally under the rule of
the stupidest, dullest, least intelligent and least admirable of all
the classes in the community. Wilde's "Soul of Man" is the
condemnation--let us hope the effective condemnation--of this
epoch in the journey of the race.
The odium which France--always the protector of civilisation--has
stamped upon the word "bourgeois" is no mere passing levity of an
irresponsible Latin Quarter. It is the judgment of classic taste--the
taste of the great artists and poets of all ages--upon the worst type of
person, the type most pernicious to true human happiness, that has
ever yet appeared upon the planet. And it is this type, the
commercial type, the type that loves the money-making toil it is
engaged upon, which rules over us now with an absolute authority,
and creates our religion, our morality, our pleasures, our pastimes,
our literature and our art.
Oscar Wilde must be forgiven everything in his gay impertinence
which may jar upon our more sensitive moments, when one
considers what he has done in dragging this great issue into the light
and making it clear. He shows that what we have against us is not so
much a system of society or a set of laws, as a definite and
contemptible type of human character.
Democracy may well appear the most hopeless and lamentable
failure in the government of men that history has ever known--but
this is only due to the fact that the working classes have until now
meekly and mildly received from the commercial classes their
notions as to what democracy means.
No one could suppose for a moment that such a thing as the
puritanical censorship of art and letters which now hangs, like a
leaden weight, round the neck of every writer of original power,
would be thrust upon us by the victims of sweatshops and factories.
It is thrust upon us, like everything else which is degrading and
uncivilised in our present system, by the obstinate stupidity and silly
sentiment of the self-righteous middle class, the opponents of
everything that is joyous and interesting and subtle and imaginative.
It is devoutly to be hoped that, when the revolution arrives, the
human persons who force their way to the top and guide the
volcanic eruption will be such persons as are absolutely free from
every kind of middle-class scruple.
There are among us to-day vigorous and indignant minds who find
in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy
influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of
Oscar Wilde's writings shows that they are wrong.
It is the self-satisfied moralist who stands in the way, not the mystic
or the visionary. They spoil everything they touch, these people.
They turn religion into a set of sentimental inhibitions that would
make Marcus Aurelius blush. They turn faith into pietism, sanctity
into morality, and righteousness into a reeking prurience.
After all, it is not on the strength of his opinions, wise and sound as
these may be, that Wilde's reputation rests. It rests on the beauty, in
its own way never equalled, of the style in which he wrote. His style,
as he himself points out, is one which seems to compel its readers to
utter its syllables aloud. Of that deeper and more recondite charm
which lies, in a sense, outside the sphere of vocal articulation, of that
rhythm of the very movements of thought itself which lovers of
Walter Pater catch, or dream they catch, in those elaborate delicately
modulated sentences, Wilde has little or nothing.
What he achieves is a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as
the ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone or
echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering
fall--melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and the
moment lead.
He is at his best, or at any rate his style shows itself at its best, not
in the utterances of those golden epigrams, the gold of which, as days
pass, comes in certain cases to look lamentably like gilt, but in his
use of those far-descended legendary images gathered up into poetry
and art again and again till they have acquired the very tone of time
itself, and a lovely magic, sudden, swift and arresting, like the odour
of "myrrh, aloes, and cassia."
The style of Wilde is one of the simplest in existence, but its
simplicity is the very apex and consummation of the artificial. He
uses Biblical language with that self-conscious preciosity--like the
movements of a person walking on tiptoe in the presence of the
dead--which is so different from the sturdy directness of Bunyan or
the restrained rhetoric of the Church of England prayers. There
come moments when this premeditated innocence of tone--this
lisping in liturgical monosyllables--irritates and annoys one. At such
times the delicate unction of his naïveté strikes one, in despite of its
gravity, as something a little comic; as though some very
sophisticated and experienced person suddenly joined in a children's
game and began singing in a plaintive tenderly pitched voice--
"This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our
hands--
This is the way we wash our hands,
On a cold and frosty morning!"
But it were absurd to press this point too far. Sophisticated though
the simplicity of Wilde is, it does actually spring with all its
ritualistic tiptoeing straight out of his natural character. He was born
artificial, and he was born with more childishness than the great
majority of children.
I like to picture him as a great Uranian baby, full of querulousness
and peevishness, and eating greedily, with a sort of guileless wonder
that anyone should scold him for it, every species of forbidden fruit
that grows in the garden of life! How infantile really, when one
thinks of it, and how humorously solemn the man's inordinate
gravity over the touch of soft fabrics and the odour of rare perfumes!
One seems to see him, a languid-limbed "revenant," with
heavy-lidded drowsy eyes and voluptuous lips, emerging all swathed and
wrapped in costly cerements out of the tomb of some Babylonian
king.
After all, it remains a tremendous triumph of personality, the
manner in which this portly modern Antinous has taken captive our
imagination. His influence is everywhere, like an odour, like an
atmosphere, like a diffused flame. We cannot escape from him.
In those ridiculous wit-contests with Whistler, from which he
always emerged defeated, how much more generous and careless
and noble he appears than the wasp-like artist who could rap out so
smartly the appropriate retort! He seems like a great lazy king, at
such times, caught off his guard by some skipping and clever knave
of his spoilt retinue. Perhaps even now no small a portion of the
amused and astonished wonder he excites is due to the fact that he
really had, what so few of us have, a veritable passion for precious
stuffs and woven fabrics and ivory and cedar wood and beads of
amber and orchid-petals and pearl-tinted shells and lapis-lazuli and
attar of roses.
It is open to doubt whether even among artists, there are many who
share Wilde's Hellenic ecstasy in these things. This at any rate was
no pose. He posed as a man of the world. He posed as an immoralist.
He posed as a paradoxist. He posed in a thousand perverse
directions. But when it comes to the colour and texture and odour
and shape of beautiful and rare things--there, in his voluptuous
delight in these, he was undeniably sincere.
He was of course no learned virtuoso. But what does that matter?
The real artist is seldom a patient collector or an encyclopedic
authority. That is the rôle of Museum people and of compilers of
hand-books. Many thoroughly uninteresting minds know more about
Assyrian pottery and Chinese pictures than Oscar Wilde knew about
wild flowers.
Knowledge, as he teaches us himself, and it is one of the
profoundest of his doctrines, is nothing. Knowledge is external and
incidental. The important thing is that one's senses should be
passionately alive and one's imagination fearlessly far-reaching.
We can embrace all the treasures of the Herods and all the riches of
the Caesars as we lay our fingers upon a little silver coin, if the
divine flame is within us, and, if not, we may excavate a thousand
buried cities and return learned and lean and empty. Well, people
must make their own choice and go their own way. The world is
wide, and Nature has at least this in common with Heaven, that it
has many mansions.
The feverish passion for fair things which obsessed Oscar Wilde and
carried him so far is not for all the sons of men; nor even, in every
hour of their lives, for those who most ardently answer to it. That
feverishness burns itself out; that smouldering fire turns to cold
ashes. Life flows on, though Salome, daughter of Herodias, lies
crushed under the piled-up shields, and though in all the prisons of
the world "the damned grotesques make arabesques, like the wind
upon the sand."
Life flows on, and the quips and merry jests of Oscar Wilde, his
artful artlessness, his insolence, his self-pity, his loyalty and
fickleness, his sensuality and tenderness, only fill after all a small
space in the heart's chamber of those who read him and stare at his
plays and let him go.
But there are a few for whom the tragic wantonness of that strange
countenance, with the heavy eyelids and pouting mouth, means
something not easily forgotten, not easily put by.
To have seen Oscar Wilde and talked with him gives to such persons
a strange significance, an almost religious value. One looks long at
them, as if to catch some far-off reflection from the wit of the dead
man. They do not seem to us quite like the rest. They have seen
Oscar Wilde, and "They know what they have seen." For when all
has been said against him that can be said it remains that Oscar
Wilde, for good and for evil, in innocence and in excess, in
orthodoxy and in rebellion, is a "symbolic figure."
It is indeed easy enough, when one is under the spell of the golden
gaiety of his wit, to forget the essential and irresistible truth of so
many of his utterances.
That profound association between the "Sorrow that endureth
forever" and the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment," which he
symbolises under the parable of the Image of Bronze, has its place
throughout all his work.
It is a mistake to regard De Profundis as a recantation. It is a
fulfilment, a completion, a rounding off. Like a black and a scarlet
thread running through the whole tapestry of his tragic story are the
two parallel "motifs," the passion of the beauty which leads to
destruction and the passion of the beauty which leads to life.
It matters little whether he was or was not received into the Church
before he died. In the larger sense he was always within those
unexcluding walls, those spacious courts of the Ecclesia of humanity.
There was no trace in him, for all his caprices, of that puritanism of
denial which breaks the altars and shatters the idols at the bidding of
scientific iconoclasm.
What the anonymous instinct of humanity has rendered beautiful by
building into it the golden monuments of forlorn hopes and washing
it with the salt tears of desperate chances remained beautiful to him.
From the narcissus-flowers growing on the marble ledges of
Parnassus, where Apollo still weeps for the death of Hyacinth and
Pan still mourns the vanishing of Syrinx, to the passion-flowers
growing on the slopes of Calvary, he, this lover of eidola and images,
worships the white feet of the bearers of dead beauty, and finds in
the tears of all the lovers of all the lost a revivifying rain that even in
the midst of the dust of our degeneracy makes bloom once more, full
of freshness and promise, the mystical red rose of the world's desire.
The wit of his "Golden lads and girls" in those superb comedies may
soon fall a little faint and thin upon our ears. To the next generation
it may seem as faded and old-fashioned as the wit of Congreve or
Sheridan. Fashions of humour change more quickly than the
fashions of manner or of dress. The only thing that gives
immortality to human writing is the "eternal bronze" of a noble and
imaginative style. Out of such divine material, with all his
petulances and perversities, Oscar Wilde's style was hammered and
beaten. For there is only one quarry of this most precious metal, and
the same hand that shapes from it the "Sorrow that endureth forever"
must shape from it the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment," and the
identity of these two with that immortal bronze is the symbol of the
mystery of our life.
The senses that are quickened by the knowledge of this mystery are
not far from the ultimate secret. As with the thing sculptured, so
with the sculptor.
Oscar Wilde is a symbolic figure.