OSCAR WILDE
One evening in the early summer of 1895 the newsboys were shouting “All
the winners.” Yet one line on their placards gave the lie to that eternal
cry which mocks the death of great men and the fall of great empires. It
referred to the sentence which, in due time, was to give birth to the one
indisputably genuine and serious thing Oscar Wilde wrote, the _Ballad of
Reading Gaol_.
[Illustration: OSCAR WILDE.]
Oscar Wilde was one of the losers; in the long list of men of genius who
have paid just forfeit it is not easy to think of a more tragic figure.
Others had fallen from greater heights; none had gone more friendlessly
to a lower perdition. For it was the very element of his tragedy that
it could not be shared or alleviated; on the path he had henceforth to
tread there could be no comrade; his offence was one at which charity
itself stood embarrassed, and compassion felt the fear of compromise.
On this very evening theatres were full of people chuckling over jests
of almost wicked brilliance which he had turned and re-turned, polished
and sharpened, with the laborious care of a lapidary, for he worked at
trifles with tremendous earnestness, and the ease of the style was the
reward of immense pains on the part of the writer. One of his comedies
was being actually played in London while the drama of his trial was
proceeding on another stage. Business is business, and managers with
money at stake did not care to withdraw immediately good money-drawing
pieces. But they made a due _amende_ to outraged decency. They played
Wilde’s play, but they struck his name out of the bill. The action might
be mean. But it was understandable. There was no harm in the play, but
the name could then hardly be pronounced without offence.
Even at this distance, when there can be pity without suspicion of
condonation, it is not easy to discuss Wilde as we should any other
author whose influence was considerable in his day and generation. Yet
those who would pass by this ill-starred man of genius because of the
event which interrupted his career as a writer would be acting almost as
foolishly as the absurd people (mostly Germans) who on the same account
yield him a perverse and irrational homage. Wilde was not only important
in himself; he was still more important as the representative of a
mood yet to some extent with us, but extraordinarily prevalent in the
latter years of the nineteenth century. Of this mood he was in letters
the only able English representative. There were many men who thought
his thoughts, and even attempted to write his style. But they are now
forgotten except by the curious; Wilde alone survives. This mood was in
certain aspects one of honesty, in others one of cowardice; it was never
a mood of health. The honesty was negative; it took the form of protest
against certain easy and conventional shams. The cowardice was positive;
it took the form of fearing to stand in competition with great realities.
People like Wilde had sense to detect, and virility to denounce, certain
poor players of old tricks; they had not the courage to be themselves
quite genuine people; they contented themselves on the whole with doing
newer tricks. There was no harm in this in itself. But they had also
much conceit, and so, to impress the public with a due sense of their
importance, they insisted that the tricks of which they were easily
capable were really the only tricks worth doing. Their art was Art
itself, and the only Art.
Now it takes all sorts to make any kind of world, and there is no sense
in expecting an artist whose gift is miniature painting to follow Paul
Veronese. By all means let him sneer at any dull fool who does follow
Paul Veronese. But we shall do well to take very little notice of him
when he says that no picture should be painted on anything larger than
six square inches of ivory. A Japanese _netsuke_ is a pleasing object;
so is Ely Cathedral. Let the _netsuke_ carver have his due credit. But
if he began to talk as if Ely Cathedral were a pretentious vulgarity,
which he himself could easily have built if (in Johnson’s phrase) he
had “abandoned his mind to it,” we should quickly tell him to mind his
own business. But this was very much the pose of Wilde and his school.
They were right in depreciating uninspired imitators of great men. They
were wrong in depreciating all greatness which could not be measured
by their own small tapes. They were especially wrong in declaring that
“popular art is bad art,” and setting up their own literary jade-work,
often graceful and pleasant enough in its own way, as the sole standard
of taste. “Only the great masters of style,” said Oscar Wilde once, “ever
succeeded in being obscure.” If that were literally true he himself,
though self-called a “lord of language,” would have to be denied the
title of stylist, for though he sometimes showed confusion of thought,
and very often said things so silly that one sometimes looks a second
time to see whether they are really meant, he was on the whole quite
extraordinarily lucid. His words, however, though nonsensical in their
literal effect, do mean something and reveal something. Every very
great writer is obscure in the sense that he does somehow contrive to
offer a choice to his reader; thus everybody has his own particular view
of _Hamlet_, and of many individual passages in _Hamlet_, though the
actual obscurities are very few. But Shakespeare never meant _Hamlet_ to
be a mystery to anybody; he meant it simply to be a good play, and one
understandable to every soul in the theatre. Shakespeare was thinking
of his audience as something that was doing him a compliment in coming
to hear his play. Wilde thought of his audience as something that was
complimented by his condescension in amusing it. Shakespeare, in short,
represented popular and obvious art at its highest, and there is no
higher art. Wilde, on the other hand, represented art that was above all
things undemocratic. Its assumption was that whatever is popular must
be vulgar, that whatever is unusual has at least a presumption of being
fine. In such an attitude, whether to life or to art, there is an obvious
spiritual danger, and it is not without reason that most people look for
corruption where there is excessive refinement. After all, all the most
important things men do must be either conventional or monstrous, and
he who consciously strives to be much above the common herd in things
mattering not very much is fatally prone to be dreadfully below it in
things that really do matter. The country or age which can show great art
with a simple and obvious motive is generally healthy. The country or
age which attaches immense importance to the elaboration of trifles for
esoteric appreciation is generally unhealthy. In these matters wherever
there is mystery there is evil.
“The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me
to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.” So says Wilde in _De
Profundis_. His father was an oculist in Dublin, a clever, ill-balanced
man of imperious passions and extravagant habits, who firmly believed
that alcohol had pulled him through a severe illness, and drank freely
on principle. Lady Wilde, poetess and Nationalist pamphleteer, was
disappointed with Oscar in much the same way that Betsy Trotwood was
disappointed with David Copperfield; she wanted a daughter, and, since
Nature had denied her, she sought consolation by dressing, treating,
and talking to her boy as if he had been a girl. It was one of the
innumerable oddities of this lady to pretend descent from great
people—she believed herself to come from a stem of the same tree which
yielded Dante the poet—and the boy was named Oscar because his mother
imagined herself she had some sort of connection with the Royal Family
of Sweden. It was an unwholesome if brilliant atmosphere in which Oscar
Wilde grew up, and the boy early contracted those habits of extravagance
which led him, when a poor man in London, to spend hundreds a year in
the matter of cabs alone. Neither at school nor at Oxford did he take
any interest in sport, but he was devoted to his blue and white china,
his antiques, and his wallpapers. This æstheticism earned him the
resentment of some robust fellow-undergraduates, and he was once tied
up in a rope and dragged to the top of a hill; when released he merely
flicked the dust off his clothes and remarked, “Yes, the view is really
very charming.” Perhaps the most important event of his Oxford life was
the winning of the Newdigate prize. His success decided him to take
up literature as a profession. And in order to make a short cut into
literature he placed himself at the head of the æsthetes, clean-shaven
and long-haired, in “a velvet coat, knee-breeches, a loose shirt with a
turn-down collar, and a floating tie of some unusual shade fastened in a
La Vallière knot,” carrying in his hand “a lily or a sunflower which he
used to contemplate with an expression of the greatest admiration.”
The notoriety naturally following on this masquerade had its advantages
in the way of dinner invitations, lecture engagements, and, to some
extent, the smiles of publishers. But Wilde earned little and had to
spend a good deal in maintaining his position; and, despite a lecturing
venture in America, it was not until his marriage with Miss Constance
Lloyd in 1884 that he settled down to anything like satisfactory
employment. For such a man the post of editor of the _Woman’s World_
could hardly be amusing, and Wilde retained the bitterest recollections
of his connection with journalism. “In centuries before ours,” he once
wrote, “the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was
quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears
to the key-hole. That is much worse.” It was not, in fact, until the
Nineties had well opened that Wilde began to make good and to relieve the
strain on his wife’s little fortune which his extravagant habits caused.
_Dorian Gray_, published in 1891, was a doubtful artistic success and a
quite undoubtful commercial failure. But at the beginning of the next
year _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ at once took the fancy of London. Wilde had
made several attempts to conquer the stage, but partly inexperience and
partly obstinacy had so far stood in his way. “I hold,” he said, “that
the stage is to a play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting.”
But a frame can generally be had to accommodate any picture, and no
stage could properly accommodate some plays. Wilde once argued for the
performance of plays by puppets. “They have many advantages. They never
argue. They have no crude views about art. They have no private lives.
We are never bored by accounts of their virtues, or bored by recitals of
their vices; and when they are out of an engagement they never do good
in public or save people from drowning.... They recognise the presiding
intellect of the dramatist, and have never been known to ask for their
parts to be written up.” A man holding such views—which are really only a
mad extension of a sane position—was likely to remain for long unacted.
But when he left behind him the intricacies of five-act tragedy, and
found his true _métier_ in comedy, his success was instantaneous.
And it was well deserved. The Wilde comedies “date” a good deal. They
are rather monotonous in their brilliancy. There is too much of a
particular trick; one is always expecting the unexpected. The characters
sit round to exchange epigrams rather too much like the Moore and
Burgess Minstrels used to sit round to exchange conundrums, with a “Mr.
Johnson” at one corner and a Mr. Somebody-else at the other. The epigrams
themselves are often forced and sometimes merely foolish. There is little
characterisation; all Wilde’s men are wits or the butts of wits, and his
women, broadly speaking, are unimportant. But when all deductions are
made his comedies are among the best in the language. _Lady Windermere’s
Fan_ was followed a year later by _A Woman of No Importance_, and in 1895
by _An Ideal Husband_ and—the best of the series—_The Importance of Being
Earnest_. From circumstances of considerable embarrassment Wilde suddenly
mounted to high prosperity. But the change was all for the worse. With
his tendencies to physical self-indulgence, a plentiful supply of ready
money tempted him to fatal excess in eating and drinking, and he was a
man to whom exercise of any kind was repellent. On his unsound mental
constitution the brilliance of his position and prospects had an equally
unfortunate effect. He grew fat and bloated in person and absurdly
inflated in conceit. His features, once handsome with the comeliness of
some image on a classic coin, were now puffed and of impure outline,
and the richness of dress which he affected degenerated into a greasy
luxuriousness. He had only three years of prosperity, but those were
enough to show that he had neither the mind nor the physical constitution
to bear success. Even before the tragedy which cut short his working life
his friends had begun to fall away, and it was pretty clear that his
career as a creative artist was likely to be limited.
Of the last chapters of his unhappy history nothing can usefully be
said. The expiation was no less horrible than the sin; his last piteous
work may suggest that there was final penitence and rest. But there
was so much of the artificial in Wilde that it was never quite safe to
infer when he was genuine and when histrionic. Almost his whole life had
been spent in posing. Yet his mind was naturally precise and logical;
with proper discipline it would have been of quite masculine strength.
“There is something tragic,” he once said, “about the enormous number
of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life
with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.” He
would have been better with a useful profession. To adapt his own words,
there is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there
are in England at any given moment who start life with some Greek and
Latin, a knack of good form and social dexterity, a more than competent
physique, enough money to enable them to spend a few of their best years
in rather laborious idleness, and no notion of giving the world a full
equivalent of what they propose to take out of it. The number of young
women in much the same case is scarcely less disquieting. The real moral
of Wilde’s tragedy is not the obvious one. It is rather that even highly
gifted people should have some honest trade to begin with, and leave
“art” and “literature” (apart from such branches as are really trades
and handicrafts) until, mayhap, they find themselves positively impelled
thereto. If that were the rule the world would be poorer by some millions
of bad pictures and unpleasant novels, but indefinitely richer in human
cleanliness and honesty.