Mr. Chesterton may congratulate himself upon being the only man of
letters in England who has had the originality or the insight or the
temperamental courage to adopt a definitely reactionary philosophy;
whereas in France we have Huysmans, Barrés, Bourget, Bordeaux, and
many others, whose persuasive and romantic rôle it is to prop up
tottering altars; in England we have only Mr. Chesterton.
That is doubtless why it is necessary for him to exaggerate his
paradoxes so extravagantly; and also why he is so important and so
dear to the hearts of intelligent clergymen.
Mr. Chesterton's grand philosophical "coup" is a simple and effective
one--the turning of everything, complacently and hilariously, upside
down. One has the salutary amusement in reading him of visualizing the
Universe in the posture of a Gargantuan baby, "prepared" for a sound
smacking. Mr. Chesterton himself is the chief actor in this
performance and wonderful pyrotechnic stars leap into space as its
happy result.
Mr. Chesterton has his own peculiar "religion"--a sort of Chelsea
Embankment Catholicism, in which, in place of Pontifical Encyclicals,
we have Punch and Judy jokes, and in place of Apostolic Doctrine we
have umbrellas, lamp-posts, electric-signs and prestidigitating
clerics.
Mr. Chesterton is never more entertaining, never more entirely at
ease, than when turning one or other of the really noble and tragic
figures of human intellect into preposterous "Aunt Sallies" at whose
battered heads he can fling the turnips and potatoes of the Average
Man's average suspicion, dipped for that purpose in a fiery sort of
brandy of his own whimsical wit. If we don't become "like little
children"; in other words like jovial, middle-aged swashbucklers, and
protest our belief in Flying Pigs, Pusses in Boots, Jacks on the top
of Beanstalks, Old Women who live in Shoes, Fairies, Fandangos,
Prester Johns, and Blue Devils, there is no hope for us and we are
condemned to a dreadful purgatory of pedantic and atheistic dullness,
along with Li Hung Chang, George Eliot, Herbert Spencer and other
heretics whose view of the Dogma of the Immortality of the Soul
differs from that of Mr. Chesterton.
87. OSCAR WILDE. INTENTIONS. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. DE
PROFUNDIS.
"Intentions" is perhaps the most original of all Wilde's remarkable
works.
His supreme art, as he himself well knew, was, after all, the art of
conversation. One might even put it that his greatest achievement in
life was just the achievement of being brazenly and shamelessly what
he naturally was--especially in conversation. To call him a "poseur"
with the implication that he pretended or assumed a manner, were just
as absurd as to call a tiger striped with the implication that the
beast deliberately "put on" that mark of distinction.
If it is a pose to enjoy the sensation of one's own spontaneous
gestures, Wilde was indeed the worst of pretenders. But the stupid
gravity of many generals, judges and archbishops is not more natural
to them than his exquisite insolence was to him.
Below the wit and provocative persiflage of "Intentions" there is a
deep and true conception of the nature of art--a conception which
might well serve as the "philosophy" of much of the most interesting
and arresting of modern work.
Wilde's extraordinary charm largely depends upon something invincibly
boyish and youthful in him. His personality, as he himself says, has
become almost symbolic--symbolic, that is, of a certain shameless and
beautiful defiance of the world, expressed in an unconquerable
insolence worthy of the very spirit of hard, brave, flagrant youth.
"The Importance of Being Earnest" is perhaps the gayest, least
responsible, and most adorably witty of all English comedies; just as
"Salome" is the most richly colored and smoulderingly sensual of all
modern tragedies. One actually touches with one's fingers the
feasting-cups of the Tetrarch; and the passion of the daughter of
Herodias hangs round one like an exotic perfume.
In "De Profundis" we sound the sea-floor of a quite open secret; the
secret namely of the invincible attraction of a certain type of artist
and sensualist towards the "white Christ" who came forth from the tomb
where he had been laid, with precious ointments about him, by the
Arimathaean.
In "The Soul of Man" another symbolic reversion displays itself--that
reversion namely of the soul of the true artist towards the
revolutionary organization which, along with insensitiveness and
brutality, proposes to abolish ugliness also.
The name of Oscar Wilde thus becomes a name "to conjure with" and a
fantastic beacon-fire to which those "oppressed and humiliated" may
repair and take new heart.