Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate.
One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. If Mr. Ransome's
estimate of Wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written book
is a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an
iconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while
Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than
second-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of
literature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the
egoistic,--æsthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist.
This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as Mr.
Ransome says, "though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he
preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams."
Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if _Salomé_
had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written.
"It is possible," observes Mr. Ransome, "that we owe _The Importance of
Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from
playing _Salomé_ at the Palace Theatre." If this conjecture is right, one
can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in _The
Importance of Being Earnest_, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of
supreme genius in its kind.
It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughter
for laughter's sake. Or you might say that, in the literature of farce, it
has a place as a "dainty rogue in porcelain." It is even lighter and more
fragile than that. It is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. It is the very
ecstasy of levity. As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing the
possibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been "born, or
at least bred, in a handbag," or as we watch Jack and Algernon wrangling
over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehow
to be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense.
Some people will contend that Wilde's laughter is always the laughter not
of the open air but of the salon. But there is a spontaneity in the
laughter of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ that seems to me to
associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field.
It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer that one
quarrels with Mr. Ransome. Wilde was much better at showing off than at
revealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much more
delightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as a
wit and persifleur. On his serious side he ranks, not as an original
artist, but as a popularizer--the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps,
in English literature. He popularized William Morris, both his domestic
interiors and his Utopias, in the æsthetic lectures and in _The Soul of
Man under Socialism_--a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide
fame of which Mr. Ransome curiously misses. He popularized the cloistral
æstheticism of Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe in _Intentions_ and
elsewhere. In _Salomé_ he popularized the gorgeous processionals of
ornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had expended not the least
marvellous portion of his genius.
Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue and
ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the assailant of
even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat tea
with a mockery that sparkled like wine. Lighting upon a world that
advertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, as
heroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvet
knee-breeches may have done to make the British public aware of the
genius, say, of Walter Pater? Not that Wilde was not a finished egoist,
using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself to
advertise them. But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the
authors should benefit by his outrageous breeches.
It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then--a popularizer who, for
a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer--that Wilde seems to me to stand to
his age. What, then, of Mr. Ransome's estimate of _Salomé_? That it is a
fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. But of what
quality is this fascination? It is, when all is said and done, the
fascination of the lust of painted faces. Here we have no tragedy, but a
mixing of degenerate philtres. Mr. Ransome hears "the beating of the wings
of the angel of death" in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the
atmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the broken
body of _Salomé_ one has a sick feeling, as though one had been present
where vermin were being crushed. There is not a hint of the elation, the
liberation, of real tragedy. The whole thing is simply a wonderful piece
of coloured sensationalism. And even if we turn to the costly sentences of
the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and
design Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in
his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town
displaying his collection of splendid gems?
Wilde speaks of himself in _De Profundis_ as a lord of language. Of
course, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice with him. He took to
it as a man might take to drink. He was addicted rather than devoted to
language. He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility
towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious
of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. How
beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone
knows who has read his brief _Endymion_ (to name one of the poems), and
the many hyacinthine passages in _Intentions_. But when one is anxious to
see the man himself as in _De Profundis_--that book of a soul imprisoned
in embroidered sophistries--one feels that this cloak of strange words is
no better than a curse.
If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled
slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much
laughter as well as language in _Intentions_ that I am inclined to agree
with Mr. Ransome that _Intentions_ is "that one of Wilde's books that most
nearly represents him." Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on
taking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that "his
paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths." How horrified Wilde would have been
to hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths--or a
good deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of
them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome's
attitude on the question of Wilde's sincerity seems to me as impossible as
his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic
sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which
every great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into
that. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome's conclusions, we must
be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of
one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one
of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century.