O. W.
It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a
martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a
label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar
Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway
Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in
the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with
his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less
insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss
to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class
morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If
he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the
clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people
who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in
reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory
of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he
tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an
unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but
the note of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was
the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more
welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far
more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender
volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of
the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and
facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana--or
Oscariana--which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early
portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a
boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He
was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers
think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy,"
his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and
"horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as
was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he
gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other
hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know
him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and
if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and
spongers, his end might have been different.
I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was
Barbey d'Aurevilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably
modelled--lace cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations.
But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every
twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out
in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the
man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when
he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care
so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne--(in the wholly
admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to
O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a
harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as
tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his
Jumbos")--Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter
Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion
element, is poor Huysmans's--just look into that masterpiece, A
Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salome
is Flaubert in operetta form--his gorgeous Herodias watered down for
uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece--which
limps dramatically--would never have been seriously considered if
not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted
essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, _i. e._,
it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical
anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in any particular. His
Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The
fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an
excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in
Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the
hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as
fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error,
yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer
them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very
gay fancy.
He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed a la Byron and Baudelaire;
but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid
or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old
wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever
inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book
gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind
prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and
very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more
witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing
Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own
anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing
an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and
amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a
plagiarist from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter
and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too
seriously--I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde
was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't
knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the
tragic denouement that has been thrashed to death by those who
know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he
called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw
Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave
attitude--always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to
leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though
neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry
conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in
cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a
second Jesus Christ--which latter statement stuns one. (The
Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not
unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as
quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after
dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts
below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me,
he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne,
Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readers
would only take the trouble to study the originals there might be
less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any
disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man.
Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called aesthetic
movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically
perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true;
but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and
playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the
"Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly
individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not--nothing but his
astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory.