From 1884 on I met Oscar Wilde continually, now at the theatre, now in
some society drawing room; most often, I think, at Mrs. Jeune's
(afterwards Lady St. Helier). His appearance was not in his favour;
there was something oily and fat about him that repelled me. Naturally
being British-born and young I tried to give my repugnance a moral
foundation; fleshly indulgence and laziness, I said to myself, were
written all over him. The snatches of his monologues which I caught
from time to time seemed to me to consist chiefly of epigrams almost
mechanically constructed of proverbs and familiar sayings turned
upside down. Two of Balzac's characters, it will be remembered,
practised this form of humour. The desire to astonish and dazzle, the
love of the uncommon for its own sake, was so evident that I shrugged
my shoulders and avoided him. One evening, however, at Mrs. Jeune's, I
got to know him better. At the very door Mrs. Jeune came up to me:
"Have you ever met Mr. Oscar Wilde? You ought to know him: he is so
delightfully clever, so brilliant!"
I went with her and was formally introduced to him. He shook hands in
a limp way I disliked; his hands were flabby, greasy; his skin looked
bilious and dirty. He wore a great green scarab ring on one finger. He
was over-dressed rather than well-dressed; his clothes fitted him too
tightly; he was too stout. He had a trick which I noticed even then,
which grew on him later, of pulling his jowl with his right hand as he
spoke, and his jowl was already fat and pouchy. His appearance filled
me with distaste. I lay stress on this physical repulsion, because I
think most people felt it, and in itself, it is a tribute to the
fascination of the man that he should have overcome the first
impression so completely and so quickly. I don't remember what we
talked about, but I noticed almost immediately that his grey eyes were
finely expressive; in turn vivacious, laughing, sympathetic; always
beautiful. The carven mouth, too, with its heavy, chiselled,
purple-tinged lips, had a certain attraction and significance in spite
of a black front tooth which shocked one when he laughed. He was over
six feet in height and both broad and thick-set; he looked like a
Roman Emperor of the decadence.
We had a certain interest in each other, an interest of curiosity, for
I remember that he led the way almost at once into the inner drawing
room in order to be free to talk in some seclusion. After half an
hour or so I asked him to lunch next day at _The Café Royal_, then the
best restaurant in London.
At this time he was a superb talker, more brilliant than any I have
ever heard in England, but nothing like what he became later. His talk
soon made me forget his repellant physical peculiarities; indeed I
soon lost sight of them so completely that I have wondered since how I
could have been so disagreeably affected by them at first sight. There
was an extraordinary physical vivacity and geniality in the man, an
extraordinary charm in his gaiety, and lightning-quick intelligence.
His enthusiasms, too, were infectious. Every mental question
interested him, especially if it had anything to do with art or
literature. His whole face lit up as he spoke and one saw nothing but
his soulful eyes, heard nothing but his musical tenor voice; he was
indeed what the French call a _charmeur_.
In ten minutes I confessed to myself that I liked him, and his talk
was intensely quickening. He had something unexpected to say on almost
every subject. His mind was agile and powerful and he took a delight
in using it. He was well-read too, in several languages, especially in
French, and his excellent memory stood him in good stead. Even when
he merely reproduced what the great writers had said perfectly, he
added a new colouring. And already his characteristic humour was
beginning to illumine every topic with lambent flashes.
It was at our first lunch, I think, that he told me he had been asked
by Harper's to write a book of one hundred thousand words and offered
a large sum for it--I think some five thousand dollars--in advance. He
wrote to them gravely that there were not one hundred thousand words
in English, so he could not undertake the work, and laughed merrily
like a child at the cheeky reproof.
"I have sent their letters and my reply to the press," he added, and
laughed again, while probing me with inquisitive eyes: how far did I
understand the need of self-advertisement?
About this time an impromptu of his moved the town to laughter. At
some dinner party it appeared the ladies sat a little too long; Oscar
wanted to smoke. Suddenly the hostess drew his attention to a lamp the
shade of which was smouldering.
"Please put it out, Mr. Wilde," she said, "it's smoking."
Oscar turned to do as he was told with the remark:
"Happy lamp!"
The delightful impertinence had an extraordinary success.
Early in our friendship I was fain to see that the love of the
uncommon, his paradoxes and epigrams were natural to him, sprang
immediately from his taste and temperament. Perhaps it would be well
to define once for all his attitude towards life with more scope and
particularity than I have hitherto done.
It is often assumed that he had no clear and coherent view of life, no
belief, no faith to guide his vagrant footsteps; but such an opinion
does him injustice. He had his own philosophy, and held to it for long
years with astonishing tenacity. His attitude towards life can best be
seen if he is held up against Goethe. He took the artist's view of
life which Goethe was the first to state and indeed in youth had
overstated with an astonishing persuasiveness: "the beautiful is more
than the good," said Goethe; "for it includes the good."
It seemed to Oscar, as it had seemed to young Goethe, that "the
extraordinary alone survives"; the extraordinary whether good or bad;
he therefore sought after the extraordinary, and naturally enough
often fell into the extravagant. But how stimulating it was in London,
where sordid platitudes drip and drizzle all day long, to hear someone
talking brilliant paradoxes.
Goethe did not linger long in the halfway house of unbelief; the
murderer may win notoriety as easily as the martyr, but his memory
will not remain. "_The fashion of this world passeth away_," said
Goethe, "I would fain occupy myself with that which endures." Midway
in life Goethe accepted Kant's moral imperative and restated his
creed: "A man must resolve to live," he said, "for the Good, and
Beautiful, and for the Common Weal."
Oscar did not push his thought so far: the transcendental was not his
field.
It was a pity, I sometimes felt, that he had not studied German as
thoroughly as French; Goethe might have done more for him than
Baudelaire or Balzac, for in spite of all his stodgy German faults,
Goethe is the best guide through the mysteries of life whom the modern
world has yet produced. Oscar Wilde stopped where the religion of
Goethe began; he was far more of a pagan and individualist than the
great German; he lived for the beautiful and extraordinary, but not
for the Good and still less for the Whole; he acknowledged no moral
obligation; _in commune bonis_ was an ideal which never said anything
to him; he cared nothing for the common weal; he held himself above
the mass of the people with an Englishman's extravagant insularity and
aggressive pride. Politics, social problems, religion--everything
interested him simply as a subject of art; life itself was merely
material for art. He held the position Goethe had abandoned in youth.
The view was astounding in England and new everywhere in its
onesidedness. Its passionate exaggeration, however, was quickening,
and there is, of course, something to be said for it. The artistic
view of life is often higher than the ordinary religious view; at
least it does not deal in condemnations and exclusions; it is more
reasonable, more catholic, more finely perceptive.
"The artist's view of life is the only possible one," Oscar used to
say, "and should be applied to everything, most of all to religion and
morality. Cavaliers and Puritans are interesting for their costumes
and not for their convictions....
"There is no general rule of health; it is all personal,
individual.... I only demand that freedom which I willingly concede to
others. No one condemns another for preferring green to gold. Why
should any taste be ostracised? Liking and disliking are not under our
control. I want to choose the nourishment which suits _my_ body and
_my_ soul."
I can almost hear him say the words with his charming humorous smile
and exquisite flash of deprecation, as if he were half inclined to
make fun of his own statement.
It was not his views on art, however, which recommended him to the
aristocratic set in London; but his contempt for social reform, or
rather his utter indifference to it, and his English love of
inequality. The republicanism he flaunted in his early verses was not
even skin deep; his political beliefs and prejudices were the
prejudices of the English governing class and were all in favour of
individual freedom, or anarchy under the protection of the policeman.
"The poor are poor creatures," was his real belief, "and must always
be hewers of wood and drawers of water. They are merely the virgin
soil out of which men of genius and artists grow like flowers. Their
function is to give birth to genius and nourish it. They have no other
_raison d'être_. Were men as intelligent as bees, all gifted
individuals would be supported by the community, as the bees support
their queen. We should be the first charge on the state just as
Socrates declared that he should be kept in the Prytaneum at the
public expense.
"Don't talk to me, Frank, about the hardships of the poor. The
hardships of the poor are necessities, but talk to me of the hardships
of men of genius, and I could weep tears of blood. I was never so
affected by any book in my life as I was by the misery of Balzac's
poet, Lucien de Rubempré."
Naturally this creed of an exaggerated individualism appealed
peculiarly to the best set in London. It was eminently aristocratic
and might almost be defended as scientific, for to a certain extent it
found corroboration in Darwinism. All progress according to Darwin
comes from peculiar individuals; "sports" as men of science call them,
or the "heaven-sent" as rhetoricians prefer to style them. The many
are only there to produce more "sports" and ultimately to benefit by
them. All this is valid enough; but it leaves the crux of the question
untouched. The poor in aristocratic England are too degraded to
produce "sports" of genius, or indeed any "sports" of much value to
humanity. Such an extravagant inequality of condition obtains there
that the noble soul is miserable, the strongest insecure. But Wilde's
creed was intensely popular with the "Smart Set" because of its very
one-sidedness, and he was hailed as a prophet partly because he
defended the cherished prejudices of the "landed" oligarchy.
It will be seen from this that Oscar Wilde was in some danger of
suffering from excessive popularity and unmerited renown. Indeed if he
had loved athletic sports, hunting and shooting instead of art and
letters, he might have been the selected representative of
aristocratic England.
In addition to his own popular qualities a strong current was sweeping
him to success. He was detested by the whole of the middle or
shop-keeping class which in England, according to Matthew Arnold, has
"the sense of conduct--and has but little else." This class hated and
feared him; feared him for his intellectual freedom and his contempt
of conventionality, and hated him because of his light-hearted
self-indulgence, and also because it saw in him none of its own sordid
virtues. _Punch_ is peculiarly the representative of this class and of
all English prejudices, and _Punch_ jeered at him now in prose, now in
verse, week after week. Under the heading, "More Impressions" (by
Oscuro Wildgoose) I find this:
"My little fancy's clogged with gush,
My little lyre is false in tone,
And when I lyrically moan,
I hear the impatient critic's 'Tush!'
"But I've 'Impressions.' These are grand!
Mere dabs of words, mere blobs of tint,
Displayed on canvas or in print,
Men laud, and think they understand.
"A smudge of brown, a smear of yellow,
No tale, no subject,--there you are!
Impressions!--and the strangest far
Is--that the bard's a clever fellow."
A little later these lines appeared:
"My languid lily, my lank limp lily,
My long, lithe lily-love, men may grin--
Say that I'm soft and supremely silly--
What care I, while you whisper still;
What care I, while you smile? Not a pin!
While you smile, while you whisper--
'Tis sweet to decay!
I have watered with chlorodine, tears of chagrin,
The churchyard mould I have planted thee in,
Upside down, in an intense way,
In a rough red flower-pot, _sweeter than sin_,
That I bought for a halfpenny, yesterday!"
The italics are mine; but the suggestion was always implicit; yet this
constant wind of puritanic hatred blowing against him helped instead
of hindering his progress: strong men are made by opposition; like
kites they go up against the wind.