The blue mist creeps among the shivering trees,
Gold world by world the silent stars appear
And like a blossom blows--before the breeze
A white moon drifts across the shimmering sky."
and he hears "the curfew booming from the bell at Christ Church gate."
Wilde never wrote anything better in verse than this with the single
exception of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol." The poem deserves to rank
among the finest pastorals in the language. It is essentially musical,
written with artistic restraint and with a discrimination of the use of
words and their combination that marks the great artist. It is a true
nature poem and it will appeal to all those who prefer musical verse to
the artificial manufacture of rhymes, and simple sentences to the
torturing of words into unheard-of combinations.
As a contrast to it comes the "Magdalen Walks" which, in construction
and rhythm, is somewhat lacking in ease and freedom. It is a curious
thing that Wilde's affections seemed to alternate between the unordered
simplicity of English woods and meadows and the trim artificial
parterres and bouquets of Versailles or Sans Souci. There is a
constraint about the metre of this poem which does rather suggest a man
walking along a trim avenue from which he can perceive flowers, meadows
and riotous hedges--in the distance. There is also a suggestion of
Tennyson's "Maud" about--
"And the plane to the pine tree is whispering some tale of love
Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green
And the gloom of the wych elm's hollow is lit with the iris sheen
Of the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove."
"Impression du Matin" might be said to be a successful attempt to render
a Whistler pastel into verse, but there is a human note about the last
verse that elevates the poem far above such a mere _tour de force_, and
there is a fine sense of effect in the picture of the "pale woman all
alone" standing in the glimmering light of the gas lamp as the rays of
the sun just touch her hair.
"A Serenade" and "Endymion" possess all the qualities that a musical
setting demands, but do not call for especial comment. It is, however,
in "La Bella Donna della mia Mante" that the expression of the poet's
genius finds vent.
"As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth"
is as perfect a metaphor as one could well wish to find.
"Charmides" is a more ambitious effort than anything he had yet
attempted. The word-painting is obviously inspired by Keats, for whose
work he had an intense admiration. Such lines as "Came a great owl with
yellow sulphurous eyes," and "Vermilion-finned with eyes of bossy gold"
might have been taken straight out of "Lamia," so truly has he caught
the spirit of his master. But if enamoured of Keats's gorgeous colouring
Wilde revelled in the construction of jewelled phrase and crimson line,
there is another source of inspiration noticeable in the poem. Had
Shakespeare never written "Venus and Adonis," Wilde might have written
"Charmides" but it would not have been the same poem. The difference
between the true poet who has studied the great verse of bygone ages and
the mere imitator is that one will produce a work of art enhanced by the
suggestions derived from the contemplation of the highest conception of
genius, whereas the other will outrun the constable and merely
accentuate and burlesque the distinguishing characteristics of the work
of others. In the case in point, whilst we note with pleasure and
interest the points of resemblance between the poem and the models that
its author has followed, we are conscious that what we are reading is a
work of art in itself and that its intrinsic merits are enhanced by the
points of resemblance and do not depend on them for their existence.
There is another poem--"Ballade de Marguerite"--which recalls memories
of Keats, closely resembling as it does "La Belle Dame Sans Merci."
Rarely has the old ballad form been more successfully treated. We catch
the very spirit of mediaevalism in the lines--
"Perchance she is kneeling in St. Denys
(On her soul may our Lady have grammercy!)
Ah, if she is praying in lone chapelle
I might swing the censer and ring the bell."
It is so easy to overdo the thing, to produce a bad counterfeit made up
of Wardour Street English, that to retain the simplicity of language and
the slight _soupcon_ of Chaucerian English requires all the skill of a
master craftsman, and the intimate knowledge of the value and date of
words that can only result from a close acquaintance with the works of
the ballad writers.
In "The Dole of the King's Daughter" Wilde again essays the ballad form,
but this time the treatment shows more traces of the Rossetti influence.
The ballad spirit is maintained with unerring skill and the form
perfectly adhered to throughout. To quote good old Izaak
Walton--"old-fashioned poetry but choicely good."
As conveying the idea of impending tragedy nothing could be more
effective than the simplicity of the lines
"There are two that ride from the south and east
And two from the north and west,
For the black raven a goodly feast
For the king's daughter rest."
In this ballad as in the "Chanson" he uses the old device, so common in
ancient ballads, of making the alternate lines parenthetical, as, for
instance--
"There is one man who loves her true,
(Red, O red, is the stain of gore!)
He hath duggen a grave by the darksome yew,
(One grave will do for four)."
A rather clever parody of this mode of construction is worth quoting
here--
"SAGE GREEN"
(_By a Fading-out AEsthete_)
"My love is as fair as a lily flower.
(_The Peacock blue has a sacred sheen!_)
Oh, bright are the blooms in her maiden bower.
(_Sing Hey! Sing Ho! for the sweet Sage Green!_)
Her face is as wan as the water white.
(_The Peacock blue has a sacred sheen!_)
Alack! she heedeth it never at all.
(_Sing Hey! Sing Ho! for the sweet Sage Green!_)
The China plate it is pure on the wall.
(_The Peacock blue has a sacred sheen!_)
With languorous loving and purple pain.
(_Sing Hey! Sing Ho! for the sweet Sage Green!_)
And woe is me that I never may win;
(_The Peacock blue has a sacred sheen!_)
For the Bard's hard up, and she's got no tin.
(_Sing Hey! Sing Ho! for the sweet Sage Green!_)"
Among the sonnets written at this period the one on Keats's grave in
which he does homage to him whom he reverenced as a master is especially
felicitous in its ending--
"Thy name was writ in water--it shall stand
And tears like mine will keep thy memory green
As Isabella did her Basil-tree."
Than the graceful introducing of Keats's poem no more delicate epitaph
could be well imagined. Shelley's last resting-place likewise inspired
his pen and there is an "Impression de Voyage" written at Katakolo at
the period of his visit to Greece in company with Professor Mahaffy, the
concluding line of which, "I stood upon the soil of Greece at last,"
conveys more by its reticence than could be expressed in volumes.
Of his five theatrical sonnets headed "Impressions de Theatre," one is
addressed to the late Sir Henry Irving and the three others to Miss
Ellen Terry. It is curious that of the three Shakespearean characters he
mentioned as worthier of the actor's great talents than Fabiendei
Franchi--viz. Lear, Romeo, and Richard III.,--the only one that Irving
ever played was Romeo, and in that part he was a decided failure, which,
considering his peculiar mannerisms and method, as well as his age at
the time, was not to be wondered at. The fifth was probably intended for
Madame Sarah Bernhardt, whose wonderful rendering of Phedre could not
fail to deeply impress so cultured a critic as the author of these
poems.
In "Panthea" Oscar Wilde gives rein to his amorous fancy, and, inspired
by the poets of Greece and Rome, peoples the world with gods and
goddesses who mourn the old glad pagan days--
"Back to their lotus-haunts they turn again
Kissing each other's mouths, and mix more deep
The poppy-seeded draught which brings soft purple-lidded sleep."
How rich is the language here employed, how exquisite the lilt of "soft
purple-lidded sleep." Not even Tennyson in "The Lotus Eaters" has done
anything better than this. And how delicately expressed is the idea
embodied in the lines--
"There in the green heart of some garden close
Queen Venus with the shepherd at her side,
Her warm soft body like the briar rose
Which should be white yet blushes at its pride--"
or, how tender the fancy that inspired
"So when men bury us beneath the yew
Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
And thy soft eyes lush bluebells dimmed with dew."
None but a poet could have written those lines; the stately wording of
the second line is purposely chosen to enhance the perfect simplicity of
the third.
The poems comprised within "The Fourth Movement" include the
"Impression," "Le Reveillon," the first verse of which runs--
"The sky is laced with fitful red,
The circling mists and shadows flee,
The dawn is rising from the sea,
Like a white lady from her bed--"
which inspired the parodist with--
"MORE IMPRESSIONS"
(_By Oscuro Wildgoose_)
DES SPONETTES
"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."
I quote the two parodies to show how little Oscar Wilde's verse was
appreciated by his contemporaries. There is an unfairness and
misrepresentation about them which is significant of how the poet's
poses and extravagancies had prejudiced the public mind.
In the two love poems "Apologia" and "Quia multi Amori" a deeper key is
struck, and a note of pain predominates. There is a restraint about the
versification and the colour of the words that strikes the right chord
and tunes the lyre to a subdued note.
The underlying passion and regret find their supreme expression in the
lines--
"Ah! hadst thou liked me less and loved me more,
Through all those summer days of joy and rain,
I had not now been sorrow's heritor
Or stood a lackey in the House of Pain."
The "hadst thou liked me less and loved me more" deserves to pass into
the language with Richard Lovelace's
"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more."
In "Humanitad" we get a view of the country in winter time, and
"The gaunt bittern stalks among the reeds
And flaps his wings, and stretches back his neck,
And hoots to see the moon; across the meads
Limps the poor frightened hare, a little speck;
And a stray seamew with its fretful cry
Flits like a sudden drift of snow against the dull grey sky."
The picture is complete, we see the bare countryside, the sky grey with
impending snow, and the animal life introduced uttering nature's cry of
desolation. But hope is not dead in the poet's breast; he sees where,
when springtime comes, "nodding cowslips" will bloom again and the hedge
on which the wild rose--"That sweet repentance of the thorny
briar"--will blossom out. He runs through the whole flower calendar,
using the old English names "boy's-love," "sops in wine," and
"daffodillies."
"Soon will the glade be bright with bellamour
The flower which wantons love and those sweet nuns
Vale-lilies in their snowy vestiture,
Will tell their beaded pearls, and carnations
With mitred dusky leaves will scent the wind
And straggling traveller's joy each hedge with yellow stars will bind."
Once more we note how the flowers are personalities for him, a view
which could not long escape the humorists of _Punch_, and which was
amply taken advantage of by the writer of some burlesque verses, two of
which are sufficiently amusing to quote--
"My long lithe lily, my languid lily,
My lank limp lily-love, how shall I win--
Woo thee to wink at me? Silver lily,
How shall I sing to thee, softly, or shrilly?
What shall I weave for thee--which shall I spin--
Rondel, or rondeau, or virelay?
Shall I buzz like a bee, with my face thrust in
Thy choice, chaste chalice, or choose me a tin
Trumpet, or touchingly, tenderly play
On the weird bird-whistle, _sweeter than sin_,
That I bought for a halfpenny, yesterday?
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 stilly;
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!"
Nature appeals to Oscar Wilde in all her moods, and though he might at
times assume the pose of preferring art to nature, he gives expression
to his real feelings when he exclaims:
"Ah! somehow life is bigger after all
Than any painted Angel could we see
The God that is within us!"
The lines speak for themselves and are strongly indicative of his
attitude towards nature and art at that period. The true spirit of
Catholicism had gripped him; the influence of Rome was at work, though
enfeebled, and remained latent within him till in his hour of passing he
found peace in the bosom of the great Mother, who throughout the ages
has always held out her arms to the sinner and the outcast.
There has always been a certain amount of mystery attached to another
poem of Wilde's called "The Harlot's House," written at the same period
as "The Duchess of Padua" and "The Sphinx"--that is, when he was living
in the Hotel Voltaire. It was originally published in a magazine not
later than June 1885. It is a curious thing that all researches up to
the present as to the name of the publication have proved fruitless, and
that the approximate date of the appearance of the verses has been
arrived at by reference to a parody entitled "The Public House," which
appeared in _The Sporting Times_, of all papers in the world, on 13th
June 1885. First, an edition of the poem was brought out privately by
the Methuen Press in 1904 with five illustrations by Althea Gyles, in
which the bizarre note is markedly, though artistically, dominant.
Another edition was privately printed in London in 1905 in paper
wrappers.
The idea of this short lyrical poem is that the poet stands outside a
house and watches the shadows of the puppet dancers "race across the
blind."
"The dancers swing in a waltz of Strauss"--the "Treues Liebes
Herz"--"like strange mechanical grotesques" or "black leaves wheeling in
the wind." The marionettes whirl in the ghostly dance, and----
"Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed
A phantom lover to her breast,
Sometimes they seemed to try and sing."
The man turns to his companion and remarks that "the dead are dancing
with the dead," but drawn by the music she enters the house. As Love
enters the house of Lust the gay seductive music changes to a discord,
and the horrible shadows disappear. Then the dawn breaks, creeping down
the silent street "like a frightened girl."
That is all, but as a high specimen of imagina-verse it stands alone.
That the author was inspired by memories of Baudelaire and Poe is beyond
dispute. Nevertheless, the poem, in conception as well as execution, is
essentially original. The puppet dancers' _motif_ was afterwards
introduced by him with telling effect as we shall see later in "The
Ballad of Reading Gaol." Hardly ever have the bizarre and the _macabre_
been used with such artistic effect as in this short poem, nor have the
imaginative gifts of its author ever found a finer scope. If he had
written nothing else than these lines they would confer immortality on
him. Like all truly great work they are imperishable and will form part
of English literature when far more widely read effusions are set aside
and forgotten.
I have remarked on the original character of the poem in spite of its
obvious sources of inspiration, and there can be no better way of
verifying this than by giving an example of Baudelaire's own incursion
into puppet land--
"DANSE MACABRE"
"_Fiere, autant qu'un vivant, de sa noble stature,
Avec son gros bouquet son mouchoir et ses gants,
Elle a la nonchalance et la desinvolture
D'un coquette maigre aux airs extravagants._
_Vit-on jamais au bal une taille plus mince?
Sa robe exageree, en sa royale ampleur,
S'ecroule abondamment sur un pied sec que pince
Un soulier pomponne, joli comme une fleur._
_La ruche qui se joue au bord des clavicules,
Comme un ruisseau lascif qui se frotte au rocher,
Defend pudiquement des lazzi ridicules
Les funebres appas qu'elle tient a cacher._
_Ses yeux profonds sont faits de vide et de tenebres,
Et son crane, de fleurs artistement coiffe,
Oscille mollement sur ses freles vertebres,
--O charme d'un neant follement attife!_
_Aucuns t'appelleront une caricature,
Qui ne comprennent pas, amants ivres de chair,
L'elegance sans nom de l'humaine armature,
Tu reponds, grand squelette, a mon gout le plus cher!_
_Viens-tu troubler, avec ta puissante grimace,
La fete de la Vie? ou quelque vieux desir,
Eperonnant encor ta vivant carcasse,
Te pousse-t-il, credule, au sabbat du Plaisir?_
_Au chant des violons, aux flammes des bougies,
Esperes-tu chasser ton cauchemar moqueur,
Et viens-tu demander au torrent des orgies
De rafraichir l'enfer allume dans ton coeur?_
_Inepuisable quits de sottise et de fautes!
De l'antique douleur eternel alambic!
A travers le treillis recourbe de tes cotes
Je vois, errant encor, l'insatiable aspic._
_Pour dire vrai, je crains que ta coquetterie
Ne trouve pas un prix digne de ses efforts;
Qui, de ces soeurs mortels, entend la raillerie?
Les charmes de l'horreur n'enivrent que les forts!_
_Le gouffre de tes yeux, plein d'horrible pensees,
Exhale le vertige, et les danseurs prudents
Ne contempleront pas sans d'ameres nausees
Le sourire eternel de tes trente-deux dents._
_Pourtant, qui n'a serre dans ses bras un squelette,
Et qui ne s'est nourri des choses du tombeau?
Qu'importe le parfum, l'habit ou la toilette?
Qui fait le degoute montre qu'il se croit beau._
_Bayadere sans nez, irresistible gouge,
Dis donc a ces danseurs qui font les offusques:
'Fiers mignons, malgre l'art des poudres et du rouge,
Vous sentez tous la mort!' O squelettes musques._
_Antinous fletris, dandys a face glabre,
Cadavres vernisses, lovelaces chenus,
Le branle universel de la danse macabre
Vous entraine en des lieux qui ne sont pas connus!_
_Des quais froids de la Seine aux bords brulants du Gange,
Le troupeau mortel saute et se pame, sans voir,
Dans un trou du plafond la trompette de l'Ange
Sinistrement beante ainsi qu'un tromblon noir._
_En tout climat, sous ton soleil, la Mort t'admire
En tes contorsions, risible Humanite,
Et souvent, comme toi, se parfumant de myrrhe,
Mele son ironie a ton insanite!_"
The French poem lacks the simplicity and the directness of its English
fellow. It appears overloaded and artificial in comparison, and above
all it lacks the music which results from the juxtaposition of the
Anglo-Saxon a, e, i, and u sounds, and the Latin ahs and ohs.
But, on the other hand, as an example of the precious and artificial in
literature, a further poem of Wilde's written at this period, "The
Sphinx," reveals another phase of his extraordinarily versatile genius.
The metre of the poem is the same as that of "In Memoriam," though,
owing to the stanzas being arranged in two long lines instead of the
fairly short ones in Tennyson's poem, this might at first escape
attention. The poet at the time of writing we learn had
"hardly seen
Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn's gaudy liveries."
(which would seem to indicate that this part, at any rate, was written
at an earlier period than the rest of the poem), and in the very first
lines he tells us that--
"In a dim corner of my rooms far longer than my fancy thinks
A beautiful and silent sphinx has watched me through the silent gloom."
Day and night--
"this curious cat
Lies crouching on the Chinese mat with eyes of satin rimmed with gold."
Here we have in a very few words an exact picture of this "exquisite
grotesque half-woman and half-animal," whom, after the manner of Edgar
Allan Poe with his raven, he proceeds to apostrophise--
"Oh tell me" [he begins] "were you standing by when Isis to Osiris
knelt?
And did you watch the Egyptian melt her union for Antony?"
and plies her with many questions of similar nature. Presently he
adjures her--
"Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one
sinks!
Fawn at my feet, Sphinx! and sing me all your memories."
This idea of comparing the velvet depths of the eyes to "cushions where
one sinks" is quaint and original, though distinctly decadent, nor is
the note of the _macabre_ wanting, as--
"When through the purple corridors the screaming scarlet Ibis flew
In terror, and a horrid dew dripped from the moaning mandragores."
There is a wonderful use of contrast in the introduction of sweating
mandragores in connection with the purple of the corridors and the
scarlet plumage of the Ibis. How daring, likewise, the grotesque note
introduced as he recites the catalogue of her possible lovers and asks--
"Did giant Lizards come and couch before you on the reedy banks?
Did Gryphons with great metal flanks leap on you in your trampled
couch?
Did monstrous hippopotami come sidling towards you in the mist?
Did gilt-scaled dragons writhe and twist with passion as you passed
them by?"
The speaker will find out the secret of her amours. There is nothing too
bizarre, too monstrous to include in the list.
"Had you shameful secret quests" [he asks] "and did you hurry to your
home
Some nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock crystal breasted?"
Not Baudelaire himself could have invented anything more precious than
the description of this sea-nymph, but the gruesome must be introduced.
"Did you," he inquires,
"Steal to the border of the bar and swim across the silent lake?
And slink into the vault and make the Pyramid your lupanar,
Till from each black sarcophagus rose up the painted swathed dead?"
Wilde catalogues through the whole Egyptian mythology; he is inclined to
give first place to "Ammon."
"You kissed his mouth with mouths of flame: you made the horned god
your own:
You stood behind him on his throne: you called him by his secret name.
You whispered monstrous oracles into the caverns of his ears:
With blood of goats and blood of steers you taught him monstrous
miracles."
Decadent the idea may be, but how cleverly, how subtly the effects are
produced and how well sustained is the atmosphere of chimerical,
nightmare horrors. Wilde makes use of the impression derived from the
contemplation of colossal figures--the Egyptian galleries of the Louvre
were, one may be certain, a daily haunt of his at the time--and he
describes--"Nine cubits span" and his limbs are "Widespread as a tent at
noon," but he was of flesh and blood for all that.
"His thick soft throat was white as milk and threaded with thin veils
of blue,"
and he was royally clad, for--
"Curious pearls like frozen dew were embroidered on his flaming silk."
His love of rare and beautiful things finds an outlet in the description
of the jewels and retinue of the god.
"Before his gilded galliot ran naked vine-wreathed corybantes,
And lines of swaying elephants knelt down to draw his chariot."
Barbaric splendour and Eastern gorgeousness we have here and in one line
the sense of immense wealth is conveyed--
"The meanest cup that touched his lips was fashioned from a chrysolite."
But now--
"The god is scattered here and there: deep hidden in the windy sand
I saw his giant granite hand still clenched in impotent despair."
And he bids her--
"Go seek the fragments on the moor and wash them in the evening dew,
And from their pieces make anew thy mutilated paramour."
With mocking irony he tells her to "wake mad passions in the senseless
stone."
He counsels her to return to Egypt, her lovers are not dead--
"They will rise up and hear your voice
And clash their cymbals and rejoice and run to kiss your mouth!..."
He advises to--
"Follow some raving lion's spoor across the copper-coloured plain,"
and take him as a lover or to mate with a tiger--
"And toy with him in amorous jests, and when he turns and snarls and
gnaws
O smite him with your jasper claws! and bruise him with your agate
breasts!"
But "her sullen ways" pall on him, her presence fills him with horror,
"poisonous and heavy breath makes the light flicker in the lamp."
The poet wonders what "songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through
the curtains of the night." He drives the cat away with every
opprobrious epithet for she wakes in him "each bestial sense" and makes
him what he "would not be." She makes his "creed a barren shame," and
wakes "foul dreams of sensual life," and with a return to sanity he
chases her away. "Go thou before," he cries,
"And leave me to my crucifix
Whose pallid burden sick with pain watches the world with wearied eyes
And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in pain."
On this note of pessimism and refusal the poem ends. In the realm of the
fantastic it has no equal and though the objection may be raised that
the whole thing is unhealthy, the truth is that it is merely an
experimental excursion in the abnormal. It has all the fantastic
unreality of Chinese dragons, and, therefore, can in no way be harmful.
The nightmare effect has no lasting influence. We read it as we would
any other imaginative grotesque. But whilst we are alternately
fascinated and repulsed by the subject, we are lost in admiration of the
decorative treatment of the theme. The whole performance is artificial,
but so is all Oriental art.
It is true that Baudelaire's poems, with their morbid, highly polished
neurotic qualities, had fascinated the young artist and exercised a
powerful influence over him, but "The Sphinx" was an achievement apart
and totally different from any other of his poems. It is more in the
nature of an extravaganza, an opium dream described in finely chiselled,
richly tinted phrases. Every young poet goes through various phases and
this was only a phase in the author's literary career. Nothing could be
better than the workmanship, and that the poem should so rivet the
attention and attract where it most repels is the greatest tribute to
the genius of its creator. It is essentially a weird conception
expressed in haunting cadences, an esoteric gem for all those who have
brains to think and the necessary artistic sense to appreciate really
good work. That persons of inferior mental calibre and narrow views
should be shocked by it is only to be expected, and the author himself
excused the delay in publishing it by explaining that "it would destroy
domesticity in England!" The original edition, it may be mentioned, was
published in September 1894 by Messrs Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and
was limited to two hundred copies issued at 42s. with twenty-five on
larger paper at 105s. It was magnificently illustrated by Mr C. R.
Ricketts, the delicacy and distinction of whose work is too well known
to need comment.
In striking contrast to the artificiality and decadent character of "The
Sphinx" stands the author's imperishable "Ballad of Reading Gaol." What
the circumstances were that led to the writing of this great masterpiece
have been already sufficiently dealt with in the earlier portion of this
work. It has been aptly said that all great art has an underlying note
of pain and sorrow, beautiful work may be produced without it, but not
the work that is worthy to rank among the great creative masterpieces of
the world. "Quand un homme et une poesie," writes Barbey d'Aubrevilly,
"ont devale si bas dans la conscience de l'incurable malheur qui est
fond de toutes les voluptes de l'existence poesie et homme ne peuvent
plus que remonter." There can be no doubt that this poem could never
have been written but for the terrible ordeal the poet had been through.
It is incomparably Wilde's finest poetic work--great, not only by reason
of its beauty, but great on account of the feeling for suffering
humanity, his power to enter into the sorrows of others and to forget
his own trials in the sympathetic contemplation of the agony of his
fellow-sufferers which it reveals. The words of another distinguished
French critic might almost have been written about him:
"Desormais divorcee d'avec l'enseignement historique, philosophique
et scientifique, la poesie se trouve ramenee a so fonction
naturelle et directe, qui est de realiser pour nous la vie,
complementaire du reve, du souvenir, de l'esperance, du desir; de
donner un corps a ce qu'il y a d'insaisissable dans nos pensees et
de secret dans le mouvement de nos ames; de nous consoler ou de
nous chatier par l'expression de l'ideal ou par le spectacle de nos
vices. Elle devient non pas _individuelle_, suivant la prediction
un peu hasardeuse de l'auteur de _Jocelyn_, mais _personnelle_, si
nous sous-entendons que l'ame du poete est necessairement une ame
collective, une corde sensible et toujours tendue que font vibrer
les passions et les douleurs de ses semblables."
With Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," "Reading Gaol," holds first place
amongst the ballads of the world, and by many critics it is held, by
reason of its deep feeling and anguished intensity, to be a finer piece
of work than the older poet's _chef d'oeuvre_.
Although the author's identity was concealed under the cypher "C33,"
there was never a moment's doubt as to who the writer was. It came as a
shock to the British public that the man who, but a couple of years
before, had stood in the public pillory, the man whose work the great
majority, who had never even read it, believed to be artificial,
meretricious, and superficial, should be the author of a deeply moving
poem that could be read by the most prudish and strait-laced.
_The Times_, that great organ of English respectability, devoted a
leading article to it of a highly eulogistic character. The edition was
sold out at once, and the book was on all men's tongues. Wherever one
went one heard it discussed, priest and philistine were as loud in their
praises of it as the most decadent of minor poets. No poem had for a
generation met with such a friendly reception or caused such a
sensation.
A critical notice of the poem from the pen of Lady Currie appeared in
_The Fortnightly Review_ for July 1904. In it the author writes of the
"terrible 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' with its splendours and inequalities,
its mixture of poetic farce, crude realism, and undeniable pathos." As
to the crudeness of the realism, that is a mere matter of opinion: it is
easy to supply an adjective--it is more difficult to justify the use of
it, and give satisfactory reasons for its application. Realistic the
poem doubtless is--crude, never, but the writer shows a far keener
appreciation when she says--"all is grim, concentrated tragedy from
cover to cover. A friend of mine," Lady Currie says, "who looked upon
himself as a judge in such matters, told me that he would have placed
certain passages in this poem, by reason of their terrible, tragic
intensity, upon a level with some of the descriptions in Dante's
'Inferno,' were it not that 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was so much
more infinitely human."
Among the many laudatory notices that appeared at the time, there is an
extract from a review of the work taken from a great London paper and
quoted by a French writer which is worth reprinting as showing the
attitude of the press towards the poem.
"The whole is awful as the pages of Sophocles. That he has rendered
with his fine art so much of the essence of his life and the life
of others in that inferno to the sensitive is a memorable thing for
the social scientist, but a much more memorable thing for
literature. This is a simple, a poignant, a great ballad, one of
the greatest in the English language."
Never, perhaps, since Gray's "Elegy" had a poem been so revised, pruned
and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell. The
publisher was driven to the verge of distraction by the constant
alterations and emendations, the placing of a comma had become a matter
of moment to the fastidious author, but the work was published in its
entirety save for two or three stanzas concerning one of the prison
officials that it was deemed wise to suppress.
The poem bears the dedication--
IN MEMORIAM
C. T. W.
Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards
Obiit, H.M. Prison, Reading, Berkshire
July 7th, 1896.
The case of the trooper to whose memory the work is dedicated excited a
good deal of interest at the time. He had a fit of jealousy, murdered
his sweetheart, and though public opinion was inclined to take a
merciful view of the crime, and a petition was presented to the Home
Secretary for the withdrawal of the capital sentence, it was without
effect, and the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in the Gaol
at Reading.
The first line--
"He did not wear his scarlet coat"--
rivets the attention at once, and as surely as do the opening lines of
"The Ancient Mariner." The reason for this is given at once--
"For wine and blood are red
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead."
That the whole incident that led to the man's being there should be
communicated in the very first stanza, to make that stanza complete, is
an artistic necessity, and in the next two lines we are told who the
victim is--
"The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed."
The tragedy is complete. We have the picture of the soldier deprived of
his uniform and the whole story is revealed to us. A more concise or
supremely reticent description of the pathetic drama there could not be.
But the picture must be filled in even to the most trivial detail, and
we see the poor wretch taking his daily exercise among the prisoners
awaiting their trial, attired in "a suit of shabby grey," trying to
demean himself like a man and, trivial, but, from the artist's point of
view, important detail, with a cricket cap on his head. There is a world
of pathos and lines of unspoken tragedy in that cricket cap worn by a
man whose days are numbered, who never will play a game again and whose
mind must be occupied with thoughts far removed from sport and amusement
save perhaps when they may revert to happy days spent with bat and ball,
and which will never recur again. But though his step be jaunty, the
oppression of his impending doom is on him,
"I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day."
We can see that prison yard, the circle of convicts pacing the
melancholy round at ordered intervals and with measured tread, and the
strong man, full of life and vigour looking up at God's blue sky and
drinking in the air with greedy lungs. We can see the author of the
poem, the erstwhile social favourite, in his convict garb walking
"With other souls in pain
Within another ring."
and his horror as he receives the information muttered by some
fellow-prisoner through closed lips that
"That fellow's got to swing."
In words, the simplicity and intensity of which are sublime, he tells us
of how the news affected him--
"Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel."
That apostrophe to the Redeemer is a revelation in itself coming from a
man who is enduring his own mortal agony, but his particular sorrows
fade into insignificance and are forgotten in the presence of a
fellow-creature's crucifixion--
"And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel."
Already he is purified by his months of trial and tribulation, and he
can enter sympathetically into the sorrows of others and share their
burden.
He now understands the reason of the jaunty step and the defiant manner,
he himself has tried to flee from his thoughts.
"I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step."
He realises the meaning of that "wistful look" towards the vaulted
canopy of heaven.
The man had killed the thing he loved.
"Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word;
The coward does it with a kiss
The brave man with a sword."
It has been objected that making sword rhyme with word is a makeshift,
but surely it is patent to anyone with any artistic sense whatever that
this forced rhyme avoids the danger of making the verse too facile, and,
far from being a piece of slovenly writing, is the well-thought-out
scheme of a perfect master of his craft. It is one of those stupid
objections that superficial critics are so apt to raise when utterly
devoid themselves of any sense of proportion or fitness.
The idea that all men, young or old, kill the thing they love is not
only original but it is a very fine flight of metaphor--there is a whole
sermon in the conception, and Wilde elaborates the theme--
"The kindest use a knife because
The dead so soon grow old."
It is as we read these lines that our thoughts are immediately directed
to "The Dream of Eugene Aram," that incomparable masterpiece of another
poet, who likewise was looked upon as a mere jester whose work should
not be treated seriously, but who has left us three of the finest and
most deeply moving poems in the English language. There is a striking
resemblance in the wording between the two poems, but without
disparaging Hood's work there can be no possible doubt as to which is
the greater and more noble achievement.
Another stanza elaborates the theme still further and the fact is
recorded that though every man kills the thing he loves, yet death is
not always meted out to him.
"He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty space."
Within these grim prison walls all the horrible details of execution
obtrude themselves upon the wretched captive. He has tasted the horrors
of solitary confinement, of being spied on night and day by grim,
taciturn warders who, at frequent intervals, slide back the panel in the
door to observe through the grated opening that the prisoner is all
right. So he can feel all the torture that a man under sentence of death
must go through at having to
"Sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day,
Who watch him when he tries to weep
And when he tries to pray."
The ceaseless watch that is kept on the poor wretch lest he should be
tempted, given the opportunity, to "rob the prison of its prey" by doing
violence on himself, the whole grim ceremonial of the carrying out of
the law's decree are conjured up by him. He pictures the doomed man
awakened from sleep by the entrance of the Sheriff, and the Governor of
the Gaol accompanied by the "shivering Chaplain robed in white." He
dwells on the hurried toilet, the putting on of the convict dress for
the last time whilst the doctor takes professional stock of every
nervous symptom. It is to be hoped that the lines descriptive of the
doctor are purely imaginative--one must hope, for the credit of the
medical profession, that it has no foundation in personal experience.
Then there is the awful thirst that tortures the victim and another
introduction of an apparently trivial detail, "the gardener's gloves"
worn by the hangman. But the detail is not trivial, its introduction
adds to the ghastliness of the scene. The reading of the Burial Service
over a man yet living is another realistic touch that serves its
purpose. With him we can enter into the agony of the condemned wretch as
he prays
"with lips of clay
For his agony to pass."
Wilde proceeds with the strict narrative. He tells us how for six weeks
that Guardsman walked the prison yard still wearing the same suit and
his head covered with the same incongruous headgear.
Still does he cast yearning glances at the sky,
"And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its ravelled fleeces by."
But the man is no coward, he does not wring his hands and bemoan his
fate, he merely kept his eyes on the sun "and drank the morning air."
The other convicts, forgetful of themselves and their crimes, watch with
silent amazement "The man who had to swing." He still carries himself
bravely and they can hardly realise that he will so soon be swept into
eternity; and then a perfectly mediaeval note is struck--
"For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
That in the springtime shoot:
But grim to see is the gallows-tree
With its adder-bitten root
And green or dry a man must die
Before it bears its fruit."
There we have the true spirit of the old ballads. The comparison between
the oak and elm in the spring putting forth their leaves, and the gaunt,
bare timber of the gibbet with its burden of dead human fruit is a
highly imaginative and artistic piece of fantasy, though possibly a
poem of Villon's was in Wilde's mind at the time of writing.
He gives us in the next stanza a picture of the murderer with noose
adjusted to his neck, taking his last look upon the world, and the drop
suggests another finely imaged comparison to him--
"'Tis sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair,"
and goes on so for another two lines before he brings in the
antithesis--
"But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air."
The almost morbid fascination the sight of this man with his foot in the
grave exercises over him is undiminished, till one day he misses him and
knows that he is standing "In black dock's dreadful pen." He himself had
been through that dread ordeal and his spirit goes out to him whom he
had seen daily for a brief space without ever holding commune with him.
"Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way,"
he writes, and proceeds to explain that it was impossible for them to
exchange word or sign, as they never saw each other in the "holy" night
but in the "shameful" day. In a passage of rare beauty, one of the
finest in the poem, he explains--
"A prison wall was round us both
Two outcast men we were
The world had thrust us from his heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare."
The lines in their supreme reticence indicate precisely the agony and
despair that filled the heart of C33, and once again a comparison with
"Eugene Aram" is forced upon us.
The third period starts with a picture of the doomed man and a scathing
bit of satire directed against the prison officials. The wretch is shown
to us watched day and night by keen, sleepless eyes, debarred even for a
brief second of the privilege of being alone with his thoughts and his
misery.
Then a small detail is introduced to heighten the effect of the grim
picture--
"And thrice a day he smoked his pipe
And drank his quart of beer."
There is quite a Shakespearean note in this introduction of these
commonplace details, which proves how thoroughly Oscar Wilde had studied
the methods of the great dramatist.
But he leaves the condemned cell to paint the effect the whole ghastly
tragedy being enacted within those grey walls had upon the other
prisoners. To a highly strung and supersensitive nature like the
writer's the strain must have been terrible. The captives went through
the allotted tasks of picking oakum till the fingers bled, scrubbing the
floors, polishing the rails, sewing sacks, and all the other daily
routine of prison life.
"But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still--"
until one day, returning from their labours, they "passed an open
grave," and they knew that the execution would take place on the morrow.
They saw the hangman with his black bag shuffling through the gloom, and
like cowed hounds they crept silently back to their cells. Then night
comes and Fear stalks through the prison, but the man himself is wrapt
in peaceful slumbers. The watching warders cannot make out
"How one could sleep so sweet a sleep
With a hangman close at hand."
Not so with the other prisoners--"the fool, the fraud, the knave"--sleep
is banished from their cells, they are feeling another's guilt, and the
hardened hearts melt at the thought of another's agony. The warders,
making their noiseless round, are surprised as they look through the
wickets to see "gray figures on the floor." They are puzzled and
wonder--
"Why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before."
All through the long night they keep their sacred vigil.
"The grey cock crew, the red cock crew
But never came the day,"
and their imaginations people the corners and shadows with shapes of
terror. The marionette dance of death of these ghostly visitants is as
fine a bit of word-painting as can be found any where. The idea is an
amplification of the _motif_ of "The Harlot's House," but how
immeasurably superior, how much more artistically effective the most
cursory comparison of the two poems will make apparent.
At last the first faint streaks of day steal through the prison bars and
the daily task of cleaning the cells is performed as usual, but the
Angel of Death passes through the prison, and with parched throats the
prisoners, who were kept in their cells while the grim tragedy was being
enacted, wait for the stroke of eight, the hour fixed for the carrying
out of the sentence. As the first chimes of the prison clock are heard a
moan arises from those imprisoned wretches. At noon they are marched out
into the yard, and each man's eye is turned wistfully to the sky, just
as the condemned man's had been. They notice that the warders are
wearing their best uniforms, but the task they have just been engaged
upon is revealed "by the quicklime on their boots." The murderer has
expiated his crime,
"And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal."
In his dishonoured grave he lies in a winding-sheet of quicklime; no
rose or flower shall bloom above it, no tear shall water it, no prayer
or benison be uttered over it.
"In Reading Gaol by Reading Town," with a repetition of the stanza
embodying the theme that "all men kill the thing they love," the poem
ends.
Truly a wonderful poem this. We close the covers of the book slowly,
almost reverently, our minds all saddened and attuned to a low note by
this gloomy picture of agony, torture and horror. We feel as if we had
been assisting at a funeral, and with hushed voices slowly make our way
back to the world of life and bustle.
Wilde's place in poetry has yet to be settled, we have not yet had time
to focus his work into perspective. That he will rank amongst the very
greatest creative geniuses of the world, the men whose songs sway
nations, is doubtful, though time alone can tell us.
The least that can be said is that there is a distinction about Wilde's
poetry that will always stamp it as the work of a great artist, and as
such it commands a high place amongst the best literary work that this
country has produced.
PART VI
THE FICTION WRITER
FICTION
That the gift of composing beautiful verse and the ability to write
gracefully and wittily in prose does not of necessity enable an author
to produce good fiction, is a truism that requires no elaboration. That
the novelist should possess style is a _sine qua non_--that is, if his
novels are to take their place as works of art and not merely achieve an
ephemeral success amongst the patrons of circulating libraries--but to
achieve distinction in the field of romance many other qualities are
requisite. To begin with, the story must be of sufficient interest to
hold the attention of the reader, the dialogue must be brisk and to the
point, and the delineation of character--a gift in itself--lifelike and
convincing.
Whether Oscar Wilde would, had his life been prolonged, have ever
achieved success in this branch of literature is one of those vexed
questions which may well be left to those speculative persons who love
to discuss "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" and other unfinished works of
fiction. That he was endowed with an extraordinarily vivid imagination
and that his versatility was marvellous are factors that no one should
neglect to take into account when considering the matter. His own
contributions to fiction are so few that they afford very little data
to go upon. They consist of "The Picture of Dorian Gray," published in
1890; "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime"; "The Incomparable and Ingenious
History of Mr W. H., being the true secret of Shakespeare's Sonnets, now
for the first time here fully set forth," the manuscript of which, after
passing through the hands of Messrs Elkin Mathews and John Lane,
publishers, who had announced the work as being in preparation, has been
unaccountably lost, although it is known that it was returned to the
author's house on the very day of his arrest. An article in _Blackwood's
Magazine_ alone enables us to gather some idea of the last work. Then we
have three short stories--"The Sphinx without a Secret," "The
Canterville Ghost," "The Model Millionaire," which complete the list of
Wilde's fiction in the limited sense of the word.
A careful study of these remains must lead to the inevitable conclusion
that, so far as we can judge by these more or less fragmentary
specimens, Wilde's _forte_ was not fiction. He can in no sense be
regarded as a novelist, certainly not as an exponent of modern fiction.
The pieces are brilliantly clever, gemmed with paradoxes and quaint
turns of thought, but they are not fiction in the accepted sense of the
word. Works of imagination, yes, but "fiction," no. That he was a
graceful allegorist nobody can deny, but that his work in this other
field of letters was great is never for a moment to be even suggested.
He used fiction as a means of introducing his curiously topsy-turvy
views of life, but his characters are mere puppets, strange creatures
with unreal names, without any particular personality or especially
characteristic features, who enunciate the author's views and opinions.
In a preface to "Dorian Gray," when it was published in book form, Oscar
Wilde himself confirms this view--"The highest and the lowest form of
criticism," he tells us, "is a mode of autobiography." That he himself
believed in the artistic value of his story is evident from the series
of brilliant aphorisms which constitute the preface.
When in July, 1890, there appeared in an American magazine the fantastic
story of "Dorian Gray" an astonished public rubbed its eyes and wondered
whether all its previous theories as to this class of work had been
absolutely false and should henceforth be discarded like a garment that
has gone out of fashion.
The story provoked a storm of criticism which, for the most part, only
served to increase the sale of the magazine in which it appeared. In
answer to his critics the author contented himself with the dictum that
"Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital." Whether "The Picture of Dorian Gray" possessed
these three essential qualities is a question which may best be answered
by giving a short _resume_ of the story itself. Basil Hallward, a young
artist who, some years previously, had caused a great sensation by his
disappearance, has painted a full-length portrait of a young man of
"extraordinary personal beauty." In conversation with Lord Henry Wotton,
who is visiting the studio, he inadvertently reveals that it is the
portrait of Dorian Gray, and alleges as his reason for not exhibiting
the picture that he has put too much of himself into it; and, pressed
for an explanation, he tells the story of his meeting the original of
the painting at a Society function, and how deeply he had been impressed
by his extraordinary personality. He experiences a "curious artistic
idolatry" for the young man, and as they are discussing him the servant
announces "Mr Dorian Gray." We then get a word-picture of this
interesting young man, we are told that there was something in his face
which made you trust him, that it was full of the candour of youth and
passionate purity. During the sitting that follows, Lord Henry
enunciates his views of life, and his words leave a deep impression on
his youthful auditor. Dorian's acquaintance with Lord Henry soon ripens
into friendship, and he confides to his friend that he has fallen deeply
in love with Sybil Vane, a young actress he has accidentally discovered
in an East End playhouse.
Late upon the same night on which the confidence was made Lord Henry
finds, on his return home, a telegram from Dorian Gray announcing his
engagement to the object of his affections. We are next introduced to
Sybil's shabby home in the Euston Road; to her mother, a faded,
tired-looking woman with bismuth-whitened hands, and to her brother, a
young lad with a thick-set figure, rough brown hair and large hands and
feet "somewhat clumsy in movement." The faded beauty of the elder woman
and her theatrical gestures and manners are deftly touched upon. The
son, whom we learn is about to seek his fortune in Australia, goes with
his sister for a walk in the park, and their talk is all of her love for
Dorian, of which he does not approve. Sybil catches sight of her lover,
but before she can point him out to her brother he is lost to sight.
They return home; the lad's heart is filled with jealousy, and a fierce
murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it seemed to him, had come
between him and his sister. Downstairs he startles his mother with a
sudden question--"Were you married to my father?" The woman had been
dreading the question for years, but she answers it in the negative, and
tells him that his parent was a gentleman and highly connected, but not
free to marry her. In the meanwhile, Lord Henry and Basil are
discussing the proposed marriage in the private room of a fashionable
restaurant, and presently they are joined by Dorian himself, who takes
part in the discussion, till it is time for them to go to the theatre.
His two friends are delighted with the beauty of his _fiancee_, but her
acting is below mediocrity, and the boy, who has seen her act really
well on previous occasions, is terrible disconcerted.
Later, in the green-room, Sybil explains the reason of this falling off.
She is quite candid about it: she tells him she will never act well
again, because he has transfigured her life, and that acting, which had
before been a matter of reality to her, had become a hollow sham, and
that she can no longer mimic a passion that burns her like fire.
Flinging himself down on a seat, Dorian exclaims, "You have killed my
love," and after an impassioned tirade answers his own question of "What
are you now?" with "A third-rate actress with a pretty face." In vain
she pleads for his love; he leaves her telling her that he can never see
her again, for she has disappointed him. When, after wandering aimlessly
about all night, he returns home, he is suddenly conscious of a change
in the portrait Basil had painted of him. The expression is different,
and there are lines of cruelty round the mouth, though he can trace no
such lines in his own face.
"Suddenly, there flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil
Hallward's studio the day the picture had been finished.... He had
uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young and the portrait
grow old, that his own beauty might be untarnished and the face on the
canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins." He is struck with
remorse for his cruelty to Sybil, and by the time Lord Henry comes to
see him has determined to atone for it by marrying her, but it is too
late. He learns from his friend's lips that Sybil has committed suicide
in the theatre shortly after he had left her.
He spends the evening at the opera with Lord Henry Wotton, and his
sister, Lady Gwendolen. When, next day, he mentions this to Basil the
latter is horrified, but Dorian is perfectly callous and is inclined to
be flattered by the fact that the girl should have committed suicide for
love of him.
Basil wishes to look at the picture, which he intends to exhibit in
Paris, and before which Dorian has placed a screen, but the latter will
not let him see it, and the former presently goes away greatly puzzled
by the refusal. When he is gone Dorian sends for a framemaker, and gets
him and his assistant to remove the draped picture to a disused room in
his house, having previously sent his man out with a note to Lord Henry
in order to get him out of the way. Having dismissed the framemaker and
his assistant, he carefully locks the door of the room and retains the
key. When he comes down, he finds that Lord Henry has sent him a paper
containing an account of the inquest on Sybil, and an unhealthy French
book which fascinates whilst it repels him, and the influence of which
he cannot shake off for years after.
Time passes, but the hero of the story shows no signs of growing older,
nor does he lose his good looks. Meanwhile, the most evil rumours as to
his mode of life are in circulation. We learn that he is in the habit of
frequenting, disguised and under an assumed name, a little ill-famed
tavern near the docks, and we are given a long analysis of his mental
and spiritual condition, whilst his various idiosyncrasies are carefully
recorded, and we are insensibly reminded of the surroundings invented
for himself by the hero of Huysman's "A Rebours."
All the while, the picture remains hidden away, a very skeleton in the
cupboard. Dorian Gray is nearly blackballed for a West End Club, Society
looks askance at him, and there are all sorts of ugly rumours current as
to his doings and movements.
One night he meets Hallward, who wants to talk to him about his mode of
life. The painter enumerates all the scandalous stories he has heard
about him; he ends up by expressing a doubt whether he really knows his
friend. To do so, he says, he should have to see his soul. "You shall
see it yourself to-night," Dorian exclaims, "it is your handiwork," and,
holding a lamp, he takes him up to the locked room, and removes the
drapery from the picture. An exclamation of horror breaks from the
painter as he perceives the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him.
It fills him with loathing and disgust, and he has difficulty in
believing it to be his own work. Dorian is seized with an uncontrollable
feeling of hatred for his friend, and, seizing a knife lying on a chest,
stabs him in the neck and kills him. After the murder he locks the door,
and goes quietly downstairs. He slips out into the street closing the
front door very gently, and rings the bell. When his valet opens it he
explains that he had left his latchkey indoors, and casually inquires
the time, which the man informs him is ten minutes past two.
The next day Dorian sends for a former friend of his, Alan Campbell,
whose hobby is chemistry, and after telling him of the murder, begs him
by some chemical process to destroy the body. Alan refuses to help him.
Dorian then writes something upon a piece of paper and gives it to the
other to read. Alan is terror-struck and consents to do what is required
of him, though reluctantly. When later, provided with the necessary
chemicals, they enter the locked room, Dorian perceives that the hands
of the picture are stained with blood.
He dines out that night, and when he returns home he provides himself
with some opium paste he keeps locked up in a secret drawer, and having
dressed himself in rough garments makes his way to the docks. He enters
an opium den, but the presence of a man who owes his downfall to him
irritates him, and he decides to go to another. A woman greets him with
the title "Prince Charming" (the name Sybil had given him), and on
hearing it a sailor gets up from his seat and follows him. In a dim
archway he feels himself seized by the throat and sees a revolver
pointed at his head. Briefly, his assailant tells him that he is Sybil's
brother, and that he means to avenge his sister's death. A sudden
inspiration comes to Dorian and he inquires of the man how long it is
since his sister died. "Eighteen years," is the answer, and Gray
triumphantly exclaims "Look at my face." He is dragged under a lamp, and
at sight of the youthful face Sybil's brother is convinced that he has
made a mistake. Hardly has Dorian gone, when the woman who had called
him Prince Charming comes up, and from her the sailor learns that in
eighteen years Dorian has not altered.
Dorian goes down to his country house, where he entertains a large party
of guests, though all the while he lives in deadly terror lest Sybil's
brother should trace him. During a _battue_ a man is accidentally shot
by one of Dorian's guests. It is at first thought that the victim of the
accident is one of the beaters but it turns out to be a stranger, a
seafaring man presumably. Dorian goes to look at the body, and to his
intense relief finds that the dead man is his assailant of some nights
back.
Back in London one night Dorian Gray determines that he will reform,
and, curious to see whether his good resolutions have had any effect on
the portrait, he goes up to look at it. No, it still bears the same
repulsive look, and in a rage he stabs at it with the knife with which
he had murdered Basil. A loud agonised cry rings through the house, and
when the servants at last make their way into the room they find hanging
upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen
him, while lying on the floor with a knife through his heart was a dead
man "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage," whom they could only
identify by the rings on his fingers.
Such, shorn of all its brilliant dialogue and exquisite descriptive
passages, is the story of "The Portrait of Dorian Gray," in its bald
outlines. As an imaginative work it must rank high, and in spite of the
fantastic character of the plot and its inherent improbability, it
exercises a weird fascination over us as we read. That its author (more
even in the treatment than in the plot) was inspired by Balzac's
incomparable "Peau de Chagrin" is beyond question. In the one story we
have a man purchasing a piece of shagreen skin inscribed with Sanskrit
characters which, as each of its possessor's desires are gratified, by
its shrinkage marks a diminution in the span of his life. In the other,
whilst the original man remains outwardly unchanged, his portrait ages
with the years and reveals in its features all the passions and sins
that gradually transform his nature. In both cases the story ends in
tragedy.
The colouring of the tale is one of its most remarkable features. In
passages of rare beauty Oscar Wilde gives us descriptions of jewels and
perfumes, rare tapestries and quaint musical instruments. The catalogue
of the jewels as set out by him deserves to be quoted for the marvellous
knowledge of precious stones it reveals as well as for the exquisite
description of them.
"He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in the
cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the
olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane
with its wirelike line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot,
rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet
with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon stones, orange
and violet spinels, and amethysts with the alternate layers of ruby
and sapphire. He loved the red-gold of the sunstone, and the
moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky
opal. He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary
size and richness of colour, and had a turquoise _de la vicille
roche_ that was the envy of all connoisseurs."
It may here be pointed out, though the fact is not generally known, that
Wilde's knowledge of tapestry which, at first sight, seems so profound,
was obtained from Lefebure's "History of Embroidery and Lace," a book
which he had reviewed in an article having for title "A Fascinating
Book." It is interesting to compare an extract from that article with a
passage from the review under discussion:
"Where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought
against the giants, that had been worked for Athena? Where the huge
velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, on
which were represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot
drawn by white gilt-reined steeds? He longed to see the curious
table-napkins wrought for Elagabalus, on which were displayed all
the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the
mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the
Bishop of Pontus, and were figured with 'lions, panthers, bears,
dogs, forests, rocks, hunters,--all, in fact, that a painter can
copy from nature'; and the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore,
on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song
beginning '_Madame je suis tout joyeux_,' the musical accompaniment
of the words being wrought in gold thread, and each note, of square
shape in those days, formed with four pearls. He read of the room
that was prepared at the palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan
of Burgundy, and was decorated with 'thirteen hundred and
twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's
arms and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were
similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked
in gold.' Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of
black velvet powdered with crescents and suns. Its curtains were of
damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and
silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of
pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's
devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver. Louis XIV. had
gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment. The
state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of Smyrna gold
brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the Koran. Its
supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely set
with enamelled and jewelled medallions. It had been taken from the
Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mohammed had stood
under it."
"Where is the great crocus-coloured robe that was wrought for
Athena, and on which the gods fought against the giants? Where is
the huge velarium that Nero stretched across the Colosseum at Rome,
on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a
chariot drawn by steeds? How one would like to see the curious
table-napkins wrought for Heliogabalus, on which were displayed
all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; or
the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
bees; or the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the
Bishop of Pontus, and were embroidered with 'lions, panthers,
bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that painters
can copy from nature.' Charles of Orleans had a coat, on the
sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a song, beginning
'Madame, je suis tout joyeux,' the musical accompaniment of the
words being wrought in gold thread, and each note (of square shape
in those days) formed with four pearls. The room prepared in the
palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy was
decorated with 'thirteen hundred and twenty-one _papegauts_
(parrots) made in broidery and blazoned with the King's arms, and
five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly
ornamented with the Queen's arms--the whole worked in fine gold.'
Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her 'of black
velvet embroidered with pearls and powdered with crescents and
suns.' Its curtains were of damask, 'with leafy wreaths and
garlands figured upon a gold and silver ground, and fringed along
the edges with broideries of pearls,' and it stood in a room hung
with rows of the Queen's devices in cut black velvet on cloth of
silver. Louis XIV. had gold-embroidered caryatides fifteen feet
high in his apartments. The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland,
was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises and
pearls, with verses from the Koran; its supports were of
silver-gilt, beautifully chased and profusely set with enamelled
and jewelled medallions. He had taken it from the Turkish camp
before Vienna, and the standard of Mahomet had stood under it."
Wilde, who at times was extremely indolent, had an amiable weakness for
using the material at hand, and throughout his writings we find whole
lines of verse and prose sentences reappearing in work produced at
another period. It is the same with the epigrams in "Dorian Gray," most
of which were subsequently transferred, bodily, to his plays. During his
travels in Italy, as I have already pointed out, he had been enormously
impressed by the stately ceremonials of the Catholic Church, and in this
book he uses his opportunity of introducing the ornate and sumptuous
vestments worn at her services. Dorian Gray, he tells us, "had a special
passion also for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for
everything connected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar
chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many
rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride
of Christ, who must wear purples and jewels and fine linen that she may
hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she
seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain. He had a gorgeous cope of
crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of
golden pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on
either side was the pineapple device wrought in seed-pearls. The
orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of
the Virgin, and the coronation of the Virgin was figured in coloured
silks upon the hood. This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.
Another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups
of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the
details of which were picked out with silver thread and coloured
crystals. The morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work. The
orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred
with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St Sebastian.
He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold
brocades, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with
representation of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, and embroidered
with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and
pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and _fleurs de
lys_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many
corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria."
It may also be noted here that a couple of chapters, those dealing with
Sybil's home and the death of her brother, were not written till the
story appeared in book form, and a certain extra number of words were
required to make the volume of the requisite bulk; so must writers
submit to the inexorable demands of publishers who measure work not by
its merit but by a footrule.
The dialogue throughout the tale sparkles with brilliant epigrams, and
this is all the more notable when we remember that the story was written
in a hurry, when the author was hard pressed for money, is more or less
a piece of hack work, and that whole pages were written in at the behest
of the publisher, who, like a customer at the baker's demanding the
make-weight which the law allows him, was clamouring for more "copy."
Nothing could be more felicitous than "young people imagine that money
is everything ... and when they grow older they know it"; and, "to be
good is to be in harmony with oneself." And characteristic of that
Epicurean pose that the author delighted in is the paradoxical dictum
that "a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is
exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied." Likewise essentially
characteristic of the man and his extraordinary, topsy-turvy views of
life is, "There is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are
always made too late," or "Good resolutions are useless attempts to
interfere with scientific laws. They are simply cheques that men draw on
a bank where they have no account."
Some of the epigrams are as biting as a _Saturday Review_ article, in
the old days, as for instance, this description of a certain frail
dame--"She is still _decolletee_, and when she is in a very smart gown
she looks like an _edition de luxe_ of a bad French novel." Could
anything be more pithy or more brilliantly sarcastic? It is of this same
lady that the remark is made, "When her third husband died, her hair
turned quite golden from grief."
But one could go on for ever, and I have quoted enough to illustrate the
wittiness of the dialogue, and, as the author himself lays down,
"Enough is as good as a meal." And there, by the way, we have an
illustration of how cleverly Wilde could transform the commonest saws by
the alteration or the transposition of a word, even sometimes by the
inversion of a sentence into what, at the first flush, appeared to be
highly original and brilliant sayings. By the substitution of the word
"meal" for "feast" we fail to recognise the old homely saying, and are
ready, until we consider it more closely, to receive it as a new and
witty idea neatly embodied. It is a _truc de metier_, but one that
requires a clever workman to use properly, as anyone can make sure of by
glancing through the bungling work of the majority of his imitators.
In "Dorian Gray," Wilde gives free play to his ever-present longing to
utter the _dernier cri_, to avoid all that was _vieux jeu_, and to fill
with horror and amazement the souls of the stodgy _bourgeoisie_. That he
succeeded in doing so merely proves that the _bourgeoisie_ are stodgy,
not that the author has erred from the canons of art and good taste.
His short stories are all written in a lighter vein--we peruse them as
we eat a plover's egg, and with the same relish and appreciation. They
are things of gossamer, but gossamer will oft survive more solid
material, and has the supreme quality of delicacy.
"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" deals with that nobleman's anxiety to
commit the murder a cheiromantist has predicted he will perpetrate, and
to get the matter over before he marries the girl to whom he is engaged.
His two successive failures and his final drowning of the hand-reading
fortune-teller is conceived in the best spirit of comedy, and provokes a
gentle continuous ripple of amusement as we read it. The same may be
said of "The Sphinx without a Secret," and "The Canterville Ghost,"
whereas the "Model Millionaire" is simply a pretty story wittily told.
The whole plot is summed up in its concluding lines "Millionaire models
are rare enough ... but model millionaires are rarer still."
But, incomparably, Wilde's best work in fiction is the "Portrait of Mr
W. H." as the _Blackwood_ article is headed. After reading it our regret
becomes all the more poignant that the complete MS. of the book should
have so unaccountably disappeared. Correctly speaking, the story is
hardly a work of fiction, or, at anyrate, the fiction is so slight as to
be hardly deserving of criticism, and is a mere medium for the
exposition of a theory. The teller of the story is in a friend's rooms,
and the talk drifts on to literary forgeries. The friend (Erskine) shows
him a portrait-panel of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume,
and proceeds to tell him his story. A young friend of his had
discovered what he considered a clue to the identity of the Mr W. H. of
Shakespeare's Sonnets, the only hitch being the difficulty of proving
that the young actor to whom he asserted his poems were written, ever
existed. He shortly afterwards produced a panel-portrait of the young
man which he had, as he alleged, discovered clamped to the inside of an
old chest picked up by him at a Warwickshire farmhouse. This final proof
quite convinced Erskine of the genuineness of the discovery, and it was
not till an accidental visit to a friend's studio that the fact of the
panel being a forgery was revealed to him. He taxes the discoverer of
the clue with it and the latter commits suicide. The writer of the story
is so impressed with the various proofs that Erskine has laid before him
that, in spite of that latter's utter scepticism as to the existence of
any such person as the dead man evolved from the Sonnets themselves, he
completes the researches on his own account. But the moment he has sent
off a detailed account of the result of his investigations to Erskine,
he himself is filled with an utter disbelief in the accuracy of the
conclusions derived from them. Erskine, on the other hand, is once more
converted by his letter to his dead friend's theory.
Two years later the writer receives a letter from Erskine written from
Cannes stating that, like the discoverer of the clue, he has committed
suicide for the sake of a theory which he leaves to his friend as a
sacred legacy stained with the blood of two lives. The writer rushes off
to the Riviera only to find his friend dead, and to receive from his
mother the ill-starred panel.
The story ends with a true Wilde touch, for in a conversation with the
doctor who had attended him, he learns that Erskine had died of
consumption and had never committed suicide at all.
So much for the setting, which is quite unimportant. The real matter of
moment is, that the _Blackwood_ article is a really very valuable
contribution to the controversy as to the identity of the mysterious Mr
W. H.
It will be remembered that the Sonnets were first issued in book form in
1609, by a sort of piratical bookseller of those days, called Thames
Thorpe who, on his own responsibility, prefixed the edition with a
dedication--"To the only-begotten of these insuing sonnets, Mr W. H.,
all happinesse and that eternite promised by our ever living poet
wisheth the well wishing adventurer in setting forth. T. T." Round the
identity of this W. H. there has long raged an ardent controversy. Most
of the commentators have rushed to the conclusion that he must be the
person to whom the Sonnets are addressed. Some have attempted to
identify him as Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (the initials
being reversed), who is known to have been an early patron of the poet,
others without much apparent reason have assumed that the W. H. in
question was none other than William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. The most
probable theory is undoubtedly that of Mr Henry Lee, that the dedication
is entirely Thorpe's own, that it has nothing whatever to do with
Shakespeare or the inspirer of the poet, and that it was meant for
William Hall, a sort of literary intermediary. In confirmation of this
he adduces the undoubted fact that Thorpe had, at anyrate, once
previously dedicated a work to its "begotten."
One point is established almost beyond dispute--viz. that the first 126
sonnets are addressed to a young man and the remainder refer to a "dark
woman" who, after having bewitched the author, casts her spell over his
young friend and estranges the two.
A counter-theory is that Shakespeare's selection of the sonnet, "that
puling, petrifying, stupidly platonic composition," as Byron calls it,
as a medium for his muse, is that he was experimenting in the style of
writing which had become the fashion in England between the years 1591
and 1597.
Wilde's history is a totally new one, and deserves close examination.
Given that it could be proved that the young actor to whom he maintains
the Sonnets were addressed ever had a real existence, and the matter
would be as good as proved, but that is the weak point in his armour.
Mayhap some enthusiast may, by digging amongst old deeds and papers,
light upon some reference to him, but until then his hypothesis can be
only regarded as an ingenious, though highly interesting speculation.
Parenthetically it may be mentioned, although the fact is only known to
very few, that an artist friend of Oscar Wilde, whose work is the
admiration of all connoisseurs, had, under his direction, painted
exactly such a panel-portrait as described, employing all the arts of
the forger of antiquities in its production, and that a young poet whose
recently published volume of verse had caused considerable sensation in
literary circles had sat for the likeness.
The points Wilde advances in confirmation of his theory are as
follows:--
1. That the young man to whom Shakespeare addresses sonnets must
have been someone who was really a vital factor in the development
of his dramatic art, and that this could not be said of either Lord
Pembroke or Lord Southampton.
2. That the Sonnets, as we learn from Meres, were written before
1598 and that his friendship with W. H. had already lasted three
years when Sonnet CIV. was written, which would fix the date of its
commencement as 1594, or at latest 1595, that Lord Pembroke was born
in 1580 and did not come to London till he was eighteen (_i.e._
1598) so that Shakespeare could not have met him till after the
sonnet had been written; and that Pembroke's father did not die till
1601, whereas W. H.'s father was dead in 1598, as is proved by the
line--
"You had a father, let your son say so."
3. That Lord Southampton had early in life become the lover of
Elizabeth Vernon, so required no urging to enter the state of
matrimony, that he was not dowered with good looks, and that he did
not remember his mother as W. H. did. (Thou art thy mother's glass,
and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime), and
moreover that his Christian name being Henry he could not be the
Will to whom the punning sonnets (CXXXV. and CXLIII.) are addressed.
4. That W. H. is none other than the boy actor for whom Shakespeare
created the parts of Viola, Imogen, Juliet, Rosalind, Portia,
Desdemona and Cleopatra.
5. That the boy's name was Hughes.
These points he proves from the Sonnets themselves. As regards No. 1 he
writes: "to look upon him as simply the object of certain love poems is
to miss the whole meaning of the poems; for the art of which Shakespeare
talks in the Sonnets is not the art of the Sonnets themselves, which
indeed were to him but slight and secret things, it is the art of the
dramatist to which he is always alluding. He proceeds to quote the
lines:
"Thou art all my art and dost advance
As high as learning my rude ignorance."
2 and 3 effectually dispose of the pretensions of Pembroke and Surrey.
4. The theory of the very actor he praises by the fine sonnet:--
"'How can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, thou pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O, give thyself the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight:
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thyself dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine, which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.'"
The name of the boy he discovers in the eighth line of the 20th sonnet,
where W. H. is punningly described as--
"_A man in hew, all Hews in his contrawling_,"
and draws attention to the fact that "In the original edition of the
sonnets 'Hews' is printed with a capital H and in italics," and draws
corroboration from "these sonnets in which curious puns are made on the
words 'use' and 'usury.'"
Another point he touches on is that Will Hughes abandoned Shakespeare's
company to enter the service of Chapman, or more probably of Marlowe. He
proves this from the lines--
"But when your countenance filled up his line
Then lack I matter; that enfeebled mine"--
as also
"Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace,
But now my gracious numbers are decayed,
And my sick nurse does give another place";
and further by
"Every alien pen has got my use
And under thee their poesy disperse,"
and draws attention to the "obvious" play upon words (use = Hughes).
Such in brief are the salient points of his argument, the limitations of
space precluding me from amplifying the subject, but I strongly advise
all those interested in the subject to read the whole article for
themselves.
It is undoubtedly one of the cleverest things Wilde ever did, and as a
contribution to controversial English literature no student of letters
can afford to overlook it. Some day perhaps the manuscript of the book
will be discovered--in the library of a Transatlantic millionaire
maybe--and the author's more matured and expansive investigations be
given to the world. May that day come soon!
PART VII
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY
THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY
The greatest claim that Wilde made for himself was that he was a high
priest of aesthetics, that he had a new message concerning the relations
of beauty and the worship of beauty to life and art, to life and to
morals to give to the world. This claim was one in which to the last he
pathetically believed. He was absolutely certain in his own mind that
this was his vocation. He elaborated a sort of philosophy of beauty
which not only pleased and satisfied himself, but found very many
adherents, and became the dogma of a school.
Even in this last work, "De Profundis," written in the middle of his
degradation and misery, he still believes that it is by art that he will
be able to regenerate his spirit. He said that he would do such work in
the future, would build beautiful things out of his sufferings, that he
might cry in triumph--"Yes! This is just where the artistic life leads a
man."
We all know where the artistic life did lead Oscar Wilde upon his
release from prison. It led him to an obscure quarter of Paris where he
dragged out the short remainder of an unhappy life, having written
nothing save "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and becoming more and more
lost to finer aspirations.
Yet, nevertheless, this aesthetic philosophy of Wilde's forms one of the
most important parts of his writings, and of his attitude towards life.
It must, therefore, be carefully considered in any study of the man and
his work.
First of all, let us inquire, what are aesthetics? Do not let anyone who
has not given his attention to the subject imagine that the
"aestheticism," which became known as the hallmark of a band of people
led by Oscar Wilde who committed many whimsical extravagances, and who
were caricatured in Mr Gilbert's "Patience," has any relation whatever
to the science of aesthetics. Even to Oscar Wilde aestheticism, as it has
been popularly called, was only the beginning of an aesthetic philosophy
which he summed up finally much later in "Intentions," the "Poems in
Prose," and "The Soul of Man under Socialism."
By aesthetics is meant a theory of the beautiful as exhibited in works of
art. That is to say, aesthetics considered on its objective side has to
investigate, first, a function of art in general as expressing the
beautiful, and then the nature of the beauty thus expressed.
Secondly, the special functions of the several arts are investigated by
aesthetics and the special aspects of the beautiful with which they are
severally concerned. It, therefore, follows that aesthetics has to
discuss such topics as the relation of art to nature and life, the
distinction of art from nature, the relation of natural to artistic
beauty, the conditions and nature of beauty in a work of art, and
especially the distinction of beauty from truth, from utility, and from
moral goodness.
AEsthetics is, therefore, not art criticism. Art criticism deals with
this or that particular work or type of art, while the aesthetic theory
seeks to formulate the mere abstract and fundamental conceptions,
distinctions, and principles which underlie artistic criticism, and
alone make it possible. Art criticism is the link between aesthetic
science and the ordinary intelligent appreciation of a work of art by an
ordinary intelligence. Much more may be said in defining the functions
of aesthetics, but this is sufficient before we begin to examine Wilde's
own aesthetic theories.
His ideas were promulgated in the three works mentioned above, and also
given to the world in lectures which he delivered at various times.
It is true, as Mr Arthur Symons very clearly pointed out some years ago,
that Oscar Wilde wrote much that was true, new, and valuable about art
and the artist. But in everything that he wrote he wrote from the
outside. He said nothing which had not been said before him, or which
was not the mere wilful contrary of what had been said before him.
Indeed, it is not too much to say that Oscar Wilde never saw the full
face of beauty. He saw it always in profile, always in a limited way.
The pretence of strict logic in Wilde's writing on "Artistic Philosophy"
is only a pretence, and severe and steady thinkers recognise the
fallacy.
Let us examine Oscar Wilde's aesthetic teaching.
In one of his lectures given in America he said--
"And now I would point out to you the operation of the artistic
spirit in the choice of subject. Like the philosopher of the
platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and all
existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date;
rather, whatever of life and passion the world has known in the
desert of Judea or in Arcadian valley, by the ruins of Troy or
Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of the modern city, or
by the pleasant ways of Camelot, all lies before him like an open
scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of
it what is salutary for his own spirit, choosing some facts and
rejecting others, with the calm artistic control of one who is in
possession of the secret of beauty. It is to no avail that the muse
of poetry be called even by such a clarion note as Whitman's to
migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard 'removed' and 'to let'
on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. For art, to quote a noble
passage of Mr Swinburne's, is very life itself and knows nothing of
death. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from
his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of
that mist of familiarity, which, as Shelley used to say, makes life
obscure to us.
"Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his age, it is for
us to do naught but accept his teaching. You have most of you seen
probably that great masterpiece of Rubens which hangs in the
gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant of horse and
rider, arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment, when the
winds are caught in crimson banner and the air is lit by the gleam
of armour and the flash of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though
that golden hillside be trodden by the wounded feet of Christ; and
it is for the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous cavalcade
is passing.
"In the primary aspect a painting has no more spiritual message
than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which
all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul
are not those of the truths of lives. This should be done by a
certain inventive and creative handling entirely independent of
anything definitely poetical in the subject, something entirely
satisfying in itself, which is, as the Greeks would say, in itself
an end. So the joy of poetry comes never from the subject, but
from an inventive handling of rhythmical language."
And further he said that "in nations as in individuals, if the passion
for creation be not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty
also, it will be sure to waste its strength. It is not an increased
moral sense or moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed one
should never talk of a moral or immoral poem. Poems are either well
written or badly written; that is all. Any element of morals or implied
reference to a standard of good and evil in art is often a sign of a
certain incompleteness of vision. All good work aims at a purely
artistic effect."
In "Intentions" he enunciated serious problems which seemed constantly
to contradict themselves, and he causes ourselves to ask questions which
only bewilder and astonish. To sum up all the aesthetic teaching of the
author it amounts simply and solely to the aphorism that there must be a
permanent divorce between art and morals. "All art," he says, "is
immoral."
Some people have taken the view that Oscar Wilde in his philosophy of
beauty was never quite sincere. He did not write for philistines with
his heart in his mouth, but merely with his tongue in his cheek. I
remember Mr Richard Le Gallienne once said that in "Intentions" Wilde's
worship of beauty, which had made a latter-day myth of him before his
time, was overlaid by his gift of comic perception, and, rightly viewed,
all his flute-tone periods were written in the service of the comic
muse. When he was not of malice aforethought humorous in those parts of
the work where he seems to be arguing with a serious face enough, it is
implied that he did so simply that he might smile behind his mask at the
astonishment of a public he had from the first so delighted in
shocking--that he had a passion for being called "dangerous," just as
one type of man likes to be called "fast" and a "rake."
This is, of course, one point of view, but it is not one with which I am
in agreement. Wilde laid such enormous stress upon the sensuous side of
art, and never realised that this is but an exterior aspect which is
impossible and could not exist without a spiritual interior, an
informing soul.
With all his brilliancy the author of "Intentions" only saw a mere
fragment of his subject. It may be that he wilfully shut his eyes to the
truth. It is more likely that he was incapable of realising the truth as
a whole, and that what he wrote he wrote with absolute sincerity.
It has been said that the artist sees farther than morality. This is a
dangerous doctrine for the artist himself to believe, but it has some
truth in it. In Oscar Wilde's case, in pursuing the ideal of beauty he
may have seen "farther than morality," but blind of one eye he missed
Morality upon the way and did not realise that she was ever there.
It is the fashion nowadays among a certain set of writers, who form the
remainder of the band of "AEsthetes" who followed Wilde in his teachings,
to decry Ruskin, though, in the beginning of Wilde's "AEsthetic"
movement, Wilde was an ardent pupil of this great master of English
prose. We do not now accept Ruskin's artistic criticisms as adequate to
our modern needs. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the days
when Ruskin wrote, and his peculiar temperament, while appreciating much
that was beautiful and worthy to be appreciated, was at the same time
blind to much that is beautiful and worthy to be appreciated. Ruskin's
criticism on the painting of Whistler would not be substantiated by a
single writer of to-day. At the same time, all Ruskin's philosophy of
art--that is to say, aesthetics--is as true now as it ever was. Ruskin
showed, as the experience of life and art has shown and always will
show--show more poignantly and particularly in the case of Oscar Wilde
than in any other--that art and morality cannot be divorced, and that if
all art is immoral, then art ceases to exist. "I press to the
conclusion," he said, at the end of his famous lecture on the relation
of art to morals, "which I wish to leave with you, that all you can
rightly do, or honourably become, depends on the government of these two
instincts of order and kindness, by this great imaginative faculty,
which give you inheritance of the past, grasp of the present, authority
over the future. Map out the spaces of your possible lives by its help;
measure the range of their possible agency! On the walls and towers of
this your fair city, there is not an ornament of which the first origin
may not be traced back to the thoughts of men who died two thousand
years ago. Whom will _you_ be governing by your thoughts, two thousand
years hence? Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being
immoral, little else except art is moral; that life without industry is
guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words 'good'
and 'wicked,' used of men, you may almost substitute the words 'makers'
and 'destroyers.' Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the
world is, so far as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless
for any kind of good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable
sequence of destruction and of sorrow. Its stress is only the stress of
wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is called the
history of mankind is too often the record of the whirlwind, and the map
of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow
spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of every man, _qui non
accepit in vanitatem animan suam_, endures and prospers; a small remnant
or green bud of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint with
sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true workers redeem inch by inch
the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the
order of all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded, and
although with strange vacillation, in the eyes of the watcher, the
morning cometh, and also the night, there is no hour of human existence
that does not draw on towards the perfect day."
For our own part let us examine a little into the relation between art
and morality for ourselves.
When we hear it asserted that morality has nothing to do with art and
that moral considerations are quite beside the mark in aesthetic
criticism and judgment, such a statement is simply equivalent to saying
that actual life has nothing to do with art. The main demand that we can
make from art of all kinds is the demand of truth. Truth is beauty, and
beauty is truth. By truth in this connection we mean that higher and
more ideal truth which is inherent in the realities of things and
contained by them, but which is brought out, explained, made credible,
and visible by the artist in this or that sphere of art, and through the
process of his art purified from the accidental obscurities which cloud
it and hide it in the realm of actual life. If we are to demand truth
from the artist, and let us always remember, as Keats realised so
strongly, that in demanding truth we demand beauty also, we must insist
that the artist must give us nothing in which a false psychology
obtains, must, for example, paint no passions that do not occur in
actual life. It is, therefore, equally necessary, on a logical
conclusion, that when the subject of a work of art requires it, the
moral should be represented as it really is--that is, according to its
truth--and that the moral law should not be misrepresented. If we
require of the artist that he should give a vivid representation of the
illusions of human life, of the struggles and rivalries of men for
objects and ends of imaginary value, we must equally demand of the
artist that he should know and be capable of describing that which alone
has true and absolute value in human life. Surely it is a truism that
every drama from beginning to end contains a moral. It is a lie that art
is immoral or can by its very nature ever be so. To say so, to pretend
that art has a separate existence, is to say something which even the
most brilliant paradox cannot prove and which immediately suggests to
the mind of the thinking man an apologia or reason for licence of
personal conduct. As a great German writer on aesthetics and the relation
to the ethics has said, all human actions do of necessity presuppose a
norm, a rule to which they conform, or from which they depart; and there
is nothing which can be represented, whether as criminal or as
ridiculous, or as an object of irony, otherwise than under this
assumption. Hence every artist enforces some kind of morality, and
morality accordingly becomes of chief moment for aesthetic judgment.
Aristotle himself, from whom Oscar Wilde frequently quotes, and
incidentally from whose poetics he attempts, by means of brilliant
paradox, to infer an attitude which is not really there, has pointed out
that art is a means of purification. If the morality of a work of art is
false and wrong, if the artist is either ignorant of the subject with
which he deals or deliberately misrepresents the morality of it, then
his work is viewed merely as a work of art--and therefore as a thing
whole and complete in itself--is a failure in art. In many respects it
may have aesthetic excellence, but as a complete thing, as a work of art,
it must inevitably fail.
Sibbern in his "AEsthetik" tells us very sanely and wisely that art need
not be limited by choice of subject, but depends for its artistic
qualities upon the attitude of the artist in dealing with it.
That art must not be limited by choice of subject is a great point of
Oscar Wilde's own philosophy, and here he is perfectly sound. But he
goes further in his paradoxical view, and shows that the artist must
hold no brief for either good or evil, and that the excellence of a work
of art depends entirely upon the skill of presentation.
The German student, on the contrary, writes:
"There are dramas in which the moral element is not brought into
special prominence, but just hovers above the surface, and which
yet have their poetic value. What must, however, be absolutely
insisted on is, that the artistic treatment should never insult
morality. We do not mean that art must not represent the immoral as
well as the moral, for this is, on the contrary, indispensable, if
art is truly to reflect life as it is. But immorality must not
infect and be inherent in that view of life and those opinions
which the poet desires by his work to promulgate; for then he would
injure morality, and violate that moral ideal to which all human
life, and therefore art itself, must be subordinated. Plays and
novels which depict virtue as that mere conventionality and
Philistinism which is but an object of ridicule, or which hold up
to our admiration false and antinomian ideals of virtue,
representing _e.g._, the sentimentality of a so-called good heart
as sufficient to justify the most scandalous moral delinquencies or
'free genius' as privileged to sin, which paint vice in attractive
and seductive colours, portraying adultery and other
transgressions as very pardonable, and, under certain
circumstances, amiable weaknesses, and which by means of such
delineations bestow absolution on the public for sins daily
occurring in actual life--such plays and novels are unworthy of
art, and are as poison to the whole community.