Chapter II: Part 2

“No, you don’t feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled
and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and
passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it,
you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.
Will it always be so?... You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr.
Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius--is
higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one
of the great facts of the world, like sun-light, or spring-time, or
the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon.
It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It
makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost
it you won’t smile.

“People say sometimes that Beauty is only superficial. That may be
so. But at least it is not so superficial as Thought. To me, Beauty
is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not
judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible,
not the invisible.”

But Wilde was idealizing, making deliberately an untrue, but charming picture--doing indeed in another way what old Izaak Walton did in his _Compleat Angler_, or what John Fletcher did in his _Faithful Shepherdess_.

As for the vivid coloring of which I spoke, read this:

“The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the
light summer wind stirred amid the trees of the garden there came
through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more
delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

“From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was
lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton
could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored
blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly
able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and
now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted
across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front
of the huge windows, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect,
and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in
an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of
swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering
their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with
monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early
June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive,
and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant
organ.”

You see from that what Wilde meant when he made his character express a wish to write a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet. I think that in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, Wilde started with the Persian carpet in his mind’s eye, but sometimes lapsed into the carelessness of a wool sack maker. He is not innocent of passages suggestive of the transpontine drama. But that we overlook in sheer delight at his joy in magnificence.

A last word on _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. It appeared at the end of a time when the English world was full of books with a purpose, such books as Edward Bellamy’s _Looking Backward_, Edna Lyell’s sentimental agnosticism, Grant Allen’s _Woman Who Did_, and, at the same time, there was a lively stream of Zola translations, much energetic, realistic stuff very comparable with the work of Sherwood Anderson of our day. To go further, there was much of the kind of fiction, conventionally unconventional on the order of the present day Ben Hecht. There was George Moore, too. The strictly conventional had Hall Caine, Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, writers of the stripe of Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton Porter. Oscar Wilde struck a path away from all that kind of thing and swung towards a modified romanticism, a something that should not be literary photography. His attempt was rather to lead away from the morass of realism into the valley of idealism. You get the idea somewhat in the Shakespearean lesson that

Nature is made better by no mean,
But Nature makes that mean; so o’er that art,
Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes.... This is an art
Which does mend Nature--change it rather: but
The art itself is Nature.

So we come to the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, the best by far of which is _The Happy Prince_. These naturally gave Wilde full scope for his passion for color and luxury and decorative effects. But Wilde’s fairy tales were fairy tales for grown ups and not for children. Indeed, it is safe to say that for small folk who are in the Grimm’s Fairy Tale age, they do not stand the test of reading aloud--the only test in a children’s book. Oliver Goldsmith observed wittily that Dr. Johnson made his little fish talk like great whales. Oscar Wilde made his fairy animals and creatures talk like Oscar Wilde. Try this on a child and observe the effect. “Tomorrow my friends will fly up to the Second Cataract. The river horse couches there among the bulrushes and on a great granite throne sits the great God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines, he utters one cry of joy and then is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the water’s edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the Cataract.”

It would be waste of space to spend words on what children do, and do not, appreciate. Had Wilde sought a guide, he could have taken none better than his contemporary, Walter Crane. One careful study of Walter Crane’s illustrations to Grimm’s household stories, the picture of the Sleeping Beauty for example, would have been sufficient. But Wilde was not writing for children, nor had he the faculty of doing so. What Wilde cared about was his style--consideration of that filled his horizon. Besides, his fairy tales carried altogether too obvious a moral lesson. Children demand simplicity, and simplicity and Oscar Wilde were ever strangers. The single tale, _The Happy Prince_, be it said, is in altogether a different category. Wilde must have written it because he wished to write it. Turning to the bibliography of Oscar Wilde, I find that in every case, when fellow authors have written about the book of fairy tales, there has been mention of _The Happy Prince_. Walter Pater mentions it in a letter dated June 12th, to Oscar Wilde: it is mentioned in a poem printed in the Harliquinade; Thomas Hutchinson has a dedication to Oscar Wilde in his Jolts and Jingles:

“To you who wrote The Happy Prince,
The sweetest tale of modern time...”

Next appeared _The House of Pomegranates_, dedicated to Mrs. Wilde, a book of tales frankly written for grown up folk in whom the love of Romance is not dead. It was not a financial success and the stock was sold off as a remainder. Wrote Wilde to the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette: “... in building this House of Pomegranates, I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public.” In another letter he compares his situation as writer of fairy tales with Andersen’s, saying that the true admirer of fairy tales was to be found “not in the nursery, but on Parnassus.”

True, equally with Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde might have written fairy stories because it pleased him to do so, but between the method of the two men there was a gulf of difference. Andersen wrote because he wanted to, but he wanted to do things that would please children. Wilde wrote because he wanted to, but he wanted to do things that would please himself. The fuss aesthetic is the one thing that fairies will not put up with, the atmosphere that destroys credibility. Wilde’s fantastic creatures were sophisticated rather than simple, often self-conscious, like precocious children, hot house beings eager for applause of their elders. Andersen’s fairy folk were simple, dream-creatures that could stand cold water and clear air and sunshine. In Wilde there is elegance always, but never rascally gaiety. In Andersen there is quiet unobtrusiveness, never cleverness nor facetiousness.

THE STAGE

It would seem that in some mysterious way, all things pointed to success for Wilde as a playwright. His love for gorgeous scenes, for spectacular effects, for swift surprises, for witty dialogue, for neat, staccato sentences, for the brilliant social life, for silver laughter--all these were ingredients for success on the boards. More, in his essays, we find the result of his study of the theater, a study concerning itself sagely with stage, with scenery, with effects, with management. As spectator and as critic, he accumulated a vast store of knowledge and we find him, in _Lady Windermere’s Fan_, experimenting with that knowledge. As Shaw pointed out, Wilde played with everything; with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theater.

Wilde’s appearance on the English stage was as a bright star in a dark sky. His advent caused a flutter like the advent of Sheridan. It was a time when the theater had sunk, when stage craft had slipped into the slough of spectacularity. People flocked, here to see the dresses that Mrs. Patrick Campbell wore, there to see Wilson Barrett in the lime light with his subordinates duly subordinate, to another place to gaze at the spectacles provided by Augustus Harris, to the music halls for an exhibition of strong animal spirits and physical agility, to the Lyceum to bathe in the heroics of Henry Irving, to melodramas, to pantomimes, to acting versions of old plays that were little more than falsifications. “Nobody goes to the theater,” wrote Shaw in 1896, “except the people who also go to Madame Tussaud’s. Nobody writes for it, unless he is hopelessly stage struck and cannot help himself. It has no share of the leadership of thought; it does not even reflect the current. It does not create beauty; it apes fashion. It does not produce personal skill; our actors and actresses, with the exceptions of a few persons of natural gifts and graces, mostly miscultivated or half cultivated, are simply the middle class section of the residuum. The curt insult with which Matthew Arnold dismissed it from consideration found it and left it utterly defenseless.” And it was into a theater world thus described, that Oscar Wilde stepped with his skill and cultivated taste.

The situation was much as it is today in the world of moving picture production, a situation extremely demoralizing to true art in which, by what we may call the star system, a few short sighted managers strive to obtain vast wealth. I say demoralizing to art, because in time the public wearies of its stars, and, having been educated to no standard, deserts the field. I point to the moving picture world as analogy, because in spite of all the advertisements of the correspondence schools featuring scenario work as the way to fame, it is pretty well admitted that today plays are written for actors, for stars, and actors do not exist to act. Therefore we have, perforce, so much that is sensational, childish or merely vulgar; so little on the screen that is artistic.

But Wilde with his wit, his gentle mirth, and, above all, his pose as egotist, took London by storm. It was a real triumph of ability over ineptitude. There was a delightful page written by A. B. Walkeley in the _Speaker_ at the time _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ was produced, a passage that gives an admirable picture of not only the play, but the author, and it is easy to imagine the astonishment of the fashionable audience at the St. James’s Theater. “The man or woman who does not chuckle with delight at the good things which abound in _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ should consult a physician at once; delay would be dangerous. Of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s coming forward at the end, cigarette in hand, to praise his players, like a preface of Victor Hugo, and to commend his own play, ‘of which I am sure, ladies and gentlemen, you estimate the merits almost as highly as I do myself,’ you will already have read. I am still chortling ... at its exquisite impertinence.”

There was something new indeed for London: piquancy, pungency, wit, ingenious situations--to cap all, a throwing overboard of the conventional self-depreciation and a public self glorification. Wilde, clever, lucky, amiable, was a Beaumarchais redivivus. He walked into his place like a monarch: considered his new position to be his birthright. Life became to him as a holiday. I think that my friend Haldeman-Julius hit the mark when he said to me, one day, that Wilde would live for posterity as Sheridan has lived. There is a singular resemblance between the two men indeed. Lord Byron, the friend of Sheridan, has left on record his opinion that he had never heard nor conceived of a more extraordinary conversationalist: has told us how men spent nights listening to him: has told us that no one equaled him at a supper: has told us how he retained his wit even when drunk. It is Wilde to a hair. There was, in Wilde, the sparkling individuality of the author of _The School for Scandal_, the sustained brilliancy, the infinite variety, the inexhaustible vigor. Both men had the art of repartee, of heaping witticism on witticism and happy phrase on phrase in a fine crescendo. Both had the gift of satire--not the satire of Swift to biting and stinging, but the satire of La Bruyère, a satire that hides behind a gracious smile. One is inclined to think that the plays are too good for acting, so swiftly comes arrow after arrow of wit.

_Vicomte de Nanjac (approaching)._ Ah, the English young lady is
the dragon of good taste, is she not? Quite the dragon of good
taste.

_Lord Goring._ So the newspapers are always telling us.

_Vicomte de Nanjac._ I read all your English newspapers. I find
them so amusing.

_Lord Goring._ Then, my dear Nanjac, you must certainly read
between the lines.

_Vicomte de Nanjac._ I should like to, but my professor objects.
(_To_ MABEL CHILTERN.) May I have the pleasure of escorting you to
the music-room, Mademoiselle?

_Mabel Chiltern (looking very disappointed)._ Delighted, Vicomte,
quite delighted! (_Turning to_ LORD GORING.) Aren’t you coming to
the music-room?

_Lord Goring._ Not if there is any music going on, Miss Mabel.

_Mabel Chiltern (severely)._ The music is in German. You would
not understand it. (_Goes out with the_ VICOMTE DE NANJAC. LORD
CAVERSHAM _comes up to his son_.)

_Lord Caversham._ Well, sir! what are you doing here? Wasting your
life as usual. You should be in bed, sir. You keep too late hours!
I heard of you the other night at Lady Rufford’s dancing till four
o’clock in the morning!

_Lord Goring._ Only a quarter to four, father.

_Lord Caversham._ Can’t make out how you stand London society. The
thing has gone to the dogs, a lot of damned nobodies talking about
nothing.

_Lord Goring._ I love talking about nothing, father. It is the only
thing I know anything about.

_Lord Caversham._ You seem to me to be living entirely for pleasure.

_Lord Goring._ What else is there to live for, father? Nothing ages
like happiness.
--_An Ideal Husband (Act I.)_

I choose, deliberately, the less talked of portions of the plays I quote. Here again:

_Lady Hunstanton._ We who are wives don’t belong to any one.

_Lady Stutfield._ Oh, I am so very, very glad to hear you say so.

_Lady Hunstanton._ But do you really think, dear Caroline, that
legislation would improve matters in any way? I am told that,
nowadays, all the married men live like bachelors, and all the
bachelors like married men.

_Mrs. Allonby._ I certainly never know one from the other.

_Lady Stutfield._ Oh, I think one can always know at once whether
a man has home claims upon his life or not. I have noticed a very,
very sad expression in the eyes of so many married men.

_Mrs. Allonby._ Ah, all that I have noticed is that they are
horribly tedious when they are good husbands, and abominably
conceited when they are not.

_Lady Hunstanton._ Well, I suppose the type of husband has
completely changed since my young days, but I’m bound to state that
poor dear Hunstanton was the most delightful of creatures, and as
good as gold.

_Mrs. Allonby._ Ah, my husband is a sort of promissory note; I am
tired of meeting him.

_Lady Caroline._ But you renew him from time to time, don’t you?

_Mrs. Allonby._ Oh no, Lady Caroline. I have only had one husband
as yet. I suppose you look upon me as quite an amateur.

_Lady Caroline._ With your views on life I wonder you married at
all.

_Mrs. Allonby._ So do I.
--_A Woman of No Importance (Act II.)_

Compare such a discharge of wit with the current popular “Revue” with its slap stick farce, its reference to booze, to negroes, to sporting drummers and the absurd bids for applause by a little thrown in about the flag--and let us hope that we may produce a Wilde.

But for sheer color and gorgeous vision, Wilde achieved nothing better than his unpublished Burmese Masque, _For Love of the King_. As in a lightning flash the eye takes in a scene of wondrous richness. King Beng on his ruby sewn cushion; the blinding blue of an eastern sky; the hundred waiting elephants; the peacocks; the silken banners “propelled with measured rhythm”; the tables and chairs piled high with fruits on golden dishes; the flower crowned courtiers and dancing girls, some half nude, others splendidly robed. But everywhere that intense brightness of a sunlit scene. There is little in the Masque that would make it attractive to a stage manager, much that should attract a scenario man. Indeed, it reads as though Wilde had visualized the possibilities of the screen world. I copy from Act II, Scene I:

“The jungle once more. Time; noonday. In place of the hut is a
building, half Burmese, half Italian villa, of white, thick wood,
with curled roofs rising on roofs gilded and adorned with spiral
carvings and a myriad golden and jewel-incrusted bells. On the
broad verandahs are thrown Eastern carpets, rugs, embroideries.

“The world is sun soaked. The surrounding trees stand sentinel like
in the burning light. Burmese servants squat motionless, smoking on
the broad white steps that lead from the house to the garden. The
crows croak drowsily at intervals. Parrots scream intermittently.
The sound of a guitar playing a Venetian love song can be heard
coming from the interior. Otherwise life apparently sleeps.”

It is an arabesque: it is a something very like that novel Wilde wanted to write, the novel that was to have been as splendid as a Persian rug; it is a word weaving in silk and gold and splendid feathers taken from quetzal, and peacock, and golden crested wren. It is, in a word, Oscar Wilde in his glory; a free fantasia of description; a rhapsodie of color.

As may well be imagined, Wilde was the target of the dramatic critics of his day, especially of those of the malignant type. The type is not unfamiliar and Coleridge has characterized it.

No private grudge they need, no personal spite;
The _viva sectio_ is its own delight!
All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,
Disinterested thieves of our good name;
Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.

But Wilde was no Keats to be wounded by abuse. For instance, consider his letter to _St. James’s Gazette_ from which I copy a paragraph as follows:

“... When criticism becomes in England a real art, as it should
be, and when none but those of artistic instincts and artistic
cultivation is allowed to write about works of art, artists will,
no doubt, read criticisms with a certain amount of intellectual
interest. As things are at present, the criticisms of ordinary
newspapers are of no interest whatsoever, except in so far as they
display, in its crudest form, the Boetianism of a country that has
produced some Athenians, and in which some Athenians have come to
dwell.”

Much that passed as adverse criticism of Wilde’s dramatic work, grew out of personal dislike--some out of scandal which had already begun to raise a reptant head. There was one Charles Brookfield for instance, who not only was active in adverse criticism, but also produced a burlesque on _Lady Windemere’s Fan_ entitled _The Poet and the Puppets_, the poet being Wilde. It was the same Charles Brookfield who was largely responsible for collecting the evidence against Wilde, which brought about his downfall very soon after. Indeed, Brookfield and a few others entertained Queensberry at a banquet in celebration of the conviction of Wilde. It was “criticism” of the kind impeached by Coleridge in a never to be forgotten passage that should not be lost to the world. “As soon as the critic betrays that he knows more of his author than the author’s publications could have told him; as soon as from this more intimate knowledge, elsewhere obtained, he avails himself of the slightest trait against the author; his censure immediately becomes personal injury, his sarcasms personal insults. He ceases to be a critic and takes on him the most contemptible character to which a rational creature can be degraded, that of a gossip, backbiter, _pasquillant_; but with this heavy aggravation, that he steals the unquiet, the deforming passions of the world into the museum; into the very place which, next to the chapel and oratory, should be our sanctuary and secure place of refuge; offers abominations on the altar of the Muses, and makes its sacred paling the very circle in which he conjures up the lying and profane spirit.” And it is because of the existence in the Wilde case of so much of that which Coleridge thundered against, that much of the so-called criticism of Wilde’s dramatic work must be cast out. But the wonder of it all is that knowing what was behind, for he must have been cognizant of it, Wilde fought so well. If ever man died in the last ditch it was he. Greatly he dared and we love him for his daring. We find him throwing down the gage to the whole body of critics in a brilliant interview published in _The Sketch_ of January 9th, 1895, three months before his downfall, when he knew perfectly well that the dark clouds were rolling up, and that poison tongues were fast wagging. He is talking to Gilbert Burgess. Hear him:

“... For a man to be a dramatic critic is as foolish and inartistic
as it would be for a man to be a critic of epics or a pastoral critic
or a critic of lyrics. All modes of art are one, and the modes of art
that employ words as its medium are quite indivisible. The result of
the vulgar specialization of criticism is an elaborate scientific
knowledge of the stage--almost as elaborate as that of the stage
carpenter, and quite on a par with that of the call boy--combined
with an entire incapacity to realize that a play is a work of art or
to receive any artistic impression at all....

“... The aim of the true critic is to try to chronicle his moods,
not to try to correct the masterpieces of others.... Real critics?
Ah, how perfectly charming they would be! I am always waiting for
their arrival. An inaudible school would be nice.... There are just
two real critics in London ... I think I had better not mention
their names; it might make the others jealous ... I do not write to
please cliques. I write to please myself.... It is a burning shame
that there should be one law for men and another law for women. I
think there should be no law for anybody....”

The whole interview is too long to quote and I have taken some of the salient passages. The complete thing may be read in the New York Daily Tribune of January 27th, 1895, under the heading _A Highly Artistic Interview_.

WILDE AS CRITIC

The critic of the critics was himself a critic. Whether he modified his work to suit his editors, or whether he was of the kindly sympathetic nature of a Michael Monahan or a William Marion Reedy is impossible to say, but certain it is that the Wilde of the criticisms is altogether a different being from the Wilde of the satirical epigram. You find very little of the Wilde perversities and idiosyncrasies, certainly none of the Hazlitt waspishness nor any of the Mencken bluntness. Now and then there are discovered occasional touches of tenderness as in his criticism of William Morris’s _House of the Wolfings_, (_Pall Mall Gazette_, March 2nd, 1889) and again in the review of W. B. Yeats’ _Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry_, written for the magazine of which Wilde was editor, the _Woman’s World_, February, 1889. There is a geniality almost equal to that of Charles Lamb or of Leigh Hunt somewhat evident. “As we read Mr. Morris’s story (The Wolfings) with its fine alternations of verse and prose, its decorative and descriptive beauties, its wonderful handling of romantic and adventurous themes, we cannot but feel that we are as far removed from the ignoble fiction as we are from the ignoble facts of our own day. We breathe a purer air, and have dreams of a time when life had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and was simple, stately and complete.” Certainly, Wilde as critic sought to be just, was at pains to write frankly, vividly, accurately as possible. As critic he was thoroughly in earnest. The clever smartness we discover in him in his plays is absent in his critical work.

I think that the very real Wilde was revealed in a little essay, a writing that appeared in _The Speaker_, February 8th, 1890. It deals with a translation of the works of Chuang Tzu as made by Mr. Herbert Giles, British Consul at Tamsui. With the Chinaman, Wilde was sympathetic. The idea pleased him that all modes of government are wrong, that they are unscientific because of their tendency to alter the natural environment of men; immoral because they interfere with the individual. In the essay there is a ring of Edmund Burke with his “the thing, government, the thing itself, is the abuse.” It pleased Wilde immensely to find that the sage born in the fourth century before Christ denounced the uplifter, because trying to make others good was as foolish an occupation as “beating a drum in a forest to find a fugitive.” Wilde found a man after his heart in the philosopher who declared against chattering about clever men, and lauding good men, and, what was worse, deifying powerful men. Then there is this by Wilde, talking about the accumulation of wealth, which, he says, Chuang Tzu denounces as eloquently as Mr. Hyndman. Wilde agrees with the philosopher, or at any rate, interprets him approvingly.

“The accumulation of wealth is to him the origin of evil. It
makes the strong violent and the weak dishonest. It creates the
petty thief and puts him in a bamboo cage. It creates the big
thief and sets him on a throne of white jade. It is the father
of competition, and competition is the waste, as well as the
destruction, of energy. The order of nature is rest, repetition and
peace. Weariness and war are the results of an artificial society
based upon capital; and the richer the society gets, the more
thoroughly bankrupt it is, for it has neither sufficient rewards
for the good nor sufficient punishment for the wicked. There is
also this to be remembered--that the prizes of the world degrade a
man as much as the world’s punishments. The age is rotten with the
worship of success. As for education, true wisdom can neither be
learnt nor taught. It is a spiritual state to which he who lives
in harmony with nature attains. Knowledge is shallow if we compare
it with the extent of the unknown, and only the unknowable is of
value. Society produces rogues, and education makes one rogue
cleverer than others.”

Compare that with the passage in _The Critic As Artist_, a speech that Wilde puts into the mouth of Gilbert:

_Ernest._ We exist, then, to do nothing?

_Gilbert._ It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is
limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him
who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age, are at
once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and
too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations
about life in exchange for life itself. To us the “citta divina”
is colorless, and the “fruitio Dei” without meaning. Metaphysics
do not satisfy our temperaments, and religious ecstasy is out of
date. The world through which the Academic philosopher becomes
“the spectator of all time and of all existence” is not really an
ideal world, but simply a world of abstract ideas. When we enter
it, we starve amidst the chill mathematics of thought. The courts
of the city of God are not open to us now. Its gates are guarded by
Ignorance, and to pass them we have to surrender all that in our
nature is most divine. It is enough that our fathers believed. They
have exhausted the faith-faculty of the species.

And in another place, later, in the same essay:

The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct,
and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism,
is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members.
The great majority of people, being fully aware of this, rank
themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that
elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage so wildly
against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question
that concerns life, that one is tempted to define man as a rational
animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in
accordance with the dictates of reason.

Certainly, the philosophy of Chuang Tzu impressed Wilde greatly, influenced him more than has been generally thought, and, in fact, the philosophical basis of the greater part of the essay _The Critic As Artist_ rests on that of the Chinese mystic, with a decided substratum of Boehme. Boehme, certainly. The idea of self-surrender that Boehme promulgated, you find everywhere in Wilde, like a recurring golden thread in a tapestry. There is the Boehme “to-be” for which one will is necessary; for the “becoming,” two. So Wilde:

Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for
its aim not _doing_ but _being_, and not _being_ merely, but
_becoming_--that is what the critical spirit can give us.

The mystery of it is that Wilde should have so intermixed in his own life and philosophy the self-surrender of Boehme with the self-assertion of Nietzsche. That he did so is not to be denied--to attempt to explain how it so came to be is impossible. But then, who can explain another? Who can understand or explain himself? The truth is that Wilde, like everyone else, was a bundle of vain strivings, as Thoreau put it. Wilde, like everyone else, gathered together his things to make a bridge to the moon and wound up by making something like a woodshed of the material. So do we all. Man’s reach certainly does exceed his grasp. Browning said much there in a half dozen words.

Of course, there are _Sententiae_, little impatiences, sympathetic critic though he was. “Most modern novels are more remarkable for their crime than for their culture.” “Though the Psalm of Life be shouted from Maine to California, that would not make it good poetry.” “Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.” “Such novels as ---- are possibly more easy to write than to read.” “There seems to be some curious connection between piety and poor rhymes.” “It is always a pleasure to come across an American poet who is not national, and who tries to give expression to the literature that he loves rather than to the land he lives in. The Muses care so little for geography!”--but as critic of literature Wilde was eminently fair and just, pointing out the good in writers so vastly apart as Walt Whitman, Pater, Yeats, Blunt, Matthew Arnold; dropping his own prejudices, getting inside the skins of those whose work he found to be worthy.

WILDE AS ESSAYIST

Perhaps Wilde was to the fashionable of London much as the robust Henry Fielding was to the literary world when Samuel Richardson wrote _Clarissa Harlowe_. He had to shock the polite world out of its terrible complacency. For there were such proper waxen figures as Samuel Smiles and Martin Farquahar Tupper cooing, and there were many who modeled their conduct upon the example of Sir Charles Grandison--milk and water men, sanctified prigs, pious and irreproachable gentlemen in whose mouths butter would not melt. To be respectable was the one virtue, and tender sensibilities were shocked when Shaw wore a woolen shirt and when Morris solemnly sat on his silk hat. Yet, there must have been a secret delight in scandal. Turning over the newspapers of the day we find prominence given to items with salacious base. For instance, the crimes of Jack the Ripper, the Charles Dilke divorce case, the Parnell-O’Shea tangle, Stead’s Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. The fascination of murder held them as now. Quiet men and women found something of vast interest in reading reports of acts of violence, in living in imagination unrestrained lives. But, the record of crime had been left to inept hands. To be sure in novels, action hinged upon crime, but in novels criminals were always black, lost souls who bore the brand of Cain on their brows, had no single redeeming trait and went their way for a time certain of being laid by the heels. It was, then, a tremendous and daring conception of Oscar Wilde to take a wholesale murderer as the subject of an essay, but he did so and produced a most interesting piece of work conceived in graceful vein in his _Pen, Pencil and Poison_--the story of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. The subject of the essay has been confused with another murderer, Henry Wainwright, also an educated man with literary tastes, familiar with the actors and poets of his day, but the last named murderer was but a clumsy fellow compared with Wilde’s hero.

The late Max Nordau in his book _Degeneration_ has found, stupidly enough, evidence of a love for “immorality” in Wilde because of the essay, tearing from the context certain passages and adducing them as proof of Wilde’s diabolism. One paragraph is truly amusing in its ingenuousness. I quote from page 320:

“Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In
a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith
Wainewright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of
several people, he says: ‘He was a forger of no mean or ordinary
capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without
a rival in this or any age.’ ‘This remarkable man, so powerful
with pen and pencil, and poison.’ ‘He sought to find expression by
pen or poison.’ ‘When a friend reproached him with the murder of
Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders and said: “Yes; it
was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.”’ ‘His
crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave
a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work
certainly lacked.’ ‘There is no sin except stupidity.’ ‘An idea
that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’

“He cultivates incidently a slight mysticism in colours. ‘He,’
Wainewright, ‘had that curious love of green which in individuals
is always the sign of subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations
is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence, of morals.’”

That, of course, is sheer stupidity. We do not denounce Charles Dickens because he told the story of Bill Sikes, of the Artful Dodger, of Fagin, nor do we shudder at the name of Conrad because he ended _Victory_ as he did. Doubtless, Max Nordau, on similar grounds to those on which he condemned Wilde and Ibsen and Nietzsche as degenerates, might have found cause to place the Bible on his index expurgatoris. The fact is that Oscar Wilde wrote a fine essay on the murderer and not perhaps so much because he was a murderer, as that he was one of those extraordinary men who failed to become what he bade to be, and was the friend and companion of such men as Charles Lamb, Dickens, Macready and Hablot Browne. Perhaps Wilde had in mind his own case, certainly there are prophetic passages and there is for example a parallel existing between the incident told by Gide when he met Wilde in connection with Wainewright.

While he was in gaol, Dickens, Macready, and Hablot Browne came
across him by chance. They had been going over the prisons of
London, searching for artistic effects, and in Newgate they
suddenly caught sight of Wainewright. He met them with a defiant
stare, Forster tells us, but Macready was “horrified to recognize a
man familiarly known to him in former years, and at whose table he
had dined.”

Look at the essay on Wainewright as the picture of a man who tortures himself, a man of taste and sensibility at whose heart the worm of misery gnawed constantly, a man sickened with secret maladies, a man with brain on fire who moved among his fellows with a smiling face, fearing at every moment the knocking at the gate which would mean his doom--read the essay with all that in mind and you will be rightly attuned for the pleasure. No show mannikin, no machine of creaking wood has Wilde in his Wainewright, but a living thing, a frightened thing, a tormented thing, a vice ridden thing. You feel the daily fear that must have been in the murderer’s heart though Wilde does not play on the vulgar emotions, displaying remorse crudely as Dickens does in his tale of the murderer Jonas Chuzzlewit. But, in some mysterious manner, Wilde makes his reader sense a melancholy, just as Beethoven makes us sense a melancholy in that immortal passage of his seventh symphony when the stringed instruments sob in the bass.

Here is Wilde’s picture of the man in the midst of the things that he loved:

And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the
delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted
figures and the faint ΚΑΛΟΕ finely traced upon its side, and behind
it hangs an engraving of the “Delphic Sibyl” of Michael Angelo,
or of the “Pastoral” of Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine
majolica, and here a rude lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the
table lies a book of Hours “cased in a cover of solid silver gilt,
wrought with quaint devices and studded with small brilliants and
rubies,” and close by it “squats a little ugly monster, a Lar,
perhaps, dug up in the sunny fields of corn-bearing Sicily.” Some
dark antique bronzes contrast “with the pale gleam of two noble
_Christi Crucifixi_, one carved in ivory, the other molded in
wax.” He has his trays of Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze
_bonbonniere_ with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
“brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,” his citron morocco
letter-case and his “pomona-green” chair.

One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts
and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning
over his fine collection of Marc Antonios, and his Turner’s “Liber
Studiorum,” of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with
a magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, “the head of
Alexander on an onyx of two strata,” or “that superb _altissimo
relievo_ on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.”

And again, in a charming passage:

Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and
his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale
lemon-colored kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded
by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while
his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave
him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different
from others. There was something in him of Balzac’s Lucien de
Rubempré. At times he reminds us of Julien Sorel. De Quincey saw
him once. It was at a dinner at Charles Lamb’s. “Amongst the
company, all literary men, sat a murderer,” he tells us, and he
goes on to describe how on that day he had been ill, and had hated
the face of man and woman, and yet found himself looking with
intellectual interest across the table at the young writer beneath
whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to lie so much
unaffected sensibility, and speculates on “what sudden growth of
another interest,” would have changed his mood, had he known of
what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much attention was
even then guilty.

In that last sentence, the reference to the “terrible sin” of which he knew himself to be guilty, I cannot but see a subtle reference to himself. Indeed, Wilde seems to be constantly projecting himself, giving hints as it were, of what might be, just as a child guilty of some misdemeanor, will make veiled references to its plight yet, at the same time, do all that is possible to avoid discovery. Here is a passage in which, writing of Wainewright, he surely describes himself:

His delicately strung organization, however indifferent it might
have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly
sensitive to pain. He shrank from suffering as a thing that mars
and maims human life.

Again:

Like Baudelaire, he was extremely fond of cats, and with Gautier,
he was fascinated by that “sweet marble monster” of both sexes that
we can still see at Florence and in the Louvre.

And this too, which is Wilde to a T:

Modern journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to
any man of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of
Asiatic prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school
_Janus Weathercock_ may be said to have invented. He also saw that
it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public
interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic
articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had
for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and
in what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly
notes for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the
least valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most
obvious influence. A publicist, now-a-days, is a man who bores the
community with the details of the illegalities of his private life.

Perhaps too there is an apologia in another passage:

This strange and fascinating figure that for a few years dazzled
literary London, and made so brilliant a _debut_ in life and
letters, is undoubtedly a most interesting study. Mr. W. Carew
Hazlitt, his latest biographer, to whom I am indebted for many
of the facts contained in this memoir, and whose little book is,
indeed, quite invaluable in its way, is of opinion that his love of
art and nature was a mere pretense and assumption, and others have
denied to him all literary power. This seems to me a shallow, or
at least a mistaken, view. The fact of a man being a poisoner is
nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true
basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement
for second-rate artists.

But it is neither safe nor wise to theorize too much, though, to be sure, more than one of us feel strongly inclined to say of Wilde as he said of Wainewright:

The moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection
that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required.
Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero,
or scolding Tiberius or censuring Cæsar Borgia. These personages
have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with
terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not
in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them.
They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither
art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

Wilde’s two essays, _The Decay of Lying_ and _The Critic as Artist_ I have referred to several times in the course of this essay, and also in another booklet, _The Tragic Story of Oscar Wilde_. In much, both essays are complementary to his _Art and Decoration_: the themes wind in and out like the theme in a fugue. There are inconsistencies, there is sometimes flippancy and there is much of utmost exquisite polish. But always--style--style that becomes sometimes pavonic display. Witness, from the _Decay of the Art of Lying_:

The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like
the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvelous tale, and fantasy _La Chimere_,
dances around it, and calls to it with her false, flute-toned
voice. It may not hear her now, but surely some day, when we are
all bored to death with the common-place character of modern
fiction, it will hearken to her and try to borrow her wings.

And when that day dawns, or sunset reddens, how joyous we shall
all be! Facts will be regarded as discreditable, Truth will be
found mourning over her fetters, and Romance, with her temper of
wonder, will return to the land. The very aspect of the world will
change to our startled eyes. Out of the sea will rise Behemoth
and Leviathan, and sail round the high-pooped galleys, as they do
on the delightful maps of those ages when books on geography were
actually readable. Dragons will wander about the waste places,
and the phœnix will soar from her nest of fire into the air. We
shall lay our hands upon the basilisk, and see the jewel in the
toad’s head. Champing his gilded oats, the Hippogriff will stand
in our stalls, and over our heads will float the Blue Bird singing
of beautiful and impossible things, of things that are lovely and
that never happened, of things that are not and that should be. But
before this comes to pass we must cultivate the lost art of Lying.

Of course, it must be admitted that there is truth in those who complain that Wilde advocated no system of morality which could console, raise or satisfy men. But to do that was not Wilde’s mission. He was no moralist--made, indeed, his art his religion and deals with, as Wordsworth said:

the very world, which is the world
Of all of us, the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all.
(Prelude xl, 142.)

but his world, like the world of the Pre-Raphaelites, was confessedly a falsehood, a world other than that which we see. That art, or poetry, could go on to take in things other than of fairy land, could deal with such things as sky-scrapers, fire vomiting factories, machinery, as it does in the hands of Carl Sandburg, was unthinkable to Wilde as it would have been unthinkable to Ruskin. But then, Wilde found things to love which would have been altogether strange to his men of Greece--mountain mists, brown fogs, clefts in rocks. So, pondering, we get into deep water. The idea of truth as conceived by the artist and the idea as conceived by the religious mind.... religion born of faith and art born of perception.... religion growing out of a soil of disillusion, art growing out of joy of life....

AS POET

Oscar Wilde did not have a jealous care of the art poetic. There was too much of that “style” for real ecstasy; that style, too, was too often encumbered with preciosities, overhung with ornamentation. Then, too, he was constantly trying new forms, experimenting, seeking a satisfactory model. Yet it would be wrong to assert that his poetry lacks verbal charm, and the average man who has no great patience with poetry, who would never sit down to read an _In Memoriam_ or an _Ode on a Grecian Urn_, the kind of a man who loses himself among poetic phrases, finds that Wilde evokes a picture by words full of color. Take this, for instance:

SYMPHONY IN YELLOW

An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly,
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moved against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

A slight enough thing, but full of interest and spirit. Your man who loses himself in verse based on legendary lore or mysticism, understands and enjoys that. It means something to him. For the same reason Wilde’s _Ballad of Reading Gaol_ interests and excites, almost like an adventure story, combining simplicity and beauty in a way that is altogether satisfying. Mark how a concrete image is called up by a short descriptive passage.

I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
“_That fellow’s got to swing_.”

And mark the dramatic appeal of this:

A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.

And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman’s hands were near.

But why he said so strange a thing
No warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher’s doom
Is given as his task,
Must set a lock upon his lips,
And make his face a mask.

He gets very close there to the heart of the common man, as close as James Stephens indeed, with his _What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub_.

The truth of the matter is that under pain, the artificial Wilde vanished and his poetry became something other than pretence and artifice. I say that, because Douglas has told us that up to the time of his imprisonment, Wilde had “held that style was everything, and feeling nothing; that poetry should be removed as well from material actuality as from the actuality of the spirit, and that no great poet had ever in his greatest moments been other than sincere.” (Page 209, Oscar Wilde and Myself.) And of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, Douglas writes, “(in it) we have a sustained poem of sublimated actuality and of a breadth and sweep and poignancy such as had never before been attained in this line. The emotional appeal is ... quite legitimate and ... the established tradition as to what is fitting and comely in a poem of this nature is not outraged or transgressed.”