Chapter IV: Oscar Wilde: the Last Phase

The singularity of Oscar Wilde has puzzled writers since his death quite as much as it puzzled the public during the startled years of his wonderful visit to these glimpses of Philistia; for after all that has been written about him we are no nearer a convincing interpretation of his character than we were during the great silence which immediately followed his trial and imprisonment. Robert H. Sherard’s _Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship_, throws the clear light of sincerity and eloquence upon his own and his subject’s capacity for friendship, but little more than that; André Gide has created a delightful, literary miniature which must always hang on the line in any gallery of studies of Oscar Wilde, but his work is portraiture rather than interpretation. For the rest, we have to be content with such indications of character as may be obtained from the numerous critical essays which have been published during the last few years, notable among them being Arthur Ransome’s fine study, and the always wise commentations of Wilde’s literary executor and editor, Robert Ross, and the notes and collectanea of Stuart Mason. But whatever ultimate definition his character may assume in future biography, and however difficult such definition may be, it is not so hard to define Oscar Wilde’s position and influence during the last decade of the nineteenth century, and what proved to be as well the last decade of his own life.

_From the Photograph by Ellis & Walery_]

In the year 1889 Oscar Wilde might have passed away without creating any further comment than that which is accorded an eccentric poet who has succeeded in drawing attention to himself and his work by certain audacities of costume and opinion. His first phase was over, and he had become an outmoded apostle of an æstheticism which had already taken the place of a whimsically remembered fad, a fad which, even then, almost retained its only significance through the medium of Gilbert and Sullivan’s satirical opera, _Patience_. He was the man who had evoked merriment by announcing a desire to live up to his blue-and-white china; he was the man who had created a sort of good-humoured indignation by expressing displeasure with the Atlantic Ocean: “I am not exactly pleased with the Atlantic,” he had confessed. “It is not so majestic as I expected”; and whose later dissatisfaction with Niagara Falls convinced the United States of America of his flippancy: “I was disappointed with Niagara. Most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest if not the keenest disappointments in American married life.” These sayings were beginning to be remembered dimly, along with the picturesque memories of a plum-coloured velveteen knickerbocker suit and a famous stroll down Bond Street as a form of æsthetic propaganda by example. This memory also was aided by W. S. Gilbert:

“_If you walk down Piccadilly
With a poppy or a lily
In your mediæval hand...._”

But certain encounters with Whistler, in which Oscar Wilde felt the sting of the Butterfly, were remembered more distinctly and with more satisfaction, with the result that, besides being outmoded, he became soiled by the charge of plagiarism. “I wish I had said that,” he remarked once, approving of one of Whistler’s witticisms. “You will, Oscar; you will!” was the reply. And still more emphatic, the great painter had said on another occasion: “Oscar has the courage of the opinions ... of others!” The fact was that the brilliant Oxford graduate had not yet fulfilled the promise of his youth, of his first book, and of his own witty audacity. He had achieved notoriety without fame, and literary reputation without a sufficient means of livelihood, and so small was his position in letters that, from 1887 to 1889, we find him eking out a living by editing _The Woman’s World_ for Messrs Cassell & Co.

His successes during this period were chiefly in the realms of friendship, and of this the public knew nothing. Publicly he was treated with amiable contempt: he was a social jester, an intellectual buffoon, a _poseur_; food for the self-righteous laughter of the Philistines; fair quarry for the wits of _Punch_, who did not miss their chance. Yet during the very years he was controlling editorial destinies which were more than foreign to his genius, he was taking the final preparatory steps towards the attractive and sometimes splendid literary outburst of his last decade. During 1885 and 1890 his unripe genius was feeling its way ever surer and surer towards that mastery of technique and increasing thoughtfulness which afterwards displayed themselves. This was a period of transition and co-ordination. Oscar Wilde was evolving out of one _bizarrerie_ and passing into another. And in this evolution he was not only shedding plumes borrowed from Walter Pater, Swinburne and Whistler, he was retaining such of them as suited his needs and making them definitely his own. But, further than that, he was shedding his purely British masters and allowing himself to fall more directly under the influence of a new set of masters in France, where he was always at home, and where he had played the “sedulous ape” to Balzac some years earlier. From time to time during these years he had polished and engraved and added to the luxuriant imagery of that masterpiece of baroque poetry, _The Sphinx_, which was published in 1894 in a beautiful format with decorations by Charles Ricketts. Essays like “The Truth of Masks” and “Shakespeare and Stage Costume” appeared in the pages of _The Nineteenth Century_ in 1885; in other publications appeared such stories as “The Sphinx without a Secret,” “The Canterville Ghost” and “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” and in 1888 he issued _The Happy Prince and Other Tales_. “Pen, Pencil and Poison” appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_ in 1889, and in the same year _The Nineteenth Century_ published the first of his two great colloquies, _The Decay of Lying_. In all of these stories and essays his style was conquering its weaknesses and achieving the undeniable distinction which made him the chief force of the renaissance of the early Nineties. In 1890 his finest colloquy, “The Critic as Artist,” appeared in _The Nineteenth Century_. Several of the above-named essays and tales went to the making of two of his most important books, _The House of Pomegranates_ and _Intentions_, both of which appeared in the first year of the Nineties, and in the same year he published in book form the complete version of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_, thirteen chapters of which had appeared serially in _Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine_ in the previous year.

Thus, with the dawn of the Eighteen Nineties, Oscar Wilde came into his own. _The House of Pomegranates_ alone was sufficient to establish his reputation as an artist, but the insouciant attitude of the paradoxical philosopher revealed in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ and _Intentions_ stung waning interest in the whilom apostle of beauty to renewed activity. Shaking off the astonishing reputation which had won him early notoriety as the posturing advertiser of himself by virtue of the ideas of others, he arose co-ordinate and resplendent, an individual and an influence. He translated himself out of a subject for anecdote into a subject for discussion. And whilst not entirely abandoning that art of personality which had brought him notoriety as a conversationalist and dandy in _salon_ and drawing-room and at the dinner-table, he transmuted the personality thus cultivated into the more enduring art of literature, and that brought him fame of which notoriety is but the base metal. For many years he had looked to the theatre as a further means of expression and financial gain, and he had tried his ’prentice hand on the drama with _Vera: or the Nihilists_ in 1882, which was produced unsuccessfully in America in 1883, and with _The Duchess of Padua_, written for Mary Anderson and rejected by her about the same time, and produced without encouraging results in New York in 1891. There were also two other early plays, _A Florentine Tragedy_, a fragment only of which remains, and _The Woman Covered with Jewels_, which seems to have been entirely lost. The failure of these works to make any sort of impression involves no reflection on the public, as they are the veriest stuff of the beginner and imitator; echoes of Sardou and Scribe; romantic costume plays inspired by the theatre rather than by life, and possessing none of the signs of that skilled craftsmanship upon which the merely stage-carpentered play must necessarily depend. But with that change in the whole trend of his genius which heralded the first year of the Nineties came a change also in his skill as a playwright. In 1891 he wrote _Salomé_ in French, afterwards translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas and published by the Bodley Head, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, in 1894. This play would have been produced at the Palace Theatre in 1892 with Madame Sarah Bernhardt in the cast, had not the censor intervened. Oscar Wilde achieved his first dramatic success with _Lady Windermere’s Fan_, produced by George Alexander at the St James’s Theatre, on 20th February 1892. The success was immediate. Next year Herbert Beerbohm Tree produced _A Woman of No Importance_ at the Haymarket Theatre before even more enthusiastic audiences. In 1895 _An Ideal Husband_ was produced at the same theatre in January, and, in February, _The Importance of Being Earnest_ was produced at the St James’s.

Oscar Wilde had now reached the age of forty-one and the height of his fame and power. “The man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world,” he had said. He had dominated many a London dinner-table; he now dominated the London stage. He was a monarch in his own sphere, rich, famous, popular; looked up to as a master by the younger generation, courted by the fashionable world, loaded with commissions by theatrical managers, interviewed, paragraphed and pictured by the Press, and envied by the envious and the incompetent. All the flattery and luxury of success were his, and his luxuriant and applause-loving nature appeared to revel in the glittering surf of conquest like a joyous bather in a sunny sea. But it was only a partial victory. The apparent capitulation of the upper and middle classes was illusory, and even the man in the street who heard about him and wondered was moved by an uneasy suspicion that all was not well. For, in spite of the flattery and the amusement, Oscar Wilde never succeeded in winning popular respect. His intellectual playfulness destroyed popular faith in his sincerity, and the British people have still to learn that one can be as serious in one’s play with ideas as in one’s play with a football. The danger of his position was all the more serious because those who were ready to laugh with him were never tired of laughing at him. This showed that lack of confidence which is the most fertile ground of suspicion, and Wilde was always suspected in this country even before the rumours which culminated in his trial and imprisonment began to filter through the higher strata of society to the lower. It sufficed that he was strange and clever and seemingly happy and indifferent to public opinion. This popular suspicion is summarised clearly, and with the sort of disrespect from which he never escaped even in his hour of triumph, in an article in _Pearson’s Weekly_ for 27th May 1893, written immediately after the success of _Lady Windermere’s Fan_ and _A Woman of No Importance_:

“Where he does excel is in affectation. His mode of life, his
manner of speech, his dress, his views, his work, are all masses
of affectation. Affectation has become a second nature to him,
and it would probably now be utterly impossible for him to
revert to the original Oscar that lies beneath it all. In fact,
probably none of his friends have ever had an opportunity of
finding out what manner of man the real Oscar is.... So long as
he remains an amiable eccentricity and the producer of amusing
trifles, however, one cannot be seriously angry with him. So
far, it has never occurred to any reasonable person to take him
seriously, and the storms of ridicule to which he has exposed
himself have prevented his becoming a real nuisance. For the
present, however, we may content ourselves with the reflection
that there is no serious danger to be apprehended to the State
from the vagaries of a butterfly.”

The above may be taken as a fair example of the attitude of the popular Press towards Oscar Wilde, and the same sentiments were expressed, varying only in degrees of literary polish, in many directions, even at a time when the new spirit of comedy he had introduced into the British theatre was giving unbounded delight to a vast throng of fashionable playgoers; for these plays had not to create audiences for themselves, like the plays of Bernard Shaw; they were immediately acclaimed, and Wilde at once took rank with popular playwrights like Sydney Grundy and Pinero.

There were of course many who admired him; and he always inspired friendship among his intimates. All who have written of him during his earlier period and during the early days of his triumph refer to his joyous and resplendent personality, his fine scholarship, his splendid manners and conversational gifts, his good humour and his lavish generosity. André Gide gives us many glimpses of Wilde both before and after his downfall, one of which reveals him as table-talker:

“I had heard him talked about at Stéphane Mallarmé’s house,
where he was described as a brilliant conversationalist, and
I expressed a wish to know him, little hoping that I should
ever do so. A happy chance, or rather a friend, gave me the
opportunity, and to him I made known my desire. Wilde was
invited to dinner. It was at a restaurant. We were a party
of four, but three of us were content to listen. Wilde did
not converse--he told tales. During the whole meal he hardly
stopped. He spoke in a slow, musical tone, and his very voice
was wonderful. He knew French almost perfectly, but pretended,
now and then, to hesitate for a word to which he wanted to call
our attention. He had scarcely any accent, at least only what
it pleased him to affect when it might give a somewhat new or
strange appearance to a word--for instance, he used purposely
to pronounce _scepticisme_ as _skepticisme_. The
stories he told us without a break that evening were not of his
best. Uncertain of his audience, he was testing us, for, in
his wisdom, or perhaps in his folly, he never betrayed himself
into saying anything which he thought would not be to the taste
of his hearers; so he doled out food to each according to his
appetite. Those who expected nothing from him got nothing, or
only a little light froth, and as at first he used to give
himself up to the task of amusing, many of those who thought
they knew him will have known him only as the amuser.”

With the progress of his triumph as a successful playwright, his friends observed a coarsening of his appearance and character, and he lost his powers of conversation. Robert H. Sherard met him during the Christmas season of 1894 and described his appearance as bloated. His face seemed to have lost its spiritual beauty, and he was oozing with material prosperity. At this time serious rumours about his private life and habits became more persistent in both London and Paris, and countenance was lent to them by the publication of _The Green Carnation_, which, although making no direct charge, hinted at strange sins. Oscar Wilde knew that his conduct must lead to catastrophe, although many of his friends believed in his innocence to the end. André Gide met him in Algiers just before the catastrophe happened. Wilde explained that he was fleeing from art:

“He spoke of returning to London, as a well-known peer was
insulting him, challenging him, and taunting him with running
away.

“‘But if you go back what will happen?’ I asked him. ‘Do you
know the risk you are running?’

“‘It is best never to know,’ he answered. ‘My friends are
extraordinary--they beg me to be careful. Careful? But how can I
be careful? That would be a backward step. I must go on as far
as possible. I cannot go much further. Something is bound to
happen ... something else.’

“Here he broke off, and the next day he left for England.”

Almost immediately after his arrival he brought an action for criminal libel against the Marquis of Queensberry and, upon losing the case, was arrested, and charged under the 11th Section of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and sentenced to two years’ penal servitude. During his imprisonment he wrote _De Profundis_, in the form of a long letter, addressed but not delivered, to Lord Alfred Douglas, a part of which was published in 1905, and after his release he wrote _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, published, under a pseudonym, “C. 3. 3.” (his prison number), by Leonard Smithers, and he contributed two letters on the conditions of prison life, “The Cruelties of Prison Life,” and “Don’t Read this if you Want to be Happy To-day,” to _The Daily Chronicle_ in 1897 and 1898. These were his last writings.

After leaving prison he lived for a while, under the assumed name of “Sebastian Melmoth,” at the Hôtel de la Plage, and later at the Villa Bourget, Berneval-sur-Mer, near Dieppe, where he wrote _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, and the prison letters, and where he contemplated writing a play called _Ahab and Jezebel_. This play he hoped would be his passport to the world again. But a new restlessness overcame him, and all his good resolutions turned to dust. For a while he travelled, visiting Italy, the south of France and Switzerland, eventually settling in Paris, where he died, in poverty and a penitent Catholic, on 30th November 1900. He was buried in the Bagneux Cemetery, but on 20th July 1909 his remains were removed to Père Lachaise.

It is too soon, perhaps, even now, to set a final value upon the work of Oscar Wilde. Time, although not an infallible critic, is already winnowing the chaff from the grain, and almost with the passing of each year we are better able to recognise the more permanent essences of his literary remains. It is inevitable in his case, where the glamour of personality added so significantly to the character of his work, that Time should insist upon being something more than a casual arbiter. In proof of this the recollection of so much futile criticism of Wilde cannot be overlooked. Both the man and his work have suffered depreciations which amount to defamation, and appraisals which can only be described as silly. But finally he would seem in many instances to have suffered more at the hands of his friends than his enemies. There have been, to be sure, several wise estimations of his genius, even in this country, notably those of Arthur Ransome and the not altogether unprovocative essay of Arthur Symons, entitled “An Artist in Attitudes”; and the various prefaces and notes contributed by Robert Ross to certain of the volumes in the complete edition of the works are, of course, of great value. But, as the incidents associated with the life and times of Wilde recede further into the background of the mental picture which inevitably forms itself about any judgment of his work, we shall be able to obtain a less biased view. Even then, our perspective may be wrong, for this difficulty of personality is not only dominant, but it may be essential.

The personality of Oscar Wilde, luxuriant, piquant and insolent as it was, is sufficiently emphatic to compel attention so long as interest in his ideas or his works survives. Indeed, it may never be quite possible to separate such a man from such work. It is certainly impossible to do so now. With many writers, perhaps the majority, it requires no effort to forget the author in the book, because literature has effectually absorbed personality, or all that was distinctive of the author’s personality. With Oscar Wilde it is otherwise. His books can never be the abstract and brief chronicles of himself; for, admittedly on his part, and recognisably on the part of others, he put even more distinction into his life than he did into his art. Not always the worthier part of himself; for that often, and more often in his last phase, was reserved for his books. But there is little doubt that the complete Oscar Wilde was the living and bewildering personality which rounded itself off and blotted itself out in a tragedy which was all the more nihilistic because of its abortive attempt at recuperation--an attempt which immortalised itself in the repentant sincerity of _De Profundis_, but almost immediately fell forward into an anti-climax of tragedy more pitiful than the first.

So far as we are able to judge, and with the aid of winnowing Time, it is already possible to single out the small contribution made by Oscar Wilde to poetry. The bulk of his poetry is negligible. It represents little more than the ardent outpourings of a young man still deeply indebted to his masters. One or two lyrics will certainly survive in the anthologies of the future, but if Wilde were dependent upon his verses for future acceptance his place would be among the minor poets. There is, however, a reservation to be made even here, as there is in almost every generalisation about this elusive personality; he wrote three poems, two towards the close of his earlier period, _The Harlot’s House_ and _The Sphinx_, and one near the close of his life, _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, which bear every indication of permanence. The two former will appeal to those who respond to strange and exotic emotions, the latter to those who are moved by the broader current of average human feeling. His last poem, and last work, does not reveal merely Oscar Wilde’s acceptance of a realistic attitude, it reveals what might have been, had he lived to pursue the matter further, conversion to a natural and human acceptation of life. The sense of simplicity in art which previously he had been content to use as a refuge for the deliberately complex, as a sort of intensive culture for modern bewilderment, is now used with even greater effect in the cause of the most obvious of human emotions--pity:

“I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

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._’”

There is none of the old earnest insincerity in this poem, and only occasionally does the poet fall back into the old _bizarrerie_. Had _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ been written a hundred years ago, it would have been printed as a broadside and sold in the streets by the balladmongers; it is so common as that, and so great as that. But there is nothing common, and nothing great, in the universal sense, about the two earlier poems. These are distinguished only as the expressions of unusual vision and unusual mood; they are decadent in so far as they express emotions that are sterile and perverse. They are decadent in the sense that Baudelaire was decadent, from whom they inherit almost everything save the English in which they are framed. But few will doubt their claim to a place in a curious artistic niche. _The Sphinx_, a masterly fantasy of bemused artificiality, is really a poetic design, an arabesque depending for effect upon hidden rhymes and upon strange fancies, expressing sensations which have hitherto been enshrined in art rather than in life:

“Your eyes are like fantastic moons that shiver in some stagnant
lake,
Your tongue is like some scarlet snake that dances to fantastic
tunes,

Your pulse makes poisonous melodies, and your black throat is like
the hole
Left by some torch or burning coal on Saracenic tapestries.”

Similarly, _The Harlot’s House_ interprets a mood that is so sinister and impish and unusual as to express disease rather than health:

“Sometimes a horrible marionette
Came out, and smoked its cigarette
Upon the steps like a live thing.

Then turning to my love, I said,
‘The dead are dancing with the dead,
The dust is whirling with the dust.’

But she--she heard the violin,
And left my side, and entered in:
Love passed into the house of lust.”

Wilde developed this abnormal attitude towards life in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ and in _Salomé_, and in each of these prose works he endeavours, often with success, to stimulate feelings that are usually suppressed, by means of what is strange and rare in art and luxury. It is not the plot that you think about whilst reading _Salomé_, but the obvious desire of the author to tune the senses and the mind to a preposterous key:

“I have jewels hidden in this place--jewels that your mother
even has never seen; jewels that are marvellous. I have a collar
of pearls, set in four rows. They are like unto moons chained
with rays of silver. They are like fifty moons caught in a
golden net. On the ivory of her breast a queen has worn it.
Thou shalt be as fair as a queen when thou wearest it. I have
amethysts of two kinds, one that is black like wine, and one
that is red like wine which has been coloured with water. I have
topazes yellow as are the eyes of tigers, and topazes that are
pink as the eyes of a wood-pigeon, and green topazes that are as
the eyes of cats. I have opals that burn always, with an icelike
flame, opals that make sad men’s minds, and are fearful of the
shadows. I have onyxes like the eyeballs of a dead woman. I have
moonstones that change when the moon changes, and are wan when
they see the sun. I have sapphires big like eggs, and as blue
as blue flowers. The sea wanders within them and the moon comes
never to trouble the blue of their waves. I have chrysolites
and beryls and chrysoprases and rubies. I have sardonyx and
hyacinth stones, and stones of chalcedony, and I will give them
all to you, all, and other things will I add to them. The King
of the Indies has but even now sent me four fans fashioned from
the feathers of parrots, and the King of Numidia a garment of
ostrich feathers. I have a crystal, into which it is not lawful
for a woman to look, nor may young men behold it until they
have been beaten with rods. In a coffer of nacre I have three
wondrous turquoises. He who wears them on his forehead can
imagine things which are not, and he who carries them in his
hand can make women sterile. These are great treasures above
all price. They are treasures without price. But this is not
all. In an ebony coffer I have two cups of amber, that are like
apples of gold. If an enemy pour poison into these cups they
become like an apple of silver. In a coffer encrusted with amber
I have sandals encrusted with glass. I have mantles that have
been brought from the land of the Seres, and bracelets decked
about with carbuncles and with jade that came from the city of
Euphrates.... What desirest thou more than this, Salomé? Tell me
the thing that thou desirest, and I will give it thee. All that
thou askest I will give thee, save one thing. I will give thee
all that is mine, save one life. I will give the mantle of the
High Priest. I will give thee the veil of the sanctuary.”

The mere naming of jewels and treasures in a highly wrought prose-poem might in itself be as innocent as one of Walt Whitman’s catalogues of implements, but even removed from its context there is something unusual and even sinister about Herod’s offerings to Salomé. The whole work is coloured by a hunger for sensation that has all the sterility of an excessive civilisation.

In the essays collected in the book called _Intentions_, Oscar Wilde has let us into the secret which produced these works. That secret is an attempt to push Gautier’s idea of art for art’s sake, and Whistler’s idea of art as Nature’s exemplar, to their logical conclusions. He outdoes his masters with the obvious intention of going one better. Throughout the whole of his life he was filled with a boyish enthusiasm which took the form of self-delight. “His attitude was dramatic,” says Arthur Symons, “and the whole man was not so much a personality as an attitude. Without being a sage, he maintained the attitude of a sage; without being a poet, he maintained the attitude of a poet; without being an artist he maintained the attitude of an artist.” It is certainly true that his intellect was dramatic, and it is equally true that he was fond of adopting attitudes, but it is far from true to name three of his favourite attitudes and to say that these began and ended in the mere posture. For Oscar Wilde was both poet and sage and artist. He may not have been a great poet, he may not have been a great sage, he may not, which is more doubtful, have been a great artist, but the fact remains that the attitudes representing those faculties and adopted by him were the symbols of demonstrable phases of his genius. Whilst always longing to express himself in literary forms, and knowing himself to be capable of doing so, he found it easier to express himself through the living personality. Writing bored him, and those who knew him are agreed that he did not put the best of himself into his work. “It is personalities,” he said, “not principles, that move the age.”

Throughout the whole of his life he tried to live up, not to his blue-and-white china, but to an idea of personality; and the whole of his philosophy is concerned with an attempt to prove that personality, even though it destroy itself, should be the final work of art. Indeed, in his opinion, art itself was nothing but the medium of personality. His attitudes thus become details in the art of personality. If they had no basis in fact, Oscar Wilde would have been no more than an actor playing a part in a work of art, but although he played, played at intellectual dandy, much as a boy will play at pirates, he was playing a part in the drama of life; and he adopted the attitude of dandy in response to as real an emotion at least as that which inspires a boy to adopt the attitude of pirate. What he seemed to be doing all the time was translating life into art through himself. His books were but incidents in this process. He always valued life more than art, and only appreciated the latter when its reflex action contributed something to his sensations; but because he had thought himself into the position of one who transmutes life into art, he fell into the error of imagining art to be more important than life. And art for him was not only those formal and plastic things which we call the fine arts; it embraced all luxurious artificialities. “All art is quite useless,” he said. Such an attitude was in itself artificial; but with Oscar Wilde this artificialism lacked any progressive element: it was sufficient in itself; in short, it ended in itself, and not in any addition to personal power. Oscar Wilde never, for instance, dreamt of evolving into a god; he dreamt of evolving into a master of sensation, a harp responding luxuriously to every impression. This he became, or rather, this he always was, and it explained the many quite consistent charges of plagiarism that were always being brought against him, and it may explain his insensate plunge into forbidden sin, his conversion and his relapse. He lived for the mood, but whatever that mood brought him, whether it was the ideas of others or the perversities of what is impish in life, he made them his own. What he stole from Whistler, Pater, Balzac, Gautier and Baudelaire, whilst remaining recognisably derivative, had added unto them something which their originals did not possess. He mixed pure wines, as it were, and created a new complex beverage, not perhaps for quaffing, but a sort of liqueur, or, rather, a cocktail, with a piquant and original flavour not ashamed of acknowledging the flavours of its constituents.

This, then, was in reality an attitude towards life, and not an empty pose. I do not think that Oscar Wilde had any hope of finding anything absolute; he was born far too late in the nineteenth century for that. He had no purpose in life save play. He was the playboy of the Nineties; and, like the hero of John Millington Synge’s drama, he was subject to the intimidation of flattery. Naturally inclined to go one better than his master, he was also inclined to please his admirers and astonish his enemies by going one better than himself, and as this one better generally meant in his later life one more extravagance, one further abandonment, it resulted, from the point of view of convention, in his going always one worse. Repetition of this whim turned perversity into a habit, and the growing taunt of those who knew or suspected his serious perversions drove him into the final perversion of deliberately courting tragedy, much as the mouse is charmed back into the clutches of the cat after it has apparently been given a loophole of retreat. It would not have been cowardice if Oscar Wilde had escaped while he had the chance, and it was not bravery that made him blind to that chance; he was bemused by his own attitude. Afterwards, he learnt the meaning of pain, and he arrived at a conclusion similar to that of Nietzsche. But it was not until afterwards. And although he found consolation in Christian mysticism whilst in prison, and again on his deathbed, we shall never know with what subtle joy he permitted his own destruction during the intervening period. Looked at from such a point of view, his books help in explaining the man. The best of them, _Intentions_, _The House of Pomegranates_, _The Importance of Being Earnest_, _The Soul of Man_, _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, _De Profundis_, and a handful of epigrams and short parables which he called _Prose Poems_, must, it seems to me, take a definite place in English literature as the expression and explanation of the type Wilde represented.

This type was not created by Oscar Wilde: it was very general throughout Europe at the close of the last century, and he represented only one version of it. Probably to himself he imagined himself to approximate somewhat to the cynical idlers of his plays: Lord Goring in _An Ideal Husband_, Lord Darlington in _Lady Windermere’s Fan_, Lord Illingworth in _A Woman of No Importance_ and Algernon Moncrieff in _The Importance of Being Earnest_ may be partial portraits of the sort of personal impression their author imagined he was creating in the fashionable world. But he drew fuller portraits of himself in his novel. Lord Henry Wotton and Dorian Gray represent two sides of Oscar Wilde; they are both experimenters in life, both epicureans and both seeking salvation by testing life even to destruction. _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ is really a moral tale, and that also is characteristic of the genius of Oscar Wilde, for at no period of his life had he the courage of his amorality. He was always haunted by the still small voice which broke bounds and expressed itself freely in _De Profundis_. And whilst reading his books, or listening to his plays, one cannot help feeling that their very playfulness is but the cloak of tragedy. The decadent, weary with known joys and yearning for new sensations, perpetually being rebuked by the clammy hand of exhausted desire, must needs laugh. Oscar Wilde laughed, and made us laugh, not by his wit so much as by his humour, that humour which dances over his plays and epigrams with the flutter of sheet lightning, compelling response where response is possible, but always inconsequent and always defying analysis. It reached its height in _The Importance of Being Earnest_, a comedy so novel, so irresistibly amusing and so perfect in its way that discussion of it ends in futility, like an attempt to explain the bouquet of old Cognac or the iridescence of opals. It is the moonshine of genius. The still small voice in him, of which his lambent humour is the mask, is stronger in _The Soul of Man_ and _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, and it is quite possible that had he lived the even life that he began to live on the bleak coast of Normandy after his release from prison, this underlying strain in his character would have turned him into a social reformer. His harrowing letters on prison conditions point to some such destiny especially when associated with his philosophic dash into the realm of Socialism. As it was, such humane zeal as he possessed ended on the one side in sublime pity and on the other in the dream of a Utopia for dandies.

Dandy of intellect, dandy of manners, dandy of dress, Oscar Wilde strutted through the first half of the Nineties and staggered through the last. So pleased was he with himself, so interested was he in the pageant of life, that he devoted his genius, in so far as it could be public, to telling people all about it. His genius expressed itself best in stories and conversation, and he was always the centre of each. The best things in his plays are the conversations: the flippancies of dandies and the garrulities of delightful shameless dowagers. His best essays are colloquies; those that are not depend for effect upon epigrams and aphorisms, originally dropped by himself in the dining-rooms and _salons_ of London and Paris. When he was not conversing he was telling stories, and these stories, perhaps, the _Prose Poems_, _The House of Pomegranates_ and _The Happy Prince_, will outlive even his wittiest paradox. _Salomé_ is more a story, a “prose-poem,” than a play, and it is more, to use for once the method of inversion in which he delighted, an epigram than a story. One can imagine the glee with which Oscar Wilde worked up to the anti-climax, to the moment after Salomé has kissed the dead mouth of Jokanaan, and Herod has turned round and said: “Kill that woman.” One can taste his own delight whilst writing the final stage instruction: “The soldiers run forward and crush beneath their shields Salomé, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judæa.” But more easily still can one imagine this remarkable man for ever telling himself an eternal tale in which he himself is hero.