Critical Woodcuts/Oscar Wilde
OSCAR WILDE would have enjoyed his appearance in this large paper edition of 575 numbered copies in dull blue boards with white paper labels, chaste as a set of Wedgwood china.[1] "I must try to live up," he might have said, "to my wide margins." He would have liked the note of ducal luxury in his personal marks on the binding: the small gold sunflower under his name in the upper left-hand corner and the seal at the center, symbolic of his literary conquests, bearing the lion rampant, the fleur-de-lis, and the harp of Erin. He would have been gratified, too, by the company of friends and critics who bring their tribute of roses and thorns to this edition of his works.
The æsthetic movement which Wilde was ultimately to mislead into unseemly places was, in its earlier pre-Raphaelite phase, conspicuous for its chivalric Arthurian reminiscences and for "the white feet of angels coming down the golden stair." (Oscar Wilde subsequently gilded the feet.) And so the general introduction is appropriately by Richard Le Gallienne, whose head and halo-like hair pleased Wilde by reminding him of the angel in Rossetti's "Annunciation." Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson, who, I believe, posed for Rossetti's Dante, contributes a prefatory page to "The Duchess of Padua," which Wilde read to him from a lectern, over which he draped himself in the æsthetic attitudes immortalized by Gilbert and Sullivan in "Patience." William Butler Yeats, who gave the green carnation new life by transplanting it in Irish soil, introduces the fairy tales, and he speculates in his moon-stricken prose on the joy it would have given Wilde to know that his works are widely read in the land of jade and powdered lacquer and in Arabia: "In the midst of my meditation it was as though I heard him saying with that slow, precise, rhythmical elocution of his, 'I have a vast public in Samarkand.'" Coulson Kernahan expresses his pained distaste for "Dorian Gray," and Walter Pater's appreciative but suavely condemnatory review of it is also included.
One misses many minor figures whom one might expect to see in this procession. One misses the major figures of G. K. Chesterton and G. B. Shaw, who certainly learned from Wilde much about the uses of paradox as a form of wit and as an implement of intellectual exploration. One misses also the belligerent championship of Frank Harris. But all three of these warriors have defined their attitude toward Wilde and his movement elsewhere. The other contributors are Edgar Saltus, Richard Butler Glaenzer, A. B. Walkley, John Drinkwater, John Cowper Powys, Michael Monahan, W. F. Morse and Padraic Colum. Since Wilde in his glory regarded himself as peerless "king" of his world, he would have denied the possibility of a trial by his peers; but I think every one else will acknowledge that the publisher has assembled a jury as competent and as sympathetic as a problematic man of letters could hope for.
In those years when Wilde spent his golden hours scrubbing his cell in prison, washing his tin dishes and, in the evening, reading a few chapters of the New Testament in Greek, he wrote in "De Profundis": "If life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. People must adopt some attitude toward me, and so pass judgment both on themselves and me."
One aspect of the problem which Wilde presents to us is suggested by George Bernard Shaw as follows: "Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love nobody; I will be utterly selfish, and I will be not merely a rascal but a monster, and you shall forgive me everything. In other words, I will reduce your standards to absurdity not by writing them down, though I could do that so well—in fact, have done it—but by actually living them down and dying them down.'"
So far as his moral character is concerned, our jury is in substantial agreement. Wilde's own intimates cheerfully concede nearly everything which a moralistic critic cares to allege against it. They concede that he was indolent, colossally egotistical, selfish, weak, flabby, incomparably vain, insolent to tradesmen and inferiors, a flatterer of wealth and titles, a thoroughgoing snob in the English sense, extravagant and untrustworthy in money matters, intemperate in eating and drinking, incapable of genuine friendship, and a sexual pervert.
And yet we forgive him everything; and yet in his earlier years he was welcomed by every hostess in London; and yet Mr. Frank Harris declares that "he would rather spend an evening with him than Oscar Wilde: A Dandy of Letters with Renan or Carlyle, or Verlaine or Dick Burton or Davidson. . . . I have known no more charming, no more quickening, no more delightful spirit. . . . It may be that I prize humor and good-humor and eloquence of poetic speech, the artist qualities, more than goodness or loyalty or manliness, and so overestimate things amiable. But the lovable and joyous things are to me the priceless things, and the most charming man I ever met was assuredly Oscar Wilde."
The solution of Mr. Shaw's "problem" is simple. Whenever we become infatuated with what we have conventionally called "a thoroughly bad man" we find on consideration that he possesses a string of virtues, sometimes rare virtues, which are not listed as such in the catalogue of the austere moralist. It was, for example, Wilde's central virtue that he enjoyed his life, enjoyed it immensely, enjoyed it in obviously felicitous circumstances, and enjoyed it keenly even in circumstances of misery and shame. That is one of the rarest of human virtues, and Wilde possessed it to an extraordinary degree. There is nothing whatever which human beings covet more, when they are honest, than a capacity for enjoyment.
Wilde possessed also an extraordinary faculty for communicating his pleasure. The "vice" of his vanity, if we choose to call it so, operated to social profit, spurring him incessantly to give pleasure in exchange for the pleasure of being conspicuous. Like all the famous dandies from whom he is descended—Beau Nash, Beau Brummel, Byron, Disraeli, D'Orsay, Bulwer-Lytton—he courted the public like a player; he dressed, posed, talked and sinned for the public, and he won the public because he kept it incessantly in a state of wonder, delight, amusement and horror. Like the world's famous courtesans, bandits and assassins, he contributed by his vices no less than by his virtues to the precious sum of life's interests. Digest this "unedifying" truth as we may, all mankind loves a villain, and it is a commonplace of experience that the most atrocious criminal, if he keeps a stiff upper lip and steps out with appropriate bravado, may go to his execution amid the roses and love letters and tears and adulation of admiring thousands.
Certain of Wilde's friends who admit the numerous and gross defects in his character attempt to make a sharp distinction between his life and his works. Mr. Frank Harris, for instance, says: "If his life was given overmuch to self-indulgence, it must be remembered that his writings and conversation were singularly kindly, singularly amiable, singularly pure. No harsh or coarse or bitter word ever passed those eloquent laughing lips. If he served beauty in her myriad forms he only showed in his works the beauty that was amiable and of good report."
This line of defense is, I think, absolutely untenable. It is as untenable as the contention that his "downfall" was due to a temporary aberration or a progressive disease of the brain. There was nothing fortuitous in Wilde's downfall, except the discovery of his state of mind by the law-enforcing portion of the British public. His downfall was the logical conclusion of his career in a country which disciplines his state of mind in the criminal court. Spiritually he was no more "down" in prison than he was while he scintillated in the drawing-room. His conversation and his writings are just as "abnormal" as his career. In his poems, in his comedies, in "Dorian Gray," in his critical discourses, he paints his portrait, he displays his own sentiments and opinions, again and again, with remarkable fidelity and completeness. And his ideals and his philosophy as presented in his works are entirely consistent with the conduct for which he was sent to prison.
Wilde was of the smart set, and he wrote for the smart set about the smart set. Now, the smart set has many superbly attractive traits and aspects. It does not, as Mr. Harris observes, habitually employ the coarse and obscene language of guttersnipes. Its hair does not fall over its collar, its heels are not run down, its nails are in order. It bathes frequently, dresses modishly, dines daintily, drinks exhilaratingly, lives easily, conforms with many courteous and agreeable social usages, occupies good seats at the theater, buys pictures, hunts in season, attends races, gives house parties, exchanges amenities, talks of beautiful and diverting objects, cultivates conversation and seeks in a multitude of ways to impart to the ordinary slack intercourse of life the tension of style and, for its own members, to raise the entire depressing and disgusting business of being born, married and buried to the level of a fine art.
In compensation for the arduous task of keeping up a beautiful appearance and conforming to its own code, the smart set demands certain privileges, and it takes them. When Lord Henry Wotton (or Lord Arthur Savile or Lord Goring or Algernon Moncrieff or Lord Darlington or Lord Illingworth) has seen the midday sun breaking through his ivory silk curtains, has had his cup of chocolate served by a flawless valet, has drawn his portière of peach-colored plush, bathed his fair limbs in the moonstone waters of his onyx tub, thrown himself upon his divan of Persian saddlebags and lighted a perfumed cigarette from his jeweled case, he must be allowed to begin the pleasures of the day by tearing up his tradesman's bills, pointing a half-dozen epigrams at the bourgeoisie, making a few assignations, and ruminating on some new and strange and "fiery-colored" sin.
The hero of the smart set, as Wilde conceives him, must be allowed to turn over all responsibility for truth and goodness to the middle class. What is the use of being a hero unless one can be relieved from "the sordid necessity of living for others"? "Unselfishness is letting other people's lives alone." "Industry is the refuge of those who have nothing to do." "Vulgarity is simply the conduct of other people." "Life is too important to be taken seriously." "There is nothing in the world like the devotion of a married woman. It's a thing no married man knows anything about." "The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education." "Sin is the only real color-element left in modern life." "One could never pay too high a price for any sensation." "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." "Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us." "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses."
There is just enough of sharp and piercing truth in these epigrams to carry their maddening poison into the veins of foolish and humorless young men. If one can take the point without the poison, they are worth collecting.
It is absurd to pretend that Wilde's heroes are right-thinking young men. These gilded youths are adored by adolescents, as Byron was adored, for the brilliance and daring of their wickedness. As for "Dorian Gray," our æsthetic jury deals with it as harshly as any moralist could desire. Says Mr. Kernahan: "I found the atmosphere stifling and tainted, and was repelled by the sneers, the cynicism, in a word, by what seemed to me the wickedness by which Lord Henry sought to remove the landmarks of good and evil." Says Walter Pater: "To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely, as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development." Says that eminent authority on the lives and deaths of the heroes of the Yellow Nineties, Mr. Arthur Symons: "Wilde was an extremely typical figure. . . . If he might be supposed for a moment to represent anything for himself he would be the perfect representative of all that is evidently meant by us in our modern use of the word 'Decadence.'"
It is interesting to observe that critics of Wilde's own school of art for art's sake are beginning to pull his literary accomplishments to pieces, to praise "Intentions" and "De Profundis" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" with reservations, and to grant him but one flawless masterpiece, "The Importance of Being Earnest," which, however, Mr. Shaw says, is "heartless." The line of attack is this: They declare that he originates little or nothing, that his convictions are all second-hand, that his taste and judgment are defective and his knowledge superficial, that he has no assured personal style in either poetry or prose, that his purple passages are full of echoes and mimicry of Ruskin, Whistler, Arnold, Pater, Rossetti, Gautier, Baudelaire. Whistler, who of course was a fountain of malice, charged him outright with plagiarism, and, more venomously, asserted that he was as poor a judge of a coat as of a picture! But that—c'était la guerre. Much more damaging are these cold verdicts of Mr. Arthur Symons who cannot be accused of defective sympathies towards diabolists.
Wilde, certainly from what I knew of him as a man and as a writer, was almost utterly devoid of artistic judgment, and it is no wonder that Whistler had to drop his acquaintance. . . .
Wilde said nothing which had not been said before him. In his devotion to beauty he seemed to have given up the whole world, and yet what was most tragic in the tragedy was that he never recognized the true face of beauty. He followed beauty, and beauty fled from him, for his devotion was that of the lover proud of many conquests. He was eager to proclaim the conquest, and too hasty to distinguish between beauty and beauty's handmaid. His praise of beauty is always a boast, never a homage. When he attempted to create beauty in words he described beautiful things.
That reaffirms in other words what Pater said about him thirty-five years ago. Oscar Wilde is properly and accurately called a decadent because he degrades the æsthetic movement, lowers its level. The æsthetic movement in its highest phases was the successor of a moribund religious explanation of the world. Along toward the middle of the last century it undertook the task which was falling from the palsied hands of the church: it undertook a fresh, sincere, adequate expression of man's feeling toward the mystery and beauty and terror of life—the whole of it. So Ruskin conceived of it, so Arnold, so Pater, so, somewhat less austerely, did William Morris.
Oscar Wilde will always be of great historical interest because he was the heir of all that the æsthetic movement had achieved up to 1880, and because, attempting to improve his inheritance, he wasted and well-nigh ruined it. He began by throwing out nature, which Ruskin had brought into fresh relationship with art; by throwing out religion, which Arnold had brought into fresh relationship with poetry; by throwing out moral conduct, which Pater had associated with music; by throwing out the social and altruistic feelings and the welfare of the laboring masses, which all the great leaders from Ruskin to Morris had associated with the possibility of an artistically productive epoch.
Wilde was proud of his "improvements." He plumed himself on the divorce which he had effected between art and life. He asked applause for his invention of an art which was a pure protest against life and the strenuous passions of life, an art which was as beautiful and was intended to be as sterile as a collection of blown birds' eggs. He thought his improvements would make the æsthetic movement popular—with the smart set; and they did. But, of course, we shall have nothing but smart-set art as long as the æsthetic movement is conducted by the smart set.
I wish to say a word about what sentimental biographers call "the tragedy of Oscar Wilde." By that phrase sentimental biographers refer to his spending some years in prison and ending his life in disgrace. But surely a man's real tragedy is to fail in what he attempts to perform, and Wilde never attempted, never seriously attempted, to keep out of prison. On the contrary, he applied his brilliant intellect to getting in; so that his imprisonment must be counted among his successes.
Wilde's major life effort was directed to the task of separating art from morality; in that he failed deplorably. That is his tragedy. Far from being an artist pure and undefiled by ethical intention, as he declared that an artist should be, he is himself incessantly a moralist, often a very bad moralist, sometimes unconsciously a very stern and sound moralist, but always his art is inseparable from his morality. In other writers, the story, as we say, carries a moral. In his case the morality carries the story, carries the dazzling critical dialogue, carries the bright flimsy structure of his dining-room comedies. And it is as a moralist that the exponent of art for art's sake has been most influential.
Oscar Wilde's works are in English literature, and they are likely to remain there. He will be revisited by successive generations of pilgrims, chiefly young pilgrims, as the affable, indulgent, sparkling host of a famous and infamous house on the æsthetic turnpike. There are better houses—and worse—farther along the road, but many pilgrims will never ask anything better than Wilde can give them. He has good wine, white and red; he will chant you poetry, not as good as Shelley or Keats but almost as good as FitzGerald and Housman; he will show you lovely pastorals which won't remind you of nature but will recall "Thyrsis" and "The Scholar Gipsy"; and he will show you charming "Hellenic" things which won't feel quite Greek but will remind you of the pictures of Albert Moore and Sir Frederick Leighton.
Didn't some one say truly enough that he is a man with only a third-class ticket, yet with so much appearance of style that he always manages to ride in a first-class compartment? He is, he will remain, the Goethe of undergraduates who can't read German, the Ruskin of art lovers who are bored by nature and great masters, the Arnold of moralists who dislike morality, and the Pater of those who seek culture without cultivation. He will always be "in" when scent and rouge and dyed hair and tinted finger-nails are "in"; for Wilde, if he had not been an author, would have been a dealer in perfumes and cosmetics.
- ↑ The Writings of Oscar Wilde, New York: Gabriel Wells, 12 vols, 1924.