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+      Oscar Wilde in Outline | Project Gutenberg
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+</head>
+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77494 ***</div>
+<figure class="figcenter illowp52" id="cover" style="max-width: 147.3125em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/cover.jpg" alt="Book Cover">
+</figure>
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[1]</span></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center t1">TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 442</p>
+<p class='center t2'>Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius</p>
+
+ <h1>
+Oscar Wilde in<br>
+ Outline
+</h1>
+
+<p class="center t3">Charles J. Finger</p>
+
+
+<p class="center t4">HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY</p>
+<p class='center t5'>GIRARD, KANSAS</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[2]</span></p>
+<p class='center c1'>Copyright 1923,</p>
+<p class='center c2'>  Haldeman-Julius Company.</p>
+
+<p class='center c3'><span class='allsmcap'>PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</span></p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p><span class="pagenum"><a id="Page_3"></a><a id="Page_4"></a><a id="Page_5"></a>[5]</span></p>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="OSCAR_WILDE_IN_OUTLINE">
+    OSCAR WILDE IN OUTLINE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">One fiery-coloured moment of great life!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And then—how barren the nations’ praise!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">How vain the trump of Glory! Bitter thorns</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Were in that laurel leaf, whose toothed barbs</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Burned and bit deep till fire and red flame</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Seemed to feed full upon my brain, and make</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The garden a bare desert.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent32">With wild hands</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">I strove to tear it from my bleeding brow,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">But all in vain; and with a dolorous cry</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">That paled the lingering stars before their time,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">I waked at last, and saw the timorous dawn</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Peer with grey face into my darkened room,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And would have deemed it a mere idle dream</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">But for this restless pain that gnaws my heart,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And the red wounds of thorns upon my brow.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class='verse indent12'>—<i>Translation from the Polish of </i></div>
+      <div class='verse indent14'><i>Madame Modjeska by Oscar Wilde.</i></div>
+   </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<h3 id="THE_TRUE_KNOWLEDGE">
+  THE TRUE KNOWLEDGE
+</h3>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Thou knowest all; I seek in vain</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">What lands to till or sow with seed—</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">The land is black with briar and weed,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Nor cares for falling tears or rain.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Thou knowest all; I sit and wait</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">With blinded eyes and hands that fail,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Till the last lifting of the veil</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And the first opening of the gate.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Thou knowest all; I cannot see.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">I trust I shall not live in vain,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">I know that we shall meet again</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">In some divine eternity.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[6]</span></p>
+
+<p>Men in general often find it hard to dissociate
+the work of artists from the circumstances
+of their lives. Let a company fall to
+talking of Villon, and it is a safe bet that
+before long someone will drag in the incident
+of his having wandered very close to the
+gallows. Talk of Baudelaire, and we are prone
+to forget, for a moment, his <i>Flowers of Evil</i>,
+to recall that he painted his hair green. Of
+Dowson, we remember that he was a pot house
+drunkard and overlook his <i>Impenitentia Ultima</i>.
+Sometimes it seems, indeed, as though more
+truth was in the saying that the evil that men
+do lives after them and the good is often interr’d
+with their bones, than the reverse. Certainly
+Oscar Wilde’s place in literature would
+have been decided long ago but for the distortion
+caused by circumstances in his life.
+But, as the mists clear, certain points stand
+out. It seems very definitely decided that as
+a poet he flew on wings too feeble to reach
+the clear, cold heights of Parnassus, two poems
+only being marked for distinction. <i>The Ballad
+of Reading Gaol</i> and <i>The Sphinx</i>. As a writer
+of fiction he will probably be forgotten, or
+at best, remembered by one book, as is Charles
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[7]</span>
+Brockden Brown, <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>
+living as a literary curiosity as <i>Wieland</i> lives,
+or as Beckford’s <i>Vathek</i> lives, a thing at once
+odd and curious. As literary critic Wilde cannot
+rank with Hazlitt or Sainte-Beuve. As
+dramatist, doubtless, his fame is secure, and
+as essayist he will not be forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>His friend, M. Andre Gide, has told us that
+Wilde said his novels and stories were written
+as the result of wagers made. That is
+hard to believe. Too plainly both novels and
+stories bear the earmarks of Wilde the stylist.
+His novel, <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>, approaches
+too nearly his expressed ideal, his
+desire to write a tale that should be of the
+wondrous beauty of a Persian rug. If Wilde
+wrote either novel or story on a wager, he
+must have wagered with himself. For Oscar
+Wilde took himself far too seriously to hang
+his art on a hair, to stake his literary reputation
+on the casting of a die. Indeed, he took
+himself and his art more seriously than he
+took the world, and that to his own undoing.</p>
+
+<p>In another place I have shown how Wilde
+was influenced, how his life’s path was pulled
+out of its calculated orbit because of his feminine
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[8]</span>
+soul, and how heredity swayed his acts.
+Of that last he was well aware, has, indeed,
+confessed to the world more than once and
+especially in a passage in <i>The Critic as Artist</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Heredity has become, as it were, the warrant for
+the contemplative life. It has shown us that we
+are never less free than when we try to act. It has
+hemmed us round with the nets of the hunter, and
+written upon the wall the prophecy of our doom.
+We may not watch it, for it is within us. We may
+not see it, save in a mirror that mirrors the soul.
+It is Nemesis without her mask. It is the last of
+the Fates, and the most terrible. It is the ONLY
+one of the Gods whose real name we know.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The feminine soul naturally had its influence,
+gave his literary work a tendency, a direction.
+To say that it did so seems so obvious
+as almost to be platitudinous. With that feminine
+soul he could never have written a <i>Call
+of the Wild</i>, for instance, nor could he have
+written a <i>Walden</i>, because he was physically
+and mentally incapable of living a life of adventure
+as Jack London lived, or of scaling
+life down to the bare bone as Thoreau did.
+The fact is that Wilde himself was a contradiction,
+this giant of a man with the feminine
+soul was the sport of the gods, and that the
+spirit of contradiction entered into his writings
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[9]</span>
+is everywhere apparent in the written
+page.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing the feminine soul did for him.
+Because of that inner urge, he was filled with
+a burning desire to be admired, and therefore
+wrote much for the pyrotechnical effect.
+In a word, he loved to show off, to say and
+write things calculated to startle. You have
+exactly the same spirit manifest in Chesterton,
+in Belloc, too, but to lesser degree. But
+in Wilde, that self-satisfied strutting, that peacock
+exhibition of brilliant parts is very
+obvious, indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Added to the spirit of contradiction and the
+pavonic display, there was, in Wilde, a strong
+spirit of partizanship. That accounts for his
+proclamation of himself as a kind of John
+the Baptist for Charles Baudelaire. Indeed,
+for a time, the Baudelairean influence colored
+all that he wrote and he outdid his master
+in ornateness. The same spirit of partizanship
+led him to out-Pater Pater. He conceived
+it to be a worthy mission to acquaint
+the stolid British public with Platonic teachings,
+especially as relating to affection between
+men. That, of course, was as impossible a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[10]</span>
+task and as hopeless as it would be to attempt
+to grow banana trees in Greenland.
+However, Wilde worked valiantly in his cause
+and, because of ignorance, and some wilful distortion
+and misrepresentation, much that he
+wrote in all sincerity later in his life plagued
+him.</p>
+
+<p>As final ingredients there may be cited his
+opposition to the commercialism and the
+philistinism of his day which he shared in
+company with John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold,
+and his real desire to cultivate the capacity
+for refined enjoyment of the beautiful
+in art and literature, an outcropping of his
+partizanship of Walter Pater.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="THE_SPIRIT_OF_CONTRADICTION">
+  THE SPIRIT OF CONTRADICTION
+</h3>
+
+<p>In some respects Wilde was like a clever
+debater who takes keen delight in flouting
+the opposition. He was of that sort who, privately
+granting the conclusions of his opponent,
+will deliberately beat about the bush in
+an effort to discover entirely new reasons,
+spiritedly rejecting all those advanced by the
+other side. Chesterton is of the same stripe.
+To such men to be destructive, to dazzle, to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[11]</span>
+astound, is meat and drink. Of all pleasures,
+there is none to interest them as does the
+game of conversational entanglements. At
+whatever cost, they must score off of the
+opposition, be that opposition an individual,
+the public, custom or convention. Nor do
+they come unscathed from the battle, for
+prejudices and widely held beliefs are very
+solid things to butt against. Not with entire
+impunity may anyone attack what men have
+imbibed with their mother’s milk. Conventions
+and customs are results of ages of experience
+and to modify them with changing circumstances
+is, at the best, a slow task.</p>
+
+<p>By way of instance of the argument contradictory
+and provoking, let us take a passage
+from <i>The Importance of Being Earnest</i>. It
+runs: “The modern sympathy with invalids
+is morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a
+thing to be encouraged in others.” Reading
+that, your average man who belongs to a
+fraternal order, who subscribes to charity
+funds, who rushes to fountain pen when a
+begging list is thrust before him, is shocked.
+“What!” he exclaims, “would this fellow abolish
+sympathy? would he weaken personal
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[12]</span>
+love and human affection? Does he scorn the
+little child whose mother clung to it until it
+sunk into its grave? My dear, old mother
+who——” and so on. There would be sentimentalities,
+and, at the end, Wilde would stand
+condemned as a cold callous anti-Christ.</p>
+
+<p>But without trying to read anything into
+what Wilde has written except that which
+was actually there, reading carefully and accepting
+it as the result of his own thought and
+experience, we find much of value. We remember
+that Wilde had pondered long on
+hereditary influences, was fully aware that he
+came from a failing stock and inherited fatal
+weaknesses. He had also said something
+anent the stupidity of holding that marriage
+was an institution determined by an omniscient
+divinity and if anything was made in
+heaven it was divorce, not marriage. Putting
+these together we have, not a cold and callous
+piece of impudence, but an idea which, if pondered,
+we find leads to the belief that society
+would do well to regard as an offense against
+itself the mating of undesirables from whom
+might spring unhealthy branches, or those
+prone to weaknesses or disease. Approached
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[13]</span>
+from another direction the teaching looks
+sound enough and we embrace it, calling it the
+gospel of Eugenics. Certainly, a couple having
+married and finding in the course of time
+that their union was unfavorable, unpromising
+as to their mutual happiness, would, most certainly,
+do well to separate, for of all creatures,
+who so unhappy as children of a joyless union?
+Hence Wilde’s “Divorces are made in heaven.”
+Hence, also, his scornful contempt for those
+who spend efforts on the result of those social
+ills which we see in the sick. After all,
+it is not vastly removed from Christ’s swift
+answer to the sentimentalist: “Let the dead
+bury the dead.” The Wilde idea closely touches
+Nietzsche’s. There is little time to waste on
+failures. Man is in a state of transition and
+must be surpassed. The human race has a
+long march before it. Which leads to another
+apparently contradictory statement, another
+solid truth: “Discontent is the first step
+in the progress of a man or a nation.” Of
+course it is, although shallow or thoughtless
+people denounced Wilde as a stirrer up of trouble
+when the saying was quoted by socialists
+and organizers of the unemployed. Had Wilde
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[14]</span>
+said, “It is the duty of every Englishman to
+be progressive,” the platitude would have been
+hailed with delight, and he might have basked
+in the concentrated smiles of the black-coated
+million. But he chose the argument contradictory
+and shocked with a truth. The unthinking
+saw in the saying, not a very ordinary
+remark, but a gospel of discontent calculated
+to make men vicious and improvident,
+anarchical and cruel.</p>
+
+<p>Take another instance of the argument contradictory,
+one from his essay, <i>The Decay of
+the Art of Lying</i>, which enraged many on this
+side of the Atlantic. Here it is:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>The crude commercialism of America, its materializing
+spirit, its indifference to the poetical
+side of things, and its lack of imagination and of
+high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that
+country having adopted for its national hero a
+man, who according to his own confession, was incapable
+of telling a lie, and it is not too much to
+say that the story of George Washington and the
+cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter
+space of time, than any other moral tale in the
+whole of literature.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The book of collected essays, be it said, is
+called <i>Intentions</i>. Now Wilde’s intention in
+the passage quoted, in the entire essay in fact,
+was to register a condemnation of the idiotic
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[15]</span>
+habit of pestiferous puritans in forever trying
+to tack a “moral lesson” to a work of art.
+And the desire to do that is distinctly an
+American vice. Not more than two weeks
+ago I came across an instance in which a
+school teacher had set his pupil the task of
+writing an essay with this as subject: “What
+moral lesson do we get from Robert Louis
+Stevenson’s <i>Treasure Island</i>?” Now it must
+be clear to any thinking man that Stevenson
+had no more idea of trying to convey a moral
+lesson in that glorious tale than he had of
+advocating murder and piracy. Healthy minds
+read for pleasure and not for moral profit,
+and no sane boy rushes out to murder his
+grandmother because he has read the life of
+Nero. But our moralists are forever trying
+to turn the world into a loveless place, a hell
+in which each and every one is expected to be
+forever in a state of awful spiritual anguish,
+imagining themselves to be reprobate, shaken
+with religious doubt. The dark and cruel fanaticism
+of the uplifter would rob both youth
+and man of joy, and the world would be, had
+the moral-lesson monger his way, a duller,
+blanker, grayer place every day. The uplifter
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[16]</span>
+would fasten upon us a blighting, spiritual
+tyranny. On young America, then, the meddlers
+made an early start. Washington, the
+national hero, must be portrayed first and
+foremost as inhuman, a something not of the
+world in which all men are liars. But at bottom,
+Wilde was driving home the salutory
+lesson that art is, must be, independent of
+morality: must, assuredly, follow its destiny
+quite independent of moral purpose.</p>
+
+<p>From quite another point of view, from a
+common sense point of view, we may come to
+a realization of the folly of painting our national
+heroes as monsters of virtue—as Charles
+Grandisons, all correct and precise, and finicking.
+To endow our Lincolns and Washingtons
+with middle class respectability is to belittle
+them. The picture of them is unconvincing,
+as the picture of men without faults always is.
+Your sensible European knows better than to
+set up a moral scarecrow with all bad spots
+painted out, and loves his Nelson none the
+less because of the Lady Hamilton affair, approves
+of his Dickens while admitting he
+loved his glass, had a golden opinion of the
+late King Edward, although he had his <i>affaires</i>.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[17]</span></p>
+
+<p>“The crude commercialism of America,” that
+Wilde denounced time and time again, seems
+to be something that we are only now coming
+to realize. Thoreau denounced it, of course;
+also did Emerson, but theirs were voices in
+the wilderness. Today the cry is being taken
+up everywhere. Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis,
+John Hall Wheelock and a dozen others are
+calling upon men to see something more than
+the mere piling up of dollars in life. It is
+being realized that we are, as a nation, sadly
+under-educated, that we have overlooked something
+of the highest import when we have
+overlooked real self-culture. Wilde’s words,
+once considered odd, now no longer have the
+appearance of oddity.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>The development of the race depends on the development
+of the individual, and where self-culture
+has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard
+is instantly lowered, and, often, ultimately lost. If
+you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life
+in educating himself—a rare type in our time, I
+admit, but still one occasionally to be met with—you
+rise from table richer, and conscious that a
+high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified
+your days.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And in another place in the same essay, <i>The
+Critic as Artist</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Who that moves in the stress and turmoil of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[18]</span>
+actual existence, noisy politician, or brawling social
+reformer, or poor narrow-minded priest blinded by
+the sufferings of that unimportant section of the
+community among whom he cast his lot, can seriously
+claim to be able to form a disinterested intellectual
+judgment about any one thing? Each of
+the professions means a prejudice. The necessity
+for a career forces every one to take sides.
+We live in the age of the overworked, and the
+under-educated; the age in which people are so
+industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
+And, harsh though it may sound, I cannot help
+saying that such people deserve their doom.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>To say that “we live in an age in which people
+are so industrious as to be stupid” has a ring
+of contradiction, especially to a people taught
+to sing with Dr. Watts:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">How doth the busy little bee</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Improve each shining hour,</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>but, after all, what have we in the paragraph
+but a very honest admission that in life, too
+much is often sacrificed to that <i>eclat</i> of success,
+that too many signally fail to see that there is
+such a thing as losing a life while trying to
+gain it, that in the chase for supremacy or for
+wealth, the finer things are often missed. And
+you know, and I know, and we all know that
+men are overworked and under-educated, and
+that there is a certain culture which modern
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[19]</span>
+education cannot supply. The position taken
+by Wilde is quite tenable to those who have
+been fortunate enough to read Matthew
+Arnold’s <i>Literature and Dogma</i>. Nor is it a
+new truth that Wilde gives, but, on the contrary,
+a very old one brilliantly stated. It is
+the tale told by Aesop, the tale of the dog
+crossing the bridge with a bone in its mouth.
+The shadow of notoriety is grasped at and the
+bond of really desirable things lost forever. It
+is the viewpoint indicated by that sturdy individualist
+Sumner that the man who makes
+the most of himself and does his best in his
+sphere, is far more valuable in the long run
+than the philanthropist who runs about with a
+scheme which would set the world straight if
+everyone would accept it. Wilde, in his oblique
+way, was getting the truth home that a man
+is a bundle of possibilities and that it behooves
+each and every man to find his bent, to chart
+his course true to some Polaris. And, moreover,
+each and every one must find his compulsion
+in himself. “Become what thou art,” said
+Nietzsche.</p>
+
+<p>One thing more seems necessary to say in
+this connection anent the crude commercialism
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[20]</span>
+of America and its materializing spirit. For
+generations we have not only hammered away
+at the moral lesson, but have made the mistake
+of setting up a kind of god of social ambition,
+of domination, telling the young that with this,
+that and the other quality encouraged, great
+will be the material reward. The governmentship
+of the state, the presidency of the country,
+we have insisted, would be the goal within the
+reach of everyone, the height to which all
+should aspire, the prize within each grasp.
+That, of course, is pernicious nonsense, and not
+only nonsense but senseless social ambition.
+The stupidity of it may best be realized by
+imagining an employer inept enough to tell his
+hands that each of them, by being punctual
+and accurate, would have the management of
+the concern within his grasp. Apart from the
+untruthfulness of that because of the possibility
+of several developing the required qualities to
+the same degree, consider the foolishness. For,
+it is perfectly obvious that a manager of, we
+will say, a scrap iron business, having discovered
+a good man at the handles of the electric
+hoist, would certainly keep that man in
+his position and not advance him through the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[21]</span>
+auditing department and so on the road to the
+management. No wise manager would spoil
+an excellent hoist man to make an indifferent
+bookkeeper. To do that would be a step towards
+disintegration. In other words, everyone
+in authority in the business world aims at
+the development of the individual and not to
+the inculcation of social ambition. Nationally,
+the same idea should be pursued on the ground
+that “where self-culture has ceased to be the
+ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly
+lowered.” In a passage in <i>The Picture of
+Dorian Gray</i> we find the same idea:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>The aim of life is self-development. To realize
+one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is
+here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays.
+They have forgotten the highest of all duties,
+the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course
+they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and
+clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and
+are naked.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>Without individual self-development, insists
+Wilde, a society, a nation, must become an
+empty thing, a thing all front, like a Scandinavian
+troll. In the play <i>A Woman of No Importance</i>
+Wilde, emphasizing the point, puts a
+searing speech into the mouth of his character
+Hester Worsley:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[22]</span></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>You rich people in England, you don’t know how
+you are living. How could you know? You shut
+out from your society the gentle and the good. You
+laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you
+all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice,
+and if you throw bread to the poor, it is
+merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all
+your pomp and wealth and art you don’t know how
+to live—you don’t even know that. You love the
+beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the
+beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but
+of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty
+of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost
+life’s secret. Oh, your English society seems to
+me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes,
+and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple.
+It sits like a dread thing smeared with gold. It is
+all wrong, all wrong.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Yes, there was a spirit of contradiction in
+Oscar Wilde and he delighted in awakening opposition,
+but looked at properly we find much
+that is inexorably logical beneath what seems
+to be tricksy humor. He made his hearers
+writhe while they smiled, and the writhing was
+salutary.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="WILDES_SPIRIT_OF_PARTISANSHIP">
+  WILDE’S SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP
+</h3>
+
+<p>As I have said, Wilde’s writings are tinged
+with Baudelaire, a man of strong convictions
+and with a very definite attitude to art and to
+life, who has been made a symbol of perversity
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[23]</span>
+and decadence. But let that pass for the time.
+Granted that Charles Baudelaire had made excursions
+into strange dream lands by way of
+the opium and hashish door, it is not for us to
+damn any more than to deify. What engages
+us at this moment is Baudelaire’s poetic creed
+and its influence upon Oscar Wilde. Baldly
+translated, I give the Baudelairean poetic creed
+thus: “Poetry ... poetry has no other aim
+than itself; it cannot have any other aim, and
+no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly
+worthy of the name of poem, as that which will
+have been written only for the pleasure of
+writing a poem. I do not wish to say—be it
+understood—that poetry may not ennoble
+morals, that its final result may not be to raise
+men above vulgar interests. That would
+evidently be an absurdity. I say that, if the
+poet has pursued a moral aim, he has diminished
+his poetical power, and it is not imprudent
+to wager that his work will be bad. Poetry
+cannot, under pain of death or degradation, assimilate
+itself to science or to morals. It has
+not truth for its object, it has only itself.”</p>
+
+<p>It cannot be too strongly emphasized that
+this does not mean that there is a predilection
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[24]</span>
+for things immoral, a delight in depravity and
+in ugliness. It simply means what should be
+a self evident truth, a truth accepted by all
+reasonable men; that art runs its course independently
+of morality just as it runs independently
+of science or of political economy;
+that wise men do not look for a moral lesson
+in works of art, should, indeed, accept poetry
+just as they accept music. Who, hearing a
+Beethoven sonata, would search for the lesson
+in it? Who so foolish as to seek a moral sentiment
+in Rubinstein’s <i>Kammenoi-Ostrow</i>?
+Wilde’s way of stating his artistic creed was
+very similar to Baudelaire’s. Thus:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Science is out of the reach of morals, for her
+eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of
+the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon
+things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.
+To morals belong the lower and less intellectual
+spheres.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I wrote, a few paragraphs back, that Baudelaire
+had become a kind of symbol. A word of
+explanation is due. Just as Hogarth chose to
+picture a side of life which others of his time
+were either too blind, or too squeamish, or too
+cowardly, or too conventional minded to attempt,
+pictures that showed the beast in man,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[25]</span>
+the human being as Yahoo and Struldbrug, pictures
+a man debauched, dissipated, degraded
+and filthy, so has Baudelaire sung of the unwholesome
+things which are part of our artificial life—of
+vice, and crime, and corruption.
+Very engagingly too he dabbles in things
+esoteric and diabolical. Take that little prose
+poem, <i>The Generous Player</i>—a tale in which
+the chief character sells his soul to the devil
+on condition that he shall be free from boredom
+for the remainder of his days, but, after
+the compact is made, begins to doubt with
+horror whether his satanic majesty will keep
+his word. So, to reassure himself, he prays in
+semi-slumber: “My God; Lord my God! Let
+it be that the Devil keep his word.” It is a
+queer tale and there are others akin to it, but
+each must read for himself, must try to understand
+the peculiar attraction for, not only the
+diabolical, but the loathsome, the morbid, the
+criminal and the lewd had for the Frenchman.
+Of course, the more Baudelaire was attacked
+for his supposed immorality the more extravagant
+he became. Still, he was a great poet and
+a master of the word.</p>
+
+<p>Unfortunately, somehow, we are inclined to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[26]</span>
+overlook the fact that it is not Frenchmen
+alone who have pictured the horrible. We
+forget Morrison with his <i>Tales of Mean Streets</i>,
+Caradoc Evans with his stories of sordid
+poverty and crime in the Welsh hill-country,
+Thomas Burke and his dock-land sketches. But
+pass all that. Enamored of Baudelaire, Wilde’s
+work became affected just as Swinburne’s work
+was by the same influence, and, in another
+branch of art, Aubrey Beardsley’s. But let
+us not overlook the fact that there is everywhere
+manifested a vast interest in the odd
+and the bizarre, in the occult and the fantastic.
+That peculiar interest accounts for
+the popularity of others besides those whose
+names I have mentioned; Poe, for instance,
+and Ambrose Bierce, and Zola, and Gautier and
+De Maupassant. It accounted for the vast interest
+which, as Frank Harris tells us, was
+manifested in Wilde’s poem, <i>The Harlot’s
+House</i>, as a poem slight enough, but as a picture
+very attractive, as all forbidden things
+are attractive.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">We caught the tread of dancing feet,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">We loitered down the moonlit street,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And stopped beneath the harlot’s house.</div>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[27]</span>    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Inside, above the din and fray,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">We heard the loud musicians play</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The “Treues Liebes Herz” of Strauss.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Like strange mechanical grotesques,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Making fantastic arabesques,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The shadows raced across the blind.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">We watched the ghostly dancers spin</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">To sound of horn and violin,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Like black leaves wheeling in the wind.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Like wire-pulled automatons,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Slim silhouetted skeletons</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Went sidling through the slow quadrille.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">They took each other by the hand,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And danced a stately saraband;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Their laughter echoed thin and shrill.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">A phantom lover to her breast,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Sometimes they seemed to try to sing.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Sometimes a horrible marionette</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Came out, and smoked its cigarette</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Upon the steps like a live thing.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Then, turning to my love, I said,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">“The dead are dancing with the dead,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The dust is whirling with the dust.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Baudelaire, and Wilde as well, sometimes ran
+<i>fanti</i>, just as men in arguments are intoxicated
+with their own verbosity. So we find Wilde
+in the warmth of his partizanship not only
+couching a lance for Baudelaire, but handling
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[28]</span>
+edged swords, to be wounded later with his
+own weapons. Thus:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>What is termed Sin is an essential element of
+progress. Without it the world would stagnate,
+or grow old, or become colorless. By its curiosity,
+Sin increases the experience of the race. Through
+its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves
+us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the
+current notions about morality, it is one with the
+higher ethics. And as for the virtues! What are
+the virtues? Nature, M. Renan tells us, cares little
+about chastity and it may be that it is to the
+shame of Magdalen, and not to their own purity,
+that the Lucretias of modern life owe their freedom
+from stain. Charity, as even those of whose religion
+it makes a formal part have been compelled
+to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The
+mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which
+people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly
+proud, is a sign of our imperfect development.
+It must be merged in instinct before we
+become fine. Self-denial is simply a method by
+which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice
+a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of
+that old worship of pain which is so terrible a
+factor in the history of the world, and which even
+now makes its victims day by day, and has its
+altars in the land. Virtues! Who knows what
+the virtues are? Not you. Not I. Not any one.
+It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal,
+for if we suffered him to live he might show us
+what we had gained by his crime. It is well for
+his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He
+is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.—<i>The
+Critic as Artist.</i></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[29]</span></p>
+
+<p>That, which played a great part in Wilde’s
+trial, is apparently a kind of advocacy of the
+M. Fr. Paulhan point of view, (<i>Le Nouveau
+Mysticisme</i>, page 94) the Decadent philosophy
+dished up and watered for British consumption.
+Baudelaire had said that “the vulgar
+sought goodness as an end,” and Wilde had
+this:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>To be good, according to the vulgar standard of
+goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires
+a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain
+lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low
+passion for middle-class respectability.—<i>The Critic
+as Artist.</i></p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Instances might be multiplied, but enough
+has been said to show that Wilde not only
+depended for effects upon a manifestation of
+his spirit of contradiction, but somewhat suffered
+in his art because of his partizanship.
+Still, of his originality there can be no doubt
+and a partizan is not necessarily a plagiarist.</p>
+
+<p>As to the charge of plagiarism, while others
+have charged Wilde with the literary sin, it
+remained for his former friend, Lord Alfred
+Douglas, to be the most bitter in denunciation.
+“His (Wilde’s) sonnets are, for the most
+part, Miltonic in their effects; the metre and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[30]</span>
+method of <i>In Memoriam</i> are used in the
+greater number of his lyrics; and he used the
+metre which Tennyson sealed to himself for
+all time even in <i>The Sphinx</i>, which is his great
+set work; while in such pieces as <i>Charmides</i>,
+<i>Panthea</i>, <i>Humanitad</i> and <i>The Burden of Itys</i>
+he borrowed the grave pipe of Matthew Arnold.”
+Writing of the poem <i>Le Mer</i>, Douglas
+says: “The bird is Wilde, the plumage and
+call are Tennyson’s to a fault.” Again, “While
+Wilde arranges the stanzas as though they
+consisted of two lines, they really consist of
+Tennyson’s four ... Tennyson’s suns as well
+as Tennyson’s stanza!” In another place
+Douglas writes: “I have not space to enter
+into great detail with regard to those lyrics
+of Wilde which are not flatly Tennysonian.
+There are about twenty of them, and they include
+a cheap imitation of <i>La Belle Dame sans
+Merci</i>, a flagrant copy of Hood’s lines beginning
+‘Take her up tenderly’—(Douglas refers
+to the poem <i>The Bridge of Sighs</i>)—and sundry
+pieces which are childishly reminiscent of Mrs.
+Browning, William Morris and even Jean Ingelow....
+Wilde was an over-sedulous ape,
+so over-sedulous, in fact, that he is careful to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[31]</span>
+emphasize and exaggerate the very faults and
+defects of his masters.”</p>
+
+<p>Douglas is bitter as gall and, like the gallant
+Michael Monahan, I prefer to quote him with
+the sonnet he wrote on learning of the death
+of Oscar Wilde:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">I dreamed of him last night, I saw his face</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">All radiant and unshadowed of distress.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And as of old, in music measureless,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">I heard his golden voice and marked him trace</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Under the common thing the hidden grace,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And conjure wonder out of emptiness,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Till mean things put on beauty like a dress,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And all the world was an enchanted place.</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And then methought outside a fast-locked gate</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">I mourned the loss of unrecorded words,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Forgotten tales and mysteries half said,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Wonders that might have been articulate,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And voiceless thoughts like murdered singing birds,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And so I woke and knew that he was dead!</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>It leaves a sweeter taste in the mouth.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="AS_FICTION_WRITER">
+  AS FICTION WRITER
+</h3>
+
+<p>Possessed with the spirit of contradiction,
+obsessed with the Baudelairean diabolism,
+Wilde tried his hand at fiction with curious
+results. Be it remembered that he was one of
+those odd and lucky individuals in whom
+bubble up at all times plots and ideas and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[32]</span>
+situations capable of being used in the making
+of stories. Such minds see not only the thing
+before them, a man and a woman, we will say,
+walking towards one another over a bridge,
+but with a leap into a strange world of possibilities
+or probabilities, there is conjured up
+within them a thousand visions of things odd
+and fantastic, which might happen. It is not
+even correct to say that they are men of great
+imagination—they are more than that. They
+are, in a respect, tortured men, men whose
+minds project them into all kinds of situations.
+They themselves die a thousand deaths, suffer
+a thousand sorrows and pains, are torn with
+a thousand griefs. You see that kind of character
+in Charles Dickens who is always on the
+verge of tears or laughter, enjoying life, actually
+enjoying it with Micawber, with Pickwick,
+with Sam Weller, with Cap’n Cuttle, with the
+Crummeles: suffering with Oliver Twist, with
+Sidney Carton, with his little Nell, with his
+Tom Pinch. Such men live the lives that they
+portray and there is a vast gulf separating
+them from those writers who artistically contrive
+their characters but keep themselves
+apart from them as a Creator is apart from
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[33]</span>
+his creatures. Thackeray for instance, who will
+paint for you a Beatrix, a Henry Esmond, a
+Harry Warrington, a Madam Bernstein, a Captain
+Costigan, but who will step down as it
+were, among his audience, and comment upon
+the characters upon the stage; sometimes, indeed,
+interrupt his narrative to point a moral.
+Of that sort too was Trollope: of the other sort
+was George Eliot. Yet, in both cases, in the
+case of Dickens as well as in the case of Thackeray,
+with George Eliot as with Trollope, you
+have accurate pictures of life and of society,
+and the prejudices, the motives, the ambitions,
+the form and construction of the mind of the
+fictional personages are as evident to the
+reader as if he lived in their very presence.</p>
+
+<p>Accepting Dickens and Thackeray as examples,
+we see Wilde with that peculiar constitution
+of mind which made him prone to
+identify himself with his characters, but, again,
+he had that streak of perversity in him which
+refused to allow the characters he imagined to
+act a rational way or to live in a rational
+world. There was in him that childish and
+destructive habit of destroying his own toys,
+the habit we see in Chesterton who paints pictures
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[34]</span>
+perfectly credible in his Auberons and
+Barkers and Quins, but sets them to doing
+fantastic tricks, standing on their heads, running
+about in queer disguises and undertaking
+to do things that would, in a sane society,
+promptly land them in the lunatic asylum. And,
+of course, with the trick of perversity, Wilde
+had that Baudelairean bent.</p>
+
+<p>With what has been said kept in mind, consider
+Wilde’s story, <i>Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime</i>,
+which appeared in the <i>Court and Society Review</i>
+in 1887 and in book form in 1891. In
+the story you have a mimic world that is a
+faithful reflection of the contemporary world
+with its lords and ladies and society folk of
+wealth, hobnobbing with poets, socialists, nihilists,
+sceptics and odd characters. To verify the
+truth of his picture of the reception at Bentick
+house, one has but to turn to the pages of the
+newspapers of the day, the society journals
+rather, and mark the names of those in the
+public eye: Lady Jeune, William Morris, Prince
+Kropotkine, Burne Jones, Labouchere, the
+Positivist crowd with Frederic Harrison and
+his friends, the theosophists with Madam Blavatsky
+and Sinnett, the agnostics with Annie
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[35]</span>
+Besant and Stewart Ross and Dr. Marsh; others
+too, Cunninghame Graham, Bernard Shaw,
+Belfort Bax, Walter Crane. Such a gathering is
+hardly possible in America where there is no
+democracy, but, instead, an aristocracy of
+wealth. It was, and is, quite possible in the
+older country in which there is a real democracy,
+where two impulses are present, a respect
+for tradition and for visible authority
+and a regard for precedent on the one hand,
+and on the other a regard for certain abstract
+principles and a strong sense of the value of
+individual judgment. Between an organized
+aristocracy and an organic people things are
+balanced and the triumph of one does not develop
+into despotism, nor does the triumph of
+the other result in sullen mob rule. So, as I
+say, the picture of the reception is perfectly
+credible and Wilde paints well, as well as
+Dickens paints when he tells us of the belfry
+in <i>The Chimes</i>, or of Fountain Court in his
+<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But now mark the Wilde who twists things,
+who, in a stage set for things as they are,
+chooses, in his contradictory spirit, to bring in
+events as they are not at all apt to be.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[36]</span></p>
+
+<p>One of his characters is a palmist and to him
+goes the hero, Lord Arthur Savile. The palmist,
+Mr. Podgers, tells his client that his fate is
+read—that he is to become a murderer. Now
+see the odd kink, the paradox. Lord Savile,
+being about to marry, finds his mind occupied
+with the prediction. So, since it is decreed that
+he must do murder, the sooner it is done and
+out of the way, the better. There is a kind of
+Benvenuto Cellini touch here, the Cellini who
+when at work in his shop finds his brain on
+fire because a fellow has annoyed him, so
+rushes out dagger in hand to stab him and have
+done with it; the Cellini who finding himself
+filled with amatory desire while at work, satisfies
+himself with his model and gets to work
+again. So Wilde’s Lord Savile. To him it does
+not very much matter who the victim is, so
+he tries to poison an aunt and fails, then attempts
+to kill an uncle with an infernal machine.
+Disgusted with his ill success he takes
+a walk along the Thames embankment to
+ponder, when his eyes light upon the palmist
+leaning on the parapet with folded arms, gazing
+into the black depth. Then:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>In a moment he had seized Mr. Podgers by the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[37]</span>
+legs and flung him into the Thames. There was a
+<ins title='original: course' id='cor_037'>coarse</ins> oath, a heavy splash, and all was still. Lord
+Arthur looked anxiously over, but could see nothing
+of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in
+an eddy of moonlit water. After a time it sank,
+and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible. Once he
+thought that he caught sight of the bulky misshapen
+figure striking out for the staircase of the
+bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over
+him, but it turned out to be merely a reflection, and
+when the moon shone out from behind a cloud it
+passed away. At last he seemed to have realized
+the decree of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of
+relief, and Sybil’s name came to his lips.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>You see the kink, or course. A murder with
+no cause. A murder and no remorse. The
+victim rather a scarecrow kind of figure. And
+you see also, the Baudelairean gesture properly
+watered for English consumption. Bear in
+mind, too, the quotation made a few pages ago
+from <i>The Critic as Artist</i>, relating to sin as an
+essential element of progress.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, the story is all tricksy fooling and
+certainly not worth while. It is thin stuff,
+poor stuff, unworthy stuff and all this largely
+because insincere and imitative. One seems
+to see Wilde starting seriously enough, to break
+off at a tangent with a discordant burst of
+laughter. But here is a point to consider.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[38]</span>
+Had Wilde been accused of murder, and placed
+on trial, what hidden tendency think you, would
+have been discovered by a keen lawyer in the
+book? There’s matter for thought there.</p>
+
+<p>We pass to the longer story, <i>The Picture of
+Dorian Gray</i>. In this, Wilde tried to do something
+new, putting indeed, into the mouth of
+one of his characters his ideal: “to write a
+novel that would be as lovely as a Persian
+carpet, and as unreal.” He did, or attempted
+more, endeavoring to break away from the English
+tradition and write a novel with no love
+interest as motive. A task glorious enough to
+be sure, for, as every thoughtful man must
+have realized, the Anglo-Saxon is not obsessed
+with sex. The acquisition of a woman is by
+no means the greatest thing in life, nor is it
+the thing that absorbs a man. Marriage is a
+mere incident. Other things occupy his mind
+far more than sex: business, for example, and
+art, and ambition.</p>
+
+<p>Now the story thread of <i>The Picture of
+Dorian Gray</i> is slight enough. A picture has
+been painted by Dorian’s friend, and, while
+the subject of the picture retains his youth
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[39]</span>
+and beauty, the picture ages, the face on the
+canvas reflecting the life of the man, showing
+the stigmata of a life of folly, of vice, of lust,
+of hypocrisy. The discovery of the change is
+thus described:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“You won’t? Then I must do it myself,” said
+the young man; and he tore the curtain from its
+rod, and flung it on the ground.</p>
+
+<p>An exclamation of horror broke from Hallward’s
+lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous thing on
+the canvas leering at him. There was something in
+its expression that filled him with disgust and
+loathing. Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray’s own
+face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever
+it was, had not yet entirely marred that marvelous
+beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning
+hair and some scarlet on the sensual lips. The
+sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of
+their blue, the noble curves had not yet passed entirely
+away from chiseled nostrils and from plastic
+throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had
+done it? He seemed to recognize his own brushwork,
+and the frame was his own design. The idea
+was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the
+lighted candle, and held it to the picture. In the
+left hand corner was his own name, traced in long
+letters of bright vermilion.</p>
+
+<p>It was some foul parody, some infamous, ignoble
+satire.</p>
+
+<p>Hallward turned again to the portrait, and gazed
+at it. “My God! if it is true,” he exclaimed, “and
+this is what you have done with your life, why,
+you must be worse even than those who talk against
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[40]</span>
+you fancy you to be!” He held the light up again
+to the canvas, and examined it. The surface seemed
+to be quite undisturbed, and as he had left it. It
+was from within, apparently, that the foulness and
+horror had come. Through some strange quickening
+of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly
+eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in
+a watery grave was not so fearful.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>A mere extract, of course, robs the scene
+of its vitality, but still, Wilde does not stir in
+the reader the passion of horror that a true
+artist should. Compare the scene with that
+never-to-be-forgotten page in Conrad’s <i>Secret
+Agent</i> where the woman thrusts the carving
+knife into the heart of her husband, or the
+latter part of <i>Le Père Goriot</i> where Balzac
+bruises the reader’s heart as he tells of the
+torture of anguish; or the picture in Thackeray’s
+<i>Vanity Fair</i> where Steyne is knocked
+down. The truth is that Wilde, as Ross told
+Blunt, was forever thinking of his style, and
+when a man has his pose in mind, he is not
+very apt to lay the lash on heavily. Machen,
+in his <i>Hieroglyphics</i>, has had much to say on
+the ecstasy of writers, much that is well
+worth reading, and he proves his point to the
+hilt. That ecstasy, Wilde lacked. Within him
+were no eternal tempests. Never could he
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[41]</span>
+say with Byron, “I have written from the
+fulness of my mind, from passion, from impulse,
+from many motives but not from their
+sweet voices.” Wilde did write for “sweet
+voices” and, consequently he lacked much that
+a writer of fiction requires. Turn to the passage
+in the <i>Secret Agent</i>, which I have mentioned,
+read it and compare it with this, the
+death of Dorian Gray. Wilde seems sluggish,
+uninterested, aloof.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the
+half clad domestics were talking in low whispers to
+each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying, and wringing
+her hands. Francis was as pale as death.</p>
+
+<p>After about a quarter of an hour, he got the
+coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs.
+They knocked, but there was no reply.
+They called out. Everything was still. Finally,
+after vainly trying to force the door, they got on
+the roof, and dropped down on to the balcony. The
+windows yielded easily; the bolts were old.</p>
+
+<p>When they entered, they found hanging upon the
+wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had
+last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite
+youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead
+man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart.
+He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage.
+It was not till they had examined the rings that
+they recognized who it was.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>The most patient of readers is surfeited in
+the book with long, descriptive, catalogue-like
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[42]</span>
+passages telling of the fantastic pursuits of
+Dorian Gray, a literary trick evidently imitative
+of certain French writers—Barres,
+Huysmans and Villiers de l’Isle Adam. Indeed,
+in places, the character Dorian Gray is
+strongly reminiscent of the character Des
+Essientes who “with his vaporizers injected
+into his room an essence formed of ambrosia,
+Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, ess. boquet....”
+There is much more of it in the pages of <i>A
+Rebours</i>. As I say, Wilde proved himself to
+be very imitative. You must read his ninth
+chapter, but a single quotation will give some
+idea:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>And so he would now study perfumes, and the
+secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily
+scented oils, and burning odorous gums from the
+East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind
+that had not its counterpart in the sensuous life,
+and set himself to discover their true relations,
+wondering what there was in frankincense that
+made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred
+one’s passions, and in violets that woke the memory
+of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
+brain, and in champak that stained the imagination;
+and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology
+of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences
+of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden
+flowers, of aromatic balms, and of dark and
+fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[43]</span>
+hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that
+are said to be able to expel melancholy from the
+soul.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Dorian Gray collects many things, plays with
+many things, to chase away his <i>ennui</i>: musical
+instruments, jewels, embroideries, ecclesiastical
+vestments, and there are long catalogues in the
+case of each one similar to that given above in
+relation to perfumes. There are pages,
+especially in the ninth chapter that remind the
+reader of nothing more than a great storehouse
+with Wilde standing before jumbled
+piles, picking this thing after that in the manner
+of a suave auctioneer and commenting upon
+each article quite oblivious of the fact that his
+hearers yawn, and that no real business is being
+done.</p>
+
+<p>There is, all through the book, the Baudelairean
+influence. Dorian Gray becomes very
+like the owls of Baudelaire sitting in a row, in
+his moods of inactivity. Nor is the Baudelairean
+interest in crime and criminals unimitated.
+Dorian ponders over strange things:
+over Gian Maria who used hounds to chase
+living men and whose murdered body was</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p class='no-indent'>“covered with roses by a harlot who had loved
+him; the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[44]</span>
+riding beside him, and his mantle stained with the
+blood of Perotto; Petro Riario, the young Cardinal
+Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of Sextus
+IV., whose beauty was equaled only by his debauchery,
+and who received Leonora of Aragon in
+a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with
+nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he
+might serve her at the feast as Ganymede or
+Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured
+only by the spectacle of death, and who had a
+passion for red blood, as other men have for red
+wine—the son of the fiend, as was reported, and
+one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling
+with him for his own soul; Giambattista
+Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent,
+and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads
+was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta,
+the lover of Isotta, and the lord of Rimini,
+whose effigy was burned at Rome, as the enemy
+of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with
+a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d’Este in a
+cup of emerald, and in honor of a shameful passion
+built a pagan church for Christian worship;
+Charles VI., who had so wildly adored his brother’s
+wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity
+that was coming on him, and who could only be
+soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images
+of Love and Death and Madness; and, in his trimmed
+jerkin and jeweled cap and acanthus-like curls,
+Grifonetto Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his
+bride, and Simonetto with his page, and whose
+comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the
+yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him
+could not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had
+cursed him, blessed him.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[45]</span></p>
+
+<p>The truth is, that in the character Dorian
+Gray, Wilde portrayed not a normal man, but
+one who comes very near the border line of
+being what Krafft-Ebing would have termed a
+degenerate. Certainly he shows a moral insensibility,
+a lack of proper judgment and ethical
+ideas. His egoistic ambition is unlimited and
+he is full of a sentimentality that is shallow
+cant. The book made a sensation and estimates
+of it ranged from the zenith to nadir. There
+were those who extolled it and those who damned
+it, just as there were those that extolled and
+others that damned <i>Jurgen</i> and <i>Ulysses</i>, as
+there were those that raised Rossetti to the
+skies and others who charged him with all sorts
+of artistic sins and said things anent the extolling
+of fleshliness as the distinct and supreme
+end of pictorial and poetic art.</p>
+
+<p>The thing that is rare and valuable in <i>The
+Picture of Dorian Gray</i> is the vivid coloring,
+the effect of an atmosphere of expensive and
+highly artificial life and cultured luxury; the
+florid and poetic style. He depicts a highly
+artificial life and idealizes it. He portrays a
+quite impossible world, as impossible as the
+world of pastoral poetry where meadows were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[46]</span>
+inhabited by youths and maidens who guided
+sheep and carried beribboned crooks, and conversed
+in rhymed iambic octosyllables, and
+danced and sang. For, in your experience
+doubtless as in mine, never has man talked to
+man, off of a chautauquan platform, like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“Let us go and sit in the shade,” said Lord
+Henry. “Parker has brought out the drinks, and
+if you stay any longer in this glare you will be
+quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again.
+You really must not let yourself become sunburned.
+It would be very unbecoming to you.”</p>
+
+<p>“What does it matter?” cried Dorian, laughing,
+as he sat down on the seat at the end of the
+garden.</p>
+
+<p>“It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why?”</p>
+
+<p>“Because you have now the most marvelous
+youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.”</p>
+
+<p>“I don’t feel that, Lord Henry.”</p>
+
+<p>“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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[47]</span>
+divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of
+those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you
+have lost it you won’t smile.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>But Wilde was idealizing, making deliberately
+an untrue, but charming picture—doing indeed
+in another way what old Izaak Walton did in
+his <i>Compleat Angler</i>, or what John Fletcher
+did in his <i>Faithful Shepherdess</i>.</p>
+
+<p>As for the vivid coloring of which I spoke,
+read this:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“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.</p>
+
+<p>“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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[48]</span>
+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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>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 <i>The Picture of Dorian
+Gray</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>A last word on <i>The Picture of Dorian Gray</i>.
+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 <i>Looking
+Backward</i>, Edna Lyell’s sentimental agnosticism,
+Grant Allen’s <i>Woman Who Did</i>, and, at
+the same time, there was a lively stream of
+Zola translations, much energetic, realistic stuff
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[49]</span>
+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</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent4">Nature is made better by no mean,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">But Nature makes that mean; so o’er that art,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Which, you say, adds to Nature, is an art</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">That Nature makes.... This is an art</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Which does mend Nature—change it rather: but</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The art itself is Nature.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>So we come to the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde,
+the best by far of which is <i>The Happy Prince</i>.
+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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[50]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[51]</span>
+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, <i>The Happy
+Prince</i>, 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
+<i>The Happy Prince</i>. 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0q">“To you who wrote The Happy Prince,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The sweetest tale of modern time...”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>Next appeared <i>The House of Pomegranates</i>,
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[52]</span>
+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.”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[53]</span>
+gaiety. In Andersen there is quiet unobtrusiveness,
+never cleverness nor facetiousness.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="THE_STAGE">
+  THE STAGE
+</h3>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lady Windermere’s
+Fan</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[54]</span>
+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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[55]</span>
+that Oscar Wilde stepped with his skill and cultivated
+taste.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Speaker</i> at the
+time <i>Lady Windermere’s Fan</i> was produced, a
+passage that gives an admirable picture of not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[56]</span>
+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 <i>Lady
+Windermere’s Fan</i> 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.”</p>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[57]</span>
+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 <i>The School for
+Scandal</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><i>Vicomte de Nanjac (approaching).</i> Ah, the English
+young lady is the dragon of good taste, is she
+not? Quite the dragon of good taste.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Goring.</i> So the newspapers are always
+telling us.</p>
+
+<p><i>Vicomte de Nanjac.</i> I read all your English
+newspapers. I find them so amusing.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[58]</span></p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Goring.</i> Then, my dear Nanjac, you must
+certainly read between the lines.</p>
+
+<p><i>Vicomte de Nanjac.</i> I should like to, but my
+professor objects. (<i>To</i> <span class="smcap">Mabel Chiltern</span>.) May I
+have the pleasure of escorting you to the music-room,
+Mademoiselle?</p>
+
+<p><i>Mabel Chiltern (looking very disappointed).</i> Delighted,
+Vicomte, quite delighted! (<i>Turning to</i>
+<span class="smcap">Lord Goring</span>.) Aren’t you coming to the music-room?</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Goring.</i> Not if there is any music going
+on, Miss Mabel.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mabel Chiltern (severely).</i> The music is in
+German. You would not understand it. (<i>Goes out
+with the</i> <span class="smcap">Vicomte de Nanjac</span>. <span class="smcap">Lord Caversham</span>
+<i>comes up to his son</i>.)</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Caversham.</i> 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!</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Goring.</i> Only a quarter to four, father.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Caversham.</i> Can’t make out how you stand
+London society. The thing has gone to the dogs, a
+lot of damned nobodies talking about nothing.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Goring.</i> I love talking about nothing,
+father. It is the only thing I know anything about.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Caversham.</i> You seem to me to be living
+entirely for pleasure.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lord Goring.</i> What else is there to live for,
+father? Nothing ages like happiness.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+  —<i>An Ideal Husband (Act I.)</i>
+</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>I choose, deliberately, the less talked of portions
+of the plays I quote. Here again:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[59]</span></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><i>Lady Hunstanton.</i> We who are wives don’t belong
+to any one.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lady Stutfield.</i> Oh, I am so very, very glad to
+hear you say so.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lady Hunstanton.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Allonby.</i> I certainly never know one from
+the other.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lady Stutfield.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Allonby.</i> Ah, all that I have noticed is that
+they are horribly tedious when they are good husbands,
+and abominably conceited when they are not.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lady Hunstanton.</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Allonby.</i> Ah, my husband is a sort of
+promissory note; I am tired of meeting him.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lady Caroline.</i> But you renew him from time
+to time, don’t you?</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Allonby.</i> Oh no, Lady Caroline. I have
+only had one husband as yet. I suppose you look
+upon me as quite an amateur.</p>
+
+<p><i>Lady Caroline.</i> With your views on life I wonder
+you married at all.</p>
+
+<p><i>Mrs. Allonby.</i> So do I.</p>
+
+<p class="right">
+  —<i>A Woman of No Importance (Act II.)</i>
+</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[60]</span></p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But for sheer color and gorgeous vision,
+Wilde achieved nothing better than his unpublished
+Burmese Masque, <i>For Love of the
+King</i>. 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:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“The jungle once more. Time; noonday. In
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[61]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>“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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">No private grudge they need, no personal spite;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The <i>viva sectio</i> is its own delight!</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">All enmity, all envy, they disclaim,</div>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[62]</span>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Disinterested thieves of our good name;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Cool, sober murderers of their neighbor’s fame.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>But Wilde was no Keats to be wounded by
+abuse. For instance, consider his letter to
+<i>St. James’s Gazette</i> from which I copy a paragraph
+as follows:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“... 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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lady Windemere’s Fan</i>
+entitled <i>The Poet and the Puppets</i>, 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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[63]</span>
+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, <i>pasquillant</i>; 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[64]</span>
+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
+<i>The Sketch</i> 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:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“... 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....</p>
+
+<p>“... 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[65]</span>
+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....”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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 <i>A Highly Artistic Interview</i>.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="WILDE_AS_CRITIC">
+  WILDE AS CRITIC
+</h3>
+
+<p>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 <i>House
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[66]</span>
+of the Wolfings</i>, (<i>Pall Mall Gazette</i>, March 2nd,
+1889) and again in the review of W. B. Yeats’
+<i>Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry</i>,
+written for the magazine of which Wilde was
+editor, the <i>Woman’s World</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>I think that the very real Wilde was revealed
+in a little essay, a writing that appeared in
+<i>The Speaker</i>, February 8th, 1890. It deals
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[67]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“The accumulation of wealth is to him the origin
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[68]</span>
+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<ins id='cor_068'>, and competition</ins> 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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Compare that with the passage in <i>The Critic
+As Artist</i>, a speech that Wilde puts into the
+mouth of Gilbert:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p><i>Ernest.</i> We exist, then, to do nothing?</p>
+
+<p><i>Gilbert.</i> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[69]</span>
+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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>And in another place, later, in the same essay:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Critic As Artist</i> rests on that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[70]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that
+has for its aim not <i>doing</i> but <i>being</i>, and not <i>being</i>
+merely, but <i>becoming</i>—that is what the critical
+spirit can give us.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[71]</span></p>
+
+<p>Of course, there are <i>Sententiae</i>, 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.</p>
+
+
+<h3 id="WILDE_AS_ESSAYIST">
+  WILDE AS ESSAYIST
+</h3>
+
+<p>Perhaps Wilde was to the fashionable of London
+much as the robust Henry Fielding was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[72]</span>
+to the literary world when Samuel Richardson
+wrote <i>Clarissa Harlowe</i>. 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[73]</span>
+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 <i>Pen, Pencil and Poison</i>—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.</p>
+
+<p>The late Max Nordau in his book <i>Degeneration</i>
+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:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>“Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin
+and crime. In a very affectionate biographical
+treatise on Thomas Griffith Wainewright, designer,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[74]</span>
+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.’</p>
+
+<p>“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.’”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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 <i>Victory</i> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[75]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[76]</span>
+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.</p>
+
+<p>Here is Wilde’s picture of the man in the
+midst of the things that he loved:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[77]</span>
+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 <i>Christi Crucifixi</i>, one carved in ivory,
+the other molded in wax.” He has his trays of
+Tassie’s gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze <i>bonbonniere</i>
+with a miniature by Petitot, his highly prized
+“brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-worked,” his citron
+morocco letter-case and his “pomona-green” chair.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>altissimo
+relievo</i> on cornelian, Jupiter Ægiochus.”</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And again, in a charming passage:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[78]</span>
+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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Again:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>And this too, which is Wilde to a T:</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[79]</span></p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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 <i>Janus Weathercock</i> 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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Perhaps too there is an apologia in another
+passage:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>This strange and fascinating figure that for a
+few years dazzled literary London, and made so
+brilliant a <i>debut</i> 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[80]</span>
+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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Wilde’s two essays, <i>The Decay of Lying</i> and
+<i>The Critic as Artist</i> I have referred to several
+times in the course of this essay, and also in
+another booklet, <i>The Tragic Story of Oscar
+Wilde</i>. In much, both essays are complementary
+to his <i>Art and Decoration</i>: 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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[81]</span>
+polish. But always—style—style that becomes
+sometimes pavonic display. Witness, from the
+<i>Decay of the Art of Lying</i>:</p>
+
+<blockquote>
+<p>The solid stolid British intellect lies in the desert
+sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert’s marvelous tale,
+and fantasy <i>La Chimere</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+</blockquote>
+
+<p>Of course, it must be admitted that there
+is truth in those who complain that Wilde advocated
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[82]</span>
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent4">the very world, which is the world</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Of all of us, the place where in the end</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">We find our happiness, or not at all.</div>
+<p class="right">
+  (Prelude xl, 142.)
+</p>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class='no-indent'>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....</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[83]</span></p>
+
+
+<h3 id="AS_POET">
+  AS POET
+</h3>
+
+<p>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 <i>In Memoriam</i> or an <i>Ode on a
+Grecian Urn</i>, 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:</p>
+
+
+<h4 id="SYMPHONY_IN_YELLOW">
+  SYMPHONY IN YELLOW
+</h4>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">An omnibus across the bridge</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Crawls like a yellow butterfly,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And, here and there, a passer-by</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Shows like a little restless midge.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">Big barges full of yellow hay</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Are moved against the shadowy wharf,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And, like a yellow silken scarf,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The thick fog hangs along the quay.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">The yellow leaves begin to fade</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And flutter from the Temple elms,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And at my feet the pale green Thames</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Lies like a rod of rippled jade.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[84]</span></p>
+
+<p class='no-indent'>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 <i>Ballad
+of Reading Gaol</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">I walked, with other souls in pain,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Within another ring,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And was wondering if the man had done</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">A great or little thing,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">When a voice behind me whispered low,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">“<i>That fellow’s got to swing</i>.”</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>And mark the dramatic appeal of this:</p>
+
+<div class="poetry-container">
+  <div class="poetry">
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">A prison wall was round us both,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Two outcast men we were:</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">The world had thrust us from its heart,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And God from out His care:</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">And the iron gin that waits for Sin</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Had caught us in its snare.</div>
+    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">And twice a day he smoked his pipe,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And drank his quart of beer:</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">His soul was resolute, and held</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">No hiding-place for fear;</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">He often said that he was glad</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">The hangman’s hands were near.</div>
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[85]</span>    </div>
+    <div class="stanza">
+      <div class="verse indent0">But why he said so strange a thing</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">No warder dared to ask:</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">For he to whom a watcher’s doom</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">Is given as his task,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent0">Must set a lock upon his lips,</div>
+      <div class="verse indent2">And make his face a mask.</div>
+    </div>
+  </div>
+</div>
+
+<p>He gets very close there to the heart of the
+common man, as close as James Stephens indeed,
+with his <i>What Tomas an Buile Said in a
+Pub</i>.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>The Ballad of Reading Gaol</i>,
+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
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[86]</span>
+established tradition as to what is fitting and
+comely in a poem of this nature is not outraged
+or transgressed.”</p>
+
+<p>Another great poem grew out of his prison
+life. I refer to the long letter, made into a book
+by Mr. Ross and entitled <i>De Profundis</i>, for a
+poem, a prose poem, it is. It would be better to
+mention in this place that <i>The Ballad of Reading
+Gaol</i> was not composed until Wilde had left
+prison. <i>De Profundis</i>, however, was written
+within stone walls. In another place quotation
+has been made of Blunt’s Diaries in which
+Ross is quoted as having said that it is impossible
+to tell how much of <i>De Profundis</i> is sincere
+repentance, and how much the result of
+self pity. Be that as it may, it is very certain
+that the spirit of the man was bitter in his
+solitude, that his egoism fell away from him
+at times. But it is absurd to expect that punishment
+and imprisonment and disgrace could
+change the man himself. If he had that feminine
+soul, he had it. It was part of him, and
+he could not get away from it, prison or no
+prison. But he could know in his own heart
+that he was not as he should have liked to
+be, that his life’s ideal was other than his
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[87]</span>
+life’s path. In other words, he realized, as we
+all realize, that while his eyes were fixed on
+the stars, his feet were firmly planted in the
+mud, and for that fact he was very sorry indeed.
+Not only sorry, but rebellious that things were
+as they were, and, as Wilde said, the mood of
+rebellion closes up the channels of the soul, and
+shuts out the air of heaven. The mood rebellious
+and the mood penitential cannot sit side
+by side in the same heart. Penitence presupposes
+submission and gratitude for gifts bestowed,
+and Wilde felt no gratitude to the fates
+that had, at his birth, dropped into his veins the
+one drop of black blood which colored his life.
+Destiny is omnipotent, and destiny had given
+Wilde the feminine soul. Doubtless, had Wilde
+been what he wished to be, in his better
+moments, he would have sat with august divinities.
+But neither Wilde, nor you, nor I, have
+it in our powers to command the winds that
+would waft us to the Islands of the Blest.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class='transnote'>
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="Transcribers_Notes">
+    Transcriber’s Notes
+  </h2>
+
+<ul>
+  <li>Obvious typographic and grammatical errors silently corrected.</li>
+  <li>Variations in hyphenation kept as in the original.</li>
+
+  <li><a href='#cor_037'>p. 37</a>: Corrected "a course oath" to "a coarse oath".</li>
+
+  <li><a href='#cor_068'>p. 68</a>: Corrected “It is the father of competition is the
+   waste as well as  the destruction of energy.” To “It is the
+   father of competition, and competition is the waste, as well
+   as the destruction, of energy.”</li>
+</ul>
+</div></div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 77494 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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author	www-data <www-data@mail.pglaf.org>	2025-12-17 19:41:26 -0800
committer	www-data <www-data@mail.pglaf.org>	2025-12-17 19:41:26 -0800
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