Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study Part 2

"In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre?

Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse. Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister pump, I suppose."

(Coleridge on Bowyer, in the "Biographia Literaria.")

The presence in verse of certain names of places and persons has come to be taken as implicit evidence of poetry. Where Venus is, there must poetry be; Helicon, Narcissus, Endymion (after Keats), and a score of others have become a sort of poetical counters that careless eyes do not distinguish from the sterling coin. Wilde makes full use of them, and, perhaps, trusting to the capital letters to carry them through, frequently decorates his verse with names of similar character not yet so hackneyed as to be immediately recognized as poetry. This kind of allusion flatters the reader's learning. Sometimes he brings colour into his verse by the use of a reference that must be unintelligible to a large part of his audience, and seems quite irrelevant to those who take the trouble to follow it, and have not the good fortune to hit upon the correct clue. For example, in 'The New Helen':--

"Alas, alas, thou wilt not tarry here, But, like that bird, the servant of the sun, Who flies before the north wind and the night, So wilt thou fly our evil land and drear, Back to the tower of thine old delight, And the red lips of young Euphorion."

Now that, though not poetry, is a pleasant piece of colour. But, leaving aside the question of the bird, the servant of the sun, itself not easy to resolve, young Euphorion, who has served Wilde's verse well enough in having scarlet lips, is more than a little puzzling. Wilde probably remembers Part II of Goethe's "Faust." Achilles and Helen are said, as ghosts, to have had a child called Euphorion, but Goethe makes him the son of Faust and Helen, named in the legend Justus Faust. He leaps from earth when "scarcely called to life," and "out of the deep" invites his mother to follow him not to any "tower of old delight," but to "the gloomy realm." The reference is wilful, but Euphorion is a wonderful name.

Sometimes, indeed, the verse gains nothing from such allusion. For example, in the same poem:--

"Nay, thou wert hidden in that hollow hill With one who is forgotten utterly, _That discrowned Queen men call the Erycine_."

This is simply learning put in for its own sake by the young scholar delighting in his knowledge of antiquity. The line that I have printed in italics is no more than a riddle whose answer is Venus, sometimes called Erycina (Erycina ridens) because she had a temple on Mount Eryx.

Wilde means that Helen was hidden with the spirit of beauty (Venus) now shamefully neglected. He delighted in such riddles and disguised references, and they certainly helped his less cultured readers to feel that in reading him they were intimate with more poetry than they had read. In 'The Burden of Itys,' to take a last example, he says, addressing the nightingale:--

"Light-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood!

If ever thou didst soothe with melody One of that little clan, that brotherhood Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany More than the perfect sun of Raphael And is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well."

Sir Piercie Shafton might choose such a method of referring to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed, so far does Wilde carry his ingenuity that we are reminded of the defects of that school of verse that Johnson called the metaphysical, whose virtues are too generally forgotten. He hears the wind in the trees as Palaestrina playing the organ in Santa Maria on Easter Day. With half an echo of Browning he describes a pike as "some mitred old bishop _in partibus_," and, with a true seventeenth-century conceit, speaks of the early rose as "that sweet repentance of the th.o.r.n.y briar."

This ready-made or artificial poetry lacked, however, the firm intellectual substructure that could have infused into ornament and elaboration the vitalizing breath of unity. Wilde was uncertain of himself, and, in each one of the longer poems, rambled on, gathering flowers that would have seemed better worth having if he had not had so many of them. Doubtful of his aim in individual poems, he was doubtful of his inclinations as a poet. Nothing could more clearly ill.u.s.trate this long wavering of his mind than a list of the poets whom he admired sufficiently to imitate. I have mentioned Morris, Swinburne, Arnold, and Rossetti; but these are not enough. In swift caprice he rifled a score of orchards. He very honestly confesses in 'Amor Intellectualis' that he had often "trod the vales of Castaly," sailed the sea "which the nine Muses hold in empery," and never turned home unladen.

"Of which despoiled treasures these remain, Sordello's pa.s.sion, and the honeyed line Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine Driving his pampered jades, and more than these The seven-fold vision of the Florentine, And grave-browed Milton's solemn harmonies."

Milton, Dante, Marlowe, Keats, and Browning, with those I have already named, and others, make up a goodly list of sufferers by this lighthearted corsair's piracies. He built with their help a brilliant coloured book, full of ingenuity, a boy's criticism of the objects of his admiration, almost a rhymed dictionary of mythology, whose incongruity is made apparent by those poems in which, leaving his cla.s.sics pa.s.sionately aside, he went, like a scholar gipsy, to seek a new accomplishment in the simplicity of folk-song.

Wilde's reputation as a poet does not rest on this first book, but on half a dozen poems that include 'The Harlot's House,' 'A Symphony in Yellow,' 'The Sphinx' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' and alone are worthy of a place beside his work in prose. But, though poetry is rare in it, it will presently be recognized that the first books of few men are so rich in autobiography. We have seen that the book is an index to his reading: let us see now how many indications it gives us of his life.

Threaded through the book, between the longer poems, runs an itinerary of his travels in Italy and Greece, written by a young man very conscious of being a poet, and keenly sensible of what it was fitting he should feel. In Italy, for example, he thought that he owed himself a conversion to the Catholic faith:--

"Before yon field of trembling gold Is garnered into dusty sheaves, Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves Flutter as birds adown the wold,

I may have run the glorious race, And caught the torch while yet aflame, And called upon the holy name Of Him who now doth hide his face."

He wrote almost as a Catholic might write, and spoke of the Pope as "the prisoned shepherd of the Church of G.o.d." But later, when

"The silver trumpets ran across the Dome: The people knelt upon the ground with awe: And borne upon the necks of men I saw, Like some great G.o.d, the Holy Lord of Rome,"

he turned, as a Puritan might have turned, from the emblem, triple-crowned, and clothed in red and white, of Christ's sovereignty, to remember a pa.s.sage in the gospels: "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."

He had a Calvinistic, half-shocked and half-exultant vision of his own iniquity, this undergraduate of twenty-three:--

"My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in h.e.l.l must lie If I this night before G.o.d's throne should stand."

Yet he took hope:--

"My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw, Nathless I threw them as my final cast Into the sea, and waited for the end.

When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw From the black waters of my tortured past The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!"

He had, in short, a religious experience, such as is known by most young men. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was disturbed, delightfully disturbed, by feeling that a religious experience was possible to him. He went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato, forgot the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a wholly voluntary repose in Christianity.

He returned to Oxford, to win the Newdigate Prize in the next year, and to remember, with something of a girl's adventurous regret for a lover whom she has rejected, his Italian emotion. All this is written down in 'The Burden of Itys':--

"This English Thames is holier far than Rome, Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea Breaking across the woodland, with the foam Of meadow-sweet and white anemone To fleck their blue waves,--G.o.d is likelier there Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks bear";

and, in a later stanza:--

"strange, a year ago I knelt before some crimson Cardinal Who bare the Host across the Esquiline, And now--those common poppies in the wheat seem twice as fine."

'Panthea,' in language that suggests that he is looking for approval from the eyes of Swinburne, describes his subst.i.tute for that refused conversion. It is the creed of a young poet who finds the G.o.ds asleep, and does not care, because of Darwin, Evolution, and the Law of the Conservation of Energy.

"With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerveless germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill."

And:--

"From lower cells of waking life we pa.s.s To full perfection; thus the world grows old:"

and:--

"This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil, Ay! and those argent b.r.e.a.s.t.s of thine will turn To water-lilies; the brown fields men till Will be more fruitful for our love to-night, Nothing is lost in Nature, all things live in Death's despite."