Oscar Wilde Part 1

Oscar Wilde.

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby.

PART I

OSCAR WILDE: THE MAN

OSCAR WILDE

THE MAN

The [Greek: synetoi], the connoisseurs, always recognised the genius of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde from the very first moment when he began to write. For many years ordinary people to whom literature and literary affairs were not of, at anyrate, absorbing interest only knew of Oscar Wilde by his extravagances and poses.

Then it happened that Wilde turned his powers in the direction of the stage and achieved a swift and brilliant success. The English public then began to realise that here was an unusually brilliant man, and the extraordinary genius of the subject of this work would have certainly been universally recognised in a few more years, when the shocking scandals a.s.sociated with his name occurred and Oscar Wilde disappeared into oblivion.

A great change gradually took place in public opinion. Little by little the feeling of prejudice against the work of Oscar Wilde began to die away. The man himself was dead. He had expiated his crimes by a prolonged agony of the most hideous suffering and disgrace, and people began to wonder if his writings were in any way a.s.sociated with the dark side of his life and character, or whether they might not, after all, be beautiful, pure, and treasures of the literature of our time. The four comedies of Manners, "Lady Windermere's Fan," "The Ideal Husband," "A Woman Of No Importance," "The Importance Of Being Earnest," everyone had seen and laughed at. They were certainly absolutely without offence. It was gradually seen that because a house was built by an architect of an immoral private life that did not necessarily invalidate it as a residence, that if Stephenson had ended his life upon the gallows people would still find railways convenient and necessary. The truth gradually dawned that Wilde had never in his life written a line that was immoral or impure, and that, in short, the criminal side of him was only a part of his complex nature, horribly disastrous for himself and his personal life, but absolutely without influence upon his work.

Art and his aberration never mingled or overlapped. Everybody began to realise the fact.

Opinion was also being quietly moulded from within by a band of literary and artistic people, some of them friends of the late author, others knowing him simply through his work.

The public began to ask for Wilde's books and found it almost impossible to obtain them, for the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," published while its author was still alive, had not stimulated any general demand for other works.

It was after Oscar Wilde's death that his friends and admirers were able to set to work at their endeavours to rehabilitate him as artist in the mind of general prejudice. Books and monographs were written about Wilde in English, French, and German. He was quoted in the leading Continental reviews. His play "Salome" met with sudden and stupendous success all over Europe, a famous musician turned it into an opera. A well-known English man of letters, Mr Robert Harborough Sherard, published a final official "Life" of the dead author, and Wilde's own "De Profundis"

appeared to startle, sadden, and thrill the whole reading world.

His plays are being revived, and an authoritative and exhaustive edition of his writings is being issued by a leading publis.h.i.+ng house.

There is no doubt about it, the most prejudiced and hostile critics must admit it--in a literary sense, as a man of letters with extraordinary genius, Oscar Wilde has come into his own. The time is, therefore, ripe for a work of the present character which endeavours to "appreciate" one of the strangest, saddest, most artistic and powerful brains of modern times. Five years ago such a book as this would probably have been out of place. When Balzac died Sainte-Beuve prefaced a short critical article of fourteen pages, as follows:--

"A careful study of the famous novelist who has just been taken from us, and whose sudden loss has excited universal interest, would require a whole work, and the time for that, I think, has not yet come. Those sort of moral autopsies cannot be made over a freshly dug grave, especially when he who has been laid in it was full of strength and fertility, and seemed still full of future works and days. All that is possible and fitting in respect of a great contemporary renown at the moment death lays it low is to point out, by means of a few clear-cut lines, the merits, the varied skill, by which it charmed its epoch and acquired influence over it."

When Oscar Wilde died, and before the publication of "De Profundis,"

various short essays did, as I have stated, make an appearance. A longer work seems called for, and it is that want which the present volume does its best to supply.

"Oscar Wilde: The Man" is the t.i.tle of the first part of this Appreciation. In Mr Sherard's "The Story of an Unhappy Friends.h.i.+p," as also in his careful and scholarly "Life," the many-sided nature of Oscar Wilde was set forth with all the ability of a brilliant pen. But there is yet room for another, and possibly more detached point of view, and also a summary of the views of others which will a.s.sist the general reader to gain a mental picture of a writer whose works, in a very short time, are certain to have a general, as well as a particular appeal.

The scheme of a work of this nature, which is critical rather than biographical, would nevertheless be incomplete without a personal study.

The study of Wilde's writings cannot fail to be enormously a.s.sisted by some knowledge of synetoithe man himself, and how he was regarded by others both before and after his personal disgrace.

Ever since his name was known to the world at all the public view of him has constantly been s.h.i.+fting and changing. There are, however, four princ.i.p.al periods during each of which Wilde was regarded in a totally different way. I have made a careful a.n.a.lysis of each of these periods and collected doc.u.mentary and other evidence which defines and explains them.

The first period of all--Oscar Wilde himself always spoke of the different phases of his extraordinary career as "periods"--was that of the "aesthetic movement" as it is generally called, or the aesthetic "craze" as many people prefer to name it still. New movements, whether good or bad in their conception and ultimate result, always excite enmity, hostility, and ridicule. In affairs, in religion, in art, this is an invariable rule. No pioneer has ever escaped it. England laughed at the first railway, jeered at the volunteer movement and laughed at John Keats in precisely the same fas.h.i.+on as it ridiculed Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement.

It is as well to define that movement carefully, for, though marred by innumerable extravagances and still suffering from the inanities of its first disciples, it has nevertheless had a real and permanent influence upon English life. Oscar Wilde was, of course, not the originator of the aesthetic movement. He took upon himself to become its hierophant, and to infuse much that was peculiarly his own into it. The movement was begun by Ruskin, Rossetti, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a host of others, while it was continued in the delicate and beautiful writings of Walter Pater. But it had always been an eclectic movement, not for the public eye or ear, neither known of nor popular with ordinary people.

Oscar Wilde then began to interest and excite England and America in the true aims and methods of art of all kinds. It shows an absolute ignorance of the late Victorian era to say that the movement was a pa.s.sing craze. To Oscar Wilde we owe it that people of refined tastes but moderate means can obtain beautiful papers for the walls of their houses at a moderate cost. The cheap and lovely fabrics that we can buy in Regent Street are spun as a direct consequence of the movement; harmony and delicacy of colour, beauty of curve and line, the whole renaissance of art in our household furniture are mainly due to the writings and lectures of Oscar Wilde.

It is not a crime to love beautiful things, it is not effeminate to care for them. It is to the subject of this appreciation we owe our national change of feeling on such matters.

This, briefly, is what the aesthetic movement was, such are its indubitable results. Let us see, in some instances, how Wilde was regarded in the period when, before his real literary successes, he preached the gospel of Beauty in everyday life.

Let us take a Continental view of Wilde in his first period, the view of a really eminent man, a distinguished scientist and man of letters.

The name of Dr Max Nordau will be familiar to many readers of this book.

But, if the book fulfils the purpose for which it was designed, then possibly there will be many readers who will know little or nothing of the distinguished foreign writer. Hard, one-sided, and bitter as his remarks upon Wilde during the aesthetic movement will seem to most of us--seem to me--yet they have the merit of absolute detachment and sincerity. It is as well to insist on this fact in order that my readers may realise exactly such value as the words may have, no less and no more. The following short account of Dr Max Nordau's position and achievements is taken from that useful dictionary of celebrities, "Who's Who?" for 1907:--

"NORDAU, MAX SIMON, M.D. Paris, Budapesth; Officier d'Academie, France; Commander of the Royal h.e.l.lenic Order of the St Saviour; author and physician; President Congress of Zionists; Hon. Mem. of the Greek Acad. of the Parna.s.sos; _b._ Budapesth, 29th July 1849; _y. s._ of Gabriel Sudfield, Rabbi, Krotoschin, Prussia, and his 2nd wife, _b._ Nelkin, Riga, Russia. _Educ._ Royal Gymnasium and Protestant Gymnasium, Budapesth; Royal University, Budapesth; Faculty of Medicine, Paris. Wrote very early for newspapers; travelled for several years all over Europe; practised as a physician for a year and a half, 1878-80, at Budapesth; settled then at Paris, residing there ever since; _m._ Anna-Elizabeth, 2nd _d._ of State-councillor Captain Julius Dons, Copenhagen, Denmark; one _d._ _Publications_: Paris, Studien und Bilder aus dem wahren Milliardenlande, 1878; Seifenblasen, 1879; Vom Kreml zur Alhambra, 1880; Aus der Zeitungswelt (together with Ferdinand Gross), 1880; Paris under der dritten Republik, 1881; der Krieg der Millionen, 1882; Die conventionellen Lugen der Culturmenschheit, 1883; Ausgewahlte Pariser Briefe, 1884; Paradoxe, 1885; Die Krankheit des Jahrhunderts, 1887; Seelena.n.a.lysen, 1891; Gefuhlskomodie, 1892; Entartung, 1893; Das Recht zu lieben, 1894; Die Kugel, 1895; Drohnenschlacht, 1896; La funzione sociale dell arte, 1897; Doctor Kohn, 1898; The Drones must Die, 1899: Zeitgenossische Franzosen, 1901; Morganatic, 1904; Maha-Rog, 1905. _Recreations_: foil-fencing, swimming. _Address_: 8, Rue Leonie, Paris."

Nearly all the modern manifestations of Art, implies Dr Max Nordau, in "Degeneration," are manifestations of madness. Such a sweeping statement is incredible and has not--nor will it have--many advocates, despite the brilliant special pleading of its originator. In Oscar Wilde's case the aphorism seems particularly misleading for the reason that there may appear to be a considerable amount of truth in it.

That Wilde's _social_ downfall was due to a certain kind of elliptiform insanity is without doubt. Mr Sherard has insisted on this over and over again. He has spent enormous labour in researches into Wilde's ancestry.

His view is really a scientific view because it is written by an artist who sees both sides of the question, has a judicial mind, and while capable of appreciating the truths that science teaches us, is further capable of welding them to the psychological truths which the intuition of the artist alone evolves.

A certain definite and partial insanity alone can explain Wilde's life in certain of its aspects. But when once his pen was in his hand, in his real bright life of literature and art, this hidden thing entirely disappears. Therefore, Dr Max Nordau's study seems to me fundamentally wrong, though extremely interesting and not to be disregarded. To know Oscar Wilde we must know what all sorts of people, whose opinion has weight enough to secure a wide hearing, really thought about him.

The German scientist said:

"The ego-mania of decadentism, its love of the artificial, its aversion to nature, and to all forms of activity and movement, its megalomaniacal contempt for men and its exaggeration of the importance of art, have found their English representative among the 'aesthetes,' the chief of whom is Oscar Wilde.

"Wilde has done more by his personal eccentricities than by his works. Like Barbey d'Aurevilly, whose rose-coloured silk hats and gold lace cravats are well known, and like his disciple Josephin Peladan, who walks about in lace frills and satin doublet, Wilde dresses in queer costumes which recall partly the fas.h.i.+ons of the Middle Ages, partly the rococo modes. He pretends to have abandoned the dress of the present time because it offends his sense of the beautiful; but this is only a pretext in which probably he himself does not believe. What really determines his actions is the hysterical craving to be noticed, to occupy the attention of the world with himself, to get talked about. It is a.s.serted that he has walked down Pall Mall in the afternoon dressed in doublet and breeches, with a picturesque biretta on his head, and a sunflower in his hand, the quasi-heraldic symbol of the aesthetes. This anecdote has been reproduced in all the biographies of Wilde, and I have nowhere seen it denied. But it is a promenade with a sunflower in the hand also inspired by a craving for the beautiful.

"Phrasemakers are perpetually repeating the twaddle, that it is a proof of honourable independence to follow one's own taste without being bound down to the regulation costume of the Philistine cattle, and to choose for clothes the colours, materials and cut which appear beautiful to oneself, no matter how much they may differ from the fas.h.i.+on of the day. The answer to this cackle should be that it is above all a sign of anti-social ego-mania to irritate the majority unnecessarily, only to gratify vanity, or an aesthetical instinct of small importance and easy to control--such as is always done when, either by word or deed, a man places himself in opposition to this majority. He is obliged to repress many manifestations of opinions and desires out of regard for his fellow-creatures; to make him understand this is the aim of education, and he who has not learnt to impose some restraint upon himself in order not to shock others is called by malicious Philistines, not an aesthete, but a blackguard.

"It may become a duty to combat the vulgar herd in the cause of truth and knowledge; but to a serious man this duty will always be felt as a painful one. He will never fulfil it with a light heart, and he will examine strictly and cautiously if it be really a high and imperative law which forces him to be disagreeable to the majority of his fellow-creatures. Such an action is, in the eyes of a moral and sane man, a kind of martyrdom for a conviction, to carry out which const.i.tutes a vital necessity; it is a form, and not an easy form, of self-sacrifice, for it means the renunciation of the joy which the consciousness of sympathy with one's fellow-creatures gives, and it exacts the painful overthrow of social instincts, which, in truth, do not exist in deranged ego-maniacs, but are very strong in the normal man.

"The predilection for strange costume is a pathological aberration of a racial instinct. The adornment of the exterior has its origin in the strong desire to be admired by others--primarily by the opposite s.e.x--to be recognised by them as especially well shaped, handsome, youthful, or rich and powerful, or as pre-eminent through rank or merit. It is practised, then, with the object of producing a favourable impression on others, and is a result of thought about others, of preoccupation with the race. If, now, this adornment be, not through misjudgment but purposely, of a character to cause irritation to others, or lend itself to ridicule--in other words, if it excites disapproval instead of approbation--it then runs exactly counter to the object of the art of dress, and evinces a perversion of the instinct of vanity.

"The pretence of a sense of beauty is the excuse of consciousness for a crank of the conscious. The fool who masquerades in Pall Mall does not see himself, and, therefore, does not enjoy the beautiful appearance which is supposed to be an aesthetic necessity for him.

There would be some sense in his conduct if it had for its object an endeavour to cause others to dress in accordance with his taste; for them he sees and they can scandalise him by the ugliness, and charm by the beauty, of their costume. But to take the initiative in a new artistic style in dress brings the innovator not one hair's breadth nearer his a.s.sumed goal of aesthetic satisfaction.

"When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in 'aesthetic costume'

among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no exalted aim; nor is it from a strong desire of beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction."

It is impossible to read the extracts quoted above--and only a few paragraphs sufficient to show the trend of a much longer article have been used--without realising its injustice and yet at the same time its perfect sincerity. During the "first period," with which we are dealing now, Wilde undoubtedly excited the enmity and ridicule of a vast number of people. He knew that he had something to say which was worth listening to. He knew also--as the genius always has known--that he was superior in intellect to those by whom he was surrounded. His temperament was impatient. He wanted to take the place to which he felt he was ent.i.tled in a sudden moment. His quick Celtic imagination ran riot with fact, his immeasurable ambition, his serene consciousness of worth, which to usual minds and temperaments suggested nothing but conceit, all urged him to display and extravagance in order to more speedily mount the rostrum from which he would be heard.

Therefore, in this first period of this so astonis.h.i.+ng a career, he went far to spoil and obscure his message by the very means he hoped would enable him to publish it widely. He invented a pose which he intended should become a megaphone, whereas, in the effect, it did but r.e.t.a.r.d the hearing of his voice until the practical wisdom of what he wished to say proved itself in concrete form.

Nor must we ever forget the man's constant sense of humour, a mocking sprite which doubtless led him to this or that public foolishness while he chuckled within at his own att.i.tude and the dance he was leading his imitators and fools. For Oscar Wilde had a supreme sense of humour. Many people would like to deny him _humour_, while admitting his marvellous and scintillating _wit_. That they are wrong I unhesitatingly a.s.sert, and I believe that this will be proved over and over again in the following pages.

Let us take another view of Wilde at this period. It was written after his disappearance from public life, or rather when it was imminent and certain. The words are those of Mr Labouchere, the _flaneur_ with an intellect, the somewhat acid critic of how many changing aspects and phases of English social life.