Oscar Wilde Part 23

He counsels her to return to Egypt, her lovers are not dead--

"They will rise up and hear your voice And clash their cymbals and rejoice and run to kiss your mouth!..."

He advises to--

"Follow some raving lion's spoor across the copper-coloured plain,"

and take him as a lover or to mate with a tiger--

"And toy with him in amorous jests, and when he turns and snarls and gnaws O smite him with your jasper claws! and bruise him with your agate b.r.e.a.s.t.s!"

But "her sullen ways" pall on him, her presence fills him with horror, "poisonous and heavy breath makes the light flicker in the lamp."

The poet wonders what "songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night." He drives the cat away with every opprobrious epithet for she wakes in him "each b.e.s.t.i.a.l sense" and makes him what he "would not be." She makes his "creed a barren shame," and wakes "foul dreams of sensual life," and with a return to sanity he chases her away. "Go thou before," he cries,

"And leave me to my crucifix Whose pallid burden sick with pain watches the world with wearied eyes And weeps for every soul that dies, and weeps for every soul in pain."

On this note of pessimism and refusal the poem ends. In the realm of the fantastic it has no equal and though the objection may be raised that the whole thing is unhealthy, the truth is that it is merely an experimental excursion in the abnormal. It has all the fantastic unreality of Chinese dragons, and, therefore, can in no way be harmful.

The nightmare effect has no lasting influence. We read it as we would any other imaginative grotesque. But whilst we are alternately fascinated and repulsed by the subject, we are lost in admiration of the decorative treatment of the theme. The whole performance is artificial, but so is all Oriental art.

It is true that Baudelaire's poems, with their morbid, highly polished neurotic qualities, had fascinated the young artist and exercised a powerful influence over him, but "The Sphinx" was an achievement apart and totally different from any other of his poems. It is more in the nature of an extravaganza, an opium dream described in finely chiselled, richly tinted phrases. Every young poet goes through various phases and this was only a phase in the author's literary career. Nothing could be better than the workmans.h.i.+p, and that the poem should so rivet the attention and attract where it most repels is the greatest tribute to the genius of its creator. It is essentially a weird conception expressed in haunting cadences, an esoteric gem for all those who have brains to think and the necessary artistic sense to appreciate really good work. That persons of inferior mental calibre and narrow views should be shocked by it is only to be expected, and the author himself excused the delay in publis.h.i.+ng it by explaining that "it would destroy domesticity in England!" The original edition, it may be mentioned, was published in September 1894 by Messrs Elkin Mathews and John Lane, and was limited to two hundred copies issued at 42s. with twenty-five on larger paper at 105s. It was magnificently ill.u.s.trated by Mr C. R.

Ricketts, the delicacy and distinction of whose work is too well known to need comment.

In striking contrast to the artificiality and decadent character of "The Sphinx" stands the author's imperishable "Ballad of Reading Gaol." What the circ.u.mstances were that led to the writing of this great masterpiece have been already sufficiently dealt with in the earlier portion of this work. It has been aptly said that all great art has an underlying note of pain and sorrow, beautiful work may be produced without it, but not the work that is worthy to rank among the great creative masterpieces of the world. "Quand un homme et une poesie," writes Barbey d'Aubrevilly, "ont devale si bas dans la conscience de l'incurable malheur qui est fond de toutes les voluptes de l'existence poesie et homme ne peuvent plus que remonter." There can be no doubt that this poem could never have been written but for the terrible ordeal the poet had been through.

It is incomparably Wilde's finest poetic work--great, not only by reason of its beauty, but great on account of the feeling for suffering humanity, his power to enter into the sorrows of others and to forget his own trials in the sympathetic contemplation of the agony of his fellow-sufferers which it reveals. The words of another distinguished French critic might almost have been written about him:

"Desormais divorcee d'avec l'enseignement historique, philosophique et scientifique, la poesie se trouve ramenee a so fonction naturelle et directe, qui est de realiser pour nous la vie, complementaire du reve, du souvenir, de l'esperance, du desir; de donner un corps a ce qu'il y a d'insaisissable dans nos pensees et de secret dans le mouvement de nos ames; de nous consoler ou de nous chatier par l'expression de l'ideal ou par le spectacle de nos vices. Elle devient non pas _individuelle_, suivant la prediction un peu hasardeuse de l'auteur de _Jocelyn_, mais _personnelle_, si nous sous-entendons que l'ame du poete est necessairement une ame collective, une corde sensible et toujours tendue que font vibrer les pa.s.sions et les douleurs de ses semblables."

With Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner," "Reading Gaol," holds first place amongst the ballads of the world, and by many critics it is held, by reason of its deep feeling and anguished intensity, to be a finer piece of work than the older poet's _chef d'oeuvre_.

Although the author's ident.i.ty was concealed under the cypher "C33,"

there was never a moment's doubt as to who the writer was. It came as a shock to the British public that the man who, but a couple of years before, had stood in the public pillory, the man whose work the great majority, who had never even read it, believed to be artificial, meretricious, and superficial, should be the author of a deeply moving poem that could be read by the most prudish and strait-laced.

_The Times_, that great organ of English respectability, devoted a leading article to it of a highly eulogistic character. The edition was sold out at once, and the book was on all men's tongues. Wherever one went one heard it discussed, priest and philistine were as loud in their praises of it as the most decadent of minor poets. No poem had for a generation met with such a friendly reception or caused such a sensation.

A critical notice of the poem from the pen of Lady Currie appeared in _The Fortnightly Review_ for July 1904. In it the author writes of the "terrible 'Ballad of Reading Gaol' with its splendours and inequalities, its mixture of poetic farce, crude realism, and undeniable pathos." As to the crudeness of the realism, that is a mere matter of opinion: it is easy to supply an adjective--it is more difficult to justify the use of it, and give satisfactory reasons for its application. Realistic the poem doubtless is--crude, never, but the writer shows a far keener appreciation when she says--"all is grim, concentrated tragedy from cover to cover. A friend of mine," Lady Currie says, "who looked upon himself as a judge in such matters, told me that he would have placed certain pa.s.sages in this poem, by reason of their terrible, tragic intensity, upon a level with some of the descriptions in Dante's 'Inferno,' were it not that 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' was so much more infinitely human."

Among the many laudatory notices that appeared at the time, there is an extract from a review of the work taken from a great London paper and quoted by a French writer which is worth reprinting as showing the att.i.tude of the press towards the poem.

"The whole is awful as the pages of Sophocles. That he has rendered with his fine art so much of the essence of his life and the life of others in that inferno to the sensitive is a memorable thing for the social scientist, but a much more memorable thing for literature. This is a simple, a poignant, a great ballad, one of the greatest in the English language."

Never, perhaps, since Gray's "Elegy" had a poem been so revised, pruned and polished over and over again as this cry from a prison cell. The publisher was driven to the verge of distraction by the constant alterations and emendations, the placing of a comma had become a matter of moment to the fastidious author, but the work was published in its entirety save for two or three stanzas concerning one of the prison officials that it was deemed wise to suppress.

The poem bears the dedication--

IN MEMORIAM C. T. W.

Sometime Trooper of the Royal Horse Guards Obiit, H.M. Prison, Reading, Berks.h.i.+re July 7th, 1896.

The case of the trooper to whose memory the work is dedicated excited a good deal of interest at the time. He had a fit of jealousy, murdered his sweetheart, and though public opinion was inclined to take a merciful view of the crime, and a pet.i.tion was presented to the Home Secretary for the withdrawal of the capital sentence, it was without effect, and the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in the Gaol at Reading.

The first line--

"He did not wear his scarlet coat"--

rivets the attention at once, and as surely as do the opening lines of "The Ancient Mariner." The reason for this is given at once--

"For wine and blood are red And blood and wine were on his hands When they found him with the dead."

That the whole incident that led to the man's being there should be communicated in the very first stanza, to make that stanza complete, is an artistic necessity, and in the next two lines we are told who the victim is--

"The poor dead woman whom he loved, And murdered in her bed."

The tragedy is complete. We have the picture of the soldier deprived of his uniform and the whole story is revealed to us. A more concise or supremely reticent description of the pathetic drama there could not be.

But the picture must be filled in even to the most trivial detail, and we see the poor wretch taking his daily exercise among the prisoners awaiting their trial, attired in "a suit of shabby grey," trying to demean himself like a man and, trivial, but, from the artist's point of view, important detail, with a cricket cap on his head. There is a world of pathos and lines of unspoken tragedy in that cricket cap worn by a man whose days are numbered, who never will play a game again and whose mind must be occupied with thoughts far removed from sport and amus.e.m.e.nt save perhaps when they may revert to happy days spent with bat and ball, and which will never recur again. But though his step be jaunty, the oppression of his impending doom is on him,

"I never saw a man who looked So wistfully at the day."

We can see that prison yard, the circle of convicts pacing the melancholy round at ordered intervals and with measured tread, and the strong man, full of life and vigour looking up at G.o.d's blue sky and drinking in the air with greedy lungs. We can see the author of the poem, the erstwhile social favourite, in his convict garb walking

"With other souls in pain Within another ring."

and his horror as he receives the information muttered by some fellow-prisoner through closed lips that

"That fellow's got to swing."

In words, the simplicity and intensity of which are sublime, he tells us of how the news affected him--

"Dear Christ! the very prison walls Suddenly seemed to reel."

That apostrophe to the Redeemer is a revelation in itself coming from a man who is enduring his own mortal agony, but his particular sorrows fade into insignificance and are forgotten in the presence of a fellow-creature's crucifixion--

"And, though I was a soul in pain, My pain I could not feel."

Already he is purified by his months of trial and tribulation, and he can enter sympathetically into the sorrows of others and share their burden.

He now understands the reason of the jaunty step and the defiant manner, he himself has tried to flee from his thoughts.

"I only knew what hunted thought Quickened his step."

He realises the meaning of that "wistful look" towards the vaulted canopy of heaven.

The man had killed the thing he loved.

"Yet each man kills the thing he loves By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word; The coward does it with a kiss The brave man with a sword."

It has been objected that making sword rhyme with word is a makes.h.i.+ft, but surely it is patent to anyone with any artistic sense whatever that this forced rhyme avoids the danger of making the verse too facile, and, far from being a piece of slovenly writing, is the well-thought-out scheme of a perfect master of his craft. It is one of those stupid objections that superficial critics are so apt to raise when utterly devoid themselves of any sense of proportion or fitness.

The idea that all men, young or old, kill the thing they love is not only original but it is a very fine flight of metaphor--there is a whole sermon in the conception, and Wilde elaborates the theme--