Oscar Wilde Part 18

This last is indeed a beautiful story, and not once is there sounded the mocking note of cynical disdain of men. If one had taken up this tale and known not whose pen had traced it, he would not hesitate to place it in his children's hands.

Is it not good to think that tenderness and humility and patience are seen herein to be more beautiful than all the precious things which are loved so ardently by the artistic mind? I have shown, I hope, that in both of these exquisite volumes, it may be seen that Oscar Wilde had visions sometimes of the celestial city where the angels of the little children do always behold the face of the Father. And if, as other chapters of this volume may seem to show, the vision splendid died away and faded all too soon, purgatorial pain came to the author, as to the star-child in his story, and he who could build for his soul a lordly pleasure house, and was driven forth from it, may enter it again when he has purged his sin.

PART V

THE POET

POEMS

If a keynote were wanted to Oscar Wilde's verse it might be found in a couple of stanzas by the poet whose work perhaps had the greatest share in moulding his ideas and fashioning his style. Charles Baudelaire, with all his love of the terrible and the morbid, was an incomparable stylist, and in these lines has almost formulated a creed of art.

"La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles; L'homme y pa.s.se a travers des forets de symboles Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs echos qui de loin se confondent Dans une tenebreuse et profonde unite, Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarte, Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent."

We can picture to ourselves the young Oxford student studying these lines over and over again till they had become part and parcel of himself.

Wilde himself has left it on record that he "cannot imagine anyone with the smallest pretensions to culture preferring a dexterously turned triolet to a fine imaginative ballad." In the majority of his poems, the beauties of nature, flowers, the song of birds and the music of running water are introduced either incidentally or as the _leit motif_. In fact, he was responsible for the dictum that what English poetry has to fear is not the fascination of dainty metre or delicate form, but the predominance of the intellectual spirit over the spirit of beauty.

That the expression of the beautiful need not necessarily be simple was one of his earliest contentions. "Are simplicity and directness of utterance," he asks, "absolute essentials for poetry?" and proceeds to answer his own question. "I think not. They may be admirable for the drama, admirable for all those imitative forms of literature that claim to mirror life in its externals and its accidents, admirable for quiet narrative, admirable in their place; but their place is not everywhere.

Poetry has many modes of music; she does not blow through one pipe alone. Directness of utterance is good, but so is the subtle recasting of thought into a new and delightful form. Simplicity is good, but complexity, mystery, strangeness, symbolism, obscurity even, these have their value. Indeed, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely styles, that is all."

There we have a clear, concise and catholic statement of his literary creed, and none other was to be expected from one to whom Baudelaire, Poe, Keats, and Rossetti were so many masters whose influence was to be carefully cultivated and whose methods were worthy of imitation and study. His views on the subject of simplicity in verse should be read by all who desire to understand his method and do justice to his work.

"We are always apt to think," he wrote, "that the voices which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and could pa.s.s, almost without changing, into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort.

For nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern."

"Ravenna," the poem with which Oscar Wilde won the Newdigate Prize, we find to be far above the average of such effusions, though possessing most of the faults inherent in compositions of this kind. Grace and even force of expression are not wanting, with here and there a pure strain of sentiment and thought, and a keen appreciation of the beauties of nature. Ever and anon we come across some sentence, some _tournure de phrase_ which might belong to his later work, as for instance--

"The crocus bed (that seems a moon of fire Round-girdled with a purple marriage-ring)."

But for the most part the poem is rather reminiscent of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," and is chiefly interesting by reason of the promise it holds forth.

The poems published in 1881 are preceded by some dedicatory verses addressed to his wife which are characterised by great daintiness and simplicity, instinct with tender affection and chivalrous homage.

"Helas," which forms a sort of preface to the collection, is chiefly interesting on account of the prophetic pathos of the lines:

"Surely there was a time I might have trod The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of G.o.d."

"Ave Imperatrix" will come as a surprise to those unacquainted with Wilde's works. Most people would have thought the author of "Dorian Gray" the last man in the world to write a stirring patriotic poem which would not be out of place in a collection of Mr Kipling's works. A copy of _The World_ containing this poem found its way to an officer in Lord Robert's force marching on Candahar, and evoked the enthusiasm and admiration of the whole mess. As a proof of the author's originality and care in the choice of similes he purposely discards the modern heraldic device of the British lion for the more correct and ancient leopards, as:

"The yellow leopards, strained and lean, The treacherous Russian knows so well With gaping blackened jaws are seen Leap through the hail of screaming sh.e.l.l."

There is a fine swing about the metre of this verse, and the description of the leopards as "strained and lean" is a piece of word painting, a felicity of expression that it would be difficult to improve on. The whole poem is tense with patriotic fervour, nor is it wanting in exquisitely pathetic touches, as for instance--

"Pale women who have lost their lord Will kiss the relics of the slain-- Some tarnished epaulette--some sword-- Poor toys to soothe such anguished pain."

or

"In vain the laughing girl will yearn To greet her love with love-lit eyes: Down in some treacherous ravine, Clutching the flag, the dead boy lies."

That he should have written such a poem is proof conclusive of the author's extraordinary versatility, and though a comparatively early production is worthy to rank with the finest war poems in the language.

Current events at that time attracted his pen for we find a set of verses on the death of the ill-fated Prince Imperial, a sonnet on the Bulgarian Christians, and others of a more or less patriotic character.

Few of these productions, however, invite a very serious criticism. They were of the moment and for the moment, and have lost the appeal of freshness and actuality.

In "The Garden of Eros" we get a good insight into Wilde's pa.s.sionate fondness for flowers, to whom they were human things with souls.

Probably no other verses of the poet so well define and express this master pa.s.sion of his life.

"... Mark how the yellow iris wearily Leans back its throat, as though it would be kissed By its false chamberer, the dragon-fly."

or

"And I will tell thee why the jacynth wears Such dread embroidery of dolorous moan."

or again

"Close to a shadowy nook where half afraid Of their own loneliness some violets lie That will not look the gold sun in the face."

I remember a lady telling me once that she was in a London shop one day when Wilde came in and asked as a favour that a lily be taken out of the window because it looked so tired. This looking on flowers as real live sentient things was no mere pose with him. He was thoroughly imbued with the conviction that they were possessed of feeling, and throughout his poetical work we shall find endless applications of this idea.

Of particular interest in this poem are the verses descriptive of the various poets, his contemporaries. Swinburne he alludes to most happily, as far as the neatness of phrase is concerned nothing could be better in this regard than

"And he hath kissed the lips of Proserpine And sung the Galilean's requiem."

William Morris, "our sweet and simple Chaucer's child," appeals to him strangely. Many a summer's day he informs us he has "lain poring on the dreamy tales his fancy weaves." His appreciation of Morris's verse is keen and enthusiastic.

"The little laugh of water falling down Is not so musical, the clammy gold Close h.o.a.rded in the tiny waxen town Has less of sweetness in it."

What a delicate metaphor that is, what an exquisite poet's fancy. Not Keats himself could have surpa.s.sed the "clammy gold close h.o.a.rded in the tiny waxen town"--it is worthy to rank with some of the daintiest flights in the "Queen Mab speech," that modern Mercutios murder so abominably.

Like every verse writer of his time Oscar Wilde had felt the wondrous influence of Rossetti, and no finer tribute to the painter could be written than the lines--

"All the World for him A gorgeous coloured vest.i.ture must wear, And Sorrow take a purple diadem, Or else be no more Sorrow, and Despair Gild its own thorns, and Pain, like Adon, be Even in Anguish beautiful; such is the empery which Painters held."

There is a stately splendour about the flow of "a gorgeous coloured vest.i.ture," and one pauses to admire the choice of the last word, and can picture the poet's delight when, like an artist in mosaic who has. .h.i.t upon the stone to fill up the remaining interstice, he lighted on the word. It is essentially _le mot juste_, no other could have filled its place. So also is there a peculiar happiness in the use of "empery."

There is a volume of sound and meaning in the word that could with difficulty be surpa.s.sed.

In fact, in his choice of words Wilde always and for ever deserves the glowing words of praise that Baudelaire addressed to Theodore de Bonville--

"Vous avez prela.s.se votre orgueil d'architecte Dans des constructions dont l'audace correcte Fait voir quelle sera votre maturite."