Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study Part 4

That is a specimen very favourable to the play, which contains yet duller jokes. It is hard to believe that the same man who wrote them was also the author of _Intentions_ and the inventor of Bunbury. But there is no need to linger over _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_, which, though it has moments of obscure power, Wilde did not, in later years, consider worthy of himself.

There is some doubt as to the date of composition of _The Sphinx_. A line and a half in it--

"I have hardly seen Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn's gaudy liveries"--

not only suggest extreme youth in the writer, but occur in _Ravenna_.

Mr. Stuart Mason, in his admirable "Bibliography to the Poems of Oscar Wilde," says that "altogether some dozen pa.s.sages of _Ravenna_ are taken more or less verbatim from poems published before 1878, while no instance is found of lines in the Newdigate Prize Poem being repeated in poems admittedly of later date, and this," he thinks, "seems fairly strong proof that the lines in _The Sphinx_ (if not the whole poem) antedate _Ravenna_." Mr. Ross says that Wilde told him the poem was written at the Hotel Voltaire during an earlier visit in 1874. This statement, he thinks, was an example of the poetic license in which Wilde, like Sh.e.l.ley and other men of genius, was willing to indulge. Mr.

Sherard says positively that Wilde wrote _The Sphinx_ in 1883 at the Hotel Voltaire. There seems to be no real reason why Wilde should not have borrowed from _Ravenna_ on this, even if he did so on no other occasion. He was always ready to seem younger than he was, and always ready to use again a phrase that had pleased him, no matter where he had used it before. In _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_, about whose date there is no question, he even went so far as to use two lines from a sonnet that he had previously addressed to Ellen Terry, and published in _Poems_:--

"O hair of gold, O crimson lips, O face Made for the luring and the love of man!"

There is much in the poem itself that inclines me to trust Mr. Sherard's memory of its date.

It is work more personal to Wilde than anything in _Poems_. The firm mastery of its technique would, indeed, be overwhelming proof that it was written after _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_ if it were not known that Wilde spent some time in revising it in 1889. But revision cannot alter the whole texture of a poem, and _The Sphinx_ is full of those decorative effects that are rare in his very early work and give to much of his matured writing its most noticeable quality. No one has suggested that it was written later than 1883, so that we must explain the extraordinary advance that it shows on _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_ as one of those curious phenomena known to most artists: it often happens that, in turning from one kind of work to another, as from dramatic writing to poetry, men come quite suddenly on what seem to be revised and better editions of themselves.

The kinetic base, the obvious framework, of _The Sphinx_ is an apostrophe addressed by a student to a Sphinx that lies in his room, perhaps a dream, perhaps a paperweight, an apostrophe that consists in the enumeration of her possible lovers, and the final selection of one of them as her supposed choice. It is a series rather than a whole, though an effect of form and c.u.mulative weight is given to it by a carefully preserved monotony. In a firm, lava-like verse, the Sphinx's paramours are stiffened to a bas-relief. The water-horse, the griffon, the hawk-faced G.o.d, the mighty limbs of Ammon, are formed into a frieze of reverie; they do not collaborate in a picture, but are left behind as the dream goes on. It goes on, perhaps, just a little too long. So do some of the finest rituals; and _The Sphinx_ is among the rare incantations in our language. It is a piece of black magic. Of the student who saw such things men might well say:--

"Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread,"

but they could never continue:--

"For he on honey-dew hath fed,"

and, with whatever milk he had been nourished, they would be certain that it was not that of Paradise.

"Dawn follows Dawn and Nights grow old, and all the while this curious cat Lies crouching on the Chinese mat with eyes of satin rimmed with gold."

To paint the visions she inspires, Wilde ransacks the world for magnificent colouring. He does not always secure magnificence in the n.o.blest way, but is satisfied with an opulence, rather of things than of emotion, brought bodily into the verse and not suggested by the proud stepping of the mind. Cleopatra's wine, ivory-bodied Antinous, the crocodile with jewelled ears, metal-flanked gryphons, gilt-scaled dragons,

"Some Nereid coiled in amber foam with curious rock-crystal b.r.e.a.s.t.s,"

the Ethiopian, "whose body was of polished jet," Pasht "who had green beryls for her eyes," Horus,

"Whose wings, like strange transparent talc, rose high above his hawk-faced head, Painted with silver and with red and ribbed with rods of Oreichalch,"

the marble limbs of Ammon, "on pearl and porphyry pedestalled," an ocean emerald on his ivory breast--

"The merchants brought him steat.i.te from Sidon in their painted ships: The meanest cup that touched his lips was fashioned from a chrysolite----"

the lion's "long flanks of polished bra.s.s," the tiger's "amber sides":--I think it is worth while to notice the mineral character of all this imagery. It is as if a man were finding solace for his feverish hands in the touch of cool hard stones, and at the same time, stimulating his fever by the s.e.xual excitement of contrast between the over-sensitive and the utterly insensible.

Wilde had but a short respite from the trouble of keeping up a reputation and an income. The American dollars were soon spent, and he had to bring to an end his Balzacian industry, and the delightful business of being a poet in Paris. He returned to London, where he took rooms in Charles Street, Haymarket. He had to earn a livelihood, and poverty and his own extravagance compelled him to do that which he most disliked, to take up again a pose whose fascination he had exhausted. He signed an agreement with a lecture agency, and toured through the English provinces, repeating, as cheerfully as he could, the lectures he had given in America.

NOTE ON WILDE AND WHISTLER

Both before and after his American lecturing tour Wilde was one of the frequenters of Whistler's studio in Chelsea. He had an unbounded admiration for this painter, whose conversation was no less vivid than his work, and Whistler's att.i.tude towards him was not so cavalier as that he adopted to others among his admirers.

Wilde, in spite of his youth, had a reputation, and shared with Whistler the applause of any company in which they were together.

In 1883, when Wilde was to lecture to the Academy Students, he asked Whistler what he should say to them. Whistler sketched a lecture for him, and Wilde used parts of it with success and repaid him by a tremendous compliment. Two years later Whistler himself lectured, and, for his "Ten O'Clock," re-appropriated some of the material he had suggested to his friend. That is the origin of the accusation, so often made, that Wilde built a reputation on borrowed bons mots. In the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler, annoyed by Wilde's lecturing on art, as he would have been by the lecturing of any other man who was not himself a painter, held a veiled figure of him up to ridicule, and threw a stone from a frail house in jeering at his knee-breeches. "Costume is not dress. And the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste ..." Wilde smilingly replied. Whistler feinted. Wilde parried. Whistler thrust:--"What has Oscar in common with Art except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding that he peddles in the provinces? Oscar--the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar--with no more sense of a picture than he has of the fit of a coat--has the courage of the opinions ... of others!" Wilde answered that "with our James vulgarity begins at home and should be allowed to stay there," and with that their friendship was buried, like the hatchet, "in the side of the enemy." Two years later, Wilde, with an indifference amusing in any case and delightful if it was conscious, roused further protest by using in "The Decay of Lying" the phrase, "the courage of the opinions of others," that had been the sting of Whistler's reproach. The letters on both sides may be read in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies." The whole story only makes it clear that Wilde was better able to appreciate Whistler than Whistler to appreciate a younger man, whose talent, no less brilliant, was entirely different from his own. As Mr. Ross has pointed out, all Wilde's best work was written after their friendship ceased.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] "The aesthetic Movement in England," by Walter Hamilton.

[5] He wore at this time a velvet _beret_ on his head, his shirts turned back with lace over his sleeves, puce velveteen knickerbockers with buckles, and black silk stockings.

V

MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

On May 29, 1884, Oscar Wilde was married to Constance Mary Lloyd, the daughter of a Dublin barrister. He settled with her in Chelsea. They had two children, both boys, born respectively in 1885 and 1886. Wilde's marriage was not felicitous, though he regretted it more for his wife's sake than his own. It is said that Mrs. Wilde was rather cruelly made to pose for Lady Henry Wotton in _Dorian Gray_, that "curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.... She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy ... looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain...." She was sentimental, pretty, well-meaning and inefficient. She would have been very happy as the wife of an ornamental minor poet, and it is possible that in marrying Wilde she mistook his for such a character. It must be remembered that she married the author of _Poems_ and the lecturer on the aesthetic movement. His development puzzled her, made her feel inadequate, and so increased her inadequacy.

She became more a spectacle for Wilde than an influence upon him, and was without the strength that might have prevented the disasters that were to fall through him on herself. She had a pa.s.sion for leaving things alone, broken only by moments of interference badly timed. She became one of those women whose Christian names their husbands, without malice, preface with the epithets "poor dear." Her married life was no less ineffectual than unhappy.

Wilde supplemented his wife's income by writing reviews of books for The Pall Mall Gazette, and articles on the theatre for The Dramatic Review.

From the autumn of 1887 to that of 1889 he edited The Woman's World.

Little of this was wasted labour, though Wilde had no need to fillip his invention by such practice as the writing of reviews provided.

Conversation was to him what diaries, note-books, and hack-work are to so many others. But there is an ease in the essays of _Intentions_ wholly lacking in 'The Rise of Historical Criticism' and in the lectures. It is impossible not to believe that in writing literary notes in The Woman's World and reviews in The Pall Mall Gazette, he quickened the turn of his wrist and sharpened the point of his rapier.

There is little of any great value in the volume of reviews collected by his executor; little, that is to say, that raises them above the level of reviews written by far less gifted men. Here and there are fragments that he improved and used again in more lasting works. Here and there are perfectly charming sentences, that show what sort of man would be found if we could lift the mask of the reviewer. Throughout the book are uncertain indications of the theories of art that were later to be expounded in _Intentions_. But that is all. There is, however, an historical interest in learning what Wilde thought of the writers of his time. He railed at the shocking bad grammar of Professor Saintsbury, and got an undergraduate enjoyment from laughing at Professor Mahaffy. When he could, he piously drew attention to the works of his father and mother. He was polite to his cousin, W. G. Wills, who had happened to be delivered of an epic. Among greater men, he had excellent praise for William Morris, a just appreciation of Pater, an enthusiasm for Meredith, the expression of which he afterwards used in _Intentions_, and a perspicuous criticism of Swinburne. The volume is full of clues to the sources of the inessentials in his later work. The original of the pa.s.sage in _Dorian Gray_ on embroideries and tapestries is to be found in a review of a book by Ernest Lefebure. The Starchild's curls "were like the rings of the daffodil." This curious and delightful phrase may be traced to a review of Morris' translation of the Odyssey, where Wilde noticed the line,

"With the hair on his head crisp curling as the bloom of the daffodil,"

and quoted another version published in 1665,