Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study Part 5

"Minerva renders him more tall and fair.

Curling in rings like daffodils his hair."

It would be possible to make a long list of such alibis.

Marriage and journalism slackened for a moment his ambition. He lectured once or twice, though Whistler had almost succeeded in discrediting him as an authority upon art. His reputation waned, and he was for some time a young man with a brilliant past. Art seemed less worth while than it had been, and he was ready to amuse himself with things that he thought scarcely worth writing, things that required more cleverness than temperament, and did not stretch his genius. It was in this mood that he turned to narrative, and wrote the four stories which, published in magazines in 1887, were collected into a volume in 1891. He had always been accustomed to invent plots for other people, and to compose such anecdotes as were needed to ill.u.s.trate his conversation and to give it an historical basis. Mr. Sherard says that he used to devise stories, sometimes as many as six in a morning, for his brother William to write.

It occurred to him to write some of these tales himself, and, using the conventions of the popular magazine fiction of his day, yet find means to indulge his mind with the ingenious play in which it delighted. Three of these tales need detain no student of Wilde. 'The Canterville Ghost'

is just so boisterous as to miss its balance, but, because it is about Americans, is very popular in America. 'The Sphinx without a Secret'

betrays its secret in its t.i.tle. 'The Model Millionaire' is an empty little thing no better than the popular tales it tries to imitate. 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime,' however, is not only remarkable as an indication of what Wilde was to do both as a dramatist and as a storyteller, but is itself a delightful piece of buffoonery. Wilde is so serious. The readers of The Family Herald are fond of Lords, and so the story begins with a reception at Bentinck House, a delightful parody of the popular descriptions of such a function. "It was certainly a wonderful medley of people. Gorgeous peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals, popular preachers brushed coat-tails with eminent sceptics, a perfect bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima-donna from room to room, on the staircase stood several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists, and it was said that at one time the supper-room was absolutely crammed with geniuses." There was a cheiromantist, and a d.u.c.h.ess, who, on learning that he was present, "began looking about for a small tortoisesh.e.l.l fan and a very tattered lace shawl, so as to be ready to go at a moment's notice." The plot is no less moral than simple. Lord Arthur Savile learns from the palmist that at some period of his life it is decreed that he shall commit a murder. Unwilling to marry while a potential criminal, he sets about committing the murder at once, to get it over, and be able to marry with the easy conscience of one who knows that his duty has been satisfactorily performed. He tries to kill a charming aunt with a sugared pill, and a benevolent uncle with an explosive clock, and, failing in both these essays, "oppressed with the barrenness of good intentions," walks miserably on the Embankment, where he finds Mr.

Podgers, the cheiromantist, observing the river. "A brilliant idea flashed across him, and he stole softly up behind. In a moment he had seized Mr. Podgers by the legs, and flung him into the Thames. There was a coa.r.s.e oath, a heavy splash, and all was still. Lord Arthur looked anxiously over, but could see nothing of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an eddy of moonlit water. After a time it also sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible. Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky misshapen figure striking out for the staircase by the bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a cloud it pa.s.sed away. At last he seemed to have realised the decree of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and Sybil's name came to his lips." Like much of Wilde's work, this story is very clever talk, an elaborated anecdote, told with flickering irony, a cigarette now and again lifted to the lips. But, already, a dramatist is learning to use this irony in dialogue, and a decorative artist is restraining his buoyant cleverness, to use it for more subtle purposes. There is a delicate description of dawn in Piccadilly, with the waggons on their way to Covent Garden, white-smocked carters, and a boy with primroses in a battered hat, riding a big grey horse--a promise of the fairy stories.

The vegetables against the sky are ma.s.ses of jade, "ma.s.ses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose." And, too, over the sudden death of Mr. Podgers "the moon peered through a mane of tawny clouds, as if it were a lion's eye, and innumerable stars spangled the hollow vault, like gold dust powdered on a purple dome."

_The Happy Prince and other Tales_, published in 1888, with pictures by Jacomb Hood and Walter Crane, are very married stories. In reading them, I cannot help feeling that Wilde wrote one of them as an experiment, to show, I suppose, that he could have been Hans Andersen if he had liked, and his wife importuned him to make a book of things so charming, so good, and so true. He made the book, and there is one beautiful thing in it, 'The Happy Prince,' which was, I suspect, the first he wrote. The rest, except, perhaps, 'The Selfish Giant,' a delightful essay in Christian legend, are tales whose morals are a little too obvious even for grown-up people. Children are less willing to be made good. Wilde was himself perfectly aware of his danger, and, no doubt, got some pleasure out of saying so, at the end of the story called 'The Devoted Friend': "'I am rather afraid that I have annoyed him,' answered the Linnet. 'The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.' 'Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do,' said the Duck. And I quite agree with her." There is a moral in 'The Happy Prince,' but there is this difference between that story and the others, that it is quite clear that Wilde wanted to write it. It is Andersen, treated exactly as Wilde treated Milton in the volume of 1881, only with more a.s.surance, and a greater certainty about his own contribution. We recognise Wilde by the decorative effects that are scattered throughout the book. He preferred a lyrical pattern to a prosaic perspective, and, even more than his wit, his love of decoration is the distinguishing quality of his work. Andersen might well have invented the story of the swallow who died to repay the statue for jewelled eyes and gold-leaf mail given to the poor of the town of which he had once been the Happy and unseeing Prince, but he would never have let the swallow say: "The King is there in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen and embalmed in spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are withered leaves." And only a swallow belonging to the author of _The Sphinx_ would have said, "To-morrow my friends will fly up to the second Cataract. The river horse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the G.o.d Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the water's edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the Cataract."

In the next year he was again amusing himself with fairy tales, writing this time a book alone in English literature; a book of tales not intended for the British child but for those grown-up people who shared Wilde's own enjoyment of brilliant-coloured fantasy. He had learnt to control his invention, although he did not choose to do without a tuning fork. Andersen still struck the note to which Wilde sang, but Flaubert had been his singing master, and the curious and beautiful tales collected in _A House of Pomegranates_ are like what I imagine "The Snow Queen" would have been, if it had been written by the author of "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier." In 'The Infanta's Birthday,' where one of Goya's grotesques dances before a painting by Velasquez, the flowers pa.s.s their opinions on the dwarf quite in the Danish manner. In 'The Star-child': "The Earth is going to be married, and this is her bridal dress,"

whispered the Turtle-doves to each other. "Their little pink feet were quite frost-bitten, but they felt that it was their duty to take a romantic view of the situation." That is surely written by the ghost of Andersen's English translator. But 'The Star-child' ends with the firm, aloof touch of Flaubert, who would not tolerate "quite": "Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the s.p.a.ce of three years, he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly." I remember the end of "Herodias" on just such a distant note: "Et tous les trois, ayant pris la tete de Iaokanaan, s'en allerent du cote de la Galilee. Comme elle etait tres lourde, ils la portaient alternativement." And the picture of the leper in this story is almost a transcription of that in "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier": "Over his face hung a cowl of grey linen, and through the eyelets his eyes gleamed like red coals." And Flaubert: "Il etait enveloppe d'une toile en lambeaux, la figure pareille a un masque de platre et les deux yeux plus rouge que des charbons." I do not suggest that one is a copy of the other; but I think that Wilde remembered that clay mask with gleaming eyes, and mistook it for a creation of his own whose eyes shone through a grey linen cowl.

It is hardly worth while so to carry the study of influence into detail.

Wilde wrote, with the pen of Flaubert, stories that might have been imagined by Andersen, and sometimes one and sometimes the other touches his hand. It is not impossible that Baudelaire was also present. But all this does not much concern us, except that by subtraction we may come to what we seek, which is the personal, elusive, but unmistakable quality contributed by Wilde himself.

This is, secondarily, a round mellowness of voice, a smooth solidity of suggested movement, a delight in magnificence; and, primarily, a wonderful feeling for decorative effect. This last is Wilde's peculiar contribution to literature. His contribution to thought, his exegesis of the critical att.i.tude, is another matter. But this feeling for decoration, that made him see life itself as a tapestry of ordered and beautiful movements caught in gold and dyed silk, that made him incapable of realizing that life was not so, until at last it became too strong and tore his canvas, was itself enough to prevent the picturesque figure of the dandy from obliterating the artist in the minds of posterity. It is scarcely twenty years since Wilde wrote his books, and, in poetry as well as in prose, their influence is already becoming so common as not to be recognized. The historian of the period will have to trace what he may call "The Decorative Movement in Literature" to the works of Wilde, and through them to the Pre-Raphaelite pictures and poems, whose ideals he so fantastically misrepresents.

I have implied a distinction between decoration and realism that I have not clearly defined. This distinction is not, though it has often been held to be, a distinction between two different kinds of art, between which runs a sharp dividing line. It is rather a recognition of opposite ends of a scale, like the recognition of heat and cold, both degrees of temperature, but without intrinsic superiority one over the other. In painting we thus distinguish between the attempt to imitate and the willingness (not the intention) to suggest nature. This distinction is best expressed in the old simile of the window and the wall. Some pictures represent a pattern on a wall: some pictures represent a vision through a window. In some we look at the canvas: in others we look through the frame. Some are decorative: some are realistic. Many painters have wished that their pictures should not be found wanting when compared with the pictures of similar subjects that each spectator paints with the brushes and palette of his own brain. Sometimes this desire has been carried so far as to preclude all others. Painters do not usually read Berkeley, and there have been some who forgot that there was no such thing as a world outside their brains, and cared only to be recognised as faithful portrait-painters of nature: that is to say, of what all spectators see, or can see, by training their observation. There have been critics, too, like Ruskin, who have chosen to compare painters by their fidelity to this external and observable nature. But painters have other things to do than photograph, other things to do than to select from what a camera would represent.

Sometimes the idea of imitation fades away, and they are willing, no more, to suggest lilies by a convention, and to distort even the human figure, while they concern themselves with harmonies in which the shapes of flower or figure sound merely incidental notes. We must not forget that these are extremes in a single scale, and that all painting is to some extent realistic, to some extent decorative. Its extremes are wholly imitative in aim, and dull, and wholly conventional in aim, and empty. We call the two aims realism and decoration for our convenience.

In literature it is possible to trace a similar double aim, separate from but a.n.a.logous to the duality in speech that we shall have to examine in a later chapter. There are books subservient to what we call reality, and books for which reality is no more than an excuse, books that follow nature, and books that cast nature into their own mould, and, delighting in no accidental harmonies, bend nature to the patterns that please them, and heighten or lower her colours for their private purposes of beautiful creation. Even in music we can trace these tendencies: there is music that humbly follows the moods of man, and music whose serenely indifferent patterns compel the dancing attendance of those moods.

We have observed in _The Sphinx_ the decorative character of Wilde's work. These tales provide the best examples of it that are to be found in his prose. To the woodcutters looking down from the forest, the Earth seemed "like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold."

The young fisherman speaks to the witch of his "_painted_ boat," and his author is no less aloof from realism. When the young fisherman forgets his nets and his cunning, as he listens to the sweet voice of the mermaid, Wilde writes: "Vermilion finned and with eyes of bossy gold, the tunnies went by in shoals, but he heeded them not." Now that is a picture that the young fisherman could not see. Nor can we see it, unless the fisherman is a figure on a tapestry, sewn in st.i.tches of bright-coloured thread. Above him three undulating lines are waves, and between them four tunnies, twisting unanimous tails, show their vermilion fins and their eyes of gilded metal, skilfully bedded in the canvas.

Wilde, always perfectly self-conscious, was not unaware of this difference between his own writing and that of most of his contemporaries. When _Dorian Gray_ was attacked for immorality, Wilde wrote, in a letter to a paper: "My story is an essay on decorative art.

It reacts against the brutality of plain realism." _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was written for publication in a magazine. Seven chapters were added to it to make it long enough for publication as a novel, because those who buy books, like those who buy pictures, are unable to distinguish between size and quality, and imagine that value depends upon area. The preface was written to answer a.s.sailants of the morality of the story in its first form, and included only when it was printed as a book. These circ.u.mstances partly explain the lack of proportion, and of cohesion, that mars, though it does not spoil, the first French novel to be written in the English language. England has a traditional novel-form with which even the greatest students of human comedy and tragedy square their work. In France there is no such tradition, with the result that the novel is a plastic form, moulded in the most various ways by the most various minds. After all, it is a question of name, and it is impossible without elaborate and tedious qualification to discuss cla.s.sifications of literature. They should not be made, or they should be made differently, for, at present, they deal only with superficial resemblances, depending, sometimes, upon nothing more essential than the price for which a book is sold. They have, however, a distinct influence upon production. In France, Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint Antoine,"

that wonderful dream in which so many strange dialogues are overheard, Remy de Gourmont's "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," that delightful speculative mirage, and Huysmans' "a Rebours," that phantasmagoria of intellectual experience, are all included in publishers' lists of novels and sold as such. Publishers in England are not so catholic. Whatever the reason may be, economical, depending upon the publisher, traditional, depending on the writer, Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was the first novel for many years to be written in England with that freedom in choice of matter and manner that has for a long time been in no way extraordinary in France. It has, so far, had no successor free as itself from the enforced interest in a love affair, to which we have grown so mournfully accustomed.

The story of the book is a fantastic invention like that of Balzac's "Le Peau de Chagrin," in which the sc.r.a.p of skin from a wild a.s.s shrinks with each wish of its possessor. The picture of Dorian Gray, painted by his friend, ages with the lines of cruelty, l.u.s.t and hypocrisy that should mar its ever-youthful subject. He, remaining as beautiful as when at twenty-one he had inspired the painter with a masterpiece, walks in the ways of men, sullying his soul, whose bodily reflection records neither his age nor his sins. It is the sort of invention that would have pleased Hawthorne, and the book itself is written with the marked ethical sympathy that Wilde, in his preface, denounced as "an unpardonable mannerism of style." Perhaps the reason why it was so loudly accused of immorality was that in the popular mind luxury and sin are closely allied, and the unpardonable mannerism that made him preach, in a parable, against the one, did not hide his whole-hearted delight in describing the other.

The preface, inspired by the hostility the book aroused, is an essay not in the gentle art of making enemies, but in that of annoying them when made. If his critics tell him that his book leers with the eyes of foulness and dribbles with the lips of prurience, Wilde replies, with an ambiguity as disturbing as his smile, that "it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors," and again that "the highest, as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography." His arrows are not angrily tipped with poison, but are not for that the less displeasing to those against whom they are directed. They are weighted not with anger but with aesthetic theory. They are so far separate from the story that they are best discussed with the essays of _Intentions_.

There are a few strange books that share the magic of some names, like Cornelius Agrippa, Raymond Lully, and Paracelsus, names that possibly mean more to us before than after we have investigated the works and personalities that lie behind them. These books are mysterious and kept, like mysteries, for peculiar moods. They are not books for every day, nor even for every night. We keep them for rare moments, as we keep in a lacquer cabinet some crystal-shrined thread of subtle perfume, or some curious gem, to be a solace in a mood that does not often recur, or, perhaps, to be an instrument in its evocation. _Dorian Gray_, for all its faults, is such a book. It is unbalanced; and that is a fault. It is a mosaic hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and took and used in his work whatever sc.r.a.p of jasper, or porphyry or broken flint was put into his hand; and that is not a virtue. But in it there is an individual essence, a private perfume, a colour whose secret has been lost. There are moods whose consciousness that essence, perfume, colour, is needed to intensify.

There is little need to discuss the minutiae of the book; to point out that its sayings occur in Wilde's plays, poems, reviews and dialogues; that it is, as it were, an epitome of his wit before and after the fact; that the eleventh chapter is a wonderful condensation of a main theme in "a Rebours," like an impression of a concerto rendered by a virtuoso upon a violin. There is no need to emphasize Wilde's delight in colour and fastidious luxury, as well as in a most amusing kind of dandyism: in the opening scene the studio curtains are of tussore silk, the dust is golden that dances in the sunlight, tea is poured from a fluted Georgian urn, there is a heavy scent of roses, the blossoms of the laburnum are honey-coloured as well as honey-sweet, Lord Henry Wotton reclines on a divan of Persian saddlebags, and taps "the toe of his patent-leather boot with a ta.s.selled ebony cane." There is no need to point out any of these things, but they help to justify what I have already said, and to define the indefinable character of the book. Lord Henry Wotton would have liked to write "a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal." Wilde tried to write it, and very nearly succeeded.

Wilde's second period of swift development began towards the end of 1888. This, perhaps, explains the sentence in 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison'--"One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin." His personality was, certainly, intensified when he became an habitual devotee of the vice for which he was imprisoned. He had first experimented in that vice in 1886; his experiments became a habit in 1889, and in that year he published 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison' and 'The Decay of Lying,' revised _The Sphinx_, and wrote some, at least, of the stories in _A House of Pomegranates_; these were immediately followed by 'The Critic as Artist' and _Salome_.

These things are among his best work. It is possible that a consciousness of separation from the common life of men is a sufficient explanation of an increased vividness in a man's self, a heightened ardour of production. Is Wilde's exceptional activity in those years to be attributed to an eagerness to justify himself by other men's admiration, of which he had never been careless? Was he eager to bring mankind to his side? "It is the spectator, not life, that art really mirrors." This sentence must now be applied to himself, when we consider _The Portrait of Mr. W. H._ That narrative, now printed at the end of _Lord Arthur Savile's Crime_, and first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1889, is an essay in criticism.

Wilde read something of himself into Shakespeare's sonnets, and, in reading, became fascinated by a theory that he was unable to prove.

Where another man would, perhaps, have written a short, serious essay, and whistled his theory down the wind that carries the dead leaves of Shakespeare's commentators, Wilde tosses it as a belief between three brains, and allows it to unfold itself as the background to a story. The three brains are the narrator, Cyril Graham, and Erskine. Graham discovers the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets in a boy-actor called Will Hughes, and by diligent examination of internal evidence, almost persuades Erskine to believe him. Erskine, however, demands a proof, and Graham finds one for him in a portrait of Will Hughes nailed to an old wooden chest. Erskine is persuaded, but discovers that the picture is a forgery, whereupon Graham, explaining that he had only had it made for Erskine's satisfaction, leaves the picture to his friend, protests that the forgery in no way invalidates the theory, and kills himself as a proof of his good faith. Erskine, disbelieving, tells all this to the narrator, who instantly sets to work on the sonnets, finds a quant.i.ty of further evidence, but none that sets beyond question the existence in Elizabethan times of a boy-actor called William Hughes. He writes Erskine a letter of pa.s.sionate reasoning, that, while persuading Erskine, wipes away his own belief. He finds that he has become an infidel to the theory of which he has been a successful advocate. It was a favourite idea of Wilde's, and the motive of _La Sainte Courtisane_, that to slough off a belief like a snake's skin, one has only to convert someone else to it. I need not further a.n.a.lyse the story, which is merely the mechanism that Wilde used for the display of the evidence to which he desired to draw attention.

It would be impossible to build an airier castle in Spain than this of the imaginary William Hughes; impossible, too, to build one so delightfully designed. The prose and the reasoning seem things of ivory, Indian-carved, through which the rarest wind of criticism may freely blow and carry delicate scents away without disturbing the yet more delicate fabric. Wilde a.s.sumes that Shakespeare addressed the sonnets to William Hughes, and, that a.s.sumption granted (though there is no William Hughes to be found), colours his theory with an abundance of persuasive touches, to strengthen what is, at first, only a courtesy belief. Though all his argument is special pleading, Wilde contrives to make you feel that counsel knows, though he cannot prove, that his client is in the right. The evidence is only for the jury. You are inclined to interrupt him with the exclamation that you are already convinced. But it is a pleasure to listen to him, so you let him go on. After all, "brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is like hitting below the intellect." Wilde's _Portrait of Mr. W. H._ is more than a refutable theory, a charming piece of speculation. It is an ill.u.s.tration of the critic as artist, a foretaste of _Intentions_. It is better than 'The Truth of Masks,' as good as 'The Decay of Lying.' Yet it was not printed in that book, where it might well have had a place.

The reason for this is not uninteresting. Wilde did not intend to reprint it as it stood. The theory beneath that delicate brain-play had a lasting fascination for him, and, with its proofs, grew in his mind till it overbalanced Cyril Graham and doubting Erskine. He re-wrote it at greater length, after delays. When he was arrested, the publishers, who had already announced it as a forthcoming book, returned it to his house, whence it disappeared on the day of the enforced sale of his effects. It has never been recovered.

VI

INTENTIONS

Mrs. Malaprop cla.s.ses paradoxes with Greek, Hebrew, simony and fluxions as inflammatory branches of learning, and, in _De Profundis_, Wilde says: "What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the realm of pa.s.sion." Paradox and perversity were matches to set fire to his thought and his dreams. But paradox is not in itself different from direct speech. It is made by the statement of a result and the omission of the steps of reasoning by which that result has been achieved. When somebody accused Jean Moreas, that brilliant Greek, of being paradoxical, he replied: "I do not know what paradox is; I believe it is the name which imbeciles give to the truth." Wilde might have made a similar answer, and perhaps did. His paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths. Those of them that were thought the wildest are already becoming obvious, for unfamiliarity is a temporal quality like flowers in a road: when a mult.i.tude has pa.s.sed that way the flowers are trodden out of sight. Paradox is, however, a proof of vitality and adventurous thought, and these things are sometimes the companions of charm. Unfamiliar truth was, at first, the most noticeable characteristic of Wilde's _Intentions_, but, though paradox may fade to commonplace, "age cannot wither nor custom stale" the fresh and debonair personality that keeps the book alive, tossing thoughts like roses, and playing with them in happiness of heart.

There is something of the undergraduate about the book. Its pages might be reprinted from a college magazine in which a genius was stretching youthful limbs, instead of from such staid and respectable reviews as The Fortnightly and The Nineteenth Century. It belongs to the days when the most natural thing in life is to talk until "the dusky night rides down the sky," and the pale morning light mocks at our yellow lamp.

Indeed, I think that such freshness and vivacity of writing is the gift of those authors only who are also talkers. They are accustomed to see their sentences in company, not in solitude. They give them a pleasing strut and swagger and teach them to make graceful entries and exits neither too ceremonious nor yet disorderly. Their sentences are men of the world, and of a world where the pa.s.sport to success is charm. It is not so with lecturers or preachers, whose office puts them in a different category. But men who talk for their own enjoyment and that of those who listen to them are less likely than the others to compose by eye instead of by ear. It is actually difficult to read Wilde in silence. His sentences lift the voice as well as the thoughts of their writer from the printed page.

Wilde loved speech for its own sake, and nothing could be more characteristic of his gift than his choice of that old and inexhaustible form that Plato, Lucian, Erasmus and Landor, to name only a few, have turned to such different purposes. Dialogue is at once personal and impersonal. "By its means he (the thinker) can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous afterthoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance." Nothing could better describe Wilde's own essays in dialogue.

The first of these essays is 'The Decay of Lying,' in which a young gentleman called Vivian reads aloud an article on that subject to a slightly older and rather incredulous young gentleman called Cyril, commenting as he reads, answering objections, and sometimes laying the ma.n.u.script on his knees as he follows the swift-flying swallow of his thought through the airy mazes of her joyous exercise. Vivian holds a brief for the artist against the nature that he is supposed to imitate.

He behaves like a lawyer, first picking his opponent to pieces, lest the jury should be prejudiced in his favour, and then proving his own case in so far as it is possible to prove it. The dialogue is a delightful thing in itself: it is also of the first importance to the student of Wilde's theories of art. Under its insouciance and extravagance lie many of the ideas that dictated his att.i.tude as writer and as critic. Vivian begins by opposing the comfort of a Morris chair to the discomfort of nature's insect-ridden gra.s.s, and complains that nature is as indifferent to her cultured critic as to cow or burdock--which is not to be borne. He then, a little more seriously, envisages the history of art as a long warfare between the simian instinct of imitation and the G.o.d-like instinct of self-expression. He needs to show that fine art does not imitate, and points out that j.a.panese painting, of which, at that time, everybody was talking, does not concern itself with j.a.pan, and that the j.a.pan we imagine for ourselves with the help of willow-pattern plates and the drawings of Hokusai is no more real in one sense and no less real in another than the slit-eyed girl of Gautier's "Chinoiserie," who lives in a porcelain tower above the Yellow River and the long-necked cormorants. Our ideal j.a.pan has existed only in the minds of the artists who saw it, and when we cross the seas to look for it, we find nothing but a few fans and coloured lanterns. But that is not enough. We continually see lovely things in nature, strangely like the things we see in books and pictures. There is plagiary here, on one side or on the other, and, with almost ecstatic courage, Vivian announces that, so far from art holding the mirror to nature (a view advanced by Hamlet as a proof of his insanity), nature imitates art. He may have taken the hint from Musset, for Fortunio, in the comedy of that name, exclaims with melancholy criticism: "Comme ce soleil couchant est manque ce soir. Regarde moi un pen ce vallee la-bas, ces quatre ou cinq mechants nuages qui grimpent sur cette montagne. Je faisais des paysages comme celui-la, quand j'avais douze ans, sur la couverture de mes livres de cla.s.se." But he made the statement in no spirit of extravagance. It seemed to him that we observe in nature what art has taught us to see, and he chose that way of saying so. He elaborates it delightfully, so that people may forget he has spoken the truth. Fogs, for example, did not exist till art had invented them. "Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis." Then he runs on for a few pages, ill.u.s.trating these wise saws with modern and ingenious instances of life hurrying after fiction, reproducing the opening of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," setting an unreal Becky Sharp beside Thackeray's creation, and going so far, indeed, as to trip up the heels of a serial story with the sordid actuality of fact.

He discusses Zola and his no less heavy-footed disciples, who stand for the failure of imitation and are the best proofs that the mirror cracks when the artist holds it up to anything except himself. Cyril suggests that Balzac was a realist, and Vivian quotes Baudelaire's saying, that "his very scullions have genius," compares him to Holbein, and points out that he is far more real than life. "A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades."

Then comes an objection to modernity of form, and some reasons for that objection that suggest a very interesting speculation. He thinks that Balzac's love for modernity of form prevented him from producing any single book that can rank with the masterpieces of romantic art. And then:--"The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them an unsuitable subject for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of Art." These words seemed, in 1889, to be both daring and precarious. The influence of philosophy is not so immediate as is sometimes supposed. It is not extravagant to find in those few words a reflection, direct or indirect, of Immanuel Kant, who, writing in 1790, said that what is called beautiful is the object of a delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate reference to our own circ.u.mstances or possible circ.u.mstances, so far from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our judgment. In the Preface to _Dorian Gray_, that little flaunting compendium of Wilde's aesthetics, it is easy to trace the ideas of Kant, divested of their technical phrasing, freed from their background of reasoning and their foreground of accurate explanation. For example:--"No artist desires to prove anything." This balances Kant's banishment of concepts from the beautiful. For another:--"All art is quite useless." This balances Kant's distinction between the beautiful and the good. This is not the place for any worthy discussion of the relation between the theory and the practice of art; but it is interesting to notice that what was temperamentally true for Wilde, and therefore peculiarly his own, had been logically true for a philosopher a hundred years before. Coleridge, whose originality there is no more need to question than Wilde's, gave Kant's ideas a different colouring.

Is it that the philosopher is unable to apply in detail what the artist is unable to conceive as a whole?

It is important to remember that throughout this dialogue, Wilde is speaking of pure art, a thing which possibly does not exist, and, recognising it as an ideal towards which all artists should aspire, is engaged in pointing out the more obvious means of falling short of it.

He achieves a triumph, of a kind in which he delighted, by making people read of such a subject. Not wishing to be laughed at by the British intellect, and wishing to be listened to, he laughs at it instead, and, near the end of the dialogue, is so daring as to present it with a picture of what is occurring, confident that the individual will disclaim the general, and smile without annoyance at the caricature. "The stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, _La Chimere_, dances round it and calls to it with her false flute-toned voice." And the individual reader did not understand, and Wilde danced away until he felt inclined again to make him listen to the flute-toned enunciation of unfamiliar truths.

'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' the essay on Wainewright, not in dialogue, has some of the hard angular outlines of the set article on book or public character. It fills these outlines, however, with picturesque detail and half-ironic speculation. It is impossible not to notice the resemblance between the subject of this essay and its author. It is difficult not to suspect that Wilde, in setting in clear perspective Wainewright's poisoning and writing, in estimating the possible power of crime to intensify a personality, was a.n.a.lysing himself, and expressing through a psychological account of another man the results of that a.n.a.lysis. Perhaps, in that essay we have less a.n.a.lysis than hypothesis.

Wilde may have happened on the Life of Wainewright, and taken it, among all the books he had read, as a kind of Virgilian omen. My metaphor, as Dr. Chasuble would say, is drawn from Virgil. It used to be customary among those who wished to look into the future to open the works of that poet and to observe the lines covered by the thumb: "which lines, if in any way applicable to one's condition, were accounted prophetic." I think it possible that Wilde looked upon the little account of Wainewright that gave him a basis for his article as just such a prophetic intimation. He may have written the article to taste his future before the fact. Anyhow, he foreshadows the line of defence to be taken by his own apologists when he exclaims that "the fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose." In any discussion of the influence that Wilde's disease or crime exerted on his art, this essay would be a valuable piece of evidence. But in other things than the engaging in a secret activity, Wainewright offered Wilde a curious parallel with himself. He too introduced a new manner in writing by a new manner in dress, and Wilde was able to use his own emotions in the presence of blue china to vitalize the piece of Dutch painting, a Gabriel Metsu or a Jan van Eyck, in which he paints Wainewright with his cats, his curiosities, his crucifixes, his rare books, his cameos, and his "brown-biscuit tea-pots, filigree worked," against a background in which green predominates. "He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals." Wilde also was fond of green. I have not counted occasions, but I have the impression that green is the colour most often mentioned alike in his verse and in his prose. Green and jade: these are his keynotes in colour, unless I am mistaken, and in these matters impressions are less likely to err than mathematics.

But the most striking and beautiful thing in _Intentions_ is that dialogue between the two young men in a library whose windows look over the kaleidoscopic swirl of Piccadilly to the trees and lawns of the Green Park. They talk through the summer night, supping delicately on ortolans and Chambertin, and, in the early morning, draw the curtains, see the silver ribbon of the road, the purple mist among the trees, and walk down to Covent Garden to look at the roses that have come in from the country. There is something of Boccaccio in that setting, something, too, of Landor in the lucid sentences of their talk, and something of Walter Pater in the choice of the fruit they so idly pluck from the tree of knowledge. But Pater could not have let their conversation change so easily from smooth to ripple and from ripple to smooth; Landor would have caught the ripples and carved them in transparent moonstone, and Boccaccio would have given them girls to talk of, instead of "The Critic as Artist."

That would seem to be a question for the learned and not for two young exquisites with a taste for music and books and an aesthetic dislike of the German language. But the only critical dialogue in English literature that is at all comparable with Wilde's is "The Impartial Critick" of John Dennis, who was ready to prove that choruses were unnecessary in tragedy, that Wycherley excelled Plautus, and that Shakespeare himself was not so bad as Thomas Rymer had painted him. And there too we have young men, not themselves authors, talking for pleasure's sake, drinking with discretion, now in their lodgings, now at The Old Devil and now at The c.o.c.k, reading aloud to each other and commenting verse by verse on Mr. Waller, whom they admit to be "a great Genius and a gallant Writer." There is a delightful savour about that dialogue, dry as some of the questions were that those two young sparks discussed with such wet throats. There is a suggestion of the town outside and the country beyond, of stage-coaches pa.s.sing through the Haymarket, and of Hampshire gentlemen "being forbid by the perpetual Rains to follow the daily labour of their Country Sports," handing about their Brimmers within doors, "as fast as if they had done it for Exercise." And those young men talk with just the fine superiority of Ernest and Gilbert to the authordom whose rules and persons they amuse themselves by discussing.

Ernest and Gilbert are, however, better talkers. In fact, their talk is far too good really to have been heard. They set their excellence as a barrier between themselves and life. Not for a moment will they forget that they are the creatures of art: not for a moment will they leave that calm air for the dust and turmoil of human argument. Wilde was never so sure of his art as in this dialogue, where Ernest, that ethereal Sancho Panza, and Gilbert, that rather languid Don Quixote, tilt for their hearer's joy. They share the power of visualization that made Wilde's own talk like a continuous fairy tale. They turn their ideas into a coloured pageantry, and all the G.o.ds of Greece and characters of art are ready to grace by their visible presence the exposition, whether of the ideas that are to be confuted or of those that are to take their place. "In the best days of art," says Ernest, "there were no art critics," and four pages follow in which the sculptor releases the sleeping figures from the marble, Phaedrus bathes his feet in the nymph-haunted meadow, the little figures of Tanagra are shaped with bone or wooden tool from river clay, Artemis and her hounds are cut upon a veined sardonyx, the wanderings of Odysseus are stained upon the plaster, and round the earthen wine-jar Bacchus dances and Silenus sprawls.

"But no," says Gilbert, "the Greeks were a nation of art-critics." He balances with a sequence of ideas his friend's pageant of pictures. The Greeks criticized language, and "Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and pa.s.sion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticized nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts." And so the talk goes on. There is but one defect in this panoramic method of presenting ideas. Each time that Wilde empties, or seems to spill before us, his wonderful cornucopia of coloured imagery, he seems to build a wave that towers like the blue and silver billow of Hokusai's print. Now, surely, it will break, we say, and are tempted to echo Cyril in 'The Decay of Lying,' when, at the close of one of these miraculous paragraphs, he remarks, "I like that. I can see it. Is that the end?" Too many of Wilde's paragraphs are perorations.

It is easy, in remembering the colour and rhythm of this dialogue, to forget the subtlety of its construction, the richness of its matter, and the care that Wilde brought to the consideration of his subject. I have pleased myself by working out a scheme of its contents, such as Wilde may have used in building it. Perhaps I could have found no better method of ill.u.s.trating the qualities I have mentioned.

He begins with a story in the memoirs of an Academician, and, without telling it, goes on to praise autobiographies and biographies and egotism, in order to induce a frame of mind in the reader that shall make him ready to consider without too much hostility a peculiarly subjective form of art. He winds into his subject like a serpent, as Goldsmith said of Burke, by way of music, returning to the story told by the Academician, which is allowed to suggest a remark on the uselessness of art-criticism. The ideas follow in some such order as this. Bad Criticism. The Browning Society as an example. Browning. A swift and skilful return to the point at issue. The Greeks not art critics. The Greeks a nation of art critics. Life and Literature the highest arts.

Walter Pater. Greek criticism of language and the test of the spoken word. Blind Milton writing by ear alone. Example of Greek criticism in Aristotle's "Poetics." Identification of the creative and critical faculties. All fine art is self-conscious. Criticism as such more difficult than creation. Action and reverie. Sin an element of progress, because it intensifies the individuality. The world made by the singer for the dreamer. Criticism itself art, a form of autobiography concerned with thoughts not events. Criticism purely subjective, and so independent of obvious subject. For examples, Ruskin's prose independent of his views on Turner; Pater's description of Mona Lisa independent of the intention of Leonardo. "The meaning of a beautiful created thing is as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it." Music. "Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods." The highest criticism "criticizes not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely." A work of art is to the critic a suggestion for a new work of his own. Modern painting. Too intelligible pictures do not challenge the critic.

Imitation and suggestion. "The aesthetic critic rejects those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile." At this point, supper, with a promise to discuss the critic as interpreter. Part II picks up the discussion and continues. Works of art need interpretation. A true appreciation of Milton, for example, impossible without scholarship. But the truth of a critic's interpretation depends on the intensity of his own personality.

All arts have their critics. The actor a critic of the drama. The executant a critic of the composer. Critics "will be always showing us the work of art in some new relation to our age." Tendency towards finding experience in art rather than in life. Life a failure from the artistic point of view, if only because a moment of life can never be lived again, whereas in literature, one can be sure of finding the particular emotion for which one looks. A pageantry of the things that have been happening in Dante for six hundred years. Baudelaire and others. The transference of emotion. Not through life but through art can we realize perfection. The immorality of art. "For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society." A further comparison between action and contemplation. Ernest asks, "We exist, then, to do nothing," and Gilbert answers, "It is to do nothing that the elect exist." There follows one of the few pa.s.sages that contains any outspoken mention of a decadence. (This word was freely used as a label in England and France at this time.) "But we who are born at the close of this wonderful age are at once too cultured and too critical, too intellectually subtle and too curious of exquisite pleasures, to accept any speculations about life in exchange for life itself." "In the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective life of the race."

Heredity, "the only one of the G.o.ds whose real name we know," brings gifts of strange temperaments and impossible desires, and the power of living a thousand lives. Imagination is "concentrated race-experience."