Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study Part 8

In _De Profundis_ he tries to make his friend realize what he has scarcely realized himself; the depth of his fall, the twilight in his cell, the twilight in his heart, the nature of suffering, the nature of the sorrow that does not allow itself to be forgotten. He writes pa.s.sages so poignant as to blind us to their beauty, for sorrow is no less sorrow when it walks in purple than when in rags it lies in the dust. Then, after showing the ruins of his life, he paints a picture, no less poignant, of himself rebuilding that broken edifice with those things that he has. .h.i.therto rejected. He has learnt, he tells himself, the value of pain and the virtue of humility. He has once believed that pain was a blemish on creation, and that the sobbing of a child made the G.o.ds hide their faces for shame. He now believes that suffering is a means for the purification of the spirit, a fire through which vessels of clay must pa.s.s to their perfection. And, for humility, he discovers that there is no defiance so lofty as that of self-accusation. He has been told to forget who he is; life in prison almost compels him to rebellion; but he has learnt that only by remembering his ident.i.ty, by s.h.i.+fting to his own shoulders the burden of his disaster, and by an absolute acceptance of all that has happened in and to him, will he be able to win the pride that humility confers and that rebellion makes impossible.

This purpose, to give his life the unity he demanded from a poem; these motives, of suffering and humility, run waveringly through _De Profundis_, carrying with them here and there fragments of mournful experience. Through them he came to contemplate Christ, not only as a type of humility and suffering, but also as an example of one whose life was a work of art. In such books as _De Profundis_, the continuous wandering speech of a mind following itself, some paragraphs seem to withdraw themselves a little, as the keynotes of the rest. Such paragraphs are, I think, those in which he wrote of Christ as the supreme artist, of Christ's influence on art, and of his philosophy as Wilde interpreted it. These paragraphs have seemed blasphemous to some and unreasonable to others. I cannot consider them more blasphemous than a Madonna and Child by Murillo, or a Christ and his Father by Milton, or more unreasonable than those persons who are unable to perceive that religion, no less than the Sabbath, was made for man, and not for the delectation of the Almighty.

Man makes G.o.d in his own image, or as he would like himself to be, and, as man's image changes, so is his G.o.d continually recast. Wilde's prose-poem of the artist and the bronze is the story of the making and remaking of religion. The Christ of the Roman slaves who escaped from their masters' rods to wors.h.i.+p their G.o.d in cellars was indeed a Man of Sorrows, who found in misery and low estate the means of creating loveliness. As they hoped, he promised, and each labourer's penny was minted with the superscription he had himself designed. With the renaissance of joy came new Christs. One taught the Irish monks to build their wattled cells. Another, delighting in richness no less than in simplicity, designed the stone lacework of the French cathedrals. Later, the sombre, fiery Calvin saw a divinity of black and scarlet. Milton's G.o.d conceived humanity as an epic, whose conclusion must neither be hurried nor delayed. There have been G.o.ds of war and G.o.ds of peace, changing with man's desires. It is for that reason that we are warned to make no graven images, lest we should commit ourselves to a G.o.d of a single mood. It was quite natural that the Christ whom Wilde saw, as he sat on the wooden bench in his cell and turned the pages of his Greek Testament, should be a Christ who showed that in all the acts of his life there had been hope, a Christ who perceived "the enormous importance of living completely for the moment," swept aside the tyranny of orthodoxy, and "regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection."

Wilde expresses his conception with incomparable wit and charm. When he speaks of Christ's love of the sinner, he remarks that "the conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement." On Christ's view that "one should not bother too much over affairs," he comments, "the birds didn't, why should man?" And again: "The beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a better reason for his being sent there. The people who work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun.

Why shouldn't they? Probably no one deserved anything." And I cannot refrain from reminding myself by writing it down, of his beautiful comparison of the Greek Testament with the version that endless repet.i.tion without choice of occasion has made an empty noise in our ears: "When one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some narrow and dark house." It pleased him to accept the not generally received view of some scholars, that Greek was the language actually spoken by Christ, and that [Greek: tetelestai][7] was indeed his last word and not a mere translation of a similar expression in a Nazarene dialect of Aramaic.

But Wilde's study of the gospels had left him more than a handful of phrases, and these chance flowers must not blind us to the garden of thought in which they grew. Among the subjects on which he planned to write was "Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life."

This essay was never written, but Wilde had made it almost unnecessary by those suggestive paragraphs in the letter to his friend.

Christ, for him, was a supreme artist, who chose to build a beautiful thing in life instead of in marble or song. Marble and song are to the artist means of living, indeed the medium of the highest life of which he is capable. Christ essayed the more difficult task of giving life itself the unity and the loveliness that another might have given stone or melody. And this beautiful and complete life, more moving in its completeness than that of any of the G.o.ds of Greece, who "in spite of the white and red of their fair fleet limbs were not really what they appeared to be," was at once a work of art and the life of an artist.

Christ, Wilde saw, cared more for intensity than for magnificence, for the soul more than raiment. His teaching was not one of the refusal of experience, but of self-development. He set personality above possessions, and told his followers to forgive their enemies, for their own sake, not because their enemies wished to be forgiven; it is very annoying to be forgiven. "But," says Wilde, "while Christ did not say to men 'Live for others,' he pointed out that there was no difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life." And it is this truth that marks the difference between ancient and modern art. In reading ancient critics of ancient art, we perceive that their view of the tragedies whose performance they were privileged to see in the open amphitheatres of Greece was narrower than ours. Theirs was the spectacle of a good man or a good woman at odds with tragic circ.u.mstance. We have made tragic circ.u.mstance human, and, though we walk with Christ to Calvary, we also wash trembling hands with Pontius Pilate.

It is just this widened sympathy, this vitalization of other things in a story besides the hero that divides what is called romantic from what is called cla.s.sical art. To Greek tragedy there was a background of the Fates; but n.o.body sympathized with them. In whatever is cla.s.sical as opposed to romantic in modern art, we shall find a background of Fates with whom n.o.body sympathizes, in whom n.o.body believes. But all the world was alive to St. Francis. Shakespeare is myriad-mouthed as well as myriad-minded. Daffodils are alive for him no less than kings, and Iago is a man no less than Oth.e.l.lo. And in all art that springs from the spirit, thought Wilde, "wherever there is a romantic movement in art, there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ."

Wilde, thinking in prison of Christianity in art, saw through the stone walls the cathedral at Chartres in the blue morning mist, Dante and Virgil walking in h.e.l.l, the painted s.h.i.+p of the ancient mariner idly rocking upon the painted ocean, Juliet leaning from her balcony, Pierre Vidal flying as a wolf before the hounds, the irises of Baudelaire, the bird-song of Verlaine, the breaking heart of Russian storytelling, Tannhauser in the Venusberg, and all the flowers and children who have laughed in a wind of song.

For the mind, as for love,

"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."

Wilde had all the art of the world before him as he wrote. Seldom in his life did his thought move more magnificently and with greater wealth of ill.u.s.tration than in the cell where, in a perpetual twilight, his mind alone could illumine itself, and in its own light pursue that game of thinking whose essential it is to be free and harmonious.[8] Its harmonies are those of agreement with its own character, like the harmonies of art. Its freedom is that of the consistent representation of the character chosen by the thinker. In _De Profundis_ Wilde wrote as harmoniously and freely as if his life were spent in conversation instead of in silence, in looking at books and pictures instead of in shredding oak.u.m or in swinging the handle of a crank.

It is impossible too firmly to emphasize the division between the texture of the life in _De Profundis_ and that of Wilde's life in prison, a division not only needing explanation but explicable in the light of later events. When he left prison he wrote _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. Now that ballad would have been obscured or enriched by a silver cobweb of scarcely perceptible sensations if it had been written before or during his imprisonment. Wilde could not then have suffered some of the harsh and crude effects that are harmonious with its character and necessary to its success. The newly-learnt insensibility, that allowed him to use in the ballad emotions that once he would have carefully guarded himself from perceiving, had been taught him in prison. In prison his nerves had been so jangled that they responded only to a violent agitation, so jarred that a delicate touch left them silent. But at the time of the writing of _De Profundis_ these janglings and jarrings were too immediate to affect him. They disappeared like print held too close to the eye. He escaped from them as he wrote, for he wrote from memory. While the events were happening, had just happened, and might happen again, that produced the insensibility without which he could not have secured the broad and violent effects of his later work, he returned, in writing, to an earlier life. When he took up his pen, it was as if none of these things were, unless as material for the use of an aloof and conscious artist. He was outside the prison as he wrote, and only saw as if in vision the tall man, with roughened hands, who had once been "King of life," and now was writing in a cell.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] From _The Sale of St. Thomas_. By Lascelles Abercrombie.

[7] [Greek: KATA IoANNeN], XIX, 30.

[8] "L'exercice de la pensee est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit libre et harmonieux."--REMY DE GOURMONT.

X

1897-1900

"All trials," wrote Wilde, "are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pa.s.s into a prison for two years. Society, as we have const.i.tuted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

He asked too much, both from Nature and from himself. Society would indeed have none of him, as he had foreseen, but Nature could only harbour for a moment this liver in great cities who had told her that her use was to ill.u.s.trate quotations from the poets, and had said that he preferred to have her captive on his walls in the canvases of Corot and of Constable, than to live in her cruder landscapes. He had never intended to make too elaborate an advance to her. He had learnt from Stevenson's letters that that ingenious man had "merely extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to digging." He knew that reading Baudelaire in a cafe would be more natural to him than an agricultural existence. He was determined, however, not to return to the extravagances of his life before prison, and he hoped that the country would help him to keep this resolve. He was to learn that "one merely wanders round and round within the circle of one's personality." When he left prison he did not know that one must keep moving, but hoped to choose a pleasant point in his personality, and stay there.

Released from prison on May 19, 1897, he crossed the Channel to Dieppe, where he stayed for some days, and drove about with Mr. Robert Ross and Mr. Reginald Turner, examining the surrounding villages, most of which seemed uninhabitable. At the end of a week he took rooms in the inn at the little hamlet of Berneval.

Here, for the first time, he lost his power of turning life into tapestry. Alone in his cell he had written the magnificent pageant of _De Profundis_, a pageant of purple and fine linen, though he who wrote it wore the coa.r.s.e cloth of convict dress. Set suddenly in the world again, he was cut off more sharply from his former existence than ever he had been cut off in prison. He became blithe and smiling, like a child who has had no past. He bathed, and was amused at the simplicity of his experience, which he laughingly attributed to having attended Ma.s.s and so not bathing as a pagan.... "I was not tempted by either Sirens or Mermaidens, or any of the green-haired following of Glaucus. I really think this is a remarkable thing. In my Neronian days the sea was always full of Tritons blowing conches, and other unpleasant things. Now it is quite different." "Prison has completely changed me," he said to M. Andre Gide, who visited him at Berneval; "I counted on it for that."

He spoke with disparagement of a man who urged him to take up his former life, a thing, he said, which one must never do. "Ma vie est comme un oeuvre d'art; un artiste ne recommence jamais deux fois la meme chose ... ou bien c'est qu'il n'avait pas reussi. Ma vie d'avant la prison a ete aussi reussie que possible. Maintenant c'est une chose achevee." He felt that a continuation of a life that had, as it were, ended in prison, would be like adding a sixth act and a happy ending to a tragedy, a deed repulsive to an artist, who finds it hard enough to bear when murdered Caesar doffs his wig and smiles upon the audience that has witnessed the agony of his death. He did not wish to appear in Paris until he had had time to lay aside the costume he had worn in the play that, he was glad to think, was now concluded. He did not wish to be received as a released convict, but as the author of a new work of art.

"If I can produce only one beautiful work of art I shall be able to rob malice of its venom, and cowardice of its sneer, and to pluck out the tongue of scorn by the roots." For the moment, at any rate, he was content in the country, and asked M. Gide to send him a Life of St.

Francis.

"If I live in Paris," he wrote, "I may be doomed to things I don't desire. I am afraid of big towns. Here I get up at 7.30.... I am happy all day. I go to bed at 10 o'clock. I am frightened of Paris.... I want to live here." He visited the little chapel of Notre Dame de Liesse, and persuaded the cure to celebrate Ma.s.s there. He made friends with a farmer and urged him to adopt three children. He found that the customs-officers were bored, and lent them the novels of Dumas pere. And on the day of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee he entertained forty children from the school with their master so successfully that for days after they cheered when he pa.s.sed: "Vive Monsieur Melmoth[9] et la Reine d'Angleterre." In his first enthusiasm for Berneval he wished to build a house there, and did, indeed, take a chalet for the season, giving Mr.

Ross, through whom his allowance pa.s.sed, all sorts of amusing reasons for doing so, and for hurrying on the necessary preliminaries. He planned the arrangement of the house with something of the impatient delight of a student furnis.h.i.+ng his first independent rooms. He asked for his pictures, and for j.a.panese gold paper that should provide a fitting background for lithographs by Rothenstein and Shannon. The Chalet Bourgeat was ready for habitation on June 21. A month later he wrote of _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_: "The poem is nearly finished.

Some of the verses are awfully good."

He had left prison with an improved physique, and, now that he was able to work, there was hope that he would not risk the loss of it by leaving this life of comparative simplicity. Suddenly, however, he flung aside his plans and resolutions, desperately explaining that his folly was inevitable. The iterated entreaty of a man whose friends.h.i.+p had already cost him more than it was worth, and a newly-felt loneliness at Berneval, destroyed his resolution. He became restless and went to Rouen, where it rained and he was miserable; then back to Dieppe; a few days later, with his poem still unfinished, he was in Naples sharing a momentary magnificence with the friend whose conduct he had condemned, whose influence he had feared.

I have particularly noticed the change in his mental att.i.tude that became apparent at Berneval, because I think that it throws light on the character of the work he did after leaving prison, so markedly different from that of _De Profundis_, or _Intentions_, or _The Sphinx_, or any other of the delightful designs it had pleased him to embroider. What is remarkable in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, apart from its strength, or its violence of emotion, is a change in the quality of Wilde's language.

A distinction between decoration and realism, though it immediately suggests itself, is too blunt to enable us to state clearly a change in Wilde's writing that it is impossible to overlook. We require a more sensitive instrument, and must seek it in a definition of literature, a formula that is concerned with the actual medium that literature employs.

To make such a definition I have borrowed two words from the terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted. Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert. Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict an a.n.a.logy, I wish to define the medium of literature as a combination of kinetic with potential speech.

There is no such thing in literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination vary with different poems and with the poetry of different ages.

Let me take an example of fine poetry, and show that it does perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the first stanza of Blake's "The Tiger":--

"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the phosph.o.r.escence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear.[10]

Let me now apply this formula of kinetic and potential speech to a definition of the change in Wilde's aims as a writer, that is ill.u.s.trated by _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_. I have said that the proportion between kinetic and potential speech varies with different poems and the poetry of different ages. The poets of the eighteenth century, for example, cared greatly for kinetic speech, though the white fire of their better work shows that they were fortunately prevented from its invariable achievement. The Symbolists of the nineteenth century cared greatly for potential speech. "Nommer un objet," said Mallarme, "c'est supprimer les trois quarts de la jouissance du poeme qui est faite du bonheur de deviner peu a peu. Le suggerer, voila le reve." Mallarme, indeed, went so far as to work over a poem, destroying where he could its kinetic speech, its direct statement, in the effort to make it purely potential. He is not intelligible, except where he failed in this. Wilde grew up with the Symbolists, and under the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites. His criticism of pictures accurately reflects his aims as a writer. The critic, he says, will turn from pictures that are too intelligible that "do not stir the imagination but set definite bounds to it"; "he will turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell us that even from them there is an escape into a wider world." He will have none of "those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile." He recognized suggestion or, as I prefer to say, potentiality, in pictures that were decorations rather than anecdotes, and, in his preference of potential over kinetic speech, made his own work decorative rather than realistic. Decoration was for him a mode of potentiality. Like the Symbolists, he had a sort of contempt for kinetic speech, because while it obviously preponderates in the kind of writing that he considered bad, he did not perceive that it is also essential in the writing that he admitted to be good. This view was intimately connected with his character, and before he could write a poem whose kinetic was comparable to its potential power he had to change completely his att.i.tude towards life. He could not, without doing violence to himself, have written _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ before his imprisonment.

Such an alteration in his att.i.tude became apparent when he was released: not before. And he then proceeded to write a poem whose potentiality was not won at the expense of directness. The difference between the work he did before and after his release is the same, though not so exaggerated, as that between Mallarme and the eighteenth-century poets. The later work falls midway between these two extremes. It is writing that depends, far more nearly than anything he had yet done, in verse, upon its actual statements. _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_ is not more powerfully suggestive than _The Sphinx_, but what it says, its translatable element, is more important to its effect than the catalogue of the Sphinx's lovers.

We can more accurately observe this change of att.i.tude if we examine the early version of the ballad. This version, as it is now printed by the side of that originally published, represents the poem as it was when Wilde wrote to say that it was nearly finished. It is probably very like what the poem would have been if he had not broken short his stay at Berneval. The momentary retaste of his former life at Naples gave him the more decorative verses that were then added, and the contrast between the two moods made possible his disregard of the beliefs he once had held concerning the evil effect of a message on a work of art. At the same time, he realized at Naples how far he had departed from his old standards, and added a certain recklessness to his already altered equipment. For example, he had written at Berneval one stanza of direct statement that he had afterwards deleted with others from the first version that he sent to England:--

"The Governor was strong upon The Regulation Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the chaplain called And left a little tract."

At Naples he replaced it. He admits, in a letter to Mr. Ross, that "the poetry is not good," and says, "I have put 'The Governor was strict upon the Regulation Act'--I now think that strong is better. The verse is meant to be colloquial--G. R. Sims at best--and when one is going for a coa.r.s.e effect, one had better be coa.r.s.e. So please restore 'strong.'" I think that nothing could more clearly ill.u.s.trate the difference between Wilde as artist before and after he was released. The change was radical, and appeared not only in the medium of his work but in its intention. He had once said that nothing was sadder in the history of literature than the career of Charles Reade, who, after writing "The Cloister and the Hearth," "wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons." Now, he cheerfully labelled his ballad, "Poetry and Propaganda," and admitted that though the poem should end with the fifth canto, he had something to say and must therefore go on a little longer.

He had once written for his own admiration, and, to his disadvantage, for that of people he might meet at dinner. He now wished to publish his ballad in one of the more widely read newspapers, to reach the sort of people who had shared his life in gaol. He had become anxious to speak and to be heard, and was no longer content to make and to be admired.

Little trace of the friction of change is left in the poem. It is true that in certain lights a reader may perceive that he is examining a palimpsest, and wonder what manner of writer he was whose writing is obliterated. But there is an energy in the ballad that swings even the more obvious propaganda into the powerful motion of the poetry. Nowhere else in Wilde's work is there such a feeling of tense muscles, of difficult, because pa.s.sionate, articulation. And this was the effect that he was willing to achieve. The blemishes on the poem, its moments of bad verse, its metaphors only half conceived (like the filling of an urn that has long been broken) scarcely mar the impression. It is felt that a relaxed watchfulness is due to the effort of reticence. I know of no other poem that so intensifies our horror of mortality. Beside it Wordsworth's sonnets on Capital Punishment debate with aloof, respectable philosophy the expediency of taking blood for blood, and suggest the palliatives with which a tender heart may soothe the pain of its acquiescence. Even Villon, who, like Wilde, had been in prison, and, unlike Wilde, had been himself under sentence of death, is infinitely less actual. He sees only after death: the gibbet, the row of corpses, their heads hanging, the eyes picked from their sockets by the crows, a row of blackened, sun-dried bodies swinging in wind and rain. He sees that, and thinks it a pitiful spectacle, but his only prayer is "qu'enfer n'ayt de nous la maistrie!" For Wilde it is life that matters.

After it, who knows? A pall of burning lime, a barren spot where might be roses. But he lives an hundred times life's last moments, and multiplies the agony of the man who dies in the hearts of all those others who feel with him how frail is their own perilous hold.

Wilde's two letters to The Daily Chronicle, 'On the Case of Warder Martin,' and 'On Prison Reform,' show just such a change in his att.i.tude towards social questions as that which the ballad shows in his att.i.tude towards poetry. I have not, so far, said anything of _The Soul of Man under Socialism_, and I left undiscussed the consciousness of social problems that is apparent in some of the fairy tales. It seemed better to consider these things later in the book, when it should be possible to compare his att.i.tudes towards the social system before and after he had come in conflict with it.

At the beginning of his career he had written republican poetry, but had prefaced it with the avowal:--