V
Was it not Mr. Stead who defined paradox as a truth standing on its head? Wilde’s aim in paradox was so to manipulate truth and falsehood as to make the result startle one by appearing to reverse the existing standard. A paradox by him was sometimes a lie and a truth trotting side by side together in double harness like a pair of horses, but each so cleverly disguised that one was not quite sure which horse was which.
More often a paradox by Wilde was a lie (or a seeming lie) and a truth (or a seeming truth) driven the one in front of the other tandem-wise; but whichever Wilde had placed last was tolerably sure to take one by surprise by lashing out with its heels when one came to look at it. When Wilde had carefully arranged a paradox with a kick in it and wished to see one jump, he spoke the first half smilingly to put one off one’s guard. Then he would pause, suddenly become grave and thoughtful as if searching his words. But the pause was not for loss of a word. It was no pause of momentary inaction. It was, on the contrary, if I may vary the simile, like the backward swing of a rifle, and was meant only to give fuller play and power to the forward thrust that bayonets an enemy. No sooner was one off one’s guard by the smile and the momentary silence, than swift and sure came the sting of the stab.
Let me give an illustration. Wilde once asked me some question concerning my religious belief which I did my best to answer frankly and, as he was good enough afterwards to say, without the cant which he so loathed. When I had made an end of it, he said gravely:
“You are so evidently, so unmistakably sincere and most of all so truthful” (all this running smoothly and smilingly) “that” (then came the grave look and the pause as if at a loss for a word, followed by the swift stab) “I can’t believe a single word you say.”
And so, having discharged his missile, Wilde, no longer lolling indolently forward in his seat, pulled himself backwards, and up like a gunner taking a pace to the rear, or to the side of his gun the better to see the crash of the shell upon the target, and then, if I may so word it, “smiled all over.” He was so openly, so provokingly pleased with himself and with this particular paradox that not to be a party to the gratification of such sinful vanity, instead of complimenting him, as he had expected, on its neatness, I ignored the palpable hit, and inquired:
“Where are you dining to-night, Wilde?”
“At the Duchess of So-and-so’s,” he answered.
“Precisely. Who is the guest you have marked down, upon whom—when everybody is listening—to work off that carefully prepared impromptu wheeze about ‘You are so truthful that I can’t believe a single word you say,’ which you have just fired off on me?”
Wilde sighed deeply and threw out his hands with a gesture of despair, but the ghost of a glint of a smile in the corner of his eye signalled a bull’s-eye to me.
“Compliments are thrown away on such coarse creatures as you,” he said. “This very morning I called into being a new and wonderful aphorism—‘A gentleman never goes east of Temple Bar’—notwithstanding which I have brought wit and fame and fashion to lighten your editorial room in the City. Why? To pay you the supremest compliment one artist can pay another one. To make you the only confidant of one of my most graceful and delicate fancies. I was about to tell you——”
“Yes, I know,” I interpolated rudely, “you have coined a witty new aphorism, or thought out a lovely fancy. You do both and do them more than well. But you are going to the Duchess’s dinner party to-night, and you will contrive so to turn what is said that your aphorism or fancy seems to rise as naturally and spontaneously to the surface of the conversation as the bubbles rise to the surface of the glass of champagne at your side. But you are not, as actors say, sure of your ‘words.’ You think it would be as well to have something of the nature of a dress rehearsal. So you have dropped in here, on your way to your florist’s or to some one else, to try it upon me as somebody is said to try his jokes on his dog before publishing them. I don’t mind playing ‘dog’ in your rôle in the least, but I object to being made a stalking-horse for the Duchess’s honoured guest.”
I have no intention in these Recollections to play the reporter to my own uninteresting share in the conversation, but one must do so sometimes for obvious reasons. In this case, I wish to illustrate the means by which I sometimes succeeded in inducing Wilde to drop attitudinising and to be his natural self.
There is a certain Professor of my acquaintance, a man of brilliant abilities and incomparable knowledge, whom I used to meet at a club—let us call him Clough. When Clough could be induced to talk upon the matters in which he was an expert, he was worth travelling many miles to hear. Unfortunately he had an aggressive, even offensive manner, and was troubled with self-complacent egotism. It was only after a systematic course of roughness and rudeness at the hands of his fellow clubmen that Clough was endurable, or could be got to talk of anything but himself.
One would sometimes hear a fellow clubman say, “Clough is in the other room, just down from the ‘Varsity; and more full of information than ever. Two or three capable members are administering the usual course of medicine—‘Cloughing’ we call it now—of flatly contradicting every word he says, ‘trailing’ him, snubbing him, and otherwise reducing his abnormally swollen head to moderate dimensions. Then he will be better worth listening to on his own subjects than any other man in England. Don’t miss it.”
Similarly, in my intercourse with Wilde, I found that a certain amount of “Cloughing,” such as, “Now then, Wilde! You know you are only showing off, as we used to say at home when I was one of a family of kids. Stow it, and talk sense,” had equally good result. He would protest at first when minded to let me off lightly, that such “engaging ingenuousness” alarmed and silenced him. At other times he would vow that my coarseness made him shudder and wince—that it was like crushing a beautiful butterfly, to bludgeon a sensitive creature of moods and impulses with unseemly jibes and blatant speech. Having, however, thus delivered himself and made his protest, he would often stultify that protest and provide me with an excuse to myself for my Philistinism, by throwing aside his stilts (assumed possibly because he imagined they advertised him to advantage above the heads of those who walk afoot in the Vanity Fair of Literature and Art), and by showing himself infinitely more interesting when seen naturally and near at hand than when stilting it affectedly in mid-air above one’s head.
At times, and when he had forgotten his grievance at being thus rudely pulled down, he would forget—egotist that he was—even himself, in speaking of his hopes, his ambitions and his dreams; and in his rare flashes of sincerity would show himself as greater and nobler of soul than many who met and talked to him only in the salon or in society perhaps realised.
There is a graceful fancy of Wilde’s—I do not know whether he ever told it in print—the hero of which was a poet lad who had dreamed so often and written such lovely songs about the mermaid, that at last—since the dream-world was more real to him than the waking world—he was convinced that mermaids there really are in the seas around our shores, and that if one watched long and patiently they might by mortal eye be seen. So day and night the poet watched and waited, but saw nothing. And when his friends asked him, “Have you seen the mermaids?” he answered, “Yes, by moonlight I saw them at play among the rollers,” telling thereafter what he had seen and with such vividness and beauty that almost he persuaded the listeners to believe the story. But one night by moonlight the poet did indeed have sight of the mermaids, and in silence he came away and thereafter told no one what he had seen.
So, of Wilde himself, I cannot but hope and believe that though he told many stories of exceeding beauty, none of which were true, yet hidden away in his heart was much that was gracious, true, noble and beautiful, the story of which will now never be known, for like the poet lad of his fantasy he told it to no one. Of what was evil and what was good in his life, only a merciful God can strike the balance, and only a merciful God shall judge.