87. OSCAR WILDE. INTENTIONS. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. DE PROFUNDIS.
"Intentions" is perhaps the most original of all Wilde's remarkable works.
His supreme art, as he himself well knew, was, after all, the art of conversation. One might even put it that his greatest achievement in life was just the achievement of being brazenly and shamelessly what he naturally was—especially in conversation. To call him a "poseur" with the implication that he pretended or assumed a manner, were just as absurd as to call a tiger striped with the implication that the beast deliberately "put on" that mark of distinction.
If it is a pose to enjoy the sensation of one's own spontaneous gestures, Wilde was indeed the worst of pretenders. But the stupid gravity of many generals, judges and archbishops is not more natural to them than his exquisite insolence was to him.
Below the wit and provocative persiflage of "Intentions" there is a deep and true conception of the nature of art—a conception which might well serve as the "philosophy" of much of the most interesting and arresting of modern work.
Wilde's extraordinary charm largely depends upon something invincibly boyish and youthful in him. His personality, as he himself says, has become almost symbolic—symbolic, that is, of a certain shameless and beautiful defiance of the world, expressed in an unconquerable insolence worthy of the very spirit of hard, brave, flagrant youth.
"The Importance of Being Earnest" is perhaps the gayest, least responsible, and most adorably witty of all English comedies; just as "Salome" is the most richly colored and smoulderingly sensual of all modern tragedies. One actually touches with one's fingers the feasting-cups of the Tetrarch; and the passion of the daughter of Herodias hangs round one like an exotic perfume.
In "De Profundis" we sound the sea-floor of a quite open secret; the secret namely of the invincible attraction of a certain type of artist and sensualist towards the "white Christ" who came forth from the tomb where he had been laid, with precious ointments about him, by the Arimathaean.
In "The Soul of Man" another symbolic reversion displays itself—that reversion namely of the soul of the true artist towards the revolutionary organization which, along with insensitiveness and brutality, proposes to abolish ugliness also.
The name of Oscar Wilde thus becomes a name "to conjure with" and a fantastic beacon-fire to which those "oppressed and humiliated" may repair and take new heart.