Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

"De Profundis" as a Piece of Prose

There is very little of the wise and sensuous geniality of Horace in Oscar Wilde's outlook upon life. But some lines of the poet, never a great favourite with Wilde by the way, certainly have a direct application upon the style of the author of "De Profundis"—

"Saepe stilum vertas, iterum quæ digna legi sint
Scripturus; neque te ut miretur turba labores,
Contentus paucis lectoribus."—S. I. 10, 72.

A piece of prose to Oscar Wilde was always, in a sense, like a definite musical composition in which words took the place of notes, and he carried out the poet's injunction to polish and rewrite with meticulous care.

Wilde had, in a marvellously developed degree, the sense that a piece of prose was a built-up thing proceeding piece by piece, movement by movement, sentence by sentence, and word by word towards a definite and well-understood effect. "It was the architectural conception of work which foresees the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first."

These lines were written by Oscar Wilde's master in English prose, Walter Pater, and we shall see how entirely Wilde has adhered to such an artistic attitude. Like the Greeks, he believed in an elaborate criticism of language, and the metrical movements of prose were scientifically and artistically interesting to him, as any student of harmony takes pleasure in a contrapuntal exercise. The analogy is perfectly correct, and Wilde himself has drawn attention to it more than once in his prose writings. Counterpoint consisted, in the old days of music, when a system of sounds called points were used for notation, in two or more lines of these points; each line represented a melody which, when set against each other and sounded simultaneously, produced correct harmony.

Wilde's prose was moulded entirely upon an appreciation of these facts, and the ear must always be the critic of the excellence of his prose rather than the intelligence, in the first instance, as reached by the eye. If we read aloud passages of "De Profundis" the full splendour of them strikes us far more poignantly than in any other way. It is true that Wilde's prose makes an appeal ad clerum, and it is not necessary for the connoisseur, the initiate, to apply the test of the spoken word. But those who are not actually conversant with the more technical niceties of style will do well to read Wilde's prose aloud. They will discover in it new and unsuspected beauties.

Wilde, at one period of his career, published a series of short paragraph stories which he called "Poems in Prose." With him there were many points of contact between prose and poetry. The two things could overlap and intermingle, though in his hands neither lost its own individuality in the process. There has been too much said in the past about the old principle of sharp division between poetry and prose. This was a classical tradition and was one which well applied to the Greek and Latin languages. It was maintained, until a late era in our own English literature, by the Gibbons and Macaulays who moulded themselves upon Cicero and Livy. But during the last century the force of the old tradition weakened very much. A newer and more flexible style of writing became permissible. Coleridge, De Quincey, Swift, Lamb, to mention a few names at random, showed that, at anyrate, prose need no longer be written as a stately cataract of ordered words with due balance and antithesis, and with certain rigid movements which were thought indispensable to correct writing.

Dr Boswell said, apropos of style—"Some think Swift's the best; others prefer a fuller and grander way of writing." To whom Dr Johnson replied—"Sir, you must first define what you mean by style, before you can judge who has good taste in style and who has bad. The two classes of persons whom you have mentioned don't differ as to good and bad. They both agree that Swift has a good neat style, but one loves a neat style, another a style of more splendour. In the like manner one loves a plain coat, another loves a laced coat; but neither will deny that each is good in its kind."

Although Johnson and his contemporaries certainly had a great sense of rhythm and harmony in prose they were the last defenders of the old axiom that poetry and prose were two entirely separate things. It was Walter Pater who, in our own times, finally demolished the old tradition, and opened the way for a writer, such as Oscar Wilde, to bring the new discovery to its fullest perfection. Walter Pater showed that it was not true that poetry differs only from prose by the presence of metrical restraint.

Wilde, understanding this, most thoroughly, resolved early in his literary career that his prose should be beautifully coloured, jewelled, ornate, and yet capable of every delicate nuance, every almost lyric echo that could be caught from the realms of poesy and welded into the many-coloured fabric.

In Wilde's "Intentions" we have an example of his most ornamented and decorated prose, so marvellously musical that it reminds us of a fugue played on a mighty organ with innumerable stops. Yet, at the same time, in this book of Essays, Oscar Wilde frequently laid himself open to the charge of precocity and over-elaboration. It is possible to obscure the grand and massive lines of a building by an over-elaboration of detail. Beautiful as decorated Gothic is, I have in mind the Cathedral of Cologne, there is a more massive grandeur in the early mediæval work than anything the later style can give.

"De Profundis" is purged of all the faults—one might almost say the faults of excellence—that the hypercritical student may sometimes find in the earlier prose of its author. Just as the man himself was purged and purified in mind by the terrible experiences of prison, so his style also became stronger and more beautiful, and what was once reminiscent of a marvellous nocturne or ballade of Chopin, or "some mad scarlet thing by Dvorak" inherent with all the beauty of just this, now acquires the harmony and strength of a great wind blowing through a forest.

The prose is still full of the old symbolism and imagery, but these two means of producing an effect are used with much more restraint of language and simplicity of words. Note, for example, how the following paragraph, especially when read aloud, proceeds from symbol to symbol with a marvellously adroit use of the dactyl and the spondæ, or rather their equivalents in English prosody, until the final thought is enunciated, the voice drops, the sentence is complete. "When one has weighed the sun in the balance and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven Heavens, star by star, there still remains oneself."

Here we notice in addition, the extraordinary influence that the words of the Bible always had upon the prose of Oscar Wilde. In his lonely prison cell, where nearly the whole of his reading must have consisted of Holy Scripture, the influence was naturally greater than ever before. No one can read "De Profundis" with its rhythmic repetitions of phrase without realising this in an extraordinary degree. Take the passage I have just quoted and the following paragraph, which, let me assure my readers, I have taken quite at random, opening a Bible and turning over but a very few leaves of the Old Testament without any regular search,—"So that they shall take no wood out of the field, neither cut down out of the forest; for they shall burn the weapons with fire: and they shall spoil those that spoiled them, and rob those that robbed them, saith the Lord God."

Yes! there can be no possible doubt that much of the inspiration of "De Profundis"—that is, the purely literary inspiration—came from the solemn harmonies and balanced phrases of the old Hebrew singers and poets.

With Job, Oscar Wilde might well have said, and his own lamentations are strangely reminiscent of the phrase, "My harp is turned to mourning and my organ into the voice of them that weep."

In "De Profundis" the special passages of rare and melodious beauty which star the printed page at no long intervals, have been very widely commented upon and quoted. By this time they are quite familiar to all who take an interest in modern literature, and this masterpiece of it in particular. Yet, in considering the prose of "De Profundis" we must not forget to pay a due meed of praise to the great substance of the book in which an extraordinary ease and dignity of style, an absolute simplicity of effect, which conceals the most elaborate art and the most profound knowledge of the science of words, links together those more memorable, because more striking, passages which leap out from the page and plant themselves in the mind of the appreciative reader like arrows.

"There is hardly a word in 'De Profundis' misplaced, misused, or used at all unless the fullest possible value is got from its presence in the sentence. Even now and then, when, in the midst of the grave rhetoric of his psychology, the author descends into colloquialism, the ear is not offended in the least. He knows the precise moment when the little homely word will bring back to the reader the fact that he is reading a human document written by a human sufferer in a prison cell.

"If, after I am free, a friend of mine gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit, I can be perfectly happy by myself."

Here in the midst of passages of calculated and cadenced beauty we have a little carefully devised sentence to which, though the ordinary reader will not realise the art and cunning of its employment, it will have precisely the effect upon the brain of the ordinary reader that Oscar Wilde designed when he wrote it.

The literary man himself, accustomed to deal with words, can, and will, appreciate the art of the artist in this regard.

It is with the profoundest appreciation and admiration for the marvellous skill of presentation, the perfect power and flexibility of the prose that I leave the consideration of the purely artistic merits of the book and turn to its real value as a human document.

As Oscar Wilde said of himself, he was indeed a "lord of language."

"De Profundis" as a Revelation of Self

We now come to a consideration of "De Profundis" as a revelation, or not, of the real sentiments and thoughts of the man who wrote it.

To the British temperament it is always far more important, in the judgment of a book, that the writer should be sincere in the writing than that what he wrote should be perfectly artistic.

The British public, indeed, the whole Anglo-Saxon world, has never been able to adapt itself to the French attitude that, provided a thing is a flawless work of art, the sincerity of the writer has nothing whatever to do with its worth. This attitude Wilde himself consistently preached in season and out of season. For example, he wrote a study of Wainwright, the poisoner, which, read from the ordinary English ethical point of view, would seem to show him a most sympathetic advocate of crime, provided only the criminal committed his crimes in an artistic manner and had also a sense of art in life.

When a friend reproached the monster Wainwright with the murder of an innocent girl, Helen Abercrombie, to whom he owed every duty of kindness and protection, he shrugged his shoulders and said—"Yes, it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." If we are to take Oscar Wilde's essay, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," quite seriously we must believe him to be utterly indifferent to the monstrous moral character of the hero of his memoir. He speaks of him as being not merely a poet and a painter, an art critic and antiquarian, a writer of prose and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean nor ordinary capacities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.

When "De Profundis" first made its appearance and the flood of criticism began, dozens of critics pounced upon the book, admitted its marvellous literary charm and achievement, and said that its author was absolutely and utterly insincere in all he wrote about himself. The Times for example, which still holds a certain pre-eminence of place, although it is the fashion of a younger generation to decry it and to pretend that it has lost all its influence, owing both to the change of public taste in journalistic requirements and certain business enterprises which have been associated with its name, spoke out to this effect with careful and calculated sincerity.

In an article which was extremely well written and had indubitably a certain psychological insight, the leading journal condemned "De Profundis" from an ethical point of view with no uncertain voice. It said that, while it was possessed by every wish to understand the author and to sympathise with him in the hideous ruin of his brilliant career, it was impossible, except in a very few instances, to regard his posthumous book as anything but a mere literary feat.

The excellence of that was granted, but it was not allowed to be anything more than that.

It was not in this way, so said the writer in The Times, that souls were laid bare, this was not sorrow, but the most dextrous counterfeit of sorrow. Wilde, so the review stated, was "probably unable to cry from the depths at all." His book simply showed that there was an armour of egotism which no arrow of fate was able to pierce. Even in "De Profundis" the poseur supplemented the artist, and the truth was not in him. If the heart of a broken man showed at all in the book it must, said The Times, "be looked for between the lines. It was rarely in them."

In short, so the review, when summed up and crystallised, implied, Wilde was incapable of telling the truth about himself, or about anything at all. Sometimes in his writings he fell upon the truth by accident, and then his works contained a modicum of truth. Consciously, he was never able to discover it, consciously, he was never able to enunciate it.

Now, that is a point of view which is natural enough, but which, after careful study, I cannot substantiate in any way. Over and over again the same thing was said. Everybody was prepared, at last, to admit that Wilde was a great artist—in direct contradiction to that condemnation of even his literary power which was poured upon his works at the time of his downfall—but the general opinion of the leading critics seemed to point to the fact of "De Profundis" being a pose and insincere.

Now, if the book was merely an excursion in attitude, a considered work of art without any very profound relation to the truth of its personal psychology, then I think the book would be a less saddening thing than it undoubtedly is. Surely, the author had a perfect right, if he so wished, to produce a psychological romance. This I know is not a generally held opinion, but I do not see how anybody who knows anything about the brain of the artist and the ethics of creation can really deny it. If the work is absolutely sincere, as I believe it to be, then, from the moral point of view, it is indeed a terrible document. It shows us how little the extraordinary, complex temperament of Oscar Wilde was really chastened and purified. It provides us with a moral picture of monstrous egotism set in a frame of jewels.

As has been said so often before in this book, the worse and insane side of Oscar Wilde must always obscure and conquer the better and beautiful side of him.

Oscar Wilde describes himself as a "lord of language." This is perfectly true. He goes on to say that he "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of his time." This is only half true. He continues that "I felt it myself and made others feel it." The first half of this sentence is too true, the second half is untrue, inasmuch as it implies that he made everyone feel it, whereas he mistook the flattery and adulation of a tiny coterie for the applause and sanction of a nation. Oscar Wilde always lived within four very narrow walls. At one time they were the swaying misty walls conjured up by a few and not very important voices, at another they were the walls of concrete and corrugated iron, the whitewashed walls of his prison cell. He says that his relations to his time were more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope than Byron's relation to his time. Then, almost in the same breath, he begins to tell us that there is only one thing for him now, "absolute humility." That something hidden away in his nature like a treasure in a field is "humility."

Comment is almost cruel here.

In another part of "De Profundis" the author airily and lightly touches upon those horrors which had ruined him and made him what he was, and which kept him where he was.

"People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approached them, they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. The danger was half the excitement...."

Is this Humility and is this Repentance? To me it seems as terrible a conviction of madness and inability to understand the depth to which he had sunk as one could find in the whole realm of literature.

"People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained," etc. etc. Does not the very phrase suggest that Wilde still thinks in his new-found "humility" that it was not dreadful of him at all and that he had a perfect right to do so?

There is no doubt of his absolute sincerity. He is absolutely incapable of understanding. He still thinks, lying in torture, that he has done nothing wrong. He has made an error of judgment, he has misapprehended his attitude towards society. He has not sinned. Once only does he admit, in a single sentence, that any real culpability attached to him. "I grew careless of the lives of others." This shows that a momentary glimpse of the truth had entered that unhappy brain, but it is carelessly uttered, and carelessly dismissed. All he cared for, if we believe this book to be sincere, as I think nobody who really understands the man and his mental condition at the time that it was written, can fail to believe, is, that every fresh sensation at any cost to himself and others, was his only duty towards himself and his art.

Doubtless when he wrote "De Profundis" Oscar Wilde believed absolutely in his own attitude. He was no Lucifer in his own account, no fallen angel. He was only a spirit of light which had made a mistake and found itself in fetters. That is the tragedy of the book, that its author could never see himself as others saw him or realise that he had sinned. When Satan fell from Heaven, in Milton's mighty work, he made no attempt to persuade himself that he had found something hidden away within him like a treasure in a field—"Humility." There was in the imaginary portrait of the Author of Evil still an awful and impious defiance of the Forces that controlled all nature and him as a part of nature.

Oscar Wilde could look back upon all he did to himself and all the incalculable evil he wrought upon others and say quite calmly that he did not regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. He tells us that he threw the "pearl of his soul into a cup of wine," that he "went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes." And then, after living on honeycomb he realises that to have continued living on honeycomb would have been wrong, because it would have arrested the continuance of his development.

"I had to pass on."

Let us pass on also to a consideration of Wilde's teaching on Christianity in "De Profundis."