Ever since the first printers with misguided zeal dipped an innocent world in ink, those books have been truly popular which reflected faithfully and enthusiastically the foibles and delusions of the hour. This is what is called “keeping abreast with the spirit of the times,” and we have only to look around us at present to see the principle at work. With an arid and dreary realism chilling us to the heart, and sad-voiced novelists entreating us at every turn to try to cultivate indecorous conduct and religious doubts, fiction has ceased to be a medium of delight. Even nihilism, which is the only form of relief that true earnestness permits, is capable of being overstrained, and some narrowly conservative people are beginning to ask themselves already whether this new development of “murder as a fine art” has not been sufficiently encouraged. Out of the midst of the gloom, out of the confusion and depression of conflicting forms of seriousness, rises from London a voice, clear, languid, musical, shaken with laughter, and speaking in strange, sweet tones of art and beauty, and of that finer criticism which is one with art and beauty, and claims them forever as its own. The voice comes from Mr. Oscar Wilde, and few there are who listen to him, partly because his philosophy is alien to our prevalent modes of thought, and partly because of the perverse and paradoxical fashion in which he delights to give it utterance. People are more impressed by the way a thing is said than by the thing itself. A grave arrogance of demeanor, a solemn and self-assertive method of reiterating an opinion until it grows weighty with words, are weapons more convincing than any subtlety of argument. “As I have before expressed to the still reverberating discontent of two continents”—this is the mode in which the public loves to have a statement offered to its ears, that it may gape, and wonder, and acquiesce.
Nothing can be further from such admirable solidity than Mr. Wilde’s flashing sword-play, than the glee with which he makes out a case against himself, and then proceeds valiantly into battle. There are but four essays in the volume, rather vaguely called Intentions, and of these four only two have real and permanent value. “The Truth of Masks” is a somewhat trivial paper, inserted apparently to help fill up the book, and “Pen, Pencil, and Poison” is visibly lacking in sincerity. The author plays with his subject very much as his subject, “kind, light-hearted Wainwright,” played with crime, and in both cases there is a subtle and discordant element of vulgarity. It is not given to our eminently respectable age to reproduce the sumptuous and horror-laden atmosphere which lends an artistic glamor to the poisonous court of the Medicis. This “study in green” contains, however, some brilliant passages, and at least one sentence—“The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists”—that must make Mr. George Moore pale with envy, when he reflects that he missed saying it, where it belongs, in his clever, truthful, ill-natured paper on “Mummer-Worship.”
The significance and the charm of Mr. Wilde’s book are centred in its opening chapter, “The Decay of Lying,” reprinted from The Nineteenth Century, and in the long two-part essay, entitled “The Critic as Artist,” which embodies some of his most thoughtful, serious, and scholarly work. My own ineffable content rests with “The Decay of Lying,” because, under its transparent mask of cynicism, its wit, its satire, its languid mocking humor, lies clearly outlined a great truth that is slipping fast away from us—the absolute independence of art—art nourished by imagination and revealing beauty. This is the hand that gilds the grayness of the world; this is the voice that sings in flute tones through the silence of the ages. To degrade this shining vision into a handmaid of nature, to maintain that she should give us photographic pictures of an unlovely life, is a heresy that arouses in Mr. Wilde an amused scorn which takes the place of anger. “Art,” he says, “never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.” That we should understand this, it is necessary to understand also the “beautiful untrue things” which exist only in the world of fancy; the things that are lies, and yet help us to endure the truth. Mr. Wilde repudiates distinctly and almost energetically all lying with an object, all sordid trifling with a graceful gift. The lies of newspapers yield him no pleasure; the lies of politicians are ostentatiously unconvincing; the lies of lawyers are “briefed by the prosaic.” He reviews the world of fiction with a swift and caustic touch; he lingers among the poets; he muses rapturously over those choice historic masterpieces, from Herodotus to Carlyle, where “facts are either kept in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness.” He laments with charming frankness the serious virtues of his age. “Many a young man,” he says, “starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration, which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well-informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels that are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability.” Surely this paragraph has but one peer in the world of letters, and that is the immortal sentence wherein De Quincey traces the murderer’s gradual downfall to incivility and procrastination.
“The Critic as Artist” affords Mr. Wilde less scope for his humor and more for his erudition, which, perhaps, is somewhat lavishly displayed. Here he pleads for the creative powers of criticism, for its fine restraints, its imposed self-culture, and he couches his plea in words as rich as music. Now and then, it is true, he seems driven by the whips of our modern Furies to the verge of things which are not his to handle—problems, social and spiritual, to which he holds no key. When this occurs, we can only wait with drooping heads, and what patience we can muster, until he is pleased to return to his theme; or until he remembers, laughing, how fatal is the habit of imparting opinions, and what a terrible ordeal it is to sit at table with the man who has spent his life in educating others rather than himself. “For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual, and where self-culture has ceased to be the ideal, the intellectual standard is instantly lowered, and often ultimately lost.” I like to fancy the ghost of the late Rector of Lincoln, of him who said that an appreciation of Milton was the reward of consummate scholarship, listening in the Elysian Fields, and nodding his assent to this much-neglected view of a much-disputed question. Everybody is now so busy teaching that nobody has any time to learn. We are growing rich in lectures, but poor in scholars, and the triumph of mediocrity is at hand. Mr. Wilde can hardly hope to become popular by proposing real study to people burning to impart their ignorance; but the criticism that develops in the mind a more subtle quality of apprehension and discernment is the criticism that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.
HUMORS OF GASTRONOMY
“There does not, at this blessed moment, breathe on the earth’s surface a human being that willna prefer eating and drinking to all ither pleasures o’ body or soul.” So speaks the Ettrick Shepherd, in the fulness of his content, contemplating with moist eyes the groaning supper-table, laden with a comfortable array of solid viands; after which fair and frank expression of his views we are somewhat pained to hear him denouncing in no measured terms “the awful and fearsome vice o’ gluttony,” as evidenced occasionally in women. His companions, too, those magnificent fellow-feeders, have a great many severe things to say about gudewives who betray a weakness for roasted pork, or an unfeminine solicitude for gravy; and Mr. Timothy Tickler unhesitatingly affirms that such a one, “eating for the sake of eating, and not for mere nourishment, is, in fact, the grossest of sensualists, and at each mouthful virtually breaks all ten of the commandments.” This is the language of an ascetic rather than of a bon vivant, but we are in some measure reassured when the same Mr. Tickler confesses, a little later, that, although roast goose always disagrees with him, yet he never refuses it, believing that to purchase pleasure by a certain degree of pain is true philosophy; whereupon the Shepherd, not to be outdone, gives it as his unreserved opinion that, in winter-time at least, “eating for eating’s sake, and in oblivion o’ its feenal cause, is the most sacred o’ household duties.”
From these somewhat inharmonious sentiments we reluctantly infer that gluttony is a vice—or a virtue—for man only, and that woman’s part in the programme is purely that of a ministering angel. Adam was made to eat, and Eve to cook for him, although, even in this humble sphere, she and her daughters have been doomed to rank second in command. Excellent in all things, but supreme in none, they have never yet scaled the dazzling heights of culinary fame. The records of antiquity make no mention of their skill; the middle ages grant them neither praise nor honor; and even as late as Dr. Johnson’s day they labored hard for scanty recognition. It is very painful to hear the great sage speaking lightly of our grandmother’s oracle, Mrs. Glasse, and declaring with robust contempt that women were fit to spin, but not to write a book of cookery. Yet for how many years had they modestly held their peace; profiting, doubtless, in many a roomy kitchen and in many a well-stocked buttery by the words of wisdom which vainglorious men let fall; and only now and then giving help and counsel to one another by means of little private recipe-books, which were circulated among a few noble families, and were considered as their own exclusive property and pride.
Opulence and a taste for display, upon the one side, and the natural conservatism of the great Saxon stock, upon the other, fought the battle of the table from the days of the Black Prince down to those of Anthony Trollope, and will, in all probability, fight it to the end. “A cod’s head for fourpence, and nine shillings’ worth of condiments to serve with it,” was the favorite sarcasm which greeted the growing extravagance of the rich middle classes. Those costly “subtleties” imported from French kitchens in the fifteenth century met with a sturdy opposition from British free-men, who, even while they gaped and marveled, resented such bewildering innovations. The pelican sheltering her young, and Saint Catherine, book in hand, disputing with the doctors, which figured among the dishes at the coronation of Henry V.; the hundred and four “dressed” peacocks, trailing their plumes gorgeously over the table at the consecration of Archbishop Neville, affronted more than one beef-eating gentleman, and exasperated more than one porridge-eating churl. From France, too, came certain heresies regarding the fitness of food which Englishmen had for centuries devoured and digested. Queen Elizabeth dined upon whale; Cardinal Wolsey, who was something of an epicure, and who first taught us that strawberries and cream were intended by a beneficent nature to set off each other’s merits, did not disdain to have a young porpoise served up at one of his banquets. Fish soup was a delicacy, and we are even assured by antiquarians that the grampus, or sea-wolf, was freely eaten by our strong-stomached ancestors.