Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study

by Arthur Ransome

The first of these essays is 'The Decay of Lying,' in which a young gentleman called Vivian reads aloud an article on that subject to a slightly older and rather incredulous young gentleman called Cyril, commenting as he reads, answering objections, and sometimes laying the manuscript on his knees as he follows the swift-flying swallow of his thought through the airy mazes of her joyous exercise. Vivian holds a brief for the artist against the nature that he is supposed to imitate. He behaves like a lawyer, first picking his opponent to pieces, lest the jury should be prejudiced in his favour, and then proving his own case in so far as it is possible to prove it. The dialogue is a delightful thing in itself: it is also of the first importance to the student of Wilde's theories of art. Under its insouciance and extravagance lie many of the ideas that dictated his attitude as writer and as critic. Vivian begins by opposing the comfort of a Morris chair to the discomfort of nature's insect-ridden grass, and complains that nature is as indifferent to her cultured critic as to cow or burdock—which is not to be borne. He then, a little more seriously, envisages the history of art as a long warfare between the simian instinct of imitation and the God-like instinct of self-expression. He needs to show that fine art does not imitate, and points out that Japanese painting, of which, at that time, everybody was talking, does not concern itself with Japan, and that the Japan we imagine for ourselves with the help of willow-pattern plates and the drawings of Hokusai is no more real in one sense and no less real in another than the slit-eyed girl of Gautier's "Chinoiserie," who lives in a porcelain tower above the Yellow River and the long-necked cormorants. Our ideal Japan has existed only in the minds of the artists who saw it, and when we cross the seas to look for it, we find nothing but a few fans and coloured lanterns. But that is not enough. We continually see lovely things in nature, strangely like the things we see in books and pictures. There is plagiary here, on one side or on the other, and, with almost ecstatic courage, Vivian announces that, so far from art holding the mirror to nature (a view advanced by Hamlet as a proof of his insanity), nature imitates art. He may have taken the hint from Musset, for Fortunio, in the comedy of that name, exclaims with melancholy criticism: "Comme ce soleil couchant est manqué ce soir. Regarde moi un pen ce vallée là-bas, ces quatre ou cinq méchants nuages qui grimpent sur cette montagne. Je faisais des paysages comme celui-là, quand j'avais douze ans, sur la couverture de mes livres de classe." But he made the statement in no spirit of extravagance. It seemed to him that we observe in nature what art has taught us to see, and he chose that way of saying so. He elaborates it delightfully, so that people may forget he has spoken the truth. Fogs, for example, did not exist till art had invented them. "Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerism of a clique, and the exaggerated realism of their method gives dull people bronchitis." Then he runs on for a few pages, illustrating these wise saws with modern and ingenious instances of life hurrying after fiction, reproducing the opening of "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," setting an unreal Becky Sharp beside Thackeray's creation, and going so far, indeed, as to trip up the heels of a serial story with the sordid actuality of fact.

He discusses Zola and his no less heavy-footed disciples, who stand for the failure of imitation and are the best proofs that the mirror cracks when the artist holds it up to anything except himself. Cyril suggests that Balzac was a realist, and Vivian quotes Baudelaire's saying, that "his very scullions have genius," compares him to Holbein, and points out that he is far more real than life. "A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades."

Then comes an objection to modernity of form, and some reasons for that objection that suggest a very interesting speculation. He thinks that Balzac's love for modernity of form prevented him from producing any single book that can rank with the masterpieces of romantic art. And then:—"The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them an unsuitable subject for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of Art." These words seemed, in 1889, to be both daring and precarious. The influence of philosophy is not so immediate as is sometimes supposed. It is not extravagant to find in those few words a reflection, direct or indirect, of Immanuel Kant, who, writing in 1790, said that what is called beautiful is the object of a delight apart from any interest, and showed that charm, or intimate reference to our own circumstances or possible circumstances, so far from being a criterion of beauty, was a disturbing influence upon our judgment. In the Preface to Dorian Gray, that little flaunting compendium of Wilde's æsthetics, it is easy to trace the ideas of Kant, divested of their technical phrasing, freed from their background of reasoning and their foreground of accurate explanation. For example:—"No artist desires to prove anything." This balances Kant's banishment of concepts from the beautiful. For another:—"All art is quite useless." This balances Kant's distinction between the beautiful and the good. This is not the place for any worthy discussion of the relation between the theory and the practice of art; but it is interesting to notice that what was temperamentally true for Wilde, and therefore peculiarly his own, had been logically true for a philosopher a hundred years before. Coleridge, whose originality there is no more need to question than Wilde's, gave Kant's ideas a different colouring. Is it that the philosopher is unable to apply in detail what the artist is unable to conceive as a whole?

It is important to remember that throughout this dialogue, Wilde is speaking of pure art, a thing which possibly does not exist, and, recognising it as an ideal towards which all artists should aspire, is engaged in pointing out the more obvious means of falling short of it. He achieves a triumph, of a kind in which he delighted, by making people read of such a subject. Not wishing to be laughed at by the British intellect, and wishing to be listened to, he laughs at it instead, and, near the end of the dialogue, is so daring as to present it with a picture of what is occurring, confident that the individual will disclaim the general, and smile without annoyance at the caricature. "The stolid British intellect lies in the desert sands like the Sphinx in Flaubert's marvellous tale, and fantasy, La Chimère, dances round it and calls to it with her false flute-toned voice." And the individual reader did not understand, and Wilde danced away until he felt inclined again to make him listen to the flute-toned enunciation of unfamiliar truths.

'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' the essay on Wainewright, not in dialogue, has some of the hard angular outlines of the set article on book or public character. It fills these outlines, however, with picturesque detail and half-ironic speculation. It is impossible not to notice the resemblance between the subject of this essay and its author. It is difficult not to suspect that Wilde, in setting in clear perspective Wainewright's poisoning and writing, in estimating the possible power of crime to intensify a personality, was analysing himself, and expressing through a psychological account of another man the results of that analysis. Perhaps, in that essay we have less analysis than hypothesis. Wilde may have happened on the Life of Wainewright, and taken it, among all the books he had read, as a kind of Virgilian omen. My metaphor, as Dr. Chasuble would say, is drawn from Virgil. It used to be customary among those who wished to look into the future to open the works of that poet and to observe the lines covered by the thumb: "which lines, if in any way applicable to one's condition, were accounted prophetic." I think it possible that Wilde looked upon the little account of Wainewright that gave him a basis for his article as just such a prophetic intimation. He may have written the article to taste his future before the fact. Anyhow, he foreshadows the line of defence to be taken by his own apologists when he exclaims that "the fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose." In any discussion of the influence that Wilde's disease or crime exerted on his art, this essay would be a valuable piece of evidence. But in other things than the engaging in a secret activity, Wainewright offered Wilde a curious parallel with himself. He too introduced a new manner in writing by a new manner in dress, and Wilde was able to use his own emotions in the presence of blue china to vitalize the piece of Dutch painting, a Gabriel Metsu or a Jan van Eyck, in which he paints Wainewright with his cats, his curiosities, his crucifixes, his rare books, his cameos, and his "brown-biscuit tea-pots, filigree worked," against a background in which green predominates. "He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals." Wilde also was fond of green. I have not counted occasions, but I have the impression that green is the colour most often mentioned alike in his verse and in his prose. Green and jade: these are his keynotes in colour, unless I am mistaken, and in these matters impressions are less likely to err than mathematics.

But the most striking and beautiful thing in Intentions is that dialogue between the two young men in a library whose windows look over the kaleidoscopic swirl of Piccadilly to the trees and lawns of the Green Park. They talk through the summer night, supping delicately on ortolans and Chambertin, and, in the early morning, draw the curtains, see the silver ribbon of the road, the purple mist among the trees, and walk down to Covent Garden to look at the roses that have come in from the country. There is something of Boccaccio in that setting, something, too, of Landor in the lucid sentences of their talk, and something of Walter Pater in the choice of the fruit they so idly pluck from the tree of knowledge. But Pater could not have let their conversation change so easily from smooth to ripple and from ripple to smooth; Landor would have caught the ripples and carved them in transparent moonstone, and Boccaccio would have given them girls to talk of, instead of "The Critic as Artist."

That would seem to be a question for the learned and not for two young exquisites with a taste for music and books and an æsthetic dislike of the German language. But the only critical dialogue in English literature that is at all comparable with Wilde's is "The Impartial Critick" of John Dennis, who was ready to prove that choruses were unnecessary in tragedy, that Wycherley excelled Plautus, and that Shakespeare himself was not so bad as Thomas Rymer had painted him. And there too we have young men, not themselves authors, talking for pleasure's sake, drinking with discretion, now in their lodgings, now at The Old Devil and now at The Cock, reading aloud to each other and commenting verse by verse on Mr. Waller, whom they admit to be "a great Genius and a gallant Writer." There is a delightful savour about that dialogue, dry as some of the questions were that those two young sparks discussed with such wet throats. There is a suggestion of the town outside and the country beyond, of stage-coaches passing through the Haymarket, and of Hampshire gentlemen "being forbid by the perpetual Rains to follow the daily labour of their Country Sports," handing about their Brimmers within doors, "as fast as if they had done it for Exercise." And those young men talk with just the fine superiority of Ernest and Gilbert to the authordom whose rules and persons they amuse themselves by discussing.

Ernest and Gilbert are, however, better talkers. In fact, their talk is far too good really to have been heard. They set their excellence as a barrier between themselves and life. Not for a moment will they forget that they are the creatures of art: not for a moment will they leave that calm air for the dust and turmoil of human argument. Wilde was never so sure of his art as in this dialogue, where Ernest, that ethereal Sancho Panza, and Gilbert, that rather languid Don Quixote, tilt for their hearer's joy. They share the power of visualization that made Wilde's own talk like a continuous fairy tale. They turn their ideas into a coloured pageantry, and all the gods of Greece and characters of art are ready to grace by their visible presence the exposition, whether of the ideas that are to be confuted or of those that are to take their place. "In the best days of art," says Ernest, "there were no art critics," and four pages follow in which the sculptor releases the sleeping figures from the marble, Phædrus bathes his feet in the nymph-haunted meadow, the little figures of Tanagra are shaped with bone or wooden tool from river clay, Artemis and her hounds are cut upon a veined sardonyx, the wanderings of Odysseus are stained upon the plaster, and round the earthen wine-jar Bacchus dances and Silenus sprawls.

"But no," says Gilbert, "the Greeks were a nation of art-critics." He balances with a sequence of ideas his friend's pageant of pictures. The Greeks criticized language, and "Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticized nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts." And so the talk goes on. There is but one defect in this panoramic method of presenting ideas. Each time that Wilde empties, or seems to spill before us, his wonderful cornucopia of coloured imagery, he seems to build a wave that towers like the blue and silver billow of Hokusai's print. Now, surely, it will break, we say, and are tempted to echo Cyril in 'The Decay of Lying,' when, at the close of one of these miraculous paragraphs, he remarks, "I like that. I can see it. Is that the end?" Too many of Wilde's paragraphs are perorations.