I will not stop here to enquire whether he found later the consolation he so much desired, a haven of peace in the friendship of the aristocratic adolescent, who had unwittingly caused him to become cast-a-way. It is highly probable that the bitter words which André Gide heard him utter, referred to that unfortunate intimacy: “No, he does not understand me; he can no longer understand me. I repeat to him in each letter; we can no more follow together the same path; you have yours, and it is certainly beautiful; and I have mine. His path is the path of Alcibiade, whilst mine henceforth must be that of St. Francis of Assisi.”
His last most important work in prose: De Profundis, which reveals him to us under an entirely different aspect, although, practically always the same man, shows that he is still engrossed with the perpetual love of attitudinizing, dreaming perhaps, that in spite of his sorrow and repentance, he will be able to take up again and sing, although in an humbler tone, the pagan hymn that had been strangled in his throat. In this connection, we cannot help thinking of the gesture of the great Talma, who whilst he lay a-dying, although he knew it not, took the pendant skin of his thin neck, between his fingers, and said to those who stood around: “Here is something which would suit finely to make up a visage for an old Tiberius.”
It seems to us that the chief characteristic of Wilde’s book is not so much its admirable accent as its subtle irony, through which there seems to thrill the reply of Destiny to the haughty resolutions that he had undertaken. It is as though Death itself rose up from each page to sneer and chuckle at the master-singer; and few things are more bitter on the part of this poet—who had with his own hands ensepulchred himself as a willing holocaust to the deceitful gods of factitious Art,—than the constant appeals that he makes to Nature. The song no longer rings with the old regal note; there is none of the trepidating joy of a Whitman, or the yielding sweetness of an Emerson; our ear detects only the melopœia of a heart which had been wounded in its innermost recess.
“I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes so that all the air shall be Arabia for me.”[12]
These are the words of a convalescent; of a man newly risen from a bed of sickness anticipating a richer and fuller life, unknowing that the uplifted hand of Death suspended just above him, was destined to strike him down at brief delay.
In the darkness of his prison cell, he dreams of the mysterious herbs that he will find in the realms of Nature; of the balms that he shall ferret out amongst the plants of the earth, and which will bring peace for his anguish, and deep-seated joy for the suffering that racked his brain.
“But Nature, whose sweet rains fall on the unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.”[13]
In presence of this beautiful passage, it is painful to remember how his hopes were fated to be shattered by the cruellest of disappointments, and how he was doomed to die in the grey desolation of a poverty-haunted room.
Before drawing this notice to a close, it were not unfitting to recall another name, borne by a Poet of wayward genius, who likewise wandered astray in a forest of more than Dantean darkness, because the right way he had for ever lost from view. That Poet was a poet of France, and the voice of his glory and the echo of the songs he chanted resounded with that proud and melodious note of genius which can never weary human ears. Although this poet led a life which can be compared only to the life of Oscar Wilde, he belonged to an order of mentality which differs too greatly in its essential features to allow the accidents of the career of the two men being used as a basis for comparing them closely together on the intellectual plane.
Verlaine belonged to that race of poets who distinguish themselves by their perfect spontaneity; he was a veritable poet of instinct, and had heard voices which no other mortal had heard before him on earth. In place of the metallic verses of his predecessors, the verses that for the most part are spoken by linguistic artists, he created a sort of ethereal music, a song so sweet and so penetrating that it haunts us eternally like the low, passionate, whisperings of a lover’s voice. He gave us more than royal largesse of a wonderful and delicious soul, that had no part or lot in time, a music that was created for his soul alone; and we have willingly forgotten many a haughtier voice for the bewitching strains that this baptised faun played for us with such artless joy on his forest-grown reed.