The English poet was more complex and perhaps less sheerly human; and even his errors have no other origin than the perpetual effort to astonish us; whilst above all, that which staggers us most and stirs us so profoundly is that these self-same errors, which had come into life under such innocent conditions, became terribly real in virtue of that imperious law which compels certain minds to render their dreams incarnate.
As for his work, however finely polished, however exquisite it may be and undoubtedly is, we have to confess that it has no power to move our souls into high passion and lofty endeavour; although it might easily have sufficed to conquer celebrity for more than one ambitious literary craftsman. But we feel, with regard to Wilde, that we had a legitimate right to insist on the accomplishment of far greater things, a more sincere and genuine output, and are so much more dissatisfied because we clearly see the great discord between the man who palpitated with intense life, and the esthetic dandy whose cleverness overreached itself when he tried to work out that life on admittedly artificial lines.
This extraordinary divorce between intelligence and will-power was that which gave rise to the striking drama of Wilde’s career; albeit the word drama looks strange and out of place, if applied only to the sorrow-filled period that crowned with thorns the latter end of his brilliant existence, if it be used for no other reason than to particularize the great catastrophe that took place in the sight of all the world. The fact is, the man’s entire life was one perpetual drama. Throughout the whole course of his existence, he persistently sought after and that with impunity, all sorts of excitants that could at last no longer be disguised under the name of experiences—and no doubt, others more terrible still that fall under no human laws, would have come finally to swell the ranks of their forerunners—and then, had the hand of Destiny not arrested him in his course, he would have wound up by descending so low that the artistic life of his soul would have been forever extinguished.
That, when all is said and done, would have been the veritable, the irremediable tragedy.
Fortunately, royal intellects such as these, can never utterly die, and therein consists their greatest chastisement. Spasmodic movements agitate them, revealing beneath their mendacious laughter the secret agony of their souls; and we are suddenly called upon to witness the heart-rending spectacle of the slow death-agony of a haughty, talented poet, a Petronius self-poisoned through fear of Cæsar or a Wilde whom a vicious and over-wrought Public had only half assassinated, raising his poor, glazed eyes towards the marvellous Light of Truth, whose glorious vision, we know by the sure voice that comes “from the depths,” he had caught at last....
Oscar Wilde had desired to live a pagan’s free and untramelled life in Twentieth-century England, forgetful of the enormous fact that no longer may we live pagan-wise, for the shadow of the Cross has shed a steadily increasing gloom over the conditions that enlivened the joyous existence of olden times.
C. G.
