We all know what arrows struck him, arrows that he himself had sharpened, and that Society had not forgotten to tip with poison.
“Neither his own heedlessness nor the envious and hypocritical anger of his enemies, nor the snobbish cruelty of social reprobation were the true cause of his misfortunes. It was he himself who, after a time of horrible anguish, consented to his punishment, with a sort of supercilious disdain for the weakness of human will, and out of a certain regard and unhealthy curiosity for the sportfulness of fate. Here was a voluptuary seeking for torture and desiring pain after having wallowed in every sensual pleasure.... Could such conduct have been due to aught else but sheer madness?”
The true debauchee has no such object. He seeks only for pleasure and discounts beforehand the conditions that Life dictates for the same; the conditions laid down containing no guarantee that the pleasure will be actually grasped except only in promise and anticipation. Later, too proud to acknowledge his cruel disappointment, he will gravely assure us that the bitterness left in the bottom of the goblet whose wine he has quaffed, has indeed the sweet taste that he sought after. Certain minds are satisfied with the fantasmagoria of their intelligence, whereas the voluptuary finds happiness only in the pleasure of realisation. In his heart he concocts for himself a prodigious mixture of sorrow and of joy, of suffering and of ecstacy, but the great world, wotting naught of this secret alchemy and judging only according to the facts which lie upon the surface, slices down to the same level, with the same stupid knife, the strange, beautiful flower, as well as the evil weed that grew apace.
Remy de Gourmont said of the famous author, Paul Adam, that he was “a magnificent spectacle.” Wilde may be pronounced a painful problem. He seems to escape literary criticism in order to fall under the keen scalping knife of the analytical moralist, by the paradoxical fact of his apparently imperious purpose to hew out and fashion forth his life as a work of art.
“Save here and there, in Intentions and in his poems, the Poem of Reading Gaol, nothing of his soul has he thrown into his books; he seemed to desire, one can almost postulate as a certainty, the stupendous tragedy that blasted his life. From the abyss where his flesh groaned in misery, his conscience hovered above him contemplating his woeful state whilst he thus became the spectator of his own death-throes.”[1]
That is the reason why he stirs us so deeply.
Those who might be tempted to search in his work for an echo however feeble, of a new message to mankind, will be grievously disappointed. The technical cleverness of Wilde is undeniable, but the magnificent dress in which he has clothed it appears to us to have been borrowed. He has brought us neither remedy nor poison; he leads us nowhere, but at the same time we are conscious that he has been everywhere. No companion of ours is he, but all the companions we hold dear he has known. True he sat at the feet of the wise men of Greece in the Gardens of Academus, but the eurythmy of their gests fascinated him more than the soberness of their doctrines. Dante he followed in all his subterranean travels and peregrinations, but all that he has to relate to us after his frightful journeyings is merely an ecstatic description of the highly-wrought scenery that he had witnessed.
“I packed all my genius, said he, into my life, I have put only my talent into my works.” Unfaithful to the principle which he learnedly deduced in Intentions, viz: that the undivided soul of a writer should incorporate itself in his work, even as Shakespeare pushing aside the “impulses that stirred so strongly within him that he had, as it were perforce, to suffer them to realize their energy, not on the lower plane of actual life, where they would have been trammelled and constrained and so made imperfect, but on that of the imaginative plane of art,” ... he came to confound the intensity of feeling with the calmness of beauty. Possessed of a mind of rare culture, he nevertheless only evoked, when he touched Art, harmonious vibrations perhaps, but vibrations which others, after all said and done, had already created before him. He succeeded in producing nothing more than a splendid and incomparable echo. The most that can be said is that the music he had in his soul he kept there, living all the time a crowded, ostentatious life, and distinguishing himself as a superlative conversationalist. Be this as it may, posterity cannot judge us according to those possibilities of our nature which were never developed. However numerous may be the testimonies in our favour, she cannot pronounce excepting on the works, or at least, the materials left by the workman. It is this which renders so precarious the actor’s fleeting glory, as it likewise dissipates the golden halo that hovers over the brilliant Society causeur. Nothing remains of Mallarmé excepting a few cunningly wrought verses, inferior to the clearer and more profound poems of his great master, Baudelaire. Of Wilde nothing will remain beyond his written works which are vastly inferior to his brilliant epigrammatic conversation.
In our days, the master of repartee and the after-dinner speaker is fore-doomed to forgetfulness, for he always stands alone, and to gain applause has to talk down to and flatter lower-class audiences. No writer of blood-curdling melodramas, no weaver of newspaper novels is obliged to lower his talent so much as the professional wit. If the genius of Mallarmé was obscured by the flatterers that surrounded him, how much more was Wilde’s talent overclouded by the would-be witty, shoddy-elegant, and cheaply-poetical society hangers-on, who covered him with incense? One of his devoted literary courtezans, who has written a life of Wilde, which is nothing more than a rhapsodidal panegyric of his intimacy with the poet, tells us that the first attempts of the sparkling conversationalist were not at all successful in Paris drawing-rooms. In the house of Victor Hugo seeing he had to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen he succeeded only in gaining a reputation for artificiality.
We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of tenderness for everything in nature.