I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime, and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.”[5]
This confession of irreparable defeat while being exceedingly dolorous, is unfortunately, rendered still further painful by other pages which contradict it, and almost tempt us to doubt its sincerity, in spite of the fact that Wilde was always sincere for those who knew how to read between the lines and enter into his spirit.
“There is no doubt that he was truly a most extraordinary man, endowed with striking originality, but a man who at the same time took more than uncommon care to hide his gifts under a cloak bought in some conventional bazaar which made a point of keeping abreast with the fashions of the day.”[6]
What brought about his downfall was the mad idea that possessed him of the possibility of employing in the service of noble aspirations all, without exception, all the passions that moved and agitated his human soul. Everyone of us is, no doubt, peopled at times with mysterious spirits, ephemeral apparitions, which like the wild beasts that Christ long ago cast out of the Gadarene swine, tear themselves to pieces in internecine warfare. It is with such soldiers as these, who very seldom obey the superior orders of the higher intellect, or desert and rebel against us at the opportune moment, that we are called upon to withstand the onslaught of a thousand enemies. Wilde made the grand mistake of trying to understand them all. He believed that they were capable of adapting themselves to that powerful instinct which animated him, and which directed him, wherever he wandered or wherever he went, towards the spirit of Beauty. This error lasted long enough perhaps to convince him of the power that was born in him, but unfortunately, the revelation of his error came too late.
My object in this preface is not to write the life of Wilde.
I have only to do with the Writer, for the Man is yet too much alive and his wounds have scarcely ceased bleeding! In the presence of still living sorrow, crimson-tinged, respect commands us to stand bareheaded; before the scarred face of woe the voice is dumb; we should, above all, endeavour rather to ignore the accidents that thrust themselves into a life and try to discover the great, calm soul, beautiful in its melancholy, which though pained and suffering, has never ceased to be nobly inspired. To prove that this was true in the case of Wilde, we may have recourse to some of those who knew him well and who form a great “cloud of witnesses,” testifying to the veracity of the things we have laid down.
Mr. Arthur Symons, a keen and large-minded critic, a friend of Wilde’s, and an elegant and forcible writer to boot, in his recent volume: “Studies in Prose and Verse,” characterizes Wilde as a “poet of attitudes,” and we cannot do better than quote a few lines from the fine article which he consecrated to our author:
“When the “Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published, he said, it seemed to some people that such a return to, or so startling a first acquaintance with, real things, was precisely what was most required to bring into relation, both with life and art an extraordinary talent so little in relation with matters of common experience, so fantastically alone in a region of intellectual abstractions. In this poem, where a style formed on other lines seems startled at finding itself used for such new purposes, we see a great spectacular intellect, to which, at last, pity and terror have come in their own person, and no longer as puppets in a play. In its sight, human life has always been something acted on the stage; a comedy in which it is the wise man’s part to sit aside and laugh, but in which he may also disdainfully take part, as in a carnival, under any mask. The unbiassed, scornful intellect, to which humanity has never been a burden, comes now to be unable to sit aside and laugh, and it has worn and looked behind so many masks that there is nothing left desirable in illusion. Having seen, as the artist sees, further than morality, but with so partial an eyesight as to have overlooked it on the way, it has come at length to discover morality in the only way left possible, for itself. And, like most of those who, having “thought themselves weary,” have made the adventure of putting thought into action, it has had to discover it sorrowfully, at its own incalculable expense. And now, having become so newly acquainted with what is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the arrangement of human affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme, and taken, on the one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than their just valuation, in matters of art. It is that odd instinct of the intellect, the necessity of carrying things to their furthest point of development, to be more logical than either life or art, two very wayward and illogical things, in which conclusions do not always follow from premises.
His intellect was dramatic, and the whole man was not so much a personality as an attitude....