And it was precisely in his attitudes that he was most sincere. They represented his intentions; they stood for the better, unrealised part of himself. Thus his attitude, towards life and towards art, was untouched by his conduct; his perfectly just and essentially dignified assertion of the artist’s place in the world of thought and the place of beauty in the material world being in nowise invalidated by his own failure to create pure beauty or to become a quite honest artist. A talent so vividly at work as to be almost genius was incessantly urging him into action, mental action.
Realising as he did, that it is possible to be very watchfully cognisant of that “quality of our moments as they pass,” and so shape them after one’s own ideal much more continuously and consciously than most people have ever thought of trying to do, he made for himself many souls, souls of intricate pattern and elaborate colour, webbed into infinite tiny cells, each the home of a strange perfume, perhaps a poison. “Every soul had its own secret, and was secluded from the soul which had gone before it or was to come after it. And this showman of souls was not always aware that he was juggling with real things, for to him they were no more than the coloured glass balls which the juggler keeps in the air, catching them one after another. For the most part the souls were content to be playthings; now and again they took a malicious revenge, and became so real that even the juggler was aware of it. But when they became too real he had to go on throwing them into the air and catching them, even though the skill of the game had lost its interest for him. But as he never lost his self-possession, his audience, the world, did not see the difference.”[7]
Thus not wishing to live for himself, Wilde was surprised into living mainly for others, and his ever-present desire to astonish was one of the prime causes that led to his overthrow. Yet, in spite of this, what riches of the mind, one easily divines him to possess, if for a moment we peer beyond the mobile curtain of his paradoxes. Those who listened to him, this modern St. Chrysostom, on whose lips there was ever an ambiguous smile, could not fail to see that he spoke to himself, was occupied in translating that which was passing in his mind, trying in a sense, to ravish his auditors and plunge them even into greater, though only ephemeral, ravishment, whilst ushering them into an absolutely unreal and immaterial kingdom of capricious fantasy, and they will remember that he was sometimes astonishingly profound and grave, and always charming, paradoxical, and eloquent. His mind constantly dwelt upon the questions of Art and Aesthetics. In Intentions he laid down serious problems, which in themselves bore every appearance of contradiction, and which any attempt to resolve would, at the outset, appear puerile and ambitious.
For instance:—Is lying a fundamental principle of Art, that is to say, of every art?
Is it possible for there to be perfect concordance between a finely ordered and pure life, and the worship of Beauty; or, are we to consider such a consummation as utterly impossible and chimerical?
Must there be a permanent and necessary divorce between Ethics and Aesthetics?
Ought we, beneath the flowery mask of a borrowed smile, allow ourselves to be carried away by all the waves of instinct?
The art of Criticism, is it superior to Art? The Interpreter can he be superior to the creator? Must we modify the profound axiom, “to understand is to equal,” not by reducing it to that other axiom, more profound perhaps, “to understand is to achieve,” but by modifying it with that, which, at the first glance looks at least passingly strange “to understand is to surpass?”
Such are the questions which Wilde postulated in Intentions and worked out with great audacity, but with no higher object than to win admiration, and all this with the indifferent suppleness of a conjuror of words.
Intentions is a study of artificial genius, culture, and instinct, and, for this reason, it forms a most curious production. In itself it can hardly be termed a magistral work, inasmuch as all the theories enunciated in it are, at least, twenty years old, and appear to us to-day quite worn out and decrepit. As much may be said, also, for the theories put forward by our young, contemporaneous artists who undertake to discuss all things in Heaven and Earth, and whose vapourings on Life, Nature, Social Art and other things—especially other things—are no more guaranteed against mortality than the doctrines above specified. Let them remember, in reading Wilde’s work, that their Aesthetical doctrines will soon become as antiquated, and that it is no bid for lasting fame to write flashy novels, pretty verses, high-flown or realistic dramas, pessimistic or optimistic plays, imbued with Schopenhaurian and Nitzschien principles, since the crying need of the time is for sincere work. All the doctrines ever invented are mere tittle-tattle, only fit to amuse brainless ladies wanting in beauty, or minds stricken with positive sterility.