It is not inexact that in Intentions one meets with a profound truth now and again, but the dressing of it is so paradoxical that we run a risk of misinterpreting all that may animate it of genuine fitness and sincerity.
Wilde may truly be denominated the last representative of that English art of the XIXth. century, which beginning with Shelley, continuing with the Pre-Raphaelites and culminating with the American painter, Whistler, endeavours purposely to set forth an ideal and elegant expression of the world.
The mistake of these men lies in the belief that Art was made for Life; whereas it is, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary. Life has no other value, except as subject-matter, for poet and painter. These are excentric theories, certainly, but then, what on earth, does it matter about theories? Do not they serve the great artist to make his genius more puissant, and enable him to concentrate all his forces in the same direction by uniting instead of scattering them? With, or in spite of his theories, Shelley wrote his poems and Whistler painted his pictures; if their æsthetic basis was bad, one, at least, cannot pretend that it was dangerous, since it enabled them to accomplish their masterpieces. Wilde, unfortunately, was an æsthete before he was a poet, and produced his works somewhat in the spirit of bravado. He had been told that he could not create aught of good: the reply, triumphant and crushing was, the Picture of Dorian Grey. He is a literary problem; and in considering him, we are struck with the unwarranted corruption, by his acquaintances, of a fine artistic sensibility.
The fashionable drawing-rooms of the West-End brought about his downfall, or rather, and it amounts to the same thing: his frank and undisguised desire to please and to dazzle them proved his undoing. Possibly the same misfortune would have overtaken Merimée, had it not been for his lofty and vigorous intelligence; as it was, he lost more than once, most precious time in composing “Chambres bleues,” when he was undoubtedly capable of producing another “Colomba,” and other variations of “Vases étrusques.”
With all this, let us be thoroughly just; Intentions is far from containing anything but mere paradoxes. Those that we find there are at any rate of very diverse kinds. Some are pure verbal amusements, and may be thrust aside after the moment’s attention that they snatched from our surprise. Others belong to a nobler family of ideas and awaken in us the lasting and fecund astonishment of the paradox which is born sound and healthy, because it concerns a new truth. Into the mental landscape, these paradoxes introduce that sudden change of perspective, which forces the mind to rise or to descend, and thus causes us to discover other horizons. What a grievous error would it be on our part not to feel something of that immense and exhaustive love of beauty which haunted the soul of Wilde until the bitter end? However artificial his work may appear at the first glance, there is still sufficient left of the man which was incomparable. We instinctively feel that he belonged to the chosen race of those upon whom the “spirit of the hour” had laid his magic wand, and who give forth at the cunning touch of the Magician some of the finest notes of which our stunted human nature is capable. Men thus endowed, enjoy the rare privilege of being unable to proffer a single word, without our perceiving however confusedly, the splendid harmony of an almost universal accompaniment of ideas. The choir, their eyes fixed upon the eyes of the master-musician, follows his inspired gestures with jealous care, and seeks to interpret his every nod and movement.
None but an artist could have written the admirable pages on Shakespeare, Greek Art, and other elevated themes that are to be found in the works of Oscar Wilde.
More than an artist was he, who noted down the suggestive thought: that the humility of the matter of a work of art is an element of culture. If therefore, we hear him exclaim that “thought is a sickness,” we must bear in mind that this is simply an analysis of the phrase: “We live in a period whose reading is too vast to allow it to become wise, and which thinks too much to be beautiful.”
Our eyes can no longer penetrate the esoteric meaning of the statues of the olden times, beautiful with glorified animality, and which have alas, become for us little more than the tongue-tied offspring of the inspiring god Pan, dead beyond all hope of rebirth. Our brains have become stupified through the heaviness of the flesh, and this, perhaps, because we have treated the flesh as a slave.
“The worship of the senses, wrote Wilde, has often, and with much justice, been decried; men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly-organised forms of existence. But it is probable the true nature of the senses has never been understood, and that they have remained savage and animal merely because the world has sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty will be the dominant characteristic.”[8]
In these lines, we may perhaps find the key of a certain metamorphosis in the poet’s life, before Circe, that terrible sorceress, had passed his way.