“Who knows not Circe,
The daughter of the Sun, whose charmed cup
Whoever tasted lost his upright shape,
And downward fell into a grovelling swine?”
(Milton: Comus, 50-53.)
The infant King of Rome, we are told, looking out from a window of the Louvre one day, at the muddy street where young children were playing,—sad in the midst of a perfumed and divinely flattering court,—cried out: “I too, would like to roll myself in that beautiful mud.” We are inclined to think from a sentimental outlook, that Wilde also had the same morbid desire; but, he was worth better things; and there were times in his life when serene aspirations moved his heart before he sat down to the festive board of Sin.
He had a pronounced tendency towards the discipulat; used to question youths about their studies and their mind, showing as much interest in them as a spiritual confessor, inebriating himself with their enthusiasm, and surrounding himself more and more with a medley of different friends. A vigorous pagan, ardent, intoxicated with souvenirs of Antiquity, heart-sick of his worldly successes, he dreamed perhaps of living over again:
Ces héröiques jours où les jeunes pensées
Allaient chercher leur miel aux lèvres d’un Platon.
But this artificiel de l’art was, although he wotted it not, a man who rioted in the good things of life. He sought to inculcate in himself a quiet spirit which believes itself invulnerable.
“And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thoughts, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.”[9]
This passage shows us a state of things very far removed from the old dream of antiquity.
He forgot, alas! the puritanism and sublime discourses of Diotime, which have been so finely pictured for us by Plato, to wallow in the orgies of the Island of Capria.
Before that Criminal Court, where he vainly struggled so as “not to appear naked before men,” we hear him proclaim what he had himself desired and perhaps attained.
What interpretation, asked the judge, can you give us of the verse: