CHAPTER XIII
OSCAR WILDE

One evening in the early summer of 1895 the newsboys were shouting “All the winners.” Yet one line on their placards gave the lie to that eternal cry which mocks the death of great men and the fall of great empires. It referred to the sentence which, in due time, was to give birth to the one indisputably genuine and serious thing Oscar Wilde wrote, the Ballad of Reading Gaol.

OSCAR WILDE.

Oscar Wilde was one of the losers; in the long list of men of genius who have paid just forfeit it is not easy to think of a more tragic figure. Others had fallen from greater heights; none had gone more friendlessly to a lower perdition. For it was the very element of his tragedy that it could not be shared or alleviated; on the path he had henceforth to tread there could be no comrade; his offence was one at which charity itself stood embarrassed, and compassion felt the fear of compromise. On this very evening theatres were full of people chuckling over jests of almost wicked brilliance which he had turned and re-turned, polished and sharpened, with the laborious care of a lapidary, for he worked at trifles with tremendous earnestness, and the ease of the style was the reward of immense pains on the part of the writer. One of his comedies was being actually played in London while the drama of his trial was proceeding on another stage. Business is business, and managers with money at stake did not care to withdraw immediately good money-drawing pieces. But they made a due amende to outraged decency. They played Wilde’s play, but they struck his name out of the bill. The action might be mean. But it was understandable. There was no harm in the play, but the name could then hardly be pronounced without offence.

Even at this distance, when there can be pity without suspicion of condonation, it is not easy to discuss Wilde as we should any other author whose influence was considerable in his day and generation. Yet those who would pass by this ill-starred man of genius because of the event which interrupted his career as a writer would be acting almost as foolishly as the absurd people (mostly Germans) who on the same account yield him a perverse and irrational homage. Wilde was not only important in himself; he was still more important as the representative of a mood yet to some extent with us, but extraordinarily prevalent in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Of this mood he was in letters the only able English representative. There were many men who thought his thoughts, and even attempted to write his style. But they are now forgotten except by the curious; Wilde alone survives. This mood was in certain aspects one of honesty, in others one of cowardice; it was never a mood of health. The honesty was negative; it took the form of protest against certain easy and conventional shams. The cowardice was positive; it took the form of fearing to stand in competition with great realities. People like Wilde had sense to detect, and virility to denounce, certain poor players of old tricks; they had not the courage to be themselves quite genuine people; they contented themselves on the whole with doing newer tricks. There was no harm in this in itself. But they had also much conceit, and so, to impress the public with a due sense of their importance, they insisted that the tricks of which they were easily capable were really the only tricks worth doing. Their art was Art itself, and the only Art.

Now it takes all sorts to make any kind of world, and there is no sense in expecting an artist whose gift is miniature painting to follow Paul Veronese. By all means let him sneer at any dull fool who does follow Paul Veronese. But we shall do well to take very little notice of him when he says that no picture should be painted on anything larger than six square inches of ivory. A Japanese netsuke is a pleasing object; so is Ely Cathedral. Let the netsuke carver have his due credit. But if he began to talk as if Ely Cathedral were a pretentious vulgarity, which he himself could easily have built if (in Johnson’s phrase) he had “abandoned his mind to it,” we should quickly tell him to mind his own business. But this was very much the pose of Wilde and his school. They were right in depreciating uninspired imitators of great men. They were wrong in depreciating all greatness which could not be measured by their own small tapes. They were especially wrong in declaring that “popular art is bad art,” and setting up their own literary jade-work, often graceful and pleasant enough in its own way, as the sole standard of taste. “Only the great masters of style,” said Oscar Wilde once, “ever succeeded in being obscure.” If that were literally true he himself, though self-called a “lord of language,” would have to be denied the title of stylist, for though he sometimes showed confusion of thought, and very often said things so silly that one sometimes looks a second time to see whether they are really meant, he was on the whole quite extraordinarily lucid. His words, however, though nonsensical in their literal effect, do mean something and reveal something. Every very great writer is obscure in the sense that he does somehow contrive to offer a choice to his reader; thus everybody has his own particular view of Hamlet, and of many individual passages in Hamlet, though the actual obscurities are very few. But Shakespeare never meant Hamlet to be a mystery to anybody; he meant it simply to be a good play, and one understandable to every soul in the theatre. Shakespeare was thinking of his audience as something that was doing him a compliment in coming to hear his play. Wilde thought of his audience as something that was complimented by his condescension in amusing it. Shakespeare, in short, represented popular and obvious art at its highest, and there is no higher art. Wilde, on the other hand, represented art that was above all things undemocratic. Its assumption was that whatever is popular must be vulgar, that whatever is unusual has at least a presumption of being fine. In such an attitude, whether to life or to art, there is an obvious spiritual danger, and it is not without reason that most people look for corruption where there is excessive refinement. After all, all the most important things men do must be either conventional or monstrous, and he who consciously strives to be much above the common herd in things mattering not very much is fatally prone to be dreadfully below it in things that really do matter. The country or age which can show great art with a simple and obvious motive is generally healthy. The country or age which attaches immense importance to the elaboration of trifles for esoteric appreciation is generally unhealthy. In these matters wherever there is mystery there is evil.

“The two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.” So says Wilde in De Profundis. His father was an oculist in Dublin, a clever, ill-balanced man of imperious passions and extravagant habits, who firmly believed that alcohol had pulled him through a severe illness, and drank freely on principle. Lady Wilde, poetess and Nationalist pamphleteer, was disappointed with Oscar in much the same way that Betsy Trotwood was disappointed with David Copperfield; she wanted a daughter, and, since Nature had denied her, she sought consolation by dressing, treating, and talking to her boy as if he had been a girl. It was one of the innumerable oddities of this lady to pretend descent from great people—she believed herself to come from a stem of the same tree which yielded Dante the poet—and the boy was named Oscar because his mother imagined herself she had some sort of connection with the Royal Family of Sweden. It was an unwholesome if brilliant atmosphere in which Oscar Wilde grew up, and the boy early contracted those habits of extravagance which led him, when a poor man in London, to spend hundreds a year in the matter of cabs alone. Neither at school nor at Oxford did he take any interest in sport, but he was devoted to his blue and white china, his antiques, and his wallpapers. This æstheticism earned him the resentment of some robust fellow-undergraduates, and he was once tied up in a rope and dragged to the top of a hill; when released he merely flicked the dust off his clothes and remarked, “Yes, the view is really very charming.” Perhaps the most important event of his Oxford life was the winning of the Newdigate prize. His success decided him to take up literature as a profession. And in order to make a short cut into literature he placed himself at the head of the æsthetes, clean-shaven and long-haired, in “a velvet coat, knee-breeches, a loose shirt with a turn-down collar, and a floating tie of some unusual shade fastened in a La Vallière knot,” carrying in his hand “a lily or a sunflower which he used to contemplate with an expression of the greatest admiration.”