Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression

by Edgar Saltus

It may be that she was right. St. George, I believe, fought a dragon with a spear. Whether or not he killed the brute I have forgotten. But Wilde fought poverty, which is perhaps more brutal, with a pen. The fight, if indolent, was protracted. Then, abruptly, his inkstand became a Vesuvius of gold. London that had laughed at him, laughed with him and laughed colossally. A penny-a-liner was famous. The international hurdle-race of the stage had been won in a canter and won by a hack. A sub-editor was top of the heap.

The ascent was perhaps too rapid. The spiderous Fates that sit and spin are jealous of sudden success. It may be that Mrs. Wilde was right. In any event, for some time before the crash he saw few of his former friends. After his release few of his former friends saw him. But personally, if I may refer to myself, I am not near sighted. I saw him in Paris, saw too, and to my regret, that he looked like a drunken coachman, and told him how greatly I admired the "Ballad,"—that poem which tells of his life, or rather of his death, in jail. Half covering his mouth with his hand, he laughed and said: "It does not seem to me sufficiently vécu."

Before the enormity of that I fell back. But at once he became more human. He complained that even the opiate of work was denied him, since no one would handle his wares.

The Athenians, who lived surrounded by statues, learned from them the value of silence, the mystery that it lends to beauty, in particular the dignity that it gives to grief. In their tragedies any victim of destiny is as though stricken dumb. Wilde knew that, he knew everything, in addition to being a thorough Hellenist. None the less he told of his fate. It was human, therefore terrible, but it was not the tragic muse. It was merely a tragedy of letters.

Letters, yes, but lower case. Wilde was a third rate poet who occasionally rose to the second class but not once to the first. Prose is more difficult than verse and in it he is rather sloppy. In spite of which, or perhaps precisely on that account, he called himself lord of language. Well, why not, if he wanted to? Besides, in his talk he was lord and more—sultan, pontifex maximus. Hook, Jerrold, Smith, Sheridan, rolled into one, could not have been as brilliant. In talk he blinded and it is the subsiding wonder of it that his plays contain.

In the old maps, on the vague places, early geographers used to put: Hic sunt leones—Here are lions. On any catalogue of Wilde's plays there should be written: Here lions might have been. For assuming his madness, one must also admit his genius and the uninterrupted conjunction of the two might have produced brilliancies such as few bookshelves display.

Therein is the tragedy of letters. Renan said that morality is the supreme illusion. The diagnosis may or may not be exact. Yet it is on illusions that we all subsist. We live on lies by day and dreams at night. From the standpoint of the higher mathematics, morality may be an illusion. But it is very sustaining. Formerly it was also Oscar Wilde inspirational. In post-pagan days it created a new conception of beauty. Apart from that, it has nothing whatever to do with the arts, except the art of never displeasing, which, in itself, is the whole secret of mediocrity.

Oscar Wilde lacked that art, and I can think of no better epitaph for him.

Here ends this book written by Edgar Saltus, arranged in this form by Laurence C. Woodworth, Scrivener, and printed for the Brothers of the Book at the press of The Faithorn Company, Chicago, 1917.