Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

When a friend reproached the monster Wainwright with the murder of an innocent girl, Helen Abercrombie, to whom he owed every duty of kindness and protection, he shrugged his shoulders and said—"Yes, it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles." If we are to take Oscar Wilde's essay, "Pen, Pencil and Poison," quite seriously we must believe him to be utterly indifferent to the monstrous moral character of the hero of his memoir. He speaks of him as being not merely a poet and a painter, an art critic and antiquarian, a writer of prose and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger of no mean nor ordinary capacities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.

When "De Profundis" first made its appearance and the flood of criticism began, dozens of critics pounced upon the book, admitted its marvellous literary charm and achievement, and said that its author was absolutely and utterly insincere in all he wrote about himself. The Times for example, which still holds a certain pre-eminence of place, although it is the fashion of a younger generation to decry it and to pretend that it has lost all its influence, owing both to the change of public taste in journalistic requirements and certain business enterprises which have been associated with its name, spoke out to this effect with careful and calculated sincerity.

In an article which was extremely well written and had indubitably a certain psychological insight, the leading journal condemned "De Profundis" from an ethical point of view with no uncertain voice. It said that, while it was possessed by every wish to understand the author and to sympathise with him in the hideous ruin of his brilliant career, it was impossible, except in a very few instances, to regard his posthumous book as anything but a mere literary feat.

The excellence of that was granted, but it was not allowed to be anything more than that.

It was not in this way, so said the writer in The Times, that souls were laid bare, this was not sorrow, but the most dextrous counterfeit of sorrow. Wilde, so the review stated, was "probably unable to cry from the depths at all." His book simply showed that there was an armour of egotism which no arrow of fate was able to pierce. Even in "De Profundis" the poseur supplemented the artist, and the truth was not in him. If the heart of a broken man showed at all in the book it must, said The Times, "be looked for between the lines. It was rarely in them."

In short, so the review, when summed up and crystallised, implied, Wilde was incapable of telling the truth about himself, or about anything at all. Sometimes in his writings he fell upon the truth by accident, and then his works contained a modicum of truth. Consciously, he was never able to discover it, consciously, he was never able to enunciate it.

Now, that is a point of view which is natural enough, but which, after careful study, I cannot substantiate in any way. Over and over again the same thing was said. Everybody was prepared, at last, to admit that Wilde was a great artist—in direct contradiction to that condemnation of even his literary power which was poured upon his works at the time of his downfall—but the general opinion of the leading critics seemed to point to the fact of "De Profundis" being a pose and insincere.

Now, if the book was merely an excursion in attitude, a considered work of art without any very profound relation to the truth of its personal psychology, then I think the book would be a less saddening thing than it undoubtedly is. Surely, the author had a perfect right, if he so wished, to produce a psychological romance. This I know is not a generally held opinion, but I do not see how anybody who knows anything about the brain of the artist and the ethics of creation can really deny it. If the work is absolutely sincere, as I believe it to be, then, from the moral point of view, it is indeed a terrible document. It shows us how little the extraordinary, complex temperament of Oscar Wilde was really chastened and purified. It provides us with a moral picture of monstrous egotism set in a frame of jewels.

As has been said so often before in this book, the worse and insane side of Oscar Wilde must always obscure and conquer the better and beautiful side of him.

Oscar Wilde describes himself as a "lord of language." This is perfectly true. He goes on to say that he "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of his time." This is only half true. He continues that "I felt it myself and made others feel it." The first half of this sentence is too true, the second half is untrue, inasmuch as it implies that he made everyone feel it, whereas he mistook the flattery and adulation of a tiny coterie for the applause and sanction of a nation. Oscar Wilde always lived within four very narrow walls. At one time they were the swaying misty walls conjured up by a few and not very important voices, at another they were the walls of concrete and corrugated iron, the whitewashed walls of his prison cell. He says that his relations to his time were more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope than Byron's relation to his time. Then, almost in the same breath, he begins to tell us that there is only one thing for him now, "absolute humility." That something hidden away in his nature like a treasure in a field is "humility."