Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

"The House of Pomegranates" was published in 1891, and is dedicated to Constance Mary Wilde. Here, in a volume which the author frankly calls a volume of "Beautiful Tales," is a very stern indictment of the social system which, in his essay "The Soul of Man," Oscar Wilde had so powerfully denounced. We know how profoundly that essay has influenced the minds of men in every country in Europe. Translated into every tongue it has taught the oppressed to resent the callous cruelty of capital, but I doubt if its author was altogether as earnest as he seems. Here, in the story of the young King, we have a lighter touch. It is as though the writer hesitated between two paths. In the year 1895 the wrong path had been taken if we may trust the record of a conversation which took place in that year.

"To be a supreme artist," said he, "one must first be a supreme individualist."

"You talk of Art," said I, "as though there were nothing else in the world worth living for."

"For me," said he sadly, "there is nothing else."

But when Oscar Wilde dedicated "The House of Pomegranates" to his wife the love of Beauty and the love of humankind still seemed to go together.

The young King is possessed with a passion for beauty. The son of the old King's daughter, by a secret marriage, his childhood and early youth have been obscure, and he comes into his kingdom suddenly. We see him in the Palace where are gathered rich stores of all rare and beautiful things and his love for them is an instinct. The author in some exquisite pages tells us of the glories of the King's house. Here, as in the other book of which I have written, the mind of the reader is helped to realise how beautiful luxury may be. I must quote the description of the young King's sleeping-chamber—"The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis lazuli, fitted one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass and a cup of dark veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst."

But on the eve of the coronation, the King dreams a dream. He is borne to the weavers' quarter and marks their weary toil, and the weaver of his own coronation robe has terrible things to tell him.

"In war," answered the weaver, "the strong make slaves of the weak, and in peace the rich make slaves of the poor. We must work to live, and they give us such mean wages that we die. We toil for them all day long, and they heap up gold in their coffers, and our children fade away before their time, and the faces of those we love become hard and evil. We tread out the grapes, and another drinks the wine. We sow the corn, and our own board is empty. We have chains though no eye beholds them; and are slaves, though men call us free."

"Sic vos non nobis!" The artist in words is still haunted by his master Vergil's verses, and he had not listened to Ruskin all in vain. The Pagan point of view is not that which prevailed in those happy months when "The House of Pomegranates" was written. Perhaps Ruskin's socialism made no very deep impression, but Christian Art had its message once for Oscar Wilde.

The young King sees in his dreams the toil of the weaver, and the diver, and of those who dig for the red rubies, and when he wakes he puts his pomp aside. In vain do his courtiers chide him, in vain do those whom he pities tell him that his way of redress is wrong and that "out of the luxury of the rich cometh the life of the poor."