POEMS
If a keynote were wanted to Oscar Wilde's verse it might be found in a couple of stanzas by the poet whose work perhaps had the greatest share in moulding his ideas and fashioning his style. Charles Baudelaire, with all his love of the terrible and the morbid, was an incomparable stylist, and in these lines has almost formulated a creed of art.
"La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers.
Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent."
We can picture to ourselves the young Oxford student studying these lines over and over again till they had become part and parcel of himself.
Wilde himself has left it on record that he "cannot imagine anyone with the smallest pretensions to culture preferring a dexterously turned triolet to a fine imaginative ballad." In the majority of his poems, the beauties of nature, flowers, the song of birds and the music of running water are introduced either incidentally or as the leit motif. In fact, he was responsible for the dictum that what English poetry has to fear is not the fascination of dainty metre or delicate form, but the predominance of the intellectual spirit over the spirit of beauty.
That the expression of the beautiful need not necessarily be simple was one of his earliest contentions. "Are simplicity and directness of utterance," he asks, "absolute essentials for poetry?" and proceeds to answer his own question. "I think not. They may be admirable for the drama, admirable for all those imitative forms of literature that claim to mirror life in its externals and its accidents, admirable for quiet narrative, admirable in their place; but their place is not everywhere. Poetry has many modes of music; she does not blow through one pipe alone. Directness of utterance is good, but so is the subtle recasting of thought into a new and delightful form. Simplicity is good, but complexity, mystery, strangeness, symbolism, obscurity even, these have their value. Indeed, properly speaking, there is no such thing as Style; there are merely styles, that is all."
There we have a clear, concise and catholic statement of his literary creed, and none other was to be expected from one to whom Baudelaire, Poe, Keats, and Rossetti were so many masters whose influence was to be carefully cultivated and whose methods were worthy of imitation and study. His views on the subject of simplicity in verse should be read by all who desire to understand his method and do justice to his work.
"We are always apt to think," he wrote, "that the voices which sang at the dawn of poetry were simpler, fresher, and more natural than ours, and that the world which the early poets looked at, and through which they walked, had a kind of poetical quality of its own, and could pass, almost without changing, into song. The snow lies thick now upon Olympus, and its scarped sides are bleak and barren, but once, we fancy, the white feet of the Muses brushed the dew from the anemones in the morning, and at evening came Apollo to sing to the shepherds in the vale. But in this we are merely lending to other ages what we desire, or think we desire, for our own. Our historical sense is at fault. Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us the most natural and simple product of its time is probably the result of the most deliberate and self-conscious effort. For nature is always behind the age. It takes a great artist to be thoroughly modern."