It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then—a popularizer who, for a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer—that Wilde seems to me to stand to his age. What, then, of Mr. Ransome’s estimate of Salomé? That it is a fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. But of what quality is this fascination? It is, when all is said and done, the fascination of the lust of painted faces. Here we have no tragedy, but a mixing of degenerate philtres. Mr. Ransome hears “the beating of the wings of the angel of death” in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the atmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the broken body of Salomé one has a sick feeling, as though one had been present where vermin were being crushed. There is not a hint of the elation, the liberation, of real tragedy. The whole thing is simply a wonderful piece of coloured sensationalism. And even if we turn to the costly sentences of the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and design Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town displaying his collection of splendid gems?
Wilde speaks of himself in De Profundis as a lord of language. Of course, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice with him. He took to it as a man might take to drink. He was addicted rather than devoted to language. He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. How beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone knows who has read his brief Endymion (to name one of the poems), and the many hyacinthine passages in Intentions. But when one is anxious to see the man himself as in De Profundis—that book of a soul imprisoned in embroidered sophistries—one feels that this cloak of strange words is no better than a curse.
If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much laughter as well as language in Intentions that I am inclined to agree with Mr. Ransome that Intentions is “that one of Wilde’s books that most nearly represents him.” Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on taking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that “his paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths.” How horrified Wilde would have been to hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths—or a good deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome’s attitude on the question of Wilde’s sincerity seems to me as impossible as his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which every great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into that. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome’s conclusions, we must be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century.
[XVIII.—Two English Critics]
[(1) Mr. Saintsbury]
Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. His Peace of the Augustans is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the present world among the poets and novelists and biographers and letter-writers of the eighteenth century. His enthusiasm weaves spells about even the least of them. He does not merely remind us of the genius of Pope and Swift, of Fielding and Johnson and Walpole. He also summons us to Armory’s John Buncle and to the Reverend Richard Graves’s Spiritual Quixote as to a feast. Of the latter novel he declares that “for a book that is to be amusing without being flimsy, and substantial without being ponderous, The Spiritual Quixote may, perhaps, be commended above all its predecessors and contemporaries outside the work of the great Four themselves.” That is characteristic of the wealth of invitations scattered through The Peace of the Augustans. After reading the book, one can scarcely resist the temptation to spend an evening over Young’s Night Thoughts and one will be almost more likely to turn to Prior than to Shakespeare himself—Prior who, “with the eternal and almost unnecessary exception of Shakespeare … is about the first to bring out the true English humour which involves sentiment and romance, which laughs gently at its own, tears, and has more than half a tear for its own laughter”—Prior, of whom it is further written that “no one, except Thackeray, has ever entered more thoroughly into the spirit of Ecclesiastes.” It does not matter that in a later chapter of the book it is Rasselas which is put with Ecclesiastes, and, after Rasselas, The Vanity of Human Wishes. One does not go to Mr. Saintsbury as an inspector of literary weights and measures. His estimates of authors are the impressions of a man talking in a hurry, and his method is the method of exaggeration rather than of precise statement. How deficient he is in the sense of proportion may be judged from the fact that he devotes slightly more space to Collins than to Pope, unless the pages in which he assails “Grub Street” as a malicious invention of Pope’s are to be counted to the credit of the latter. But Mr. Saintsbury’s book is not so much a thorough and balanced survey of eighteenth-century literature as a confession, an almost garrulous monologue on the delights of that literature. How pleasant and unexpected it is to see a critic in his seventies as incautious, as pugnacious, as boisterous as an undergraduate! It is seldom that we find the apostolic spirit of youth living in the same breast with the riches of experience and memory, as we do in the present book.
One of the great attractions of the eighteenth century for the modern world is that, while it is safely set at an historical distance from us, it is, at the same time, brought within range of our everyday interests. It is not merely that about the beginning of it men began to write and talk according to the simple rules of modern times. It is rather that about this time the man of letters emerges from the mists of legend and becomes as real as one’s uncle in his daily passions and his train of little interests. One has not to reconstruct the lives of Swift and Pope from a handful of myths and references in legal documents. There is no room for anything akin to Baconianism in their regard. They live in a thousand letters and contemporary illusions, and one might as well be an agnostic about Mr. Asquith as about either of them. Pope was a champion liar, and Swift spun mystifications about himself. But, in spite of lies and Mystifications and gossip, they are both as real to us as if we met them walking down the Strand. One could not easily imagine Shakespeare walking down the Strand. The Strand would have to be rebuilt, and the rest of us would have to put on fancy dress in order to receive him. But though Swift and Pope lived in a century of wig and powder and in a London strangely unlike the London of to-day, we do not feel that similar preparations would be needed in their case. If Swift came back, one can without difficulty imagine him pamphleteering about war as though he had merely been asleep for a couple of centuries; and Pope, we may be sure, would resume, without too great perplexity, his attack on the egoists and dunces of the world of letters. But Shakespeare’s would be a return from legendary Elysian fields.
Hence Mr. Saintsbury may justly hope that his summons to the modern random reader, no less than to the scholar, to go and enjoy himself among the writers of the eighteenth century will not fall on entirely deaf ears. At the same time, it is only fair to warn the general reader not to follow Mr. Saintsbury’s recommendations and opinions too blindly. He will do well to take the author’s advice and read Pope, but he will do very ill to take the author’s advice as regards what in Pope is best worth reading. Mr. Saintsbury speaks with respect, for instance, of the Elegy on an Unfortunate Lady—an insincere piece of tombstone rhetoric. “There are some,” he declared in a footnote, “to whom this singular piece is Pope’s strongest atonement, both as poet and man, for his faults as both.” It seems to me to be a poem which reveals Pope’s faults as a poet, while of Pope the man it tells us simply nothing. It has none of Pope’s wit, none of his epigrammatic characterization, none of his bewigged and powdered fancies, none of his malicious self-revelation. Almost the only interesting thing about it is the notes the critics have written on it, discussing whether the lady ever lived, and, if so, whether she was a Miss Wainsbury or a lady of title, whether she was beautiful or deformed, whether she was in love with Pope or the Duke of Buckingham or the Duc de Berry, whether Pope was in love with her, or even knew her, or whether she killed herself with a sword or by hanging herself. One can find plenty of “rest and refreshment” among the conjectures of the commentators, but in the verse itself one can find little but a good example of the technique of the rhymed couplet. But Mr. Saintsbury evidently loves the heroic couplet for itself alone. The only long example of Pope’s verse which he quotes is merely ding-dong, and might have been written by any capable imitator of the poet later in the century. Surely, if his contention is true that Pope’s reputation as a poet is now lower than it ought to be, he ought to have quoted something from the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot or The Rape of the Lock, or even The Essay on Man. The two first are almost flawless masterpieces. Here Pope suddenly becomes a star. Here he gilds his age and his passions with wit and fancy; he ceases to be a mere rhymed moralist, a mechanician of metre. Mr. Saintsbury, I regret to see, contends that the first version of The Rape of the Lock is the best. One can hardly forgive this throwing overboard of the toilet and the fairies which Pope added in the later edition. We may admit that the gnomes are a less happy invention than the sylphs, and that their introduction lets the poem down from its level of magic illusion. But in the second telling the poem is an infinitely richer and more peopled thing. Had we only known the first version, we should, no doubt, have felt with Addison that it was madness to tamper with such exquisite perfection. But Pope, who foolishly attributed Addison’s advice to envy, proved that Addison was wrong. His revision of The Rape of the Lock is one of the few magnificently successful examples in literature of painting the lily.