POEMS

It is a relief to turn from a list of bibliographical and biographical dates to the May-day colouring of a young man's first book; to forget for a moment the suffering that is nearly twenty years ahead, and to think of "undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far more rhyme than reason." It is too easy to forget this note in Wilde's personality, that he sounded again and again, and that was not cracked even by the terrible experiences whose symbol was imprisonment. To the end of his life Wilde retained the enthusiasm, the power of self-abandon to a moment of emotion, the delight in difficult beauty, in accomplished loveliness, that made his Oxford years so happy a memory, and give his first book a savour quite independent of its poetical value.

Ballade and villanelle, rondeau and triolet, the names of these French forms were enough to set the key for a young craftsman's reverie. But the university at that time was full of lively influences. Walter Pater's "Renaissance" had not long left the press. Its author, that grave man, was to be met in his panelled rooms, ready to advise, to point the way to rare books, and to talk of the secrets of his art. Pater in those days was a new classic, the private possession of those young men who found his books "the holy writ of beauty." The new classics of the generation before—Tennyson and Arnold and Browning—had not yet faded into that false antiquity that follows swift upon the heels of popular recognition. The scholar gipsy had not long been given his place in the mythology of "Oxford riders blithe," and the trees in Bagley Wood were still a little tremulous at his presence. Browning's "The Ring and the Book" had been published ten years before. Queen Victoria's approval of Tennyson may have somewhat marred him in the eyes of youthful seekers after subtlety, but the early poems offered a pleasant opportunity for discriminating appreciation. It was not very long since Swinburne "had set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry." Morris, the first edition of whose "Defence of Guenevere," though published in 1857, was not exhausted till thirteen years later, was a master not yet so widely admired as to deny to his disciples the delight of a personal and almost daring loyalty. Rossetti's was a still more powerful influence.

All these factors must be remembered in any attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere in which Wilde wrote his early poems. Nor must we forget that when Wilde entered that atmosphere as an undergraduate he had an unusual training behind him. He had known another university, and carried away from it a gold medal for Greek. He was an Irishman whose nationality had been momentarily intensified by his revolutionary mother and his own name. And, perhaps still more important, he was a very youthful cosmopolitan, had been often abroad, knew a good deal of French poetry, and had been able to date one of his earliest poems from that light-hearted Avignon where the Popes once held their court, and whence the dancing on the broken bridge has sent a merry song throughout the world.

It is curious to see this young lover of ThÉophile Gautier and old intricate rhyme-forms, winning the Newdigate Prize for a poem in decasyllabic couplets on a set subject. Many bad and a few good poets have won that prize, and it constitutes, I suppose, a sort of academic recognition that a man writes verse. Wilde was always pleased with recognition, of whatever quality, and was, perhaps, induced to compete on finding himself curiously favoured by the subject chosen for the year, which happened to be Ravenna. He had visited Ravenna on his way to Greece in the previous long vacation, and so was equipped with memories denied to his rivals. He saw the city "across the sedge and mire," when they could only see her on the map. He knew "the lonely pillar, rising on the plain" where Gaston de Foix had died. And, in Italian woods, he had actually watched, hoping to see and hear

The wordy piece of rhetoric that was published after winning him the prize is enriched by some pictorial effects that are almost effects of poetry. But the best that can or need be said of the whole is, that it is an admirable prize poem.

Three years later he published his first book.

Poems, bound in white vellum, decorated with gold, and beautifully printed, contains work done before and after Ravenna. The most obvious quality of this work, and that which is most easily and most often emphasized, is its richness in imitations. But there is more in it than that. It is full of variations on other men's music, but they are variations to which the personality of the virtuoso has given a certain uniformity. Wilde played the sedulous ape with sufficient self-consciousness and sufficient failure to show that he might himself be somebody. His emulative practice of his art asks for a closer consideration than that usually given to it. Let me borrow an admirable phrase from M. Remy de Gourmont, and say that a "dissociation of ideas" is necessary in thinking of imitation. To describe a young poet's work as derivative is not the same thing as to condemn it. All work is derivative more or less, and to pour indiscriminate contempt on Wilde's imitations because they are imitations, is to betray a lamentable ignorance of the history of poetry. There is no need too seriously to defend this early work. Wilde's reputation can stand without or even in spite of it. But it is worth while to notice that the worst it suggests is that young poets should be very careful to be bad critics, since they always do ill if they imitate the best contemporary models. They do better to copy poetasters, whom they must believe to be Miltons. When Coleridge admires Bowles, makes forty transcriptions from his poems for distribution among his friends, and imitates him as wholeheartedly as he can, he will but gain in comparison with his original. There is nothing in the master strong enough to impose itself upon the pupil. When Keats, full of admiration, imitates Leigh Hunt, he is not very heavily impeded in his search for Keats. But when Wilde blows the horn of Morris, an echo from that Norseman's lungs throws out of harmony the notes of his disciple. When he touches Rossetti's lute his melody is blurred by the thrum of the strings that the Italian's fingers have so lately left. In fifty years' time it will, perhaps, be safe to imitate Swinburne. It is not so at present.

Even in springing from the ground of prose into the air of song, it is wise to choose ground that age has worn or that is not itself remarkable. When Coleridge reads Purchas—

"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfule Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure"——

and rewrites it—

he works a true magic, bringing two out of one, and setting beside Purchas something that we can independently enjoy. Purchas died so long ago. He and Coleridge have different worlds behind them. But when Wilde remembers a passage in his favourite book, written not a dozen years before, and asks why he should not make personal to himself the description of the manifold life of Mona Lisa, that ends, "all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes"; when he prefixes two verses of explanation to a rhymed elaboration of that sentence—

he only puts it out of drawing. It is impossible to avoid a comparison, because Pater and Wilde are so close together, alike in time and feeling.

'Eleutheria,' a section at the beginning of the book, includes a number of discreet sacrifices on the altar of Milton. Here Wilde does much better. Some of these exercises, which are among the most interesting he wrote, suggest a new view of the morale of imitation. With Wilde in this mood, imitation (to use one of those renewals of popular sayings that were the playthings of his mind), was the sincerest form of parody. Now parody is a branch of criticism. The critics of the music-hall stage are those favourite comedians who imitate their fellow-actors. Lewis Carroll is a negligible critic neither of Longfellow nor of Tennyson. Parody's criticism is too often facile, seeking applause by the readiest means, holding up to ridicule rather than to examination faults rather than excellences, exaggerating tricks of manner and concerning itself not at all with personality. Wilde's parodies are at once more valuable and more sincere. He tries to catch not only the letter but the spirit, and does indeed present a clearer view of Milton than is contained in many academic essays. An accusation of mere plagiary is made impossible by his openness. He writes a sonnet on Milton, a sonnet on Louis Napoleon, and then, matching even the title of his model, a sonnet on the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria. Let me print the sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont":—

And then Wilde's:—

This is a very different thing from the blind plagiary of those who cannot see their own way, and are themselves surprised to find that they have stolen. In their case, mistrust of their own powers is justifiable. But here, when the young poet, as an exercise—indeed as more than an exercise—catches the accent of Milton in words that deliberately set the doubtful faith of our day beside the noble assurance of the Puritans, and show by implication what that absolute belief meant to Milton, we are in the presence not of flattery, but of criticism, of exact appreciation. On the next page is the sonnet 'Quantum Mutata,' with the lines:—

and the suggestion, certainly not personal to Wilde, but chosen for its fitness to the poet of whom he is thinking—

If we were to take this view of the character of Wilde's imitations it would be an easy task to run through most of the book, showing how carefully he acknowledges his indebtedness to Arnold, to Swinburne, to Morris, much as a creative critic like Walter Pater courteously sets the name of Pico della Mirandola, or of Sir Thomas Browne, at the head of a piece of his own writing of which they have been less the occasion than the chosen keynote. But there is no need.

It is more important to the student of Wilde to notice that the book had a popular success, and a success in no way due to any praise from the contemporary critics who, naturally enough, were unable to consider Poems as the first book of a great man, could not review it in the light of his later writings, and attacked it wholeheartedly, perhaps because they were flattered by the ease with which they detected its openly-acknowledged borrowings. Five editions were sold immediately, and this not very trustworthy success increased or confirmed Wilde's confidence in himself. The readiness of the public to throw their opinion in the critics' teeth was partly due, I think, to precisely those qualities for which the book was attacked. Much of this unusual eagerness of ordinary people to buy poetry, a commodity that they seldom think worth money, may be attributed to the curiosity which Wilde had contrived to stimulate by carefully calculated eccentricity. But such curiosity would be more easily satisfied by the sight of the man than by the reading of his poems. It is hardly enough to explain the sale of five editions of a book of verse. I think we may look for another reason of the book's popularity in the fact that Wilde, so far from inventing a new poetry, happened to summarize in himself the poetry of his time. He made himself, as it were, the representative poet of his period, a middleman between the muses and the public. People who had heard of Rossetti and Swinburne, but never read them, were able to recover their self-respect by purchasing Wilde.

And this leads us back to the book. All the defects of this young man's verse became qualities that contributed to its popular success. It was imitative: it summed up a period of poetry. It was overweighted with allusion: nothing could be more poetical in the ears of readers not trained by an austere Bowyer to a distrust of Pierian springs, lutes, lyres, Pegasus, and Hippocrene.

"In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse. Your nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister pump, I suppose." (Coleridge on Bowyer, in the "Biographia Literaria.")

The presence in verse of certain names of places and persons has come to be taken as implicit evidence of poetry. Where Venus is, there must poetry be; Helicon, Narcissus, Endymion (after Keats), and a score of others have become a sort of poetical counters that careless eyes do not distinguish from the sterling coin. Wilde makes full use of them, and, perhaps, trusting to the capital letters to carry them through, frequently decorates his verse with names of similar character not yet so hackneyed as to be immediately recognized as poetry. This kind of allusion flatters the reader's learning. Sometimes he brings colour into his verse by the use of a reference that must be unintelligible to a large part of his audience, and seems quite irrelevant to those who take the trouble to follow it, and have not the good fortune to hit upon the correct clue. For example, in 'The New Helen':—

Now that, though not poetry, is a pleasant piece of colour. But, leaving aside the question of the bird, the servant of the sun, itself not easy to resolve, young Euphorion, who has served Wilde's verse well enough in having scarlet lips, is more than a little puzzling. Wilde probably remembers Part II of Goethe's "Faust." Achilles and Helen are said, as ghosts, to have had a child called Euphorion, but Goethe makes him the son of Faust and Helen, named in the legend Justus Faust. He leaps from earth when "scarcely called to life," and "out of the deep" invites his mother to follow him not to any "tower of old delight," but to "the gloomy realm." The reference is wilful, but Euphorion is a wonderful name.

Sometimes, indeed, the verse gains nothing from such allusion. For example, in the same poem:—

This is simply learning put in for its own sake by the young scholar delighting in his knowledge of antiquity. The line that I have printed in italics is no more than a riddle whose answer is Venus, sometimes called Erycina (Erycina ridens) because she had a temple on Mount Eryx. Wilde means that Helen was hidden with the spirit of beauty (Venus) now shamefully neglected. He delighted in such riddles and disguised references, and they certainly helped his less cultured readers to feel that in reading him they were intimate with more poetry than they had read. In 'The Burden of Itys,' to take a last example, he says, addressing the nightingale:—

Sir Piercie Shafton might choose such a method of referring to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed, so far does Wilde carry his ingenuity that we are reminded of the defects of that school of verse that Johnson called the metaphysical, whose virtues are too generally forgotten. He hears the wind in the trees as PalÆstrina playing the organ in Santa Maria on Easter Day. With half an echo of Browning he describes a pike as "some mitred old bishop in partibus," and, with a true seventeenth-century conceit, speaks of the early rose as "that sweet repentance of the thorny briar."

This ready-made or artificial poetry lacked, however, the firm intellectual substructure that could have infused into ornament and elaboration the vitalizing breath of unity. Wilde was uncertain of himself, and, in each one of the longer poems, rambled on, gathering flowers that would have seemed better worth having if he had not had so many of them. Doubtful of his aim in individual poems, he was doubtful of his inclinations as a poet. Nothing could more clearly illustrate this long wavering of his mind than a list of the poets whom he admired sufficiently to imitate. I have mentioned Morris, Swinburne, Arnold, and Rossetti; but these are not enough. In swift caprice he rifled a score of orchards. He very honestly confesses in 'Amor Intellectualis' that he had often "trod the vales of Castaly," sailed the sea "which the nine Muses hold in empery," and never turned home unladen.

Milton, Dante, Marlowe, Keats, and Browning, with those I have already named, and others, make up a goodly list of sufferers by this lighthearted corsair's piracies. He built with their help a brilliant coloured book, full of ingenuity, a boy's criticism of the objects of his admiration, almost a rhymed dictionary of mythology, whose incongruity is made apparent by those poems in which, leaving his classics passionately aside, he went, like a scholar gipsy, to seek a new accomplishment in the simplicity of folk-song.

Wilde's reputation as a poet does not rest on this first book, but on half a dozen poems that include 'The Harlot's House,' 'A Symphony in Yellow,' 'The Sphinx' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' and alone are worthy of a place beside his work in prose. But, though poetry is rare in it, it will presently be recognized that the first books of few men are so rich in autobiography. We have seen that the book is an index to his reading: let us see now how many indications it gives us of his life.

Threaded through the book, between the longer poems, runs an itinerary of his travels in Italy and Greece, written by a young man very conscious of being a poet, and keenly sensible of what it was fitting he should feel. In Italy, for example, he thought that he owed himself a conversion to the Catholic faith:—

He wrote almost as a Catholic might write, and spoke of the Pope as "the prisoned shepherd of the Church of God." But later, when

he turned, as a Puritan might have turned, from the emblem, triple-crowned, and clothed in red and white, of Christ's sovereignty, to remember a passage in the gospels: "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."

He had a Calvinistic, half-shocked and half-exultant vision of his own iniquity, this undergraduate of twenty-three:—

Yet he took hope:—

He had, in short, a religious experience, such as is known by most young men. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was disturbed, delightfully disturbed, by feeling that a religious experience was possible to him. He went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato, forgot the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a wholly voluntary repose in Christianity.

He returned to Oxford, to win the Newdigate Prize in the next year, and to remember, with something of a girl's adventurous regret for a lover whom she has rejected, his Italian emotion. All this is written down in 'The Burden of Itys':—

and, in a later stanza:—

'Panthea,' in language that suggests that he is looking for approval from the eyes of Swinburne, describes his substitute for that refused conversion. It is the creed of a young poet who finds the gods asleep, and does not care, because of Darwin, Evolution, and the Law of the Conservation of Energy.

And:—

and:—

It is boy's thought, as serious as the sentimental dreaming of a girl. There is no need to laugh at either. No young girl ever yet made a great poem out of her inexperience, nor has any young man turned to great art his hurried reading of the universe. But few great men have been without such thoughts in youth, and the noblest women can remember girlish dreams of an incredible unreality.

After taking his degree Wilde left Oxford and came to London to build up that phantom of himself that helped to advertise him, and, at the same time, to make his progress difficult. He dedicates a sonnet to 'My Friend Henry Irving,' another to Sarah Bernhardt, and two to Ellen Terry, 'Written at the Lyceum Theatre.' We have an impression of the young man, more elaborately dressed than he can afford, paying extravagant, delightful compliments, and quickly gaining the sort of reputation that was given to gallants of an older time, who knew actors, and had their seats on the stage.

Finally, and certainly most important in his own eyes, the book contains a record of the love affair which, in a sense, balanced the abortive religious experience. He fell in love with an actress, who found him quite delightful, did not love him, let him love her for a summer, and then told him not to waste his time. Wilde, as a young poet, probably came to town prepared to fall in love, just as he had gone to Italy prepared to be converted to Catholicism. His actress may have recognized that this was so, and been ready, within reason, to play the part assigned her. Through Wilde's magnificent phrasing there appears a replica of the love affairs of how many boys with women wiser than themselves and not without a sense of humour.

But he had not to grumble: he had been able to love her learnedly in sonnets and gallantly in serenades. He had—

That was really all that he had needed, but an awakening critical faculty told him that he won more pain than poetry.

He was disappointed, but the fault was not his, not his lady's, but due only to impatience. He who wills to love has rhetoric in his feeling, and, though he wrote—

we cannot help thinking that we know better.

The book is the monument of Wilde's boyhood, and contains its history. Perhaps that, though it may save it from oblivion, is the reason of its failure. It is too immediate an attempt to translate life into literature. Sometimes it even suggests that there has been an attempt to make life simply for the purpose of transcribing it. Wilde disguised it in elaboration, but it wears the mask with an ingenuous awkwardness. It is so youthful. Indeed, the youth of the book is its justification, and helps it to throw a flickering light upon his later work. For Wilde never entirely lost his boyhood, and died, as he had mostly lived, young. Five years after the publication of Poems he wrote a letter in which, catching exactly the mood of his undergraduate days of ten years before, he said that he wished he could grave his sonnets on an ivory tablet, since sonnets should always look well. That is the precise sentiment of those who seek "to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written." It was his whenever he wished. But, though he could recapture the mood, and assume again the attitude, he did not allow himself to imitate the work that mood and attitude had produced. In that white vellum volume were harvested all the wild oats of the intellect that he did not leave to later gleaners. He was free thenceforth, and seldom again, until the magnificent confession De Profundis, did he allow his experiences the use of the first person.[3] He had done with the crude subjectivity of boyhood, whose capital "I" seems so unreal beside the complete fusions of soul and body, manner and material, that Art demands and that he was later to achieve.