ÆSTHETICISM

"I never object," said Coleridge, "to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I find him always arguing on one side of the question." Coleridge would seem to reserve legitimate dispute for the very young, did we not remember that academic education began and ended earlier in his day. Boys went to college at seventeen. I do not think he would have objected to the disputatiousness of Wilde, although he was well over twenty-five before he left the noisy field of argument, if, indeed, he left it at all. Wilde, at least, would have pleased Coleridge by arguing always on one side of the question, though it is possible that Coleridge would not have recognized that that side was his own. At Oxford, Wilde had already begun to count himself, if not an inventor, at least an exponent of the Æsthetic theories of life that were then disturbing with fitful movements the stagnant surface of British Philistinism. He did not plan a Pantisocracy, and would have turned with fright from Coleridge's sturdy proposal to harden the bodies of those accustomed to intellectual and sedentary labour until they were fitted to share in the tilling of the soil. But he was discontented with life as it was commonly lived, and had learnt to hope that it might be beautified by being set among beautiful things. He had expressed a wish that he could "live up to his blue china." His rooms in Magdalen, panelled and hung with engravings chosen for their difference from the pictures commonly affected, had been a centre of debate. His attitude had caused discussion and public protest, for he rode but did not hunt, did not play cricket, watched boat-races but did not go on the river, and only once showed much physical activity, when he wheeled Ruskin's barrow during the famous expedition of undergraduate navvies to make a road on Hinksey Marsh.[4]

We shall, perhaps, be better able to understand the first period of Wilde's public prominence, if we examine the origins of the movement of which, by accident and inclination, he became the accepted protagonist. Continental critics have noticed in his writings theories so closely analogous to those of the French Symbolists that they find it difficult not to believe that he was a disciple of that school, and, as it were, an English representative of MallarmÉ's salon in the Rue de Rome. It is true that, like the Symbolists, he sought intensity in art, and emphasis of its potential at the expense of its kinetic qualities. But in this he was English as well as French. Later in his life he was influenced by Maeterlinck and by Huysmans, but, while he was at Oxford and for some time after, he found his rules of art and life in the teaching of the Pre-Raphaelites. That teaching represents a movement in the same direction as the Symbolists, but a movement which, unlike the French, came to be identified with a desire to bring ordinary life into harmony with the intensity it demanded from art.

It is worth while to gain a clear perspective by discovering the relation between such men as Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Ruskin, and the cult of knee-breeches and chrysanthemums with which Punch and "Patience" identified Wilde. This cult was not a sudden sporadic flowering of strange blooms in the frail hands of a few undergraduates. It had its origin in 1848, when the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded The Germ, an extraordinarily earnest little monthly magazine, in which appeared Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," and etchings by Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. Perhaps, indeed, it had an earlier origin in the poetry of Keats, whose pure devotion to art for art's sake foreshadowed the feeling of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, or in the poetry of Blake, who, like them, emphasized the difference between the Sons of David and the Philistines. But, if we go back so far, we must go further and find still deeper roots for it in the great figures of the Romantic Movement, in the figures who made that movement possible, in Goethe, in Rousseau, in Ossian, in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." Wilde, at least, saw back thus far into his spiritual ancestry. But, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites, refusing the abstract art whose beginnings are marked by the technical skill of Raphael, finding in early Italian painting, whose spirit was less hidden by clear and insistent letter, a vivifying principle, stood, not only for a new kind of painting, but for a new attitude towards art in general, and then for a new attitude towards life. They were attacked, and Ruskin, who thought they were trying to realize a prophecy of his own, came to aid them with eloquent defence. Their pictures were sold but seldom exhibited, so that a kind of separateness, almost a secrecy, came to belong to their admirers. The public in general looked upon them as something aloof and mad. It happened, perhaps through the accident of Miss Siddal and Mrs. William Morris so frequently sitting as their models, perhaps because the ladies exemplified what was already their ideal, that there came into many paintings what is best known as the Pre-Raphaelite woman, long-necked, and pomegranate lipped. Nature, as Wilde was never tired of insisting, is assiduous in her imitation of art, and, when Sir Coutts Lindsay opened the Grosvenor Gallery for the benefit of these artists and their admirers, there were, beside those on the walls, a sufficient number of Pre-Raphaelite portraits walking about in the flesh to justify the curiosity and amusement of the crowd. A play, "The Colonel," of no great value, and the wholly delightful "Patience," a comic opera by Gilbert with music by Sullivan, brought the "green and yallery" gowns of the "Grosvenor Gallery" elect, with their poets and flowers and feelings towards the intenser life, into a charming masquerade. "Patience" was played at the Savoy with great success. Mr. D'Oyly Carte, attempting to repeat this success in America, perceived that Americans, being without a Grosvenor Gallery, missed much of the humour of the play, and conceived the Napoleonic scheme of sending over a specimen Æsthete to show what "Patience" was laughing at. This somewhat ignominious position was, with due diplomacy, offered to Oscar Wilde, on account of his extravagance in dress,[5] and proudly accepted by him on the wilful supposition that it was a fitting tribute to his recently published Poems. That is how it came about that on December 24, 1881, Wilde sailed for New York, to say that he was disappointed in the Atlantic, to tell the Customs Officials that he had nothing to declare except his genius, and to lecture throughout America on "The English Renaissance of Art," "House Decoration," and "Art and the Handicraftsman."

Youth and vanity helped to blind him to the rather humiliating reason of his lecturing. He wanted the money, but was able to persuade himself that he had really been chosen to represent the Æsthetic movement to the American people on account of his book of poems, and that, in any case, he wanted to go to America to have Vera, a worthless melodrama he had just written, put upon the stage. With his happy power of dramatizing his position, a power he shared with Beau Brummel and picturesque adventurers of lesser genius, he saw himself, almost immediately, as a sort of combination of William Morris and John Ruskin, gifted more than they with wit, beauty, and youth. He spoke of himself visiting the South Kensington Museum on Saturday nights, "to see the handicraftsman, the wood-worker, the glass-blower, and the worker in metals." He inspected art-schools, and carried away, to show his audiences, brass dishes beaten by little boys, and wooden bowls painted by little girls. He began to take himself more and more seriously—no doubt Punch's caricatures had helped him, and he was alone in America, far from the facts—and was able to tell his listeners "how it first came to me at all to create an artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might create." By this time I have no doubt that he believed with perfect good faith that the Æsthetic movement was the work and aim of his life. Only occasionally did he remember that he was living up to "Patience." "You have listened to 'Patience' for a hundred nights," he said, "and you have heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of Æstheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert." Once, indeed, he allowed himself to remind his audience of the extravagances at which that opera laughed, but then it was only to defend them with all the solemnity of an apostle. "You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the Æsthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some Æsthetic young men. Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art—the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy." This seems insufferable now, and probably was so then, but it is a proof of the perfection with which Wilde played the part his stage-manager had assigned him.

There is much that is charming in the lectures, together with much that is ridiculous, and some of the charm is in the folly. It is a very young knight who fights with a lily on his helmet and a sunflower tied to his spear-point. He has not perceived that the battle is at all difficult. He does not try with slow argument to undermine the enemy's position, but only says, quite cheerfully, that he would like to win. "When I was at Leadville and reflected that all the shining silver that I saw coming from the mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made me sad. It should be made into something more permanent. The golden gates at Florence are as beautiful to-day as when Michael Angelo saw them." He does not ever come to blows, but only says how ready he is for battle. "I have no respect," he quotes from Keats, "for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty." And he shows that the great men are on his side. In one lecture alone he appeals to Goethe, Rousseau, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Homer, Dante, Morris, Keats, Chaucer, Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Swinburne, Tennyson, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Edgar Allan Poe, Phidias, Michael Angelo, Sophocles, Milton, Fra Angelico, Rubens, Leopardi, Titian, Giorgione, Hugo, Balzac, Shakespeare, Mazzini, Petrarch, Baudelaire, Theocritus, and Gautier.

Indeed, his relation to the Æsthetic movement of 1880 is not unlike that of Gautier to the Romantic movement of 1830. Gautier, like Wilde, was born into an army already on the march, and became its most violent champion and exemplar. Gautier's crimson waistcoat balances Wilde's knee-breeches. It would be possible to carry the comparison further, and to find in Dorian Gray a parallel to "Mademoiselle de Maupin." An identical spirit presided over the writing of both these books. And it would be easy to find in Wilde, at any rate before his release from prison, an aloofness from ordinary life not at all unlike that of the man who exclaimed, "Je suis un homme des temps homÉriques;—le monde oÙ je vis n'est pas le mien, et je ne comprends rien À la sociÉtÉ qui m'entoure." I can imagine Gautier lecturing Americans in just such a manner as Wilde's, and forgetting, but for his loyalty to Hugo, that he had not invented Romanticism.

Wilde's lectures must have amused if they did not edify America. He urged the miners to retain their high boots, their blouses, their sombreros, when, with wealth in their pockets, they should return to the abomination of civilization. Surprised audiences in the towns heard him speak seriously of the stolid ugliness of the horse-hair sofa, and still more seriously of stoves decorated with funeral urns in cast iron. He begged them to realize the importance of a definite scheme of colour in their rooms, and to use other kinds of jugs than one. In his independence of the quarrels of his elders, he talked to them as Ruskin might have talked, of the craftsman and his place in life, and, at the same time, praised the Peacock Room and the room in blue and yellow designed by that American whom Ruskin had accused of throwing a pot of paint in the public's face. On one or two occasions Americans were rude to him. But he spoke with such courtesy and such obvious benevolence that more often they were content to pay their dollars, listen to him attentively, stare at him curiously, and then go to see "Patience."

Wilde took their dollars, left the propagation of beautiful furniture behind him, and went to Paris. He was tired of prophecy and ready to take a new part in a new play. He had

and now, seeking the fresh woods of the Bois, and the new pastures of the Champs ÉlysÉes, he "twitched his mantle" and threw it away, and with it sunflower, lily, and knee-breeches, preferring a change of costume with his change of part. He dressed now as a man of fashion, a dandy, but not an Æsthete. He even cut his hair. But the reputation he had made swelled before him. He came to Paris, after his lecturing, in 1883, but, as late as 1891, for those who had not seen him, Wilde "n'Était encore que celui qui fumait des cigarettes À bout d'or et qui se promenait dans les rues une fleur de tournesol À la main." He may even have encouraged this reputation. Stuart Merrill, writing in La Plume, said: "Certains cochers de hansom affirment mÊme l'avoir vu se promener, vers l'heure des chats et des poÈtes, avec un lys enorme À la main. Oscar Wilde rÉcuse comme À regret leur tÉmoignage en rÉpondant que la lÉgende est souvent plus vraie que la rÉalitÉ." But in 1883 Wilde had had a surfeit of lilies and sunflowers, and came to Paris as a poet, fashionably dressed, with a number of white vellum volumes of verse to distribute among those whose acquaintance he wished to secure.

He took rooms at the HÔtel Voltaire, and saw most of the better known people of the day. But, as always, he was not content to leave a part half played. He was in Paris as a poet, and, if he was ready to receive the poet's reward of admiration and homage, he was determined also to earn it, to write poetry, and not to rest on what he had already written. He was, at this time, impressed as much by Balzac's power of work as by his genius, and his biographer tells us that, with a view to imitating it, he wore, while working, a white robe with a hood, like the dressing-gown in which Balzac sat up at night, drinking coffee and creating his fiery world. He also walked out with an ivory stick, set with turquoises, like the stick that pleased Balzac because it set the town talking. At a later time he sought a similar adventitious aid to industry in buying Carlyle's writing table. He felt, like Balzac, that the special paraphernalia of work was likely to induce the proper spirit. In these circumstances, in the HÔtel Voltaire, he finished The Duchess of Padua, and possibly either wrote or re-wrote The Sphinx.

The Duchess of Padua is a play on the Elizabethan model of dark and bloody tragedy. It is a sombre spectacle, marred by a constantly shifting perspective. The folds of tragedy's cloak fall over an angular figure, a little stiff in the joints, and the verse has the effect of voluntary draping. It is the performance of a young man who has not yet achieved the knowledge of the stage that was later to be his; the performance of a young man who has not yet achieved a knowledge of himself. It is better built than Vera and more interesting, but it has the faults of the 1881 volume of Poems, without the same excuse of eager imitation and criticism. Here and there are lines of poetry that seem now afraid and now defiant of the progress of the play. The poet changes faces too often. He has all the Elizabethans at his back, and writes like the young Shakespeare on one page, and on the next like Shakespeare grown mature. His predilections are now for simplicity and now for such overworked conceits as this:—

Wilde's weakness of grip on himself and his play is shown by the quite purposeless inclusion of cumbersome, would-be-Shakespearian comic relief:—

"Third Citizen. What think you of this young man who stuck the knife into the Duke?

Second Citizen. Why, that he is a well-behaved, and a well-meaning, and a well-favoured lad, and yet wicked in that he killed the Duke.

Third Citizen. 'Twas the first time he did it: maybe the law will not be hard on him, as he did not do it before."

That is a specimen very favourable to the play, which contains yet duller jokes. It is hard to believe that the same man who wrote them was also the author of Intentions and the inventor of Bunbury. But there is no need to linger over The Duchess of Padua, which, though it has moments of obscure power, Wilde did not, in later years, consider worthy of himself.

There is some doubt as to the date of composition of The Sphinx. A line and a half in it—

not only suggest extreme youth in the writer, but occur in Ravenna. Mr. Stuart Mason, in his admirable "Bibliography to the Poems of Oscar Wilde," says that "altogether some dozen passages of Ravenna are taken more or less verbatim from poems published before 1878, while no instance is found of lines in the Newdigate Prize Poem being repeated in poems admittedly of later date, and this," he thinks, "seems fairly strong proof that the lines in The Sphinx (if not the whole poem) antedate Ravenna." Mr. Ross says that Wilde told him the poem was written at the HÔtel Voltaire during an earlier visit in 1874. This statement, he thinks, was an example of the poetic license in which Wilde, like Shelley and other men of genius, was willing to indulge. Mr. Sherard says positively that Wilde wrote The Sphinx in 1883 at the HÔtel Voltaire. There seems to be no real reason why Wilde should not have borrowed from Ravenna on this, even if he did so on no other occasion. He was always ready to seem younger than he was, and always ready to use again a phrase that had pleased him, no matter where he had used it before. In The Duchess of Padua, about whose date there is no question, he even went so far as to use two lines from a sonnet that he had previously addressed to Ellen Terry, and published in Poems:—

There is much in the poem itself that inclines me to trust Mr. Sherard's memory of its date.

It is work more personal to Wilde than anything in Poems. The firm mastery of its technique would, indeed, be overwhelming proof that it was written after The Duchess of Padua if it were not known that Wilde spent some time in revising it in 1889. But revision cannot alter the whole texture of a poem, and The Sphinx is full of those decorative effects that are rare in his very early work and give to much of his matured writing its most noticeable quality. No one has suggested that it was written later than 1883, so that we must explain the extraordinary advance that it shows on The Duchess of Padua as one of those curious phenomena known to most artists: it often happens that, in turning from one kind of work to another, as from dramatic writing to poetry, men come quite suddenly on what seem to be revised and better editions of themselves.

The kinetic base, the obvious framework, of The Sphinx is an apostrophe addressed by a student to a Sphinx that lies in his room, perhaps a dream, perhaps a paperweight, an apostrophe that consists in the enumeration of her possible lovers, and the final selection of one of them as her supposed choice. It is a series rather than a whole, though an effect of form and cumulative weight is given to it by a carefully preserved monotony. In a firm, lava-like verse, the Sphinx's paramours are stiffened to a bas-relief. The water-horse, the griffon, the hawk-faced god, the mighty limbs of Ammon, are formed into a frieze of reverie; they do not collaborate in a picture, but are left behind as the dream goes on. It goes on, perhaps, just a little too long. So do some of the finest rituals; and The Sphinx is among the rare incantations in our language. It is a piece of black magic. Of the student who saw such things men might well say:—

but they could never continue:—

and, with whatever milk he had been nourished, they would be certain that it was not that of Paradise.

To paint the visions she inspires, Wilde ransacks the world for magnificent colouring. He does not always secure magnificence in the noblest way, but is satisfied with an opulence, rather of things than of emotion, brought bodily into the verse and not suggested by the proud stepping of the mind. Cleopatra's wine, ivory-bodied Antinous, the crocodile with jewelled ears, metal-flanked gryphons, gilt-scaled dragons,

the Ethiopian, "whose body was of polished jet," Pasht "who had green beryls for her eyes," Horus,

the marble limbs of Ammon, "on pearl and porphyry pedestalled," an ocean emerald on his ivory breast—

the lion's "long flanks of polished brass," the tiger's "amber sides":—I think it is worth while to notice the mineral character of all this imagery. It is as if a man were finding solace for his feverish hands in the touch of cool hard stones, and at the same time, stimulating his fever by the sexual excitement of contrast between the over-sensitive and the utterly insensible.

Wilde had but a short respite from the trouble of keeping up a reputation and an income. The American dollars were soon spent, and he had to bring to an end his Balzacian industry, and the delightful business of being a poet in Paris. He returned to London, where he took rooms in Charles Street, Haymarket. He had to earn a livelihood, and poverty and his own extravagance compelled him to do that which he most disliked, to take up again a pose whose fascination he had exhausted. He signed an agreement with a lecture agency, and toured through the English provinces, repeating, as cheerfully as he could, the lectures he had given in America.

NOTE ON WILDE AND WHISTLER

Both before and after his American lecturing tour Wilde was one of the frequenters of Whistler's studio in Chelsea. He had an unbounded admiration for this painter, whose conversation was no less vivid than his work, and Whistler's attitude towards him was not so cavalier as that he adopted to others among his admirers. Wilde, in spite of his youth, had a reputation, and shared with Whistler the applause of any company in which they were together. In 1883, when Wilde was to lecture to the Academy Students, he asked Whistler what he should say to them. Whistler sketched a lecture for him, and Wilde used parts of it with success and repaid him by a tremendous compliment. Two years later Whistler himself lectured, and, for his "Ten O'Clock," re-appropriated some of the material he had suggested to his friend. That is the origin of the accusation, so often made, that Wilde built a reputation on borrowed bons mots. In the "Ten O'Clock," Whistler, annoyed by Wilde's lecturing on art, as he would have been by the lecturing of any other man who was not himself a painter, held a veiled figure of him up to ridicule, and threw a stone from a frail house in jeering at his knee-breeches. "Costume is not dress. And the wearers of wardrobes may not be doctors of taste ..." Wilde smilingly replied. Whistler feinted. Wilde parried. Whistler thrust:—"What has Oscar in common with Art except that he dines at our tables and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding that he peddles in the provinces? Oscar—the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar—with no more sense of a picture than he has of the fit of a coat—has the courage of the opinions ... of others!" Wilde answered that "with our James vulgarity begins at home and should be allowed to stay there," and with that their friendship was buried, like the hatchet, "in the side of the enemy." Two years later, Wilde, with an indifference amusing in any case and delightful if it was conscious, roused further protest by using in "The Decay of Lying" the phrase, "the courage of the opinions of others," that had been the sting of Whistler's reproach. The letters on both sides may be read in "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies." The whole story only makes it clear that Wilde was better able to appreciate Whistler than Whistler to appreciate a younger man, whose talent, no less brilliant, was entirely different from his own. As Mr. Ross has pointed out, all Wilde's best work was written after their friendship ceased.