MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

On May 29, 1884, Oscar Wilde was married to Constance Mary Lloyd, the daughter of a Dublin barrister. He settled with her in Chelsea. They had two children, both boys, born respectively in 1885 and 1886. Wilde's marriage was not felicitous, though he regretted it more for his wife's sake than his own. It is said that Mrs. Wilde was rather cruelly made to pose for Lady Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray, that "curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.... She tried to look picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy ... looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain...." She was sentimental, pretty, well-meaning and inefficient. She would have been very happy as the wife of an ornamental minor poet, and it is possible that in marrying Wilde she mistook his for such a character. It must be remembered that she married the author of Poems and the lecturer on the Æsthetic movement. His development puzzled her, made her feel inadequate, and so increased her inadequacy. She became more a spectacle for Wilde than an influence upon him, and was without the strength that might have prevented the disasters that were to fall through him on herself. She had a passion for leaving things alone, broken only by moments of interference badly timed. She became one of those women whose Christian names their husbands, without malice, preface with the epithets "poor dear." Her married life was no less ineffectual than unhappy.

Wilde supplemented his wife's income by writing reviews of books for The Pall Mall Gazette, and articles on the theatre for The Dramatic Review. From the autumn of 1887 to that of 1889 he edited The Woman's World. Little of this was wasted labour, though Wilde had no need to fillip his invention by such practice as the writing of reviews provided. Conversation was to him what diaries, note-books, and hack-work are to so many others. But there is an ease in the essays of Intentions wholly lacking in 'The Rise of Historical Criticism' and in the lectures. It is impossible not to believe that in writing literary notes in The Woman's World and reviews in The Pall Mall Gazette, he quickened the turn of his wrist and sharpened the point of his rapier.

There is little of any great value in the volume of reviews collected by his executor; little, that is to say, that raises them above the level of reviews written by far less gifted men. Here and there are fragments that he improved and used again in more lasting works. Here and there are perfectly charming sentences, that show what sort of man would be found if we could lift the mask of the reviewer. Throughout the book are uncertain indications of the theories of art that were later to be expounded in Intentions. But that is all. There is, however, an historical interest in learning what Wilde thought of the writers of his time. He railed at the shocking bad grammar of Professor Saintsbury, and got an undergraduate enjoyment from laughing at Professor Mahaffy. When he could, he piously drew attention to the works of his father and mother. He was polite to his cousin, W. G. Wills, who had happened to be delivered of an epic. Among greater men, he had excellent praise for William Morris, a just appreciation of Pater, an enthusiasm for Meredith, the expression of which he afterwards used in Intentions, and a perspicuous criticism of Swinburne. The volume is full of clues to the sources of the inessentials in his later work. The original of the passage in Dorian Gray on embroideries and tapestries is to be found in a review of a book by Ernest LefÉbure. The Starchild's curls "were like the rings of the daffodil." This curious and delightful phrase may be traced to a review of Morris' translation of the Odyssey, where Wilde noticed the line,

and quoted another version published in 1665,

It would be possible to make a long list of such alibis.

Marriage and journalism slackened for a moment his ambition. He lectured once or twice, though Whistler had almost succeeded in discrediting him as an authority upon art. His reputation waned, and he was for some time a young man with a brilliant past. Art seemed less worth while than it had been, and he was ready to amuse himself with things that he thought scarcely worth writing, things that required more cleverness than temperament, and did not stretch his genius. It was in this mood that he turned to narrative, and wrote the four stories which, published in magazines in 1887, were collected into a volume in 1891. He had always been accustomed to invent plots for other people, and to compose such anecdotes as were needed to illustrate his conversation and to give it an historical basis. Mr. Sherard says that he used to devise stories, sometimes as many as six in a morning, for his brother William to write. It occurred to him to write some of these tales himself, and, using the conventions of the popular magazine fiction of his day, yet find means to indulge his mind with the ingenious play in which it delighted. Three of these tales need detain no student of Wilde. 'The Canterville Ghost' is just so boisterous as to miss its balance, but, because it is about Americans, is very popular in America. 'The Sphinx without a Secret' betrays its secret in its title. 'The Model Millionaire' is an empty little thing no better than the popular tales it tries to imitate. 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime,' however, is not only remarkable as an indication of what Wilde was to do both as a dramatist and as a storyteller, but is itself a delightful piece of buffoonery. Wilde is so serious. The readers of The Family Herald are fond of Lords, and so the story begins with a reception at Bentinck House, a delightful parody of the popular descriptions of such a function. "It was certainly a wonderful medley of people. Gorgeous peeresses chatted affably to violent Radicals, popular preachers brushed coat-tails with eminent sceptics, a perfect bevy of bishops kept following a stout prima-donna from room to room, on the staircase stood several Royal Academicians, disguised as artists, and it was said that at one time the supper-room was absolutely crammed with geniuses." There was a cheiromantist, and a Duchess, who, on learning that he was present, "began looking about for a small tortoiseshell fan and a very tattered lace shawl, so as to be ready to go at a moment's notice." The plot is no less moral than simple. Lord Arthur Savile learns from the palmist that at some period of his life it is decreed that he shall commit a murder. Unwilling to marry while a potential criminal, he sets about committing the murder at once, to get it over, and be able to marry with the easy conscience of one who knows that his duty has been satisfactorily performed. He tries to kill a charming aunt with a sugared pill, and a benevolent uncle with an explosive clock, and, failing in both these essays, "oppressed with the barrenness of good intentions," walks miserably on the Embankment, where he finds Mr. Podgers, the cheiromantist, observing the river. "A brilliant idea flashed across him, and he stole softly up behind. In a moment he had seized Mr. Podgers by the legs, and flung him into the Thames. There was a coarse oath, a heavy splash, and all was still. Lord Arthur looked anxiously over, but could see nothing of the cheiromantist but a tall hat, pirouetting in an eddy of moonlit water. After a time it also sank, and no trace of Mr. Podgers was visible. Once he thought that he caught sight of the bulky misshapen figure striking out for the staircase by the bridge, and a horrible feeling of failure came over him, but it turned out to be merely a reflection, and when the moon shone out from behind a cloud it passed away. At last he seemed to have realised the decree of destiny. He heaved a deep sigh of relief, and Sybil's name came to his lips." Like much of Wilde's work, this story is very clever talk, an elaborated anecdote, told with flickering irony, a cigarette now and again lifted to the lips. But, already, a dramatist is learning to use this irony in dialogue, and a decorative artist is restraining his buoyant cleverness, to use it for more subtle purposes. There is a delicate description of dawn in Piccadilly, with the waggons on their way to Covent Garden, white-smocked carters, and a boy with primroses in a battered hat, riding a big grey horse—a promise of the fairy stories. The vegetables against the sky are masses of jade, "masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose." And, too, over the sudden death of Mr. Podgers "the moon peered through a mane of tawny clouds, as if it were a lion's eye, and innumerable stars spangled the hollow vault, like gold dust powdered on a purple dome."

The Happy Prince and other Tales, published in 1888, with pictures by Jacomb Hood and Walter Crane, are very married stories. In reading them, I cannot help feeling that Wilde wrote one of them as an experiment, to show, I suppose, that he could have been Hans Andersen if he had liked, and his wife importuned him to make a book of things so charming, so good, and so true. He made the book, and there is one beautiful thing in it, 'The Happy Prince,' which was, I suspect, the first he wrote. The rest, except, perhaps, 'The Selfish Giant,' a delightful essay in Christian legend, are tales whose morals are a little too obvious even for grown-up people. Children are less willing to be made good. Wilde was himself perfectly aware of his danger, and, no doubt, got some pleasure out of saying so, at the end of the story called 'The Devoted Friend': "'I am rather afraid that I have annoyed him,' answered the Linnet. 'The fact is, that I told him a story with a moral.' 'Ah! that is always a very dangerous thing to do,' said the Duck. And I quite agree with her." There is a moral in 'The Happy Prince,' but there is this difference between that story and the others, that it is quite clear that Wilde wanted to write it. It is Andersen, treated exactly as Wilde treated Milton in the volume of 1881, only with more assurance, and a greater certainty about his own contribution. We recognise Wilde by the decorative effects that are scattered throughout the book. He preferred a lyrical pattern to a prosaic perspective, and, even more than his wit, his love of decoration is the distinguishing quality of his work. Andersen might well have invented the story of the swallow who died to repay the statue for jewelled eyes and gold-leaf mail given to the poor of the town of which he had once been the Happy and unseeing Prince, but he would never have let the swallow say: "The King is there in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen and embalmed in spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are withered leaves." And only a swallow belonging to the author of The Sphinx would have said, "To-morrow my friends will fly up to the second Cataract. The river horse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the water's edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the Cataract."

In the next year he was again amusing himself with fairy tales, writing this time a book alone in English literature; a book of tales not intended for the British child but for those grown-up people who shared Wilde's own enjoyment of brilliant-coloured fantasy. He had learnt to control his invention, although he did not choose to do without a tuning fork. Andersen still struck the note to which Wilde sang, but Flaubert had been his singing master, and the curious and beautiful tales collected in A House of Pomegranates are like what I imagine "The Snow Queen" would have been, if it had been written by the author of "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier." In 'The Infanta's Birthday,' where one of Goya's grotesques dances before a painting by Velasquez, the flowers pass their opinions on the dwarf quite in the Danish manner. In 'The Star-child': "The Earth is going to be married, and this is her bridal dress," whispered the Turtle-doves to each other. "Their little pink feet were quite frost-bitten, but they felt that it was their duty to take a romantic view of the situation." That is surely written by the ghost of Andersen's English translator. But 'The Star-child' ends with the firm, aloof touch of Flaubert, who would not tolerate "quite": "Yet ruled he not long, so great had been his suffering, and so bitter the fire of his testing, for after the space of three years, he died. And he who came after him ruled evilly." I remember the end of "HÉrodias" on just such a distant note: "Et tous les trois, ayant pris la tÊte de Iaokanaan, s'en allÈrent du cÔtÉ de la GalilÉe. Comme elle Était trÈs lourde, ils la portaient alternativement." And the picture of the leper in this story is almost a transcription of that in "Saint Julien l'Hospitalier": "Over his face hung a cowl of grey linen, and through the eyelets his eyes gleamed like red coals." And Flaubert: "Il Était enveloppÉ d'une toile en lambeaux, la figure pareille À un masque de platre et les deux yeux plus rouge que des charbons." I do not suggest that one is a copy of the other; but I think that Wilde remembered that clay mask with gleaming eyes, and mistook it for a creation of his own whose eyes shone through a grey linen cowl.

It is hardly worth while so to carry the study of influence into detail. Wilde wrote, with the pen of Flaubert, stories that might have been imagined by Andersen, and sometimes one and sometimes the other touches his hand. It is not impossible that Baudelaire was also present. But all this does not much concern us, except that by subtraction we may come to what we seek, which is the personal, elusive, but unmistakable quality contributed by Wilde himself.

This is, secondarily, a round mellowness of voice, a smooth solidity of suggested movement, a delight in magnificence; and, primarily, a wonderful feeling for decorative effect. This last is Wilde's peculiar contribution to literature. His contribution to thought, his exegesis of the critical attitude, is another matter. But this feeling for decoration, that made him see life itself as a tapestry of ordered and beautiful movements caught in gold and dyed silk, that made him incapable of realizing that life was not so, until at last it became too strong and tore his canvas, was itself enough to prevent the picturesque figure of the dandy from obliterating the artist in the minds of posterity. It is scarcely twenty years since Wilde wrote his books, and, in poetry as well as in prose, their influence is already becoming so common as not to be recognized. The historian of the period will have to trace what he may call "The Decorative Movement in Literature" to the works of Wilde, and through them to the Pre-Raphaelite pictures and poems, whose ideals he so fantastically misrepresents.

I have implied a distinction between decoration and realism that I have not clearly defined. This distinction is not, though it has often been held to be, a distinction between two different kinds of art, between which runs a sharp dividing line. It is rather a recognition of opposite ends of a scale, like the recognition of heat and cold, both degrees of temperature, but without intrinsic superiority one over the other. In painting we thus distinguish between the attempt to imitate and the willingness (not the intention) to suggest nature. This distinction is best expressed in the old simile of the window and the wall. Some pictures represent a pattern on a wall: some pictures represent a vision through a window. In some we look at the canvas: in others we look through the frame. Some are decorative: some are realistic. Many painters have wished that their pictures should not be found wanting when compared with the pictures of similar subjects that each spectator paints with the brushes and palette of his own brain. Sometimes this desire has been carried so far as to preclude all others. Painters do not usually read Berkeley, and there have been some who forgot that there was no such thing as a world outside their brains, and cared only to be recognised as faithful portrait-painters of nature: that is to say, of what all spectators see, or can see, by training their observation. There have been critics, too, like Ruskin, who have chosen to compare painters by their fidelity to this external and observable nature. But painters have other things to do than photograph, other things to do than to select from what a camera would represent. Sometimes the idea of imitation fades away, and they are willing, no more, to suggest lilies by a convention, and to distort even the human figure, while they concern themselves with harmonies in which the shapes of flower or figure sound merely incidental notes. We must not forget that these are extremes in a single scale, and that all painting is to some extent realistic, to some extent decorative. Its extremes are wholly imitative in aim, and dull, and wholly conventional in aim, and empty. We call the two aims realism and decoration for our convenience. In literature it is possible to trace a similar double aim, separate from but analogous to the duality in speech that we shall have to examine in a later chapter. There are books subservient to what we call reality, and books for which reality is no more than an excuse, books that follow nature, and books that cast nature into their own mould, and, delighting in no accidental harmonies, bend nature to the patterns that please them, and heighten or lower her colours for their private purposes of beautiful creation. Even in music we can trace these tendencies: there is music that humbly follows the moods of man, and music whose serenely indifferent patterns compel the dancing attendance of those moods.

We have observed in The Sphinx the decorative character of Wilde's work. These tales provide the best examples of it that are to be found in his prose. To the woodcutters looking down from the forest, the Earth seemed "like a flower of silver, and the Moon like a flower of gold." The young fisherman speaks to the witch of his "painted boat," and his author is no less aloof from realism. When the young fisherman forgets his nets and his cunning, as he listens to the sweet voice of the mermaid, Wilde writes: "Vermilion finned and with eyes of bossy gold, the tunnies went by in shoals, but he heeded them not." Now that is a picture that the young fisherman could not see. Nor can we see it, unless the fisherman is a figure on a tapestry, sewn in stitches of bright-coloured thread. Above him three undulating lines are waves, and between them four tunnies, twisting unanimous tails, show their vermilion fins and their eyes of gilded metal, skilfully bedded in the canvas.

Wilde, always perfectly self-conscious, was not unaware of this difference between his own writing and that of most of his contemporaries. When Dorian Gray was attacked for immorality, Wilde wrote, in a letter to a paper: "My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the brutality of plain realism." The Picture of Dorian Gray was written for publication in a magazine. Seven chapters were added to it to make it long enough for publication as a novel, because those who buy books, like those who buy pictures, are unable to distinguish between size and quality, and imagine that value depends upon area. The preface was written to answer assailants of the morality of the story in its first form, and included only when it was printed as a book. These circumstances partly explain the lack of proportion, and of cohesion, that mars, though it does not spoil, the first French novel to be written in the English language. England has a traditional novel-form with which even the greatest students of human comedy and tragedy square their work. In France there is no such tradition, with the result that the novel is a plastic form, moulded in the most various ways by the most various minds. After all, it is a question of name, and it is impossible without elaborate and tedious qualification to discuss classifications of literature. They should not be made, or they should be made differently, for, at present, they deal only with superficial resemblances, depending, sometimes, upon nothing more essential than the price for which a book is sold. They have, however, a distinct influence upon production. In France, Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint Antoine," that wonderful dream in which so many strange dialogues are overheard, Remy de Gourmont's "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," that delightful speculative mirage, and Huysmans' "À Rebours," that phantasmagoria of intellectual experience, are all included in publishers' lists of novels and sold as such. Publishers in England are not so catholic. Whatever the reason may be, economical, depending upon the publisher, traditional, depending on the writer, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray was the first novel for many years to be written in England with that freedom in choice of matter and manner that has for a long time been in no way extraordinary in France. It has, so far, had no successor free as itself from the enforced interest in a love affair, to which we have grown so mournfully accustomed.

The story of the book is a fantastic invention like that of Balzac's "Le Peau de Chagrin," in which the scrap of skin from a wild ass shrinks with each wish of its possessor. The picture of Dorian Gray, painted by his friend, ages with the lines of cruelty, lust and hypocrisy that should mar its ever-youthful subject. He, remaining as beautiful as when at twenty-one he had inspired the painter with a masterpiece, walks in the ways of men, sullying his soul, whose bodily reflection records neither his age nor his sins. It is the sort of invention that would have pleased Hawthorne, and the book itself is written with the marked ethical sympathy that Wilde, in his preface, denounced as "an unpardonable mannerism of style." Perhaps the reason why it was so loudly accused of immorality was that in the popular mind luxury and sin are closely allied, and the unpardonable mannerism that made him preach, in a parable, against the one, did not hide his whole-hearted delight in describing the other.

The preface, inspired by the hostility the book aroused, is an essay not in the gentle art of making enemies, but in that of annoying them when made. If his critics tell him that his book leers with the eyes of foulness and dribbles with the lips of prurience, Wilde replies, with an ambiguity as disturbing as his smile, that "it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors," and again that "the highest, as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography." His arrows are not angrily tipped with poison, but are not for that the less displeasing to those against whom they are directed. They are weighted not with anger but with Æsthetic theory. They are so far separate from the story that they are best discussed with the essays of Intentions.

There are a few strange books that share the magic of some names, like Cornelius Agrippa, Raymond Lully, and Paracelsus, names that possibly mean more to us before than after we have investigated the works and personalities that lie behind them. These books are mysterious and kept, like mysteries, for peculiar moods. They are not books for every day, nor even for every night. We keep them for rare moments, as we keep in a lacquer cabinet some crystal-shrined thread of subtle perfume, or some curious gem, to be a solace in a mood that does not often recur, or, perhaps, to be an instrument in its evocation. Dorian Gray, for all its faults, is such a book. It is unbalanced; and that is a fault. It is a mosaic hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and took and used in his work whatever scrap of jasper, or porphyry or broken flint was put into his hand; and that is not a virtue. But in it there is an individual essence, a private perfume, a colour whose secret has been lost. There are moods whose consciousness that essence, perfume, colour, is needed to intensify.

There is little need to discuss the minutiÆ of the book; to point out that its sayings occur in Wilde's plays, poems, reviews and dialogues; that it is, as it were, an epitome of his wit before and after the fact; that the eleventh chapter is a wonderful condensation of a main theme in "À Rebours," like an impression of a concerto rendered by a virtuoso upon a violin. There is no need to emphasize Wilde's delight in colour and fastidious luxury, as well as in a most amusing kind of dandyism: in the opening scene the studio curtains are of tussore silk, the dust is golden that dances in the sunlight, tea is poured from a fluted Georgian urn, there is a heavy scent of roses, the blossoms of the laburnum are honey-coloured as well as honey-sweet, Lord Henry Wotton reclines on a divan of Persian saddlebags, and taps "the toe of his patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane." There is no need to point out any of these things, but they help to justify what I have already said, and to define the indefinable character of the book. Lord Henry Wotton would have liked to write "a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet, and as unreal." Wilde tried to write it, and very nearly succeeded.

* * * * * *

Wilde's second period of swift development began towards the end of 1888. This, perhaps, explains the sentence in 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison'—"One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin." His personality was, certainly, intensified when he became an habitual devotee of the vice for which he was imprisoned. He had first experimented in that vice in 1886; his experiments became a habit in 1889, and in that year he published 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison' and 'The Decay of Lying,' revised The Sphinx, and wrote some, at least, of the stories in A House of Pomegranates; these were immediately followed by 'The Critic as Artist' and SalomÉ.

These things are among his best work. It is possible that a consciousness of separation from the common life of men is a sufficient explanation of an increased vividness in a man's self, a heightened ardour of production. Is Wilde's exceptional activity in those years to be attributed to an eagerness to justify himself by other men's admiration, of which he had never been careless? Was he eager to bring mankind to his side? "It is the spectator, not life, that art really mirrors." This sentence must now be applied to himself, when we consider The Portrait of Mr. W. H. That narrative, now printed at the end of Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and first published in Blackwood's Magazine in 1889, is an essay in criticism.

Wilde read something of himself into Shakespeare's sonnets, and, in reading, became fascinated by a theory that he was unable to prove. Where another man would, perhaps, have written a short, serious essay, and whistled his theory down the wind that carries the dead leaves of Shakespeare's commentators, Wilde tosses it as a belief between three brains, and allows it to unfold itself as the background to a story. The three brains are the narrator, Cyril Graham, and Erskine. Graham discovers the Mr. W. H. of the Sonnets in a boy-actor called Will Hughes, and by diligent examination of internal evidence, almost persuades Erskine to believe him. Erskine, however, demands a proof, and Graham finds one for him in a portrait of Will Hughes nailed to an old wooden chest. Erskine is persuaded, but discovers that the picture is a forgery, whereupon Graham, explaining that he had only had it made for Erskine's satisfaction, leaves the picture to his friend, protests that the forgery in no way invalidates the theory, and kills himself as a proof of his good faith. Erskine, disbelieving, tells all this to the narrator, who instantly sets to work on the sonnets, finds a quantity of further evidence, but none that sets beyond question the existence in Elizabethan times of a boy-actor called William Hughes. He writes Erskine a letter of passionate reasoning, that, while persuading Erskine, wipes away his own belief. He finds that he has become an infidel to the theory of which he has been a successful advocate. It was a favourite idea of Wilde's, and the motive of La Sainte Courtisane, that to slough off a belief like a snake's skin, one has only to convert someone else to it. I need not further analyse the story, which is merely the mechanism that Wilde used for the display of the evidence to which he desired to draw attention.

It would be impossible to build an airier castle in Spain than this of the imaginary William Hughes; impossible, too, to build one so delightfully designed. The prose and the reasoning seem things of ivory, Indian-carved, through which the rarest wind of criticism may freely blow and carry delicate scents away without disturbing the yet more delicate fabric. Wilde assumes that Shakespeare addressed the sonnets to William Hughes, and, that assumption granted (though there is no William Hughes to be found), colours his theory with an abundance of persuasive touches, to strengthen what is, at first, only a courtesy belief. Though all his argument is special pleading, Wilde contrives to make you feel that counsel knows, though he cannot prove, that his client is in the right. The evidence is only for the jury. You are inclined to interrupt him with the exclamation that you are already convinced. But it is a pleasure to listen to him, so you let him go on. After all, "brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is like hitting below the intellect." Wilde's Portrait of Mr. W. H. is more than a refutable theory, a charming piece of speculation. It is an illustration of the critic as artist, a foretaste of Intentions. It is better than 'The Truth of Masks,' as good as 'The Decay of Lying.' Yet it was not printed in that book, where it might well have had a place. The reason for this is not uninteresting. Wilde did not intend to reprint it as it stood. The theory beneath that delicate brain-play had a lasting fascination for him, and, with its proofs, grew in his mind till it overbalanced Cyril Graham and doubting Erskine. He re-wrote it at greater length, after delays. When he was arrested, the publishers, who had already announced it as a forthcoming book, returned it to his house, whence it disappeared on the day of the enforced sale of his effects. It has never been recovered.