Part 1 (1/2)
Oscar Wilde.
by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby.
PART I
OSCAR WILDE: THE MAN
OSCAR WILDE
THE MAN
The [Greek: synetoi], the connoisseurs, always recognised the genius of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde from the very first moment when he began to write. For many years ordinary people to whom literature and literary affairs were not of, at anyrate, absorbing interest only knew of Oscar Wilde by his extravagances and poses.
Then it happened that Wilde turned his powers in the direction of the stage and achieved a swift and brilliant success. The English public then began to realise that here was an unusually brilliant man, and the extraordinary genius of the subject of this work would have certainly been universally recognised in a few more years, when the shocking scandals a.s.sociated with his name occurred and Oscar Wilde disappeared into oblivion.
A great change gradually took place in public opinion. Little by little the feeling of prejudice against the work of Oscar Wilde began to die away. The man himself was dead. He had expiated his crimes by a prolonged agony of the most hideous suffering and disgrace, and people began to wonder if his writings were in any way a.s.sociated with the dark side of his life and character, or whether they might not, after all, be beautiful, pure, and treasures of the literature of our time. The four comedies of Manners, ”Lady Windermere's Fan,” ”The Ideal Husband,” ”A Woman Of No Importance,” ”The Importance Of Being Earnest,” everyone had seen and laughed at. They were certainly absolutely without offence. It was gradually seen that because a house was built by an architect of an immoral private life that did not necessarily invalidate it as a residence, that if Stephenson had ended his life upon the gallows people would still find railways convenient and necessary. The truth gradually dawned that Wilde had never in his life written a line that was immoral or impure, and that, in short, the criminal side of him was only a part of his complex nature, horribly disastrous for himself and his personal life, but absolutely without influence upon his work.
Art and his aberration never mingled or overlapped. Everybody began to realise the fact.
Opinion was also being quietly moulded from within by a band of literary and artistic people, some of them friends of the late author, others knowing him simply through his work.
The public began to ask for Wilde's books and found it almost impossible to obtain them, for the ”Ballad of Reading Gaol,” published while its author was still alive, had not stimulated any general demand for other works.
It was after Oscar Wilde's death that his friends and admirers were able to set to work at their endeavours to rehabilitate him as artist in the mind of general prejudice. Books and monographs were written about Wilde in English, French, and German. He was quoted in the leading Continental reviews. His play ”Salome” met with sudden and stupendous success all over Europe, a famous musician turned it into an opera. A well-known English man of letters, Mr Robert Harborough Sherard, published a final official ”Life” of the dead author, and Wilde's own ”De Profundis”
appeared to startle, sadden, and thrill the whole reading world.
His plays are being revived, and an authoritative and exhaustive edition of his writings is being issued by a leading publis.h.i.+ng house.
There is no doubt about it, the most prejudiced and hostile critics must admit it--in a literary sense, as a man of letters with extraordinary genius, Oscar Wilde has come into his own. The time is, therefore, ripe for a work of the present character which endeavours to ”appreciate” one of the strangest, saddest, most artistic and powerful brains of modern times. Five years ago such a book as this would probably have been out of place. When Balzac died Sainte-Beuve prefaced a short critical article of fourteen pages, as follows:--
”A careful study of the famous novelist who has just been taken from us, and whose sudden loss has excited universal interest, would require a whole work, and the time for that, I think, has not yet come. Those sort of moral autopsies cannot be made over a freshly dug grave, especially when he who has been laid in it was full of strength and fertility, and seemed still full of future works and days. All that is possible and fitting in respect of a great contemporary renown at the moment death lays it low is to point out, by means of a few clear-cut lines, the merits, the varied skill, by which it charmed its epoch and acquired influence over it.”
When Oscar Wilde died, and before the publication of ”De Profundis,”
various short essays did, as I have stated, make an appearance. A longer work seems called for, and it is that want which the present volume does its best to supply.
”Oscar Wilde: The Man” is the t.i.tle of the first part of this Appreciation. In Mr Sherard's ”The Story of an Unhappy Friends.h.i.+p,” as also in his careful and scholarly ”Life,” the many-sided nature of Oscar Wilde was set forth with all the ability of a brilliant pen. But there is yet room for another, and possibly more detached point of view, and also a summary of the views of others which will a.s.sist the general reader to gain a mental picture of a writer whose works, in a very short time, are certain to have a general, as well as a particular appeal.
The scheme of a work of this nature, which is critical rather than biographical, would nevertheless be incomplete without a personal study.
The study of Wilde's writings cannot fail to be enormously a.s.sisted by some knowledge of synetoithe man himself, and how he was regarded by others both before and after his personal disgrace.
Ever since his name was known to the world at all the public view of him has constantly been s.h.i.+fting and changing. There are, however, four princ.i.p.al periods during each of which Wilde was regarded in a totally different way. I have made a careful a.n.a.lysis of each of these periods and collected doc.u.mentary and other evidence which defines and explains them.
The first period of all--Oscar Wilde himself always spoke of the different phases of his extraordinary career as ”periods”--was that of the ”aesthetic movement” as it is generally called, or the aesthetic ”craze” as many people prefer to name it still. New movements, whether good or bad in their conception and ultimate result, always excite enmity, hostility, and ridicule. In affairs, in religion, in art, this is an invariable rule. No pioneer has ever escaped it. England laughed at the first railway, jeered at the volunteer movement and laughed at John Keats in precisely the same fas.h.i.+on as it ridiculed Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement.
It is as well to define that movement carefully, for, though marred by innumerable extravagances and still suffering from the inanities of its first disciples, it has nevertheless had a real and permanent influence upon English life. Oscar Wilde was, of course, not the originator of the aesthetic movement. He took upon himself to become its hierophant, and to infuse much that was peculiarly his own into it. The movement was begun by Ruskin, Rossetti, William Morris, Burne-Jones, and a host of others, while it was continued in the delicate and beautiful writings of Walter Pater. But it had always been an eclectic movement, not for the public eye or ear, neither known of nor popular with ordinary people.
Oscar Wilde then began to interest and excite England and America in the true aims and methods of art of all kinds. It shows an absolute ignorance of the late Victorian era to say that the movement was a pa.s.sing craze. To Oscar Wilde we owe it that people of refined tastes but moderate means can obtain beautiful papers for the walls of their houses at a moderate cost. The cheap and lovely fabrics that we can buy in Regent Street are spun as a direct consequence of the movement; harmony and delicacy of colour, beauty of curve and line, the whole renaissance of art in our household furniture are mainly due to the writings and lectures of Oscar Wilde.