They pierce the hide of the thickest and dullest; they startle and bewilder the brains of the most cra.s.s and the most insensitive. And it is just because they do this that Wilde is so cordially feared and hated. It was, one cannot help feeling, the presence in him of a shrewd vein of sheer boyish bravado, mingled--one might go even as far as that--with a dash of incorrigible worldliness in his own temper, that made his. .h.i.ts so effective and wounding.
It is interesting, with this in mind, to compare Wilde"s witticisms with those of Matthew Arnold or Bernard Shaw. The reason that Wilde"s lash cuts deeper than either of these other champions of rational humanism, is that he goes, with more cla.s.sical clearness, straight to the root of the matter.
The author of "Thyrsis" was not himself free from a certain melancholy hankering after "categorical imperatives," and beneath the cap and bells of his theological fooling, Shaw is, of course, as gravely moralistic as any puritan could wish.
Neither of these--neither the ironical schoolmaster nor the farcical clown of our Renaissance of intelligence--could exchange ideas with Pericles, say, or Caesar, without betraying a puritanical fussiness that would grievously bewilder the lucid minds of those great men.
The philosophy of Wilde"s aesthetic revolt against our degraded mob-ridden conscience was borrowed from Walter Pater, but whereas that shy and subtle spirit moved darkly and mysteriously aside from all contact with the vulgar herd, Wilde, full of gay and wanton pride in his sacred mission, lost no opportunity of flaunting his cla.s.sic orthodoxy in the face of the heretical mob.
Since the death of Wilde, the brunt of the battle for the spiritual liberties of the race has been borne by the sterner and more formidable figure of Nietzsche; but the vein of high and terrible imagination in this great poet of the Superman sets him much closer to the company of the saints and mystics than to that of the instinctive children of the pagan ideal.
Oscar Wilde"s name has become a sort of rallying cry to all those writers and artists who suffer, in one degree or another, from the persecution of the mob--of the mob goaded on to blind brutality by the crafty incentives of those conspirators of reaction whose interest lies in keeping the people enslaved. This has come about, in a large measure, as much by the renown of his defects as by reason of his fine quality.
The majority of men of talent lack the spirit and the gall to defy the enemy on equal terms. But Wilde while possessing n.o.bler faculties had an undeniable vein in him of sheer youthful insolence. To the impertinence of society he could oppose the impertinence of the artist, and to the effrontery of the world he could offer the effrontery of genius.
The power of personality, transcending any actual literary achievement, is what remains in the mind when one has done reading him, and this very faculty--of communicating to us, who never saw him or heard him speak, the vivid impact of his overbearing presence--is itself evidence of a rare kind of genius. It is even a little ironical that he, above all men the punctilious and precious literary craftsman, should ultimately dominate us not so much by the magic of his art as by the spell of his wilful and wanton individuality, and the situation is heightened still further by the extraordinary variety of his works and their amazing perfection in their different spheres.
One might easily conceive an artist capable of producing so clean-cut and crystalline a comedy as "The Importance of Being Earnest,"
and so finished and flawless a tragedy as "Salome," disappearing quite out of sight, in the manner so commended by Flaubert, behind the shining objectivity of his flawless creations. But so far from disappearing, Oscar Wilde manages to emphasise himself and his imposing presence only the more startlingly and flagrantly, the more the gem-like images he projects harden and glitter.
Astoundingly versatile as he was--capable of producing in "Reading Gaol" the best tragic ballad since "The Ancient Mariner," and in "Intentions" one of the best critical expositions of the open secret of art ever written at all--he never permits us for a second to lose touch with the wayward and resplendent figure, so full, for all its bravado, of a certain disarming childishness, of his own defiant personality.
And the fact remains that, perfect in their various kinds though these works of his are, they would never appeal to us as they do, and Oscar Wilde would never be to us what he is, if it were not for the predominance of this personal touch.
I sometimes catch myself wondering what my own feeling would be as to the value of these things--of the "Soul of Man," for instance, or "Intentions," or the Comedies, or the Poems--if the unthinkable thing could be done, and the emergence of this irresistible figure from behind it all could be drastically eliminated. I find myself conscious, at these times, of a faint disturbing doubt; as though after all, in spite of their jewel-like perfection, these wonderful and varied achievements were not quite the real thing, were not altogether in the "supreme manner." There seems to me--at the moments when this doubt arises--something too self-consciously (how shall I put it?) _artistic_ about these performances, something strained and forced and far-fetched, which separates them from the large inevitable utterances of cla.s.sic genius.
I am ready to confess that I am not sure that this feeling is a matter of personal predilection or whether it has the larger and graver weight behind it of the traditional instincts of humanity, instincts out of which spring our only permanent judgments. What I feel at any rate is this: that there is an absence in Wilde"s writings of that large cool s.p.a.ciousness, produced by the magical influence of earth and sky and sea, of which one is always conscious in the greater masters.
"No gentleman," he is said to have remarked once, "ever looks out of the window"; and it is precisely this "never looking out of the window" that produces his most serious limitations.
In one respect I must acknowledge myself grateful to Wilde, even for this very avoidance of what might be called the "magical"
element in things. His clear-cut palpable images, carved, as one so often feels, in ebony or ivory or gold, offer an admirable relief, like the laying of one"s hand upon pieces of h.e.l.lenic statuary, after wandering among the vague mists and "beached margents."
Certainly if all that one saw when one "looked out of the window"
were Irish fairies with dim hair drifting down pallid rivers, there would be some reason for drawing the curtains close and toying in the lamp-light with cameo-carved profiles of Antinous and Cleopatra!
But nature has more to give us than the elfish fantasies, charming as these may be, of Celtic legend--more to give us than those "brown fauns" and "hoofed Centaurs" and milk-white peac.o.c.ks, which Wilde loves to paint with his Tiepolo-like brush. The dew of the morning does not fall less lightly because real autumns bring it, nor does the "wide aerial landscape" of our human wayfaring show less fair, or its ancient antagonist the "salt estranging sea" less terrible, because these require no legendary art to endow them with mystery.
Plausible and full of significance as these honeyed arguments in "Intentions" are--and fruitful as they are in affording us weapons wherewith to defend ourselves from the mob--it is still well, it is still necessary, to place against them the great Da Vinci saying, "Nature is the Mistress of the higher intelligences."
Wilde must be held responsible--along with others of his epoch--for the encouragement of that deplorable modern heresy which finds in bric-a-brac and what are called "objets d"art" a disproportionate monopoly of the beauty and wonder of the world. One turns a little wearily at last from the silver mirrors and purple masks. One turns to the great winds that issue forth out of the caverns of the night.
One turns to the sun and to the rain, which fall upon the common gra.s.s.
However! It is not a wise procedure to demand from a writer virtues and qualities completely out of his role. In our particular race there is far more danger of the beauty and significance of art--together with all its subtler and less normal symbols--perishing under crude and sentimental Nature-worship, than of their being granted too large a place in our crowded house of thought.
After all, the art which Wilde a.s.sures us adds so richly to Nature, "is an art which Nature makes." They are not lovers of what is rarest and finest in our human civilisation who would suppress everything which deviates from the common track.
Who has given these people--these middle-cla.s.s minds with their dull intelligences--the right to decide what is natural or unnatural in the presence of the vast tumultuous forces, wonderful and terrible, of the life-stream which surrounds us?
The mad smouldering l.u.s.t which gives a sort of under-song of surging pa.s.sion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is as much an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of that sentence in "De Profundis"--"Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coa.r.s.e, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow."
What, beneath all his bravado and his paradoxes, Wilde really sought, was the enjoyment of pa.s.sionate and absorbing emotion, and no one who hungers and thirsts after this--be he "as sensual as the brutish sting itself"--can fail in the end to touch, if only fleetingly with his lips, the waters of that river of pa.s.sion which, by a miracle of faith if not by a supreme creation of art, Humanity has caused to issue forth from the wounded flesh of the ideal.
It is in his "Soul of Man"--perhaps the wisest and most eloquent revolutionary tract ever written--that Wilde frees himself most completely from the superficial eccentricities of his aesthetic pose, and indicates his recognition of a beauty in life, far transcending Tyrian dyes and carved cameos and frankincense and satin-wood and moon-stones and "Silks from Samarcand."
It is impossible to read this n.o.ble defence of the natural distinction and high dignity of our human days when freed from the slavery of what is called "working for a living," without feeling that the boyish bravado of his insolent wit is based upon a deep and universal emotion. What we note here is an affiliation in revolt between the artist and the ma.s.ses. And this affiliation indicates that the hideousness of our industrial system is far more offensive than any ancient despotism or slave-owning tyranny to the natural pa.s.sion for light and air and leisure and freedom in the heart of man.
That Oscar Wilde, the most extreme of individualists, the most unscrupulous of self-a.s.serters, the pampered darling of every kind of sophisticated luxury, should thus lift up his voice on behalf of the wage-earners, is an indication that a state of society which seems proper and inevitable to dull and narrow minds is, when confronted, not with any mere abstract theory of Justice or Political rights, but with the natural human craving for life and beauty, found to be an outrage and an insult.
Oscar Wilde by pointing his derisive finger at what the gross intelligence of our commercial mob calls the "honourableness of work" has done more to clear our minds of cant than many revolutionary speeches.
An age which breeds a world of uninteresting people whose only purpose in life is working for their living is condemned on the face of it. And it is just here that the a.s.sociation between your artist and your "labouring man" becomes physiologically evident. The labourer shows quite clearly that he regards his labour as a degradation, a burden, an interruption to life, a necessary evil.
The role of the capitalist-hired preacher is to condemn him for this and to regret the departure from the scene of that imaginary and extremely ridiculous figure, the worker who "took pleasure in his work." If there ever have been such people, they ought, as Wilde says, to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Any person who enjoys being turned into a machine for the best part of his days and regards it with pride, is no better than a blackleg or a scab--not a "scab" in regard to a little company of strikers, but a "scab" in regard to the human race; for he is one who denies that life in itself, life with all its emotional, intellectual and imaginative possibilities, can be endured without the gross, coa.r.s.ening, dulling "anaesthetic" of money-making toil.
This is the word that the social revolution wanted--the word so much more to the point than discourses upon justice and equality and charity. And it is precisely here that the wage-earners of our present system are in harmony with the "intellectuals."
The "wage-earners," or those among them who have in them something more than the souls of scabs, despise and loathe their enforced labour. The artist also despises the second-rate tasks set him by the stupidity and bad taste of his middle-cla.s.s masters.
The only persons in the community who are really happy in their life"s work, as they fantastically call it, are those commercial _ruffians_ whose brutal, self-righteous, puritanical countenances one is swamped by--as if by a flood of suffocating mediocrity--in the streets of all our modern cities.
Oscar Wilde is perfectly right. We are living in an age when the world for the first time in its history is literally under the rule of the stupidest, dullest, least intelligent and least admirable of all the cla.s.ses in the community. Wilde"s "Soul of Man" is the condemnation--let us hope the effective condemnation--of this epoch in the journey of the race.
The odium which France--always the protector of civilisation--has stamped upon the word "bourgeois" is no mere pa.s.sing levity of an irresponsible Latin Quarter. It is the judgment of cla.s.sic taste--the taste of the great artists and poets of all ages--upon the worst type of person, the type most pernicious to true human happiness, that has ever yet appeared upon the planet. And it is this type, the commercial type, the type that loves the money-making toil it is engaged upon, which rules over us now with an absolute authority, and creates our religion, our morality, our pleasures, our pastimes, our literature and our art.
Oscar Wilde must be forgiven everything in his gay impertinence which may jar upon our more sensitive moments, when one considers what he has done in dragging this great issue into the light and making it clear. He shows that what we have against us is not so much a system of society or a set of laws, as a definite and contemptible type of human character.
Democracy may well appear the most hopeless and lamentable failure in the government of men that history has ever known--but this is only due to the fact that the working cla.s.ses have until now meekly and mildly received from the commercial cla.s.ses their notions as to what democracy means.
No one could suppose for a moment that such a thing as the puritanical censorship of art and letters which now hangs, like a leaden weight, round the neck of every writer of original power, would be thrust upon us by the victims of sweatshops and factories.
It is thrust upon us, like everything else which is degrading and uncivilised in our present system, by the obstinate stupidity and silly sentiment of the self-righteous middle cla.s.s, the opponents of everything that is joyous and interesting and subtle and imaginative.
It is devoutly to be hoped that, when the revolution arrives, the human persons who force their way to the top and guide the volcanic eruption will be such persons as are absolutely free from every kind of middle-cla.s.s scruple.
There are among us to-day vigorous and indignant minds who find in the ugliness and moral squalor of our situation, the unhappy influence of Christ and his saints. They are wrong. The history of Oscar Wilde"s writings shows that they are wrong.
It is the self-satisfied moralist who stands in the way, not the mystic or the visionary. They spoil everything they touch, these people.
They turn religion into a set of sentimental inhibitions that would make Marcus Aurelius blush. They turn faith into pietism, sanct.i.ty into morality, and righteousness into a reeking prurience.
After all, it is not on the strength of his opinions, wise and sound as these may be, that Wilde"s reputation rests. It rests on the beauty, in its own way never equalled, of the style in which he wrote. His style, as he himself points out, is one which seems to compel its readers to utter its syllables aloud. Of that deeper and more recondite charm which lies, in a sense, outside the sphere of vocal articulation, of that rhythm of the very movements of thought itself which lovers of Walter Pater catch, or dream they catch, in those elaborate delicately modulated sentences, Wilde has little or nothing.
What he achieves is a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as the ring of gla.s.s upon gla.s.s, and with a mellifluous after-tone or echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering fall--melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and the moment lead.
He is at his best, or at any rate his style shows itself at its best, not in the utterances of those golden epigrams, the gold of which, as days pa.s.s, comes in certain cases to look lamentably like gilt, but in his use of those far-descended legendary images gathered up into poetry and art again and again till they have acquired the very tone of time itself, and a lovely magic, sudden, swift and arresting, like the odour of "myrrh, aloes, and ca.s.sia."
The style of Wilde is one of the simplest in existence, but its simplicity is the very apex and consummation of the artificial. He uses Biblical language with that self-conscious preciosity--like the movements of a person walking on tiptoe in the presence of the dead--which is so different from the st.u.r.dy directness of Bunyan or the restrained rhetoric of the Church of England prayers. There come moments when this premeditated innocence of tone--this lisping in liturgical monosyllables--irritates and annoys one. At such times the delicate unction of his navete strikes one, in despite of its gravity, as something a little comic; as though some very sophisticated and experienced person suddenly joined in a children"s game and began singing in a plaintive tenderly pitched voice--
"This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our hands-- This is the way we wash our hands, On a cold and frosty morning!"