Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  With these stories Wilde established himself as a storyteller. If the characters are lacking, interest is not. The plots tumbled out of him, though they were anything but impromptu in the themes they sustained. At the time that he was celebrating personality, Wilde bewailed an excess of selfhood. His generosity led him to mock the hypocrisy which often went with it in others. Friendship and love were displayed through absence, faith through faithlessness, life in the pointlessness of death. There were usually sudden explosions of something into nothing or of nothing into something beyond price.

  Among all his stories of this time, the best, and dearest to him, was ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ It too trod the high wire between being and not-being. Published in July 1889, it was being written, as a letter to Wemyss Reid indicates, by October 1887. The subject was Shakespeare, and takes for granted that Shakespeare was attracted to boys. Frank Harris, as heterosexual as a man can be, tried to dissuade Wilde from writing it up, because he could see Shakespeare only in his own, womanizing image. If Wilde paid any attention, he did so by writing a story instead of an essay.

  In ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ he dazzlingly offered a theory, withdrew it, and half offered it again, in fiction within fiction that anticipates Borges. The anonymous narrator hears from his friend Erskine about Cyril Graham’s theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Graham, an effeminate young man who at school would always take the female leads in Shakespeare’s plays, is convinced that Mr W.H. is a boy actor. His first name, Will, is hidden in the punning sonnets cxxxv and cxliii, and his last name, Hughes, is in xx:

  A man in hew, all Hews in his controwling.

  The skeptical Erskine points out the lack of any evidence that Will Hughes ever existed. Graham goes away in disappointment, but returns later with the missing evidence. It is an Elizabethan chest, against one side of which he has found clamped a portrait of a young man, the masks of Tragedy and Comedy before him, and bearing the rubric ‘Master Will. Hews.’ Erskine’s doubts vanish, until he discovers the portrait is forged and accuses Graham. Graham shoots himself. He leaves Erskine a letter which insists that the theory is true and that Erskine must give it to the world. The narrator is moved, and comes to the conclusion that Graham was right, and that the Sonnets are an attempt to persuade Hughes to act in the sonneteer’s plays—an unexpectedly wholesome conclusion. The narrator writes to Erskine with new evidence, but feels suddenly a Wildean indifference. ‘Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations.’ If he has overpersuaded himself, he has persuaded Erskine. Two years later a letter tells the narrator that by the time it is received, Erskine will have committed suicide to prove the truth of Graham’s theory. The narrator is too late to stop him. But it turns out that Erskine has actually died of consumption. He has bequeathed the portrait of Willie Hughes to the narrator. At the end, the narrator tells how he looks at it and thinks ‘there is really a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.’ Between forgery and genuineness, fiction and fact, there hangs only a hair.

  Wilde was using an old theory, but the story was his own. It arose from that sense of a secret life which had drawn him to Chatterton, who, with MacPherson—another forger—is mentioned in the story. A fine touch is twinning the forgery of suicide with that of the painting, in an elegant variation of the pattern suggested in his letter to Harry Marillier of dying for what one does not believe in. Erskine cleverly pretends to die for what he believes in. Wilde could not see analogies with his own forgery of personalities as a Mason, a Pre-Raphaelite, a Roman Catholic, a débauchée, a dandy. Like Willie Hughes, he had played many parts, and like the narrator, Erskine, and Graham, with varying degrees of conviction.

  Nowhere, except in The Importance of Being Earnest, did Wilde achieve quite this mixture of reality and make-believe, of a world poised on a word. ‘You must believe in Willy Hughes,’ he said to Helena Sickert, ‘I almost do myself.’22 He had almost believed in Catholicism as an equally attractive fiction.

  The story came closer to him still. He imagined Shakespeare, a married man with two children like himself, captivated by a boy as he had been captivated by Ross.‖ Wilde wrote to Ross, ‘indeed the story is half yours, and but for you it would not have been written.’ Excited by his idea, Wilde went to call upon the artists Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, whom he had not previously met, in May 1889. He read the story to them, and asked Ricketts to illustrate it with a painting of Willie Hughes in the manner of Clouet. On the frame he wanted the motto ‘ARS AMORIS, AMOR ARTIS,’ in which he said there was an entire philosophy. Confident that his homoerotic hosts would be sympathetic, he expatiated upon Shakespeare’s love for the boy actor: ‘The Renaissance brought with it a great revival of Platonism. Plato, like all the Greeks, recognized two kinds of love, sensual love which delights in women—such love is intellectually sterile, for women are receptive only, they take everything, and give nothing, save in the way of nature. The intellectual loves or romantic friendships of the Hellenes, which surprise us today, they considered spiritually fruitful, a stimulus to thought and virtue—I mean virtue as it was understood by the ancients and the Renaissance, not virtue in the English sense, which is only caution and hypocrisy.’ He held that Shakespeare’s dedication of the Sonnets to their ‘onlie Begetter’ was pure Platonism. Yet the sonnets were unhappy: ‘Shakespeare felt that his art had been created in him by the beauty of his treacherous friend.’ Hence the Latin motto. He contrasted Greek art, ‘the expression of joy,’ with modern art, ‘a flower of suffering.’ Even Keats, though ‘almost Greek,’ had ‘died of sorrow.’

  Ricketts fulfilled his commission for a portrait of Willie Hughes. On receiving it Wilde wrote to him, ‘It is not a forgery at all—it is an authentic Clouet of the highest artistic value. It is absurd of you and Shannon to try and take me in—as if I did not know the master’s touch, or was no judge of frames!’ He loved confusing still further the borders of life and art. Unfortunately, the ‘Clouet’ disappeared at the time of his trials, when his effects were auctioned off.

  Balfour and Asquith, to whom Wilde told the story of Willie Hughes, advised him not to print it, lest it corrupt English homes. He sent it, however, to The Fortnightly Review, assuming that Frank Harris would be amused by it in its fictional form. But Harris was abroad, and his assistant rejected it rudely, so Wilde sent it to Blackwood’s, where it was published. The effect was considerable. Harris said, with Ross as corroborator, ‘It set everyone talking and arguing.… It gave his enemies for the first time the very weapon they wanted.’ The story was guarded—more guarded than a longer version which Wilde wrote later—and while it raised the question of Shakespeare’s passion for the actor, it deflected it towards a professional friendship. Wilde only played with fire; he was not Prometheus. He remarked to Ross, ‘My next Shakespeare book will be a discussion as to whether the commentators on Hamlet are mad or only pretending to be.’24

  His reputation as an author dated from the publication of The Happy Prince and Other Tales in London in May 1888. The Athenaeum compared him to Hans Christian Andersen, and Pater wrote to say that ‘The Selfish Giant’ was ‘perfect in its kind,’ and the whole book written in ‘pure English’—a wonderful compliment. The stories suffer from florid figures (‘the long grey fingers of the dawn clutching at the fading stars’) and Biblical pronouns. The incidents often begin with disfigurement and end, like ‘The Happy Prince,’ in transfiguration. Wilde presents the stories like sacraments of a lost faith. Most of the characters are brought to recognition of themselves, and a recognition of ugliness and misery. Wilde celebrates the power of love as greater than the power of evil or the power of good. Going from a castle to a hovel leads to suffering and love. For the most part Wilde subdued his desire to assault his readers with unfamiliar sensations, though there are references to the young King’s kissing a statue of Antinous, and allusions to the beauty of boys. Their occasional social satire is subordinated to a sadness unusu
al in fairy tales—the other side of the boisterousness which Wilde was simultaneously expressing in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ and other short stories.

  The fairy tales move slowly. Wilde’s natural motion was swifter, and he was able to embody it successfully in two pieces of discursive prose which seem more natural expressions of his genius. One was ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison,’ which Frank Harris published in The Fortnightly Review in January 1889, and the other was ‘The Decay of Lying,’ published the same month in the Nineteenth Century and later greatly revised. With these two essays, especially the second, Wilde discovered his own genius. Much of what he had thought and written about Chatterton and Cyril Graham and Erskine went into the first essay, which dealt with Thomas Wainewright the forger. While all illegality impressed him, forgery was a crime which perhaps seems closest to Wilde’s social presentation of himself. Robert Ross spoke of his inveterate artificiality. He was now in league with the underworld of people who pretended to be what they were not, like some group of Masons without the law. He said of Wainewright, ‘His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked.’

  The calm discussion of Wainewright’s phases of artistry and criminality was more appropriate than the emotional defense of Chatterton. Wainewright did not offer for contemplation a beautiful soul, and he was in no sense pathetic. Instead he was ‘a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and … a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age.’ Like the character in Rollinat’s ‘Le Soliloque de Troppmann,’ the writer is as free of moral compunction as the murderer. Wilde associated Wainewright with Baudelaire, whom he always described as poisonous and perfect. Among his quaint tastes Wainewright had ‘that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence, of morals.’ (The remark heralded the green carnation.) When a friend reproached Wainewright with a murder, he shrugged his shoulders and gave an answer that Wilde relished: ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’ Wilde concludes that ‘the fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose,’ and that ‘there is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.’ It is too early to judge his value as a writer, Wilde says, but he is inclined to believe that Wainewright’s criminal craft revealed a true artist.

  Decadence Mocked

  The past is what man should not have been.

  The present is what man ought not to be.

  The future is what artists are.

  After ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison,’ Wilde began to write his first and most successful dialogue, ‘The Decay of Lying,’ and finished it by December 1888. The impulse to write it came, as with ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,’ from a conversation with Robert Ross, the beloved disciple. Not the least of its effects was that it bound Wilde to Yeats, one of the first to hear it, and it was Yeats who would translate Wilde into fully twentieth-century terms.

  They had probably met at Lady Wilde’s, but in his Autobiographies Yeats sets this first meeting at the house of William Ernest Henley, about September 1888, when Henley and Wilde first became friends. (Bearing out a remark Wilde made on this occasion, ‘The basis of literary friendship is mixing the poisoned bowl,’ Henley would throw his stick at Wilde later.) At twenty-three, Yeats was amused by the contrast of Henley, industrious and imperial, with Wilde, indolent and subversive. He was also amazed by Wilde’s ‘perfect sentences,’ which allegorized the victory of imagination over all impeding circumstances. Wilde’s ‘hard brilliance, dominating self-possession’ were more than a match for Henley’s lively intelligence. ‘I envy those men who become mythological while still living,’ Yeats said to Wilde, half in compliment, and received the reply, ‘I think a man should invent his own myth.’ It was an injunction which Yeats would remember all his life. He was delighted also by Wilde’s praise of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance in that un-Pater-like company: ‘I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence; the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.’ ‘But,’ said a dull man, ‘would you not have given us time to read it?’ ‘Oh no,’ replied Wilde, ‘there would have been plenty of time afterwards—in either world.’ Wilde was at once admiring Pater and making him faintly ridiculous, freeing himself by professing outlandish bondage. After his departure Henley commented, ‘No, he is not an aesthete. One soon finds he is a scholar and a gentleman.’25

  If Yeats took note of Wilde, Wilde took note of him. He invited him to Christmas dinner in 1888, pretending that Yeats had no family in London, a pretense Yeats was glad not to embarrass with truth. Having heard the gossip about the untidy house of Wilde’s parents in Dublin, and about Sir William Wilde’s dirty fingernails, Yeats was unprepared for what he found in Tite Street. The drawing room and dining room were done in white, the walls, furniture, and carpets too. The exception was the red lampshade suspended from the ceiling, which cowled a terra-cotta statue on a diamond-shaped red cloth in the middle of the white table. Yeats felt embarrassed by this elegance, especially when Wilde visibly started at his yellow shoes—a botched attempt at the vogue of undyed leather. Yeats’s effort to tell Cyril Wilde a story about a giant frightened the child to tears and earned a reproachful look from the father, whose own stories of giants dwelt upon amiability rather than monstrosity. Flustered by his gaucheries, Yeats was not entirely at a disadvantage. He knew himself to be a better poet than Wilde. Something of this feeling must have been conveyed to Wilde at the Christmas dinner, for he converted the muted disparagement into articulate victory by saying, ‘We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.’a

  After dinner Wilde brought out the proofs of ‘The Decay of Lying,’ which James Knowles was to publish the next month in the Nineteenth Century. It could hardly have found a more willing listener. Yeats did not share the fashionable aversion to critical theory, but until this time his literary ideas had been fostered by occultism and nationalism. He needed an aesthetic which would take into account the intense speculation about the nature and function of art that had been going on in Europe since the pronouncements of the early romantic poets. In the dialogue Wilde summed up the disdain for life and nature of writers from Gautier to Mallarmé, the disdain for common morality of Poe and Baudelaire, the disdain for content of Verlaine and Whistler. Such views were counterposed by Wilde against conventional theories of sincerity and verisimilitude. Through the dialogue form, which Yeats followed him in using, he sharpened the central paradox—that art creates life—with all its dialectical possibilities.

  ‘The Decay of Lying’ began as a mockery of the current talk of Neronian decadence. Wilde spoke of a club called ‘The Tired Hedonists’ and explained, ‘We are supposed to wear faded roses in our buttonholes when we meet, and to have a sort of cult for Domitian.’ To the suggestion that the members must be bored with one another, he agreed: ‘We are. That is one of the objects of the club.’ So Wilde smiled decadence away. Another target was Zola’s essay, published nine years before in Le Roman expérimental (1880), which minimized imagination, and made the artistic labyrinth into a laboratory. The real decadence, Wilde said, was this trespass of life into art.

  The approach he proposed was less Salvationist than that of Matthew Arnold, whose recent death appeared to make room for a new aesthetic. Wilde praised art’s rejection of sincerity and accuracy in favor of lies and masks. He largely avoided the word ‘imagination,’ grown stale and innocuous, though he was of course upholding imagination against reason and observation. ‘Imagination’ was also a word that sounded too natural and involuntary for Wilde. ‘Lying’ is better because it is no outpouring of the self, but a conscious effort to mislead. It also sounds sinful and willful. ‘All fine imaginative work,’ he declares, ‘is self-conscious and deliberate. A
great poet sings because he chooses to sing,’ but ‘if one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out!’ Wilde celebrates art unsentimentally in the name of Ananias, not of Ariel.

  He identified two basic energies in art, both subversive. One asserts a magnificent isolation from experience, an unreality, a sterility. Art is a kind of trick played on nature and God, an illicit creation by man. ‘All art is entirely useless,’ said Wilde, like Gautier and Whistler before him. ‘Art never expresses anything but itself.’ ‘Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.’ Form determines content, not content form. Wilde turned Taine upon his head: the age does not shape art, but it is art which gives the age its character. So far from responding to questions posed by the epoch, art offers answers before questions have been asked. ‘It is the ages that are her symbols.’b Yeats was attentive, since his historical chapter in A Vision is an illustration of the thesis.

  The second energy of art is its insemination of images. Life, straggling after art, seizes upon forms in art to express itself. Life imitates art. Aristotle, like Taine, is stood on his head. ‘Think of what we owe to the imitation of Christ, of what we owe to the imitation of Caesar.’ No one had so clearly invoked the antinomies for Yeats as Wilde did. He would follow Wilde’s lead, though he would use St Francis and Cesare Borgia.27 In one of his most splendid passages, Wilde said, ‘This unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters.’ If art is a mirror, we look in it to see a mask. (Herod would agree.) Actually, ‘life is the mirror, and art the reality.’ Corot’s paintings created the fogs they were thought to depict, an idea which Proust echoed when he said women began to look like Renoir’s images of them. Wilde said, ‘the whole of Japan is a pure invention’ of its artists. ‘There is no such country, there are no such people.’ ‘The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.… One of the greatest tragedies of my life is the death of Lucien de Rubempré.’ Hamlet has had its effect upon two centuries. ‘The world has grown sad because a puppet was once melancholy.’ (Yeats caviled at Wilde’s substitution of ‘melancholy’ for ‘sad,’ and did not accept his explanation that the sentence needed a full sound at the close; but Wilde was justified in using ‘melancholy’ as an Elizabethan clinical term.) As for sculpture, ‘The Greeks … set in the bride’s chamber the statue of Hermes or Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the work of art she looked at in her rapture or her pain.c They knew that Life gains from Art not merely spirituality … but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can produce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles.’