Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  The indifferent conferring of forms upon life by art slips into the idea that art may infect life rather than isolate it. Wilde would have said that both could happen. In ‘The Decay of Lying’ he speaks of ‘silly boys who, after reading the adventures of Jack Sheppard or Dick Turpin, pillage the stalls of unfortunate applewomen, break into sweetshops at night, and alarm old gentlemen who are returning from the city by leaping out on them in suburban lanes, with black masks and unloaded revolvers.’ Art may charge its audience with criminal impulses. Like Whitman, Wilde could say, ‘Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more.’ Whitman, Wilde, and Yeats all envisaged going beyond good and evil, at least in their conventional guises. With this idea of the artist as a sacred malefactor, the opposite of Wilde’s idea of the artist as isolato, he brought his theories full circle. The function of art is to make a raid on predictability.

  The subversiveness of Wilde’s views is matched by the grace of their expression. In the dialogue, two characters talk to entertain and persuade each other, the author keeping a little apart from both sides, even that which he obviously favors. The delight in debate is greater than the desire for conviction. Wilde went further than Pater, who had dared only to hint at the overthrow of an old world by new art. Pater did not speak of art’s indifference to life, since for him life was composed of feelings, and art provided the most intense of them. Wilde’s infusion of irony into aesthetics was adroit; he found a way of saying that art should please and instruct without making it obsequious or didactic. Yeats spoke of ‘our more profound Pre-Raphaelitism,’ but it was Wilde’s more profound postaestheticism which set him going. Still, he was not entirely dazzled. He thought Wilde by nature ‘a man of action,’ and was surprised to learn that he had turned down a safe seat in Parliament. As a writer, Wilde seemed to Yeats ‘unfinished,’ a man who, ‘by sheer vehemence of nature, all but saw the Grail.’28

  Wilde’s form of greatness was different from Yeats’s. But with ‘The Decay of Lying’ he gave his theories a voice. His paradoxes danced, his wit gleamed. His language resounded with self-mockery, amusement, and extravagance. ‘The Decay of Lying’ became the locus classicus for the expression of the converging aesthetic ideas of writers everywhere. Art was not to be put down by politics, economics, ethics, or religion. Its pride and power could no longer be challenged as frivolous or futile. Degeneration was regeneration. By cunning and eloquence Wilde restored art to the power that the romantic poets had claimed for it, able once again to legislate for the world.

  * The Lady’s Pictorial for 8 January 1887 noted another occasion on which Mr and Mrs Wilde appeared wearing matching costumes, in the same shade of Lincoln green.

  † Wilde told an interviewer in the spring of 1894, ‘We are all of us more or less Socialists now-a-days.… I think I am rather more than a Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe, but, of course, the dynamite policy is very absurd indeed.’12

  ‡ Wilde’s attitude towards dialect he expressed elsewhere: ‘The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say “mither” instead of “mother” seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialisms.’18

  § Wilde told E. F. Benson that he was busy with a small volume of ethical essays—moral tracts, they might be called—designed to be given as presents at Christmastime. The Bishop of London had kindly consented to write a preface. The first of these was ‘The Value of Presence of Mind,’ and took the form of a parable. A play was being performed to full houses. One night, during that tremendous scene in which the flower girl of Piccadilly Circus rejects with scorn the odious proposals of a debauched marquess, a huge volume of smoke and fire poured out of the wings. The audience rose in panic and stampeded to the exits. Then onstage there appeared the noble figure of the young man who was the true lover of the flower girl. His voice rang out—the fire was already under control; the chief danger was from panic. Let them all go back to their seats, and recover their calm. So commanding was his presence that they returned to their places. The young actor then leaped lightly over the footlights and ran out of the theatre. The rest were burned to a crisp.21

  ‖ Wilde once explained, at Lady Archibald Campbell’s, why he thought he looked like Shakespeare. He ended a brilliant monologue by saying he intended to have a bronze medallion struck of his own profile and Shakespeare’s. ‘And I suppose, Mr Wilde,’ said Lady Archibald, ‘your profile will protrude beyond Shakespeare’s.’23 It was Lady Colin Campbell who described Wilde as ‘a great white caterpillar.’

  a He had said in a review that women are too poetical to be poets, a point also made by George Eliot’s Will Ladislaw in Middlemarch.

  b Other epigrams of Wilde in a notebook are related:

  Life is the only thing that is never real.

  Life is a dream that prevents one from sleeping.

  The impossible in art is anything that has happened in real life.

  The improbable in art is anything that has happened too often in real life.

  By the artificial separation of soul and body men have invented a Realism that is vulgar, an Idealism that is void.26

  c So it is said in Yeats’s The King’s Threshold,

  But why were you born crooked?

  What bad poet did your mother listen to

  That you were born so crooked?

  CHAPTER XII

  The Age of Dorian

  Aesthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong.

  The New Aestheticism

  The nineties began in 1889 and ended in 1895. At least the Wildean nineties did so, and without Wilde the decade could not have found its character. These were the years in which aestheticism was revised and perfected. During the eighties, Wilde’s extremist sponsorship had helped to discredit it and provoked extravagant scorn. Now he conferred a new complexity upon the movement. Without surrendering the contempt for morality, or for nature, that had alarmed and annoyed his critics, Wilde now allowed for ‘a higher ethics’ in which artistic freedom and full expression of personality were possible, along with a curious brand of individualistic sympathy or narcissistic socialism. He also made it clear that nature might mirror, through art, what Shelley called ‘the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present.’ To these he added another feature of aestheticism, the invasion of forbidden areas of thought and behavior. Decorum became merely a formal attribute of works of art, not a question of morality.

  Aestheticism in its new guise modified the relationship between reader and writer. If matter once the exclusive preserve of pornography could be broached, then the reader’s calm and sense of unthreatened distance were violable. Many young men and women learned of the existence of uncelebrated forms of love through the hints in The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Unofficially, Wilde took note of what he officially denied, and told young Graham Robertson the artist, ‘Graham, the book was not written for you, and I hope you will not read it.’) People also learned from Wilde how to shape a sentence and live in style. In the eighties, aestheticism suffered for lack of example: Dorian Gray filled the need. With its irreverent maxims, its catch phrases, its conversational gambits, its insouciance and contrariness, it announced the age of Dorian.

  In the eighties, aestheticism had been less a movement than an expostulation with the lack of one. Yet its influence, and the influence of the movement of which it was a part—that propaganda for art and artist against ‘factification’ and ‘getting-on’—grew stronger. The claims of action over art were challenged by the idea that artistic creation, related to that contemplative life celebrated by Plato, was the highest form of action. Wilde summed up ideas that were only implicit in England, but expressed in the poems of Mallarmé and Verlaine and in t
he novels of Flaubert and D’Annunzio. These writers propounded their positions more carefully than Wilde, but he vied with them in one respect: he was spectacular always.

  He was the more spectacular because his views, which agitated among the roots of literature and life, were presented with nonchalance. The use of dialogue lent undogmatic informality to his expression. He said, ‘I can invent an imaginary antagonist and convert him when I choose by some absurdly sophistical argument.’1 Even when he relinquished that form, as in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ he seemed to allow for debate with his position. It was as essential to disturb complacencies as to convince, or possibly more. In a diary for 21 July 1890 Katharine Bradley (of the ‘Michael Field’ collaboration) recorded how Wilde affirmed his role of lounge lizard:

  We agreed—the whole problem of life turns on pleasure—Pater shows that the hedonist—the perfected hedonist—is the saint. ‘One is not always happy when one is good; but one is always good when one is happy.’ He is writing two articles at present in the Nineteenth Century on the Art of Doing Nothing. He is at his best when he is lying on a sofa thinking. He does not want to do anything; overcome by the ‘maladie du style’—the effort to bring in delicate cadences to express exactly what he wants to express—he is prostrate. But to think, to contemplate …2

  Wilde was referring to his articles on ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing: A Dialogue,’ published in the Nineteenth Century in July and September 1890. In Dorian Gray, first published in Lippincott’s on 20 June 1890, Lord Henry Wotton speaks ‘languidly’ three times and ‘languorously’ once. He gave a new sanction to these words, as Verlaine had given it to ‘langueur’ in French seven years before. Wilde was not indolent: he read voraciously, he devised and tried out conversational gambits, and touched them up in accordance with the shock, amusement, acquiescence, or delight that they aroused. He attributed the same interest in speech to the Greeks: ‘Their test was always the spoken word in its musical and metrical relations. The voice was the medium, and the ear the critic.’ He radiated, in Katharine Bradley’s words, ‘bien être’ with his ‘mossy voice.’ Most of his writing, Pater noted half in dispraise, had the air of ‘an excellent talker.’3 Yet in 1891, his annus mirabilis, he published four books (two volumes of stories, one of critical essays, and a novel) and a long political essay (‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’) and wrote his first successful play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, as well as most of Salome. Languor was the mask of industry.

  The group of young men who followed Wilde swelled with his success. He had only to hear of a young poet to tender compliments and hospitality; he treated such literary aspirants as kindly as Mallarmé—a comparable chef de cénacle. New ones were constantly added. Wilde and Constance happened to be at Edward Burne-Jones’s house on 12 July 1891 when the eighteen-year-old Aubrey Beardsley arrived unannounced, with his face ‘like a silver hatchet’ under his chestnut hair.4 Burne-Jones, usually noncommittal when shown work by young artists, offered Beardsley every encouragement. The Wildes took Beardsley and his sister Mabel home in their carriage and became friends. It was perhaps under Wilde’s influence that Beardsley’s style became more satirical and sinister. He would say later that he had created Beardsley, and perhaps he had.

  His principal young man until well into 1892 was one who arrived in Wilde’s circle like a new star—John Gray. Born on 2 March 1866, the son of a carpenter, Gray longed to join the world of cultivated people. Forced to leave school at thirteen and become a metal-turner, he studied languages, music, and painting on the side. At sixteen he passed a civil-service examination and landed a clerkship, first in the Post Office, and six years later in the Library of the Foreign Office. Just when he and Wilde met is uncertain, because both of them said it was later than it was. But by 1889 the association had begun.

  In August of that year, Ricketts and Shannon, with whom Gray was on close terms, included two pieces by him in the first number of their magazine, The Dial. One was an article on the Goncourt brothers, the other a fairy tale in Wilde’s manner entitled ‘The Great Worm.’ On receiving a copy, Wilde promptly came to No. 1, The Vale, to thank them for it. ‘It is quite delightful,’ he told them, ‘but do not bring out a second number, all perfect things should be unique.’ The subject of his young imitator with the passion for French literature must have come up, and Ricketts and Shannon could not have failed to describe their young, fair, and beautiful contributor. The writer Frank Liebich also attended a dinner party in 1889 at which Wilde and Gray were present.5

  To give the hero of his novel the name of ‘Gray’ was a form of courtship. Wilde probably named his hero not to point to a model, but to flatter Gray by identifying him with Dorian. Gray took the hint, and in letters to Wilde signed himself ‘Dorian.’ Their intimacy was common talk, for after a meeting of the Rhymers’ Club about 1 February 1891, where Gray read and Wilde turned up to listen, Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson both alluded to it. Johnson wrote in a letter of 5 February 1891, ‘I have made great friends with the original of Dorian: one John Gray, a youth in the Temple, aged thirty [actually twenty-five], with the face of fifteen.’ Dowson wrote on 2 February that’ “Dorian” Gray [read] some very beautiful and obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism.’6 The next month Wilde announced that he was going to write an article entitled ‘A New Poet’ for The Fortnightly Review, and was only waiting for Gray to produce enough poems to be so heralded.

  Wilde and Gray were assumed to be lovers, and there seems no reason to doubt it. Wilde probably wrote to Gray the two sentences which Dorian recalls having received from someone, ‘The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.’ For a time Gray was overwhelmed—Bernard Shaw observed that he was ‘one of the more abject of Wilde’s disciples.’7 But Wilde’s attention was not so concentrated.

  His special fondness was for students of his university. He traveled to Oxford in mid–February 1890, primarily because the Oxford University Dramatic Society had promised to follow his suggestions for their production of Browning’s Strafford. While there, he called on Pater and heard, perhaps from him, about a new poet at New College, Lionel Johnson. Wilde went to New College at noon to visit Johnson, only to be told that he was still in bed. He sent in a note ‘plaintively’ asking him to get up and receive him. Johnson, who was reading T. H. Green, read no more that day. He wrote to a friend, ‘I found him as delightful as Green is not. He discourses, with infinite flippancy, of everyone: lauded the Dial [of Ricketts and Shannon]: laughed at Pater: and consumed all my cigarettes. I am in love with him.’8 Wilde promised to come back, but was prevented by theatre business; he sent a letter from London addressed to ‘Dear Mr Johnson,’ praising his poems and asking to know their author better.

  Another New College friend was the half-demented poet John Barlas, who threatened to blow up the Houses of Parliament. When he was arrested in 1891, Wilde went with another friend of Barlas to the Westminster Police Court to offer himself as a surety for Barlas’s good behavior. On the way, he learned from his companion that Barlas regarded himself as a reincarnated Biblical figure, and imagined that people were showing their reverence by crossing their hands in passing. Wilde commented with great sincerity, ‘My dear fellow, when I think of the harm the Bible has done, I am quite ashamed of it.’9 They were able to persuade the judge to accept their guarantees.

  A more total convert to Wilde than Johnson or Barlas was Max Beerbohm, who met him first in 1888, while still at school at Charterhouse, and became a friend in the early 1890s when his brother, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, produced a Wilde play. Beerbohm was quick and clever: Wilde taught him to be languid and preposterous. Beerbohm referred to Wilde as ‘the Divinity’; Wilde said that Beerbohm had ‘the gift of perpetual old age.’ If Wilde celebrated the mask, Beerbohm in his first essays would celebrate maquillage; if Wilde wrote Dorian Gray about a man and his portrait, Beerbohm w
ould write The Happy Hypocrite about a man and his mask. To some extent the disciple went beyond the master; Wilde complained to Ada Leverson, ‘He plays with words as one plays with what one loves. When you are alone with him, Sphinx, does he take off his face and reveal his mask?’10 The exquisite triviality of Zuleika Dobson tried to match The Importance of Being Earnest. Its discussion of peacocks and presents came straight from Salome. Beerbohm admired, learned, and resisted; aware that Wilde was homosexual, and anxious not to follow him in that direction, he drew back from intimacy. He was to caricature Wilde savagely; this was ungrateful, but it was a form of ingratitude, and of intimacy, into which other followers of Wilde lapsed.