Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  New Disciples

  I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.

  The principal friendships Wilde made in Paris were with Schwob, Pierre Louÿs, and André Gide. Gide and Louÿs, both a little over twenty-one, were of almost opposite temperament, Gide furtive and self-aware, Louÿs outspoken and outrageous, given to cruel practical jokes of which Gide was for a time—until he broke off with Louÿs—the butt. The one attracted to men and the other to women, Gide and Louÿs both admired Wilde, who admired them. He inscribed The House of Pomegranates to Louÿs in gaudy terms:

  Au jeune homme qui adore la Beauté

  Au jeune homme que la Beauté adore

  Au jeune homme que j’adorec

  They wrote a composite autograph, Wilde’s part being a quotation from Salome:

  Il ne faut regarder ni les choses ni les personnes

  Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Car les miroirs ne nous montrent que les masques.d

  Louÿs wrote earnestly, ‘Il faut montrer la Beauté aux hommes.’31 By January 1892, Louÿs, preparing his book of poems, Astarté, for the printer, followed Wilde’s method in The House of Pomegranates by dedicating each poem to a friend, one being Wilde himself; and he quoted Wilde’s story ‘The Young King’ in an epigraph. His letters to Wilde begin, ‘Cher Maître.’ He was won.

  Gide and Wilde first met about 26 November 1891, by which time Wilde was thirty-seven and Gide just twenty-two. We know almost too well the schedule of their meetings, which occurred nearly every day, lasting often for hours on end, during three weeks. The second was at the poet Heredia’s, a day or two later. (Louÿs was to marry Heredia’s youngest daughter.) Then Louÿs, at Gide’s request, arranged a small dinner for Wilde at the Café d’Harcourt, Place de la Sorbonne, on the 28th, probably with Stuart Merrill making a fourth. Perhaps at Wilde’s counterinvitation, Gide met him again at five o’clock the next day; and the two men dined with Stuart Merrill on 2 December, with Marcel Schwob at Aristide Bruant’s on the 3rd. These were presumably some of the three-hour dinners at which, according to Gide in a letter to Paul Valéry of December 1891, Wilde talked so well he seemed to be Baudelaire or Villiers (a comparison he was more indulgent towards than Renaud had been). On the 6th they were at the house of Princess Ouroussoff, who claimed—in the midst of one of Wilde’s verbal flights—to see a halo round his head. Gide also said, ‘il rayonnait [he emitted rays].’ To follow out this social calendar, there was dinner for Gide and Wilde at Schwob’s on the 7th, at Bruant’s again on the 8th. Gide’s daybook records (says Jean Delay) the single name WILDE in large letters for the 11th and 12th; on the 13th, Princess Ouroussoff entertained them both again for dinner, along with Henri de Regnier; and on the 15th, Gide and Schwob met Wilde once more, after which Gide went to the country to visit relations, and Wilde, a few days later, went back to London. For Wilde this social round was almost routine, but for Gide it was a complete change; ordinarily he did not frequent either the Café d’Harcourt or Aristide Bruant’s and did not meet so many people in a year.

  In these early days of their friendship, Gide was overwhelmed by Wilde. Stuart Merrill remembered that when Wilde told his stories, Gide stared distractedly into his plate. The bearded Jules Renard, who found the cleanshaven faces of both Gide and Wilde offensive (he emphasizes in separate descriptions that each was imberbe), met Gide at Schwob’s on 23 December just after Wilde had left Paris. He too thought the young Gide was in love with Wilde.32 As for Wilde, he liked Gide but apparently preferred the company of Louÿs and of Schwob, whose help he solicited—along with Retté’s—for Salome. (He dedicated the play to Louÿs.) His feelings may not have been reciprocated, but some process occurred which was vital to Gide, though he never specified exactly what had happened. He did give enough particulars to suggest the nature of a typical Wilde friendship.

  The relation between them was probably much like that between Dorian and Lord Henry Wotton. ‘To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual view echoed back with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume; there was a real joy in that.’ Gide chose to feel Wilde spiritually seduced him. Until that time Gide had gone through life in a dream, like a sleepwalker. Now he suddenly woke up to find himself on a sloping roof. It was well to have a companion to blame or to thank. He did not need to have been a student of Goethe, though he was, to rejoice at finding somebody to play Mephisto to his Faust, or Faust to his Gretchen.

  The stages in the seduction are marked in Gide’s correspondence and journal. At first he was dazzled: in a letter of 28 November 1891 to Paul Valéry, he describes meeting ‘l’esthète Oscar Wilde’ along with others, and then comments, ‘O, admirable, admirable, celui-là.’ But the tone quickly changes as he finds himself imperiled. A week later he represents Wilde as besieging him, and tells Valéry (4 December), ‘Wilde s’ingénie pieusement à tuer ce qui me restait d’âme, parce qu’il dit que pour connaître une essence, il faut la supprimer: il veut que je regrette mon âme. L’effort pour la détruire est la mesure de toute chose. Toute chose ne se constitue que de son vide … etc.’e

  This idea was good enough for Gide to restate it five years later in Les Nourritures terrestres, where he declares, ‘on certain evenings I was mad enough almost to believe in my soul, I felt it so near escaping from my body.’ He adds scrupulously, ‘Ménalque [Wilde] said this too.’ And in 1924 (24 August), in his journal for Les Faux-monnayeurs, he writes, ‘we name things only when we are breaking with them,’ and then adds that this ‘formula … may well presage a new departure.’33 The idea that the devil should circulate in the book incognito, his reality growing stronger the less the other characters believe in him, is a corollary to Wilde’s theorem. Beyond the evocation of a stagy devil, Gide’s remarks reflect his eagerness to abandon the idea of self which should be sequential and predictable, and to accept fits and starts as his natural medium.

  When Wilde left Paris in 1891, Gide almost ceased to write letters—a sure sign of turmoil in this relentless correspondent. After an interval he communicated with Valéry: ‘Forgive my being silent: since Wilde I only exist a little.’ He was conscious of something gone out of his existence, out of his innocence. This feeling of being ‘devirginated,’ and rather too easily, persisted and stirred in him some resentment. (Wilde too was fatigued by the speed of Gide’s spiritual submission.) Gide begins his diary of 1 January 1892, two weeks after his last encounter with Wilde, with a solemn verdict: ‘Wilde, I believe, did me nothing but harm. In his company I lost the habit of thinking. I had more varied emotions, but had forgotten how to bring order into them.’ He plunged with relief into his readings in philosophy. The damage was not permanent. Paul Valéry had anticipated as much by joking about Wilde, even when Gide was enraptured, as a ‘symbolic mouth à la Redon which swallows a mouthful and mechanically transforms it at once into a satanic aphorism.’

  Gide never said explicitly what evangel Wilde had imparted to him, but in the character Ménalque, who appears in both Les Nourritures terrestres and L’Immoraliste, there is a bow to Wilde, though an ironic one, especially in the later book. The narrator feels for Ménalque more than friendship, but less than love. Ménalque is a man who no longer lives under the old dispensation. He is not dissolute, but unconstrained. Gide represents him as much older—each time Gide met Wilde afterwards he noted how terribly he had aged since their last encounter. In the section about Ménalque published in the review L’Ermitage before the rest of Les Nourritures terrestres, Ménalque was approximately Wilde’s age; in the later version Gide heaped on another decade, perhaps to qualify the allusion. Ménalque is a grandfather then, but a newborn one, an elderly apostle of youthful sensation. If Wilde recognized this unsmiling portrait of himself, he gave no hint. Wilde’s main influence on the book came fro
m his faith in himself as bearer of a new gospel to be transmitted above all to the young. Gide took over this role for his own; it is he who tutors Nathanaël, while Ménalque is relegated to the lesser part of precursor.

  Besides this fictional transformation of Wilde, Gide wrote about him nonfictionally many times. His finest tribute may, however, be not what he published, distinguished though that is, but his removal from his journal of those pages dealing with the first three weeks of their friendship. The main document about the psychic possession of Gide by Wilde is an absent one—a truly symbolist piece of evidence, like Mallarmé’s ‘I’Absente de tous bouquets.’ We know it, as Wilde said we might know the soul, by its having been eliminated.

  One can speculate about Wilde’s message to Gide, and its disturbing effect. Much that the two men have in common derives from their equal saturation in a literary movement which sought, by imbedding symbol within symbol and perspective within perspective, to reach ‘the mind’s native land,’ as Mallarmé called it. Yet speculation about the missing pages is possible and need not be too risky, since we have Gide’s essays on Wilde, which, for all their evasions, are highly informative. We have one remark from their conversation which Wilde recorded. And there are, of course, their writings. No doubt much that passed between them was unspoken, a matter of assumptions, smiles, calculated disdain or indifference, exclusion. The subject of homosexuality, for example, was not mentioned—so Gide says—although it must have been at least behind the scenes, like the devil in Les Faux-monnayeurs.

  Wilde had his parables to impart. One had to do with Narcissus, about whom Gide had just published a book. According to Wilde,

  When Narcissus died, the flowers of the field were desolate and asked the river for some drops of water to weep for him. ‘Oh!’ answered the river, ‘if all my drops of water were tears, I should not have enough to weep for Narcissus myself. I love him.’ ‘Oh!’ replied the flowers of the field, ‘how could you not have loved Narcissus? He was beautiful.’ ‘Was he beautiful?’ said the river. ‘And who should know better than you? Each day, leaning over your bank, he beheld his beauty in your waters.’ ‘If I loved him,’ replied the river, ‘it was because, when he leaned over my waters, I saw the reflection of my waters in his eyes.’34

  The name of this story, said Wilde, was ‘The Disciple.’ The point was that there are no disciples—a lesson to one of Mallarmé’s disciples from a rival master. People are suns, not moons.

  Wilde’s conquest of Gide was partly by parable. But he had precepts as well. He soon realized that Gide was of Huguenot ancestry, and would complain later to Alfred Douglas that Gide was a French Protestant, ‘the worst kind, except of course for the Irish Protestant.’ But Irish Protestantism, at least in Dublin, had spent its force. Wilde thought Gide was dominated by inhibitions that originated in his religious training. He complained that Gide’s lips were too straight, the lips ‘of someone who has never lied. I must teach you to lie, so your lips will be beautiful and curved like those on an antique mask.’ Wilde presumably broached the subject of religion to Gide in 1891, as he had broached it to Bernard Berenson a year before, by saying, ‘Tell me at once. Are you living with the Twenty Commandments?’ In Les Nourritures terrestres Gide begins one section with the question ‘God’s commandments, are there ten of you or twenty?’ Wilde had made the same kind of joke at Oxford about the ‘Forty-nine Articles.’ He probably said to Gide, as to another young man, ‘Creation began when you were born. It will end on the day you die.’35 Nothing could have so completely pervaded Gide’s consciousness as the disclosure that the Biblical terrain, on which he and his ancestors had trod so confidently, was mined.

  If, as is likely, Wilde knew about Gide’s domination by his pious mother (Louÿs would hardly have kept quiet about such things), he may have quoted, as he did in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ Christ’s question ‘Who is my mother?’ Gide, in his developing filial revolt, used a comparable quotation, ‘Woman, what have I to do with thee?’ More to the point, Wilde approached Gide at a party at Heredia’s and asked, ‘Would you like me to tell you a secret?… but promise me not to tell it to anyone.… Do you know why Christ did not love his mother?’ He paused. ‘It’s because she was a virgin!’36f To Gide, himself a virgin and obliged to remain one for another year, the idea that purity might be monstrous must have been agitating. Up to now under his mother’s thumb, he began to behave towards her with calculated ferocity, hinting, with less and less disguise, at the homosexuality which he knew she would abhor.

  In the first essay he wrote after Wilde’s death, Gide declares that Wilde posed pagan naturalism against Christian miracles so as to put Christianity out of countenance. He did do this at times, as when he said to Yeats, ‘I have been inventing a new Christian heresy. It seemed that Christ recovered after the Crucifixion, and escaping from the tomb lived on for many years, the one man upon earth who knew the falsehood of Christianity. Once St Paul visited his town and he alone in the carpenters’ quarter did not go to hear him preach. Henceforth the other carpenters noticed that, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands covered.’38

  Other examples, which Gide gives, do not so much discountenance Christianity as suggest its joylessness, while adding a further meaning to the original. It is a fifth gospel, the gospel according to St Thomas, as Wilde says of Renan’s life of Jesus. In Wilde’s version of the raising of Lazarus, Christ comes upon a young man weeping and asks why. The man replies, ‘Lord, I was dead and you raised me up. What else should I do but weep?’ In another version, told at this time to Jean Lorrain, the resurrected Lazarus bitterly reproaches Christ for lying: ‘There is nothing in death, and he who is dead is dead indeed.’ Jesus puts his finger on his lips, ‘I know it, but don’t tell them.’39 This is not pagan naturalism, but the novelist amending, as Yeats would say, ‘what was told awry / By some peasant gospeller.’ Gide forgets he is borrowing from Wilde when, in his autobiography, he speaks of ‘that kind of abominable anguish that Lazarus must have felt after his escape from the tomb.’g His own play about King Saul, which was the first of his works to interest Wilde, was a similar extension of Biblical narrative, depicting Saul in love with David. Gide understandably preferred not to think of Wilde’s method as being as close to his own as it was. Once he had received the impetus, he had no need for tutelage, and could vie with Wilde in rewriting both Testaments.

  But Wilde had something else to inculcate, something even more useful to Gide, a way of bridging the divide between art and life—a problem in Gide’s Le Traité du Narcisse. According to this theory, the artist makes models of experience which people rush to try out. As his supreme artist Wilde ingeniously named Christ. For Christ urged others to live artistically, and lived artistically himself. ‘His entire life is the most wonderful of poems,’ Wilde said. ‘He is just like a work of art himself.’ Gide’s journal contains a note written a month after he had come to know Wilde, ‘A man’s life is his image.’41 In Wilde’s work this is an old theme, in Gide’s a new one.

  That Wilde did talk in this vein to Gide is also confirmed by De Profundis, where Wilde remarks, ‘I remember saying once to André Gide, as we sat together in some Paris café, that while Metaphysics had but little real interest for me, and Morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there find its complete fulfilment. It was a generalisation as profound as it was novel.’ For Gide, a young man bent upon the exculpation of his instincts yet addicted to Biblical quotation, this idea was like an explosive device. In 1893 he writes in his journal, ‘Christ’s saying is just as true in art: Whosoever will save his life (his personality) shall lose it.’42 He proceeded with this translation of Christianity to a higher level, and even projected a book to be entitled Christianisme contre le Christ. Wilde also, if he had lived, might well have taken over Christianity as he took over socialism; to one of his friends he projected a book that would rescue his r
eligion from its adherents and be, as he said, ‘the Epic of the Cross, the Iliad of Christianity.’43

  To some extent he carried out this plan, first in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ and later in his De Profundis letter. In the first, Wilde insisted that Christ taught the importance of the individual and, a Pater before the fact, urged total self-expression. ‘ “Know thyself!” was written over the portal of the antique world.… the message of Christ to man was simply, “Be thyself.” ’ In Les Nourritures terrestres Gide similarly insists that ‘Know thyself’ is ‘a maxim as pernicious as it is ugly,’ a phrase which itself suggests Wilde’s aesthetic-ethical blend. ‘Whoever observes himself arrests his development.’ The family and personal property, impediments to self-expression, must go. (Both men said this.) Gide was willing to be rid of his mother (as Wilde was not), and to spend his ample inheritance, as Wilde would have done if only he had had one. Wilde held that art was ‘the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known,’ so the better the artist the more perfect his imitation of Christ.44 The artistic life is a guide to conduct. Gide was to complain in Les Faux-monnayeurs that symbolism offered an aesthetic but no ethic. Wilde brought the two together before Gide.

  The relation of art to life was a subject Wilde brooded over. He had said in Intentions that life would repeat itself tediously were it not for the daemonic changes art forces upon it. Art would be repetitious too if the critical impulse did not impel the artist to new and subversive modes of thinking and feeling. Wilde is willing to see this idea through; and he finds in art the impulse to destroy along with the impulse to create. Unlike Yeats, who says that works of art beget works of art, Wilde believes that works of art murder works of art. He put this idea to Gide in one of his best parables, which Ricketts says was invented in 1889.