The Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

by Oscar Wilde

  ON ART’S CAPACITY TO REVEAL US TO OURSELVES112

  A young Elizabethan, who was enamoured of a girl so white that he named her Alba, has left on record the impression produced on him by one of the first performances of “Love’s Labour’s Lost.” Admirable though the actors were, and they played “in cunning wise,” he tells us, especially those who took the lovers’ parts, he was conscious that everything was “feigned,” that nothing came “from the heart,” that though they appeared to grieve they “felt no care,” and were merely presenting “a show in jest.”113 Yet, suddenly, this fanciful comedy of unreal romance became to him, as he sat in the audience, the real tragedy of his life. The moods of his own soul seemed to have taken shape and substance, and to be moving before him. His grief had a mask that smiled, and his sorrow wore gay raiment. Behind the bright and quickly-changing pageant of the stage, he saw himself, as one sees one’s image in a fantastic glass. The very words that came to the actors’ lips were wrung out of his pain. Their false tears were of his shedding.

  There are few of us who have not felt something akin to this. We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon we rage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours, also, the sin of Iago. Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognizance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.114

  We sit at the play with the woman we love, or listen to the music in some Oxford garden, or stroll with our friend through the cool galleries of the Pope’s house at Rome, and suddenly we become aware that we have passions of which we have never dreamed, thoughts that make us afraid, pleasures whose secret has been denied to us, sorrows that have been hidden from our tears. The actor is unconscious of our presence: the musician is thinking of the subtlety of the fugue, of the tone of his instrument; the marble gods that smile so curiously at us are made of insensate stone. But they have given form and substance to what was within us; they have enabled us to realise our personality; and a sense of perilous joy, or some touch or thrill of pain, or that strange self-pity that man so often feels for himself, comes over us and leaves us different.

  Some such impression the Sonnets of Shakespeare had certainly produced on me. As from opal dawns to sunsets of withered rose I read and re-read them in garden or chamber, it seemed to me that I was deciphering the story of a life that had once been mine, unrolling the record of a romance that, without my knowing it, had coloured the very texture of my nature, had dyed it with strange and subtle dyes. Art, as so often happens, had taken the place of personal experience. I felt as if I had been initiated into the secret of that passionate friendship, that love of beauty and beauty of love,115 of which Marsilio Ficino tells us,116 and of which the Sonnets, in their noblest and purest significance, may be held to be the perfect expression.

  Yes: I had lived it all.117 I had stood in the round theatre with its open roof arid fluttering banners, had seen the stage draped with black for a tragedy, or set with gay garlands for some brighter show. The young gallants came out with their pages, and took their seats in front of the tawny curtain that hung from the satyr-carved pillars of the inner scene. They were insolent and debonair in their fantastic dresses. Some of them wore French love locks, and white doublets stiff with Italian embroidery of gold thread, and long hose of blue or pale yellow silk. Others were all in black, and carried huge plumed hats. These affected the Spanish fashion. As they played at cards, and blew thin wreaths of smoke from the tiny pipes that the pages lit for them, the truant prentices and idle schoolboys that thronged the yard mocked them. But they only smiled at each other. In the side boxes some masked women were sitting. One of them was waiting with hungry eyes and bitten lips for the drawing back of the curtain. As the trumpet sounded for the third time she leant forward, and I saw her olive skin and raven’s-wing hair. I knew her. She had marred for a season the great friendship of my life. Yet there was something about her that fascinated me.

  The play changed according to my mood. Sometimes it was “Hamlet.” Taylor acted the Prince, and there were many who wept when Ophelia went mad. Sometimes it was “Romeo and Juliet.” Burbage was Romeo.118 He hardly looked the part of the young Italian, but there was a rich music in his voice, and passionate beauty in every gesture. I saw “As You Like It,” and “Cymbeline,” and “Twelfth Night,” and in each play there was some one whose life was bound up into mine, who realised for me every dream, and gave shape to every fancy. How gracefully he moved! The eyes of the audience were fixed on him.

  And yet it was in this century that it had all happened. I had never seen my friend, but he had been with me for many years, and it was to his influence that I had owed my passion for Greek thought and art, and indeed all my sympathy with the Hellenic spirit. Φιλοσοϕειν μετ’ ερωτος!119 How that phrase had stirred me in my Oxford days! I did not understand then why it was so. But I knew now. There had been a presence beside me always. Its silver feet had trod night’s shadowy meadows, and the white hands had moved aside the trembling curtains of the dawn. It had walked with me through the grey cloisters, and when I sat reading in my room, it was there also. What though I had been unconscious of it? The soul had a life of its own, and the brain its own sphere of action. There was something within us that knew nothing of sequence or extension, and yet, like the philosopher of the Ideal City, was the spectator of all time and of all existence.120 It had senses that quickened, passions that came to birth, spiritual ecstasies of contemplation, ardours of fiery-coloured love. It was we who were unreal, and our conscious life was the least important part of our development. The soul, the secret soul, was the only reality.

  How curiously it had all been revealed to me! A book of sonnets, published nearly three hundred years ago, written by a dead hand and in honour of a dead youth, had suddenly explained to me the whole story of my soul’s romance. I remembered how once in Egypt I had been present at the opening of a frescoed coffin that had been found in one of the basalt tombs at Thebes. Inside there was the body of a young girl swathed in tight bands of linen, and with a gilt mask over the face. As I stooped down to look at it, I had seen that one of the little withered hands held a scroll of yellow papyrus covered with strange characters. How I wished now that I had had it read to me! It might have told me something more about the soul that hid within me, and had its mysteries of passion of which I was kept in ignorance. Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us! Were we to look in tombs for our real life, and in art for the legend of our days?

  Week after week, I pored over these poems, and each new form of knowledge seemed to me a mode of reminiscence.

  THE PATHETIC FALLACY OF MARTYRDOM121

  I got up from my seat, and going over to the open window I looked out on the crowded promenade. I remember that the brightly-coloured umbrellas and gay parasols seemed to me like huge fantastic butterflies fluttering by the shore of a blue-metal sea,122 and that the heavy odour of violets that came across the garden made me think of that wonderful sonnet in which Shakespeare tells us that the scent of these flowers always reminded him of his friend.123 What did it all mean? Why had Erskine written me that extraordinary letter? Why when standing at the very gate of death had he turned back to tell me what was not true? Was Hugo right? Is affectation the only thing that accompanies a man up the steps of the scaffold?124 Did Erskine merely want to produce a dramatic effect? That was not like him. It was more like something I might have done myself. No: he was simply actuated by a desire
to reconvert me to Cyril Graham’s theory, and he thought that if I could be made to believe that he too had given his life for it, I would be deceived by the pathetic fallacy of martyrdom.125 Poor Erskine! I had grown wiser since I had seen him. Martyrdom was to me merely a tragic form of scepticism, an attempt to realise by fire what one had failed to do by faith. No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true. The very uselessness of Erskine’s letter made me doubly sorry for him. I watched the people strolling in and out of the cafes, and wondered if any of them had known him. The white dust blew down the scorched sunlit road, and the feathery palms moved restlessly in the shaken air.

  *   In the years immediately following publication in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Wilde expanded the story considerably, more than doubling its length, with the intention of publishing it in book form. The expanded version remained unpublished in Wilde’s lifetime, although in 1894 it was announced as “in preparation,” by Wilde’s publishers John Lane and Elkin Mathews—who subsequently balked at publishing it—under the title The Incomparable and Ingenious History of Mr. W. H. The manuscript disappeared at around the time of Wilde’s arrest in 1895 and was long thought to be lost. It was first published in New York by Mitchell Kennerley in 1921, shortly after the manuscript was discovered. See Ian Small, introduction to The Short Fiction Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), liv–lxxxiii.

  1   Inserted by Wilde just before the final paragraph of section 1 (p. 201 above).

  2   The image of the “tiny, ivory, cell of the brain,” where powerful subconscious memories and impulses lie dormant, features in several of Wilde’s works. In “The Critic as Artist,” for instance, Wilde writes, “In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who … have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.” Wilde had been interested in evolutionary science since his undergraduate days, and as the scholar Elisha Cohn observes, Wilde “returns often to the concept of biological determination because, like the problematic thrall of beautiful things, it validates his sense of the impossibility of action” (Cohn, “ ‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain,” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no.2 [2012]).

  3   Inserted by Wilde as the second paragraph of section 2 (p. 203 above).

  4   See p. 180 n.6, and pp. 187–189 above.

  5   Love’s Labour’s Lost, act 4, scene 3, 312–313.

  6   Wilde inserted this passage in section 2 immediately after the eight-line quotation from Sonnet 81 beginning “Your name from hence immortal life shall have” (p. 215 above).

  7   Thomas Nash, “To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities,” preface to Robert Greene, Menaphon (London, 1589), 6.

  8   Richard Burbage (c. 1567–1619), whom later Wilde will call “our first great tragic actor” (p. 308 below), was the star of Shakespeare’s theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He performed the title role in the first productions of many of Shakespeare’s plays.

  9   “A Lover’s Complaint,” lines 304–305. See also p. 214 n.54 above.

  10   Ibid, lines 307–308.

  11   Ibid, lines 183–185.

  12   Ibid, lines 194–196.

  13   Ibid, lines 254–255.

  14   Ibid, lines 216–217.

  15   Ibid, lines 124–126.

  16   Ibid, lines 127–128.

  17   Ibid, lines 132–133.

  18   Venus and Adonis, line 3; Sonnet 1, line 12; Sonnet 4, lines 5–6.

  19   Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 102.

  20   Inserted in section 2 immediately after the previous passage concerning the actor as the dramatist’s fellow-worker. In the expanded version, this passage concluded section 2.

  21   “A philosophical and religious system based on Platonic ideas and originating with Plotinus in the 3rd cent. A.D., which emphasizes the distinction between an eternal world accessible to thought and the changing physical world accessible to the senses, and combines this with a mystical belief in the possibility of union with a supreme being from which all reality is held to derive” (OED).

  22   Psalm 111:10; also Proverbs 9:10.

  23   This is Wilde’s synthesis of Plato’s Symposium, especially Phaedrus’s assertion that “the principle which ought to be the guide of men who would nobly live—that principle, I say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able to implant so well as love” (Symposium, tr. Benjamin Jowett, in The Portable Plato, ed. Scott Buchanan [New York: Viking, 1948], 130).

  24   According to Walter Pater, the early Renaissance embraced “that Hellenic ideal in which man is at unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world” (Pater, The Renaissance, 177). Ancient Greece or the “Hellenic ideal” represented to many Victorians “the means of rescuing England from the uniformity and stagnation of industrial modernity” as well as a “vehicle for channeling modern progressive thought into the Victorian civic elite,” writes Linda Dowling, although Wilde and Pater developed “out of this same Hellenism a homosexual counterdiscourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms: the ‘spiritual procreancy’ associated specifically with Plato’s Symposium and more generally with Ancient Greece itself” (Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994], xiii, 62, 64).

  25   Ficino’s important Latin translation of and commentary on Plato’s Symposium was published in 1484, not 1492.

  26   Le Sympose de Platon, ou de l’amour et de beauté, transl. Lous Le Roy (Paris, 1559).

  27   Sonnet 38.

  28   “Beauty … is the destiny or goddess of parturition who presides at birth” (Plato, Symposium, in Portable Plato, ed. Buchanan, 165).

  29   Shakespeare, Sonnet 116; Plato, Symposium, in Portable Plato, ed. Buchanan, 169.

  30   Edward Blount, Dedicatory Epistle to Hero and Leander, By Christopher Marloe (London, 1598); Francis Bacon, “Of Marriage and the Single Life,” in Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers (rev. 2002; Oxford: Oxford University Press), 353.

  31   Edward Dowden, introduction to The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, ed. Edward Dowden (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, and Co., 1881), 9.

  32   Benedetto Varchi, Storia Fiorentina (1565), translated and quoted in John Addington Symonds, “Appendix II: Michael Angelo’s Sonnets,” in The Renaissance in Italy, The Fine Arts (London: Smith Elder, 1877), 521. Much of the present paragraph is derived almost verbatim from Symonds, who was one of the most important Victorian apologists for homosexuality as well as one of England’s greatest experts on the Renaissance. Wilde corresponded with Symonds and knew his work well. He reviewed a number of Symonds’s books, and although no record has survived of Wilde’s reactions to Symonds’s important defenses of homosexuality, A Problem in Greek Ethics (privately printed, 1883) and A Problem in Modern Ethics (privately printed, 1891), Thomas Wright writes that it is “inconceivable” that Wilde was unfamiliar with them (Wright, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde [New York: Henry Holt, 2009], 204).

  33   Symonds, “Appendix II: Michael Angelo’s Sonnets,” 518.

  34   Michelangelo, “A Pena Prima,” translated and quoted in Symonds, “Appendix II: Michael Angelo’s Sonnets,” 524, although Symonds gives “within the lover,” not “in the lover.”