Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study. Arthur Ransome

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СКАЧАТЬ literature, we do not mean a choice. We only compare the vividness of a man's whole life, as we perceive it, with that of those portions of it that he spent in books. Sometimes we wonder which is more alive. In Wilde's case we compare a row of volumes, themselves remarkable, with a life that was the occupation of an agile and vivid personality for which a cloistered converse with itself was not enough, a personality that loved the lights and the bustle, the eyes and ears of the world, and the applause that does not have to wait for print.

      Wilde was a kind of Wainewright, to whom his own life was very important. He saw art as self-expression and life as self-development. He felt that his life was material on which to practise his powers of creation, and handled it and brooded over it like a sculptor planning to make a dancing figure out of a pellet of clay. Even after its catastrophe he was still able to speak of his life as of a work of art, as if he had seen it from outside. Indeed, to a surprising extent, he had been a spectator of his own tragedy. In building his life his strong sense of the picturesque was not without admirable material, and he was able to face the street with a decorative and entertaining façade, which, unlike those of the palaces in Genoa, was not contradicted by dullness within. He made men see him as something of a dandy among authors, an amateur of letters in contrast with the professional maker of books and plays. If he wrote books he did not allow people to presume upon the fact, but retained the status of a gentleman. At the Court of Queen Joan of Naples he would have been a rival to Boccaccio, himself an adventurer. At the Court of James he would have crossed "Characters" with Sir Thomas Overbury. In an earlier reign he would have corresponded in sonnets with Sir Philip Sidney, played with Euphuism, been very kind to Jonson at the presentation of a masque, and never set foot in The Mermaid. Later, Anthony Hamilton might have been his friend, or with the Earl of Rochester he might have walked up Long Acre to belabour the watch without dirtying the fine lace of his sleeves. In no age would he have been a writer of the study. He talked and wrote only to show that he could write. His writings are mostly vindications of the belief he had in them while still unwritten. It pleased him to pretend that his plays were written for wagers.

      After making imaginary backgrounds for him, let us give him his own. This man, who would perhaps have found a perfect setting for himself in the Italy of the Renaissance, was born in 1854. Leigh Hunt, De Quincey, and Macaulay were alive. Wordsworth had only been dead four years. Tennyson was writing "Maud" and "The Idylls of the King." Borrow was wandering in wild Wales and finishing "The Romany Rye." Browning was preparing "Men and Women" for the press. Dickens was the novelist of the day, and had half a dozen books yet to write. Thackeray was busy on "The Newcomes." Matthew Arnold was publishing his "Poems." FitzGerald was working underground in the mine from which he was to extract the roses of Omar. Ruskin had just published "Stones of Venice," was arranging to buy the work of a young man called Rossetti, helping with the Working Men's College, and writing a pamphlet on the Crystal Palace. William Morris, younger even than Rossetti, was an undergraduate at Oxford, rhyming nightly, and exclaiming that, if this was poetry, it was very easy.

      It is characteristic of great men that, born out of their time, they should come to represent it. Victor Hugo, in 1830, was a young man irreverently trying to overturn established tradition. He had to pack a theatre with his friends to save his play from being hissed. Now, looking back on that time, his enemies seem to have faded away, tired ghosts, and he to be alone upon the stage laying about him on backs of air. So far was the Elizabethan age from a true appreciation of Shakespeare that Webster could patronise him with praise of "his happy and copious industry." Shakespeare was a busy little dramatist, working away on the fringe of the great light cast by the effulgent majesty of Elizabeth. To-day Shakespeare divides with his queen the honour of naming the years they lived in. The nineties, the early nineties when Wilde's talent was in full fruition, seem now, at least in literature, to be coloured by the personality of Wilde and the movement foolishly called Decadent. But in the nineties, when Wilde was writing, he had a very few silent friends and a very great number of vociferous enemies. His books were laughed at, his poetry parodied, his person not kindly caricatured, and, even when his plays won popular applause, this hostility against him was only smothered, not choked. His disaster ungagged it, and few men have been sent to perdition with a louder cry of hounds behind them.

      There was relief as well as hostility in the cry. Wilde had meant a foreign ideal, and one not too easy to follow. If he were right, then his detractors were wrong, and there was joy in the voices of those who taunted, pointing to the Old Bailey, "that is where the artistic life leads a man." There was also shown a curious inability to distinguish between the destruction of a man's body and the extinction of his mind's produce. When Wilde was sent to prison the spokesmen of the nineties were pleased to shout, "We have heard the last of him." To make sure of that they should have used the fires of Savonarola as well as the cell of Raleigh. They should have burnt his books as well as shutting up the writer. That sentence, so frequently iterated, that "No more would be heard of him," showed a remarkable error in valuation of his powers.

      There was surprise in England when Salomé was played in Paris while its author was in prison. It seemed impossible that a man who had been sent to gaol for such offences as his could be an artist honoured out of his own country. Only after his death, upon the appearance of De Profundis, and translations of his writings into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian, did popular opinion recognize (if it has yet recognized) that the Old Bailey, the public disgrace and the imprisonment were only circumstances in Wilde's private tragedy that would have been terrible even without them, and that they were no guarantee of the worthlessness of what he wrote.

      So far were Wilde's name and influence from ending with his personal disaster that they are daily gathering weight. Whether his writings are perfectly successful or not, they altered in some degree the course of literature in his time, and are still an active power when the wind has long blown away the dust of newspaper criticism with which they were received. It is already clear that Wilde has an historical importance too easily underestimated. His indirect influence is incalculable, for his attitude in writing gave literature new standards of valuation, and men are writing under their influence who would indignantly deny that their work was in any way dictated by Wilde.

      A personality as vivid as his, exercised at once through books and in direct but perhaps less intimate social intercourse, cannot suddenly be wiped away like a picture on a slate. No man's life was crossed by Wilde's without experiencing a change. Men lived more vividly in his presence, and talked better than themselves. No common man lives and dies without altering, to some extent, the life about him and so the history of the world. How much wider is their influence who live their lives like flames, hurrying to death through their own enjoyment and expenditure alike of their bodies and their brains. "Pard-like spirits, beautiful and swift" are sufficiently rare and notable to be ensured against oblivion.

      His personality was stronger than his will. When, as he often did, he set himself to imitation, he could not prevent himself from leaving his mark upon the counterfeit. He stole freely, but often mounted other men's jewels so well that they are better in his work than in their own. It is impossible to dismiss even his early poetry as without significance. He left no form of literature exactly as he found it. He brought back to the English stage a spirit of comedy that had been for many years in mourning. He wrote a romantic play which necessitated a new manner of production, and may be considered the starting-point of the revolution in stage-management that, happily, is still proceeding. He showed both in practice and theory the possibilities of creation open to the critic. He found a new use for dialogue, and brought to England a new variety of the novel. His work continually upset accepted canons and received views. It placed, for example, the apparently settled question of sincerity in a new obscurity, and the distinction between decoration and realism in a new light. One of the tests of novelty and beauty is that they should be a little out at elbows in an old æsthetic. Wilde sets the subtlest problems before us, and I shall not be wasting time in posing them and showing that his work has at least this quality of what is beautiful and new, that it is impossible to apply to it definitions that were sufficient before it. It will be necessary in considering his writing, as I hope to do, to digress again and again from book, or play, or poem into the abstract regions of СКАЧАТЬ