Part 12

Wilde provides us with the rare spectacle of a man most of whose powers are those of a spectator, a connoisseur, a man for whom pictures are painted and books written, the perfect collaborator for whom the artist hopes in his heart; the spectacle of such a man, delighting in the delicacies of life no less than in those of art, and yet able to turn the pleasures of the dilettante and the amateur into the motives of the artist. In some ages, when talk has been more highly valued than in ours, he would have been ready to let his criticism die in the air: he would have been content that all who knew him should credit him with the power of doing wonderful things if he chose, and with the preference of touching with the tips of his fingers the baked and painted figurine over the modelling of it in cold and sticky clay. Such credit is not to be had in our time, and he had to take the clay in his fingers and prove his mastery. Besides, he had not the money that would have let him live at ease among blue china, books wonderfully bound, and men and women as strange as the moods it would have pleased him to induce. If he had been rich, I think it possible that he would have been a des Esseintes or a Dorian Gray, and left nothing but a legend and a poem or two, and a few curiosities of luxury to find their way into the sale-rooms.

Wilde preserved, even in those of his writings that cost him most dearly, a feeling of recreation. His books are those of a wonderfully gifted and accomplished man who is an author only in his moments of leisure. Only one comparison is possible, and that is with Horace Walpole; but Wilde's was infinitely the richer intellect. Walpole is weighted by his distinction. Wilde wears his like a flower. Walpole is without breadth, or depth, and equals only as a gossip Wilde's enchanting freedom as a juggler with ideas. Wilde was indolent and knew it. Indolence was, perhaps, the only sin that stared him in the face as he lay dying, for it was the only one that he had committed with a bad conscience. It had lessened his achievement, and left its marks on what he had done. Even in his best work he is sometimes ready to secure an effect too easily. "Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning," may be regarded as an example of such effects. Much of his work fails; much of it has faded, but _Intentions_, _The Sphinx_, _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, _Salome_, _The Importance of Being Earnest_, one or two of the fairy tales, and _De Profundis_, are surely enough with which to challenge the attention of posterity.

These things were the toys of a critical spirit, of a critic as artist, of a critic who took up first one and then another form of art, and played with it almost idly, one and then another form of thought, and gave it wings for the pleasure of seeing it in the light; of a man of action with the eyes of a child; of a man of contemplation curious of all the secrets of life, not only of those that serve an end; of a virtuoso with a distaste for the obvious and a delight in disguising subtlety behind a mask of the very obvious that he disliked. His love for the delicate and the rare brought him into the power of things that are vulgar and coarse. His attempt to weave his life as a tapestry clothed him in a soiled and unbeautiful reality. Even this he was able to subdue. Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He touched nothing that he did not decorate. He touched nothing that he did not turn into a decoration.

I do not care to prophesy which in particular of these decorations, of these friezes and tapestries of vision and thought, will enjoy that prolongation of life, insignificant in the eternal progress of time, which, for us, seems immortality. Art is, perhaps, our only method of putting off death's victory, but what does it matter to us if the books that feed the intellectual life of our generation are stones to the next and manna to the generation after that? Of this, at least, we may be sure: whether remembered or no, the works that move us now will have an echo that cannot be denied them, unheard but still disturbing, or, perhaps, carefully listened for and picked out, among the myriad roaring of posterity along the furthest and least imaginable corridors of time.

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

_Uniform with this Volume._

EDGAR ALLAN POE

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

ARTHUR RANSOME

"This very interesting study."

TIMES.

"This book describes Poe's sad and extremely lonely life, with all its pride and morbidness, and it also gives a subtle and clear analysis of his brilliant gifts."

STANDARD.

"Mr. Arthur Ransome has given us a workmanlike and readable book."

CHRONICLE.

"The study is thorough and conscientious, and as entertaining as a whole as it is in parts provocative."

SATURDAY REVIEW.

"Always interesting, often ingenious, sometimes brilliantly written."

NATION.

"Prefaced with a biographical account which is quite one of the best sketches of Poe's oddly vagabond life that we have in English."

PALL MALL GAZETTE.

"It is possible that the grace and charm of Mr. Ransome's style may deceive some as to the serious import of his work; but it seems clear to us that in his critical study of Poe, Mr. Ransome has made a potent but mysterious person much more truthfully visible than before; and, in the larger matters, has shown himself one of the present time's most vital and original writers on philosophic criticism, one in whom the right instincts are mated with an enthusiastic and careful precision of analysis."

LIVERPOOL COURIER.

_Uniform with this Volume._

THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK

A CRITICAL STUDY

BY

A. MARTIN FREEMAN

"Mr. Freeman's study will be eagerly welcomed. He deals with all Peacock's known writings, giving analysis of each; and he writes with a freshness, a searching clearness and thoroughness delightful in these days of so much slovenly, slipshod criticism. He sends one to Peacock, and thereby does the best service a critic of Peacock can do."

EVENING STANDARD.

"It is distinguished and critical, and captures the atmosphere of Peacock."

OBSERVER.

"We recommend it to Peacockians, and also to those who would become such; it reveals him better than any anthology could.... The book contains biography and criticism in a manner quite sufficient to equip the casual reader with a knowledge of the man and his books."

WORLD.

"Mr. Freeman's monograph recounts all that is known about the circumstances of Peacock's career, and it contains also a good deal of acute criticism of his writings. It gives us many clues to interpretation, and helps us to understand the whimsical characteristics of a man who had a magic pen, and who was nothing if not original."

STANDARD.