Part 9

Wilde had always been laughed at, and, even before the facts of his conduct were generally known, the laughter was coloured by dislike. A book that was written by a small, prehensile mind, gifted with a limber cleverness, enables us to see him through the eyes of the early nineties. This book, "The Green Carnation," is a limited but faithful caricature. Wilde was accused of having written it, but characteristically replied: "I invented that magnificent flower. But with the middle-class and mediocre book that usurps its strangely beautiful name, I have, I need hardly say, nothing whatsoever to do. The flower is a work of art. The book is not." Here, as in the matter of "Patience," he could not forgo the perversity of lending colour to other people's parodies of himself. "The Green Carnation" shows us Esme Amarinth and a youthful patrician who models himself upon him expounding the art of being self-consciously foolish, wearing green carnations, and teaching choir-boys to sing a catch about "rose-white youth" in the presence of the widow of a strong and silent British soldier. Lady Locke thinks that England has changed, and though fascinated by Amarinth's under-study, does not marry him, for fear her "soldier's son," a stout Jehu of the governess-cart, should learn from him a soul-destroying and effeminate love of carnations pickled in arsenic. This book is like a clever statue, brightly painted, of Britannia refusing the advances of the aesthete. The aesthete is made to look rather a fool; and so is Britannia. Such sections of the public as took pleasure in it thought Wilde a peculiarly arrogant coxcomb, a disconcerting and polished reply to the Victorian tradition of muscular manhood in which they had long been secure. They were ready to rejoice in his discomfiture, and their hostility to Wilde spread swiftly and gave a quality of triumph to the delight of all classes as soon as he was arrested.

An elaborate account of the various trials would in no way serve the purpose of this book. It is sufficient to say that on May 25, 1895, he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment with hard labour.

IX

DE PROFUNDIS

The book called _De Profundis_, first published in 1905, five years after Wilde's death, is not printed as it was written, but is composed of passages from a long letter whose complete publication would be impossible in this generation. The passages were selected and put together by Mr. Robert Ross with a skill that it is impossible sufficiently to admire. The letter, a manuscript of "eighty close-written pages on twenty folio sheets," was not addressed to Mr. Ross but to a man to whom Wilde felt that he owed some, at least, of the circumstances of his public disgrace. It was begun as a rebuke of this friend, whose actions, even subsequent to the trials, had been such as to cause Wilde considerable pain. It was not delivered to him, but given to Mr. Ross by Wilde, who also gave instructions as to its partial publication.

It is not often possible to detect the original intention of rebuke in the published portions of _De Profundis_. I suppose that as Wilde pointed out his friend's share in his disaster, and set down on paper what that disaster was, he came to examine its ulterior effect on his own mind, for those pages that are open to us contain such an examination. He is in prison, and is at pains to realize exactly what this means to him: where he is unchanged, where he has lost, and where and how he has gained. He would draw up a profit and loss account, of the loaves that are sustenance for the body and the flowers of the white narcissus that are food for the soul, and in this way give himself courage to face the world with the knowledge that he had kept his soul alive. He will discover where he stands with regard to Christianity, and where with regard to Flaubert. A critic and artist, he will realize himself among masterpieces, and discover what is altered in the personality for whose notation he has been accustomed to use his criticism of works of art. "To the artist, expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead."

Wilde's life in prison was lived on two planes. Only one of them is represented in _De Profundis_. In writing that letter he was able to pick up the frayed threads of his intellectual existence, to find that some were gold and some were crimson, and to learn that whatever else he might have lost he had not lost his lordship over words. The existence whose threads he thus collected was not that which was at the moment determining the further development of his character. It was an aftermath of that summer of the intellect that had given him _Intentions_. Instead of the debonair personality of an Ernest or a Gilbert, he painted now a no less ideal vision of himself in circumstances similar to those that now surrounded him.

Behind this imaginary and as it were dramatic life was another in which he shared the days and the day's business of his fellow convicts.

"We tore the tarry rope to shreds With blunt and bleeding nails; We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors And cleaned the shining rails: And rank by rank, we soaped the plank, And clattered with the pails."

There was the routine of the prison, the daily walk for one hour round a circular path, watched by warders, inside a wall that hid all but the sky and the topmost branches of a tree, upon whose bare twigs, buds, and green and ruddy leaves, the prisoners depended for news of the magnificent passage of the seasons. These daily walks, like all the work of the prison, took place in silence, broken only by the warders' words of command delivered in the raucous voice that tradition has dictated. As speech is the greatest of man's privileges, so its deprivation is the least bearable of his punishments. During the daily walks even those convicts who in other things are obedient to the prison discipline, learn to speak without a perceptible motion of the lips. For six weeks Wilde walked in silence, but one evening at the end of that time, he heard the man walking behind him say: "Oscar Wilde, I am sorry for you. It must be worse for you than for us." He nearly fainted, and replied: "No; it's the same for all of us." In this way he made the acquaintanceship of his fellows. One by one he talked with all of them, and these scraps of conversation, he told M. Andre Gide, made his life so far tolerable that he lost his first desire of killing himself. "The only humanizing influence in prison is the prisoners," he wrote after he came out. Except in the matter of permission to write (a permission not granted until near the end of his term, and then only on the recommendation of the doctor), the prison discipline was in no way relaxed for Wilde. He slept on a plank bed. He did not, like Wainewright, remain "a gentleman," and share a cell with a bricklayer and a sweep, neither of whom ever offered him the brush. He cleaned out his cell, polished his tin drinking cup, turned the crank, and picked the oakum like the rest.

Echoes of these things are heard in _De Profundis_, but if, as Wilde had, we have made ourselves

"Misers of sound and syllable, no less Than Midas of his coinage,"

it is not in what books say but in their style that we look for the secrets of their writers. And it is impossible not to notice that the character of Wilde's prose in this book is not very different from that in _Intentions_. He observed changes in himself, and foresaw others, but the real alteration of his point of view was not accomplished until he came out of prison. In gaol he was in retreat, like a man who has gone into a monastery. The world was still the world that he had left, and not until he was again free did he realize more vividly than by speculation how different his life was to be, and across what a gulf he would look back at the existence that had been broken off by his disaster. His artistic attitude had not yet been changed.

It is for this reason that the book raises so easily a question dear to those who prefer praising or blaming to understanding. Is it sincere? they ask. Is it possible that a man who felt such things sincerely could write of his feelings in such mellifluous prose? Is it sincere? they ask, with particular insistence, pointing to the character of Wilde's life after leaving prison as a proof that it was not. And if not, what then? Why then, they say, it is worthless.

"Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A sheep-hook, or have learnt aught else the least That to the faithful herdsman's art belongs! What recks it them? What need they? They are sped; And, when they list, their lean and flashy songs Grate on their scrannel-pipes of wretched straw."

They demand that the truth shall be told in a hoarse voice, that they may recognize it, and yet the ugly, conscientious noise of their scrannel-pipes is no nearer than _De Profundis_ to the sincerity they admire. Sincerity, in the sense that they give to that word, does not exist in art. "What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities." That sentence, from the mouth of one of the personalities that Wilde was able to assume, explains the obvious variety of his work. It throws also no dubious light upon the general nature of art. For in art no attitude is insincere whose result is beautiful, and no attitude is possible whose result may not be beautiful. All depends on the artist and on the depth and abandon of his insincerity. For art tolerates many contradictions, but a work of art tolerates none. The man who takes an attitude and is unable to sustain it, who smirks at the audience, who plays as it were the traitor to his own choice, can produce nothing but what is ugly, since, like him, it will contain a contradiction. But the man who chooses an attitude, and preserves it consistently in any work of art, is thereby fulfilling a condition of beauty. He may make a lovely thing, and then, taking another attitude, may contradict himself in a thing of no less loveliness. Repentance like that in _De Profundis_ is a guarantee of a moment of humility, but not of a life of reform. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet's soliloquy and also Juliet's murmuring from the balcony. Yet he was not always in love, nor always melancholy with inaction. We are accustomed to insincerity in play-writing, and do not expect each character, fool or wise, young or old, to represent its author. We allow, as, for an obvious example, in Restoration comedy, plays to be written from a standpoint that their authors could not possibly maintain in private life. In poetry also, we do not consider Browning insincere because he speaks now for Lippo Lippi, and now for Andrea del Sarto. In novels we allow Fielding to write "Jonathan Wild" as a satirist, and "Joseph Andrews" as a comic romancer, and we are not shocked when he relishes in imagination deeds that as a magistrate he would be bound to censure. I think we have to learn that all fine literature is dramatic. No man pours from his mouth in any single speech all the roses and the vomit that would represent his soul. Men speak and hold their peace. They make and their hands are still. And many moods flit by while they are silent, and myriad souls agitate the blood in the veins of those motionless hands. The artist is he who, remembering this mood or that, can hold it fast and maintain it long enough for the making of a work of art. We do not ask him to retain it further. The shaping of his mood in words or in clay has already changed his personality. The writer of a mad song need not gibber in the streets. Golden phrases lose none of their magnificence if he who made them wears plain homespun when we meet him in the marketplace. He has been a king for a moment, and given us his kingship for ever. We can ask no more.

Wilde, perhaps more than other men, insisted on the dramatic character of his work. In considering any of it we should remember those sentences in the last paragraph of 'The Truth of Masks':--"Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything." I am not sure that this confession does not spoil 'The Truth of Masks.' It is perilously like an aside; but Wilde was sufficiently subtle to have chosen a mood which such an aside would illustrate rather than contradict. In considering his work, we must remember, first, that all work is dramatic, true to an individual mood only; and, secondly, that Wilde, more clearly conscious of this than most artists, was better able to take advantage of it. He was freed from those qualms of conscience which made Swinburne glad to differentiate his earlier from his later work by saying:--"In my next work it should be superfluous to say that there is no touch of dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion." This sentence, that denies together what is universal and what does not exist (since you cannot imagine an emotion without feeling it) points to no blemish in Swinburne's work, but only to a discomfort of mind that some of it must have caused him. From this discomfort Wilde was free. He had many tuning-forks, and distrusted none of them because it happened to be pitched differently from another.

There is no doubt that, when _De Profundis_ was finished, Wilde regarded it as a document of historical value, as a veracious confession. This is clear from the tone in which he wrote of it to Mr. Ross:--"I don't defend my conduct. I explain it. Also there are in my letter certain passages which deal with my mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place; and I want you and others who still stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I hope to face the world." Those sentences certainly let us see the attitude that Wilde hoped to induce in his readers, but, if we would turn to Wilde himself, and, careless of the beauty of the work, pry past it to discover the private feelings of the author, we must take them not as a statement of the truth, but, seeking the truth, take that statement into account. That statement, the published _De Profundis_, those unpublished portions of the letter which, probably, will never be read in our lifetime, the whole of Wilde's works, the whole of his life, the character of that person to whom he was immediately writing, the character of those other friends by whom he desired to be read, the character which, without deliberate choice, he had himself grown accustomed to present to them: we must know all these things, and be able to weigh them exactly, and balance them justly against each other. Have I not said enough to show that it is a vain task to seek for the absolute truth in such a matter, and that we are better and more hopefully employed when we concern ourselves simply with a wonderful piece of literature dictated by certain conditions that we admit are impossible accurately to discover?

In pointing out that the details of Wilde's life in prison did not affect the manner of his thought, but only provided him with fresh material, I do not wish to suggest that prison was unimportant to him. It might have been. He might, in revolt against it, have made it no more than a hideous accident, stunting his nature by not refusing to allow it to assimilate the black bread that had been thrown to it as well as the sweetened cakes. If he had been earlier released, as he said, this might have happened. He was not released, and revolt was changed to acceptance, and, at last, he was able to say, as he had hoped, that society's sending him to prison ranked with his father's sending him to Oxford, as a turning point in his life. But that is a question for the next chapter, for imprisonment did not radically alter him until he was again in the world.

In prison, however, the anaesthetic of magnificent living was denied him, and he turned to magnificent thought, recovering the power that had been his before popular success had narrowed his horizon.

"Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it Into impossible things, unlikely ends; And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire Grow large as all the regions of thy soul."[6]

In 1894 he had known the possible, and achieved it in _The Importance of Being Earnest_. But in 1889 he had been trying far beyond it, and now again, in prison, he found his desires growing far beyond the possible, and covering the regions of his soul. He needed an idea that should make this bread-and-water existence one with that of wine and lilies, an idea that should make it possible for him to conceive his life as a whole, and, in the conception, make it so.

In _De Profundis_ he tries to make his friend realize what he has scarcely realized himself; the depth of his fall, the twilight in his cell, the twilight in his heart, the nature of suffering, the nature of the sorrow that does not allow itself to be forgotten. He writes passages so poignant as to blind us to their beauty, for sorrow is no less sorrow when it walks in purple than when in rags it lies in the dust. Then, after showing the ruins of his life, he paints a picture, no less poignant, of himself rebuilding that broken edifice with those things that he has hitherto rejected. He has learnt, he tells himself, the value of pain and the virtue of humility. He has once believed that pain was a blemish on creation, and that the sobbing of a child made the gods hide their faces for shame. He now believes that suffering is a means for the purification of the spirit, a fire through which vessels of clay must pass to their perfection. And, for humility, he discovers that there is no defiance so lofty as that of self-accusation. He has been told to forget who he is; life in prison almost compels him to rebellion; but he has learnt that only by remembering his identity, by shifting to his own shoulders the burden of his disaster, and by an absolute acceptance of all that has happened in and to him, will he be able to win the pride that humility confers and that rebellion makes impossible.

This purpose, to give his life the unity he demanded from a poem; these motives, of suffering and humility, run waveringly through _De Profundis_, carrying with them here and there fragments of mournful experience. Through them he came to contemplate Christ, not only as a type of humility and suffering, but also as an example of one whose life was a work of art. In such books as _De Profundis_, the continuous wandering speech of a mind following itself, some paragraphs seem to withdraw themselves a little, as the keynotes of the rest. Such paragraphs are, I think, those in which he wrote of Christ as the supreme artist, of Christ's influence on art, and of his philosophy as Wilde interpreted it. These paragraphs have seemed blasphemous to some and unreasonable to others. I cannot consider them more blasphemous than a Madonna and Child by Murillo, or a Christ and his Father by Milton, or more unreasonable than those persons who are unable to perceive that religion, no less than the Sabbath, was made for man, and not for the delectation of the Almighty.

Man makes God in his own image, or as he would like himself to be, and, as man's image changes, so is his God continually recast. Wilde's prose-poem of the artist and the bronze is the story of the making and remaking of religion. The Christ of the Roman slaves who escaped from their masters' rods to worship their God in cellars was indeed a Man of Sorrows, who found in misery and low estate the means of creating loveliness. As they hoped, he promised, and each labourer's penny was minted with the superscription he had himself designed. With the renaissance of joy came new Christs. One taught the Irish monks to build their wattled cells. Another, delighting in richness no less than in simplicity, designed the stone lacework of the French cathedrals. Later, the sombre, fiery Calvin saw a divinity of black and scarlet. Milton's God conceived humanity as an epic, whose conclusion must neither be hurried nor delayed. There have been Gods of war and Gods of peace, changing with man's desires. It is for that reason that we are warned to make no graven images, lest we should commit ourselves to a God of a single mood. It was quite natural that the Christ whom Wilde saw, as he sat on the wooden bench in his cell and turned the pages of his Greek Testament, should be a Christ who showed that in all the acts of his life there had been hope, a Christ who perceived "the enormous importance of living completely for the moment," swept aside the tyranny of orthodoxy, and "regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection."

Wilde expresses his conception with incomparable wit and charm. When he speaks of Christ's love of the sinner, he remarks that "the conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement." On Christ's view that "one should not bother too much over affairs," he comments, "the birds didn't, why should man?" And again: "The beggar goes to heaven because he has been unhappy. I cannot conceive a better reason for his being sent there. The people who work for an hour in the vineyard in the cool of the evening receive just as much reward as those who have toiled there all day long in the hot sun. Why shouldn't they? Probably no one deserved anything." And I cannot refrain from reminding myself by writing it down, of his beautiful comparison of the Greek Testament with the version that endless repetition without choice of occasion has made an empty noise in our ears: "When one returns to the Greek, it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some narrow and dark house." It pleased him to accept the not generally received view of some scholars, that Greek was the language actually spoken by Christ, and that [Greek: tetelestai][7] was indeed his last word and not a mere translation of a similar expression in a Nazarene dialect of Aramaic.

But Wilde's study of the gospels had left him more than a handful of phrases, and these chance flowers must not blind us to the garden of thought in which they grew. Among the subjects on which he planned to write was "Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life." This essay was never written, but Wilde had made it almost unnecessary by those suggestive paragraphs in the letter to his friend.