Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (133 page)

“What was in it?” I asked.

“Oh, that he believed absolutely in Willie Hughes; that the forgery of the picture had been done simply as a concession to me, and did not in the slightest degree invalidate the truth of the theory; and that in order to show me how firm and flawless his faith in the whole thing was, he was going to offer his life as a sacrifice to the secret of the Sonnets.  It was a foolish, mad letter.  I remember he ended by saying that he intrusted to me the Willie Hughes theory, and that it was for me to present it to the world, and to unlock the secret of Shakespeare’s heart.”

“It is a most tragic story,” I cried; “but why have you not carried out his wishes?”

Erskine shrugged his shoulders.  “Because it is a perfectly unsound theory from beginning to end,” he answered.

“My dear Erskine,” I said, getting up from my seat, “you are entirely wrong about the whole matter.  It is the only perfect key to Shakespeare’s Sonnets that has ever been made.  It is complete in every detail.  I believe in Willie Hughes.”

“Don’t say that,” said Erskine gravely; “I believe there is something fatal about the idea, and intellectually there its nothing to be said for it.  I have gone into the whole matter, and I assure you the theory is entirely fallacious.  It is plausible up to a certain point.  Then it stops.  For heaven’s sake, my dear boy, don’t take up the subject of Willie Hughes.  You will break your heart over it.”

“Erskine,” I answered, “it is your duty to give this theory to the world.  If you will not do it, I will.  By keeping it back you wrong the memory of Cyril Graham, the youngest and the most splendid of all the martyrs of literature.  I entreat you to do him justice.  He died for this thing, don’t let his death be in vain.”

Erskine looked at me in amazement.  “You are carried away by the sentiment of the whole story,” he said.  “You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.  I was devoted to Cyril Graham.  His death was a horrible blow to me.  I did not recover it for years.  I don’t think I have ever recovered it.  But Willie Hughes?  There is nothing in the idea of Willie Hughes.  No such person ever existed.  As for bringing the whole thing before the world – the world thinks that Cyril Graham shot himself by accident.  The only proof of his suicide was contained in the letter to me, and of this letter the public never heard anything.  To the present day Lord Crediton thinks that the whole thing was accidental.”

“Cyril Graham sacrificed his life to a great idea,” I answered “and if you will not tell of his martyrdom, tell at least of his faith.”

“His faith,” said Erskine, “was fixed in a thing that was false, in a thing that was unsound, in a thing that no Shakespearian scholar would accept for a moment.  The theory would be laughed at.  Don’t make a fool of yourself, and don’t follow a trail that leads nowhere.  You start by assuming the existence of the very person whose existence is the thing to be proved.  Besides, everybody knows that the Sonnets were addressed to Lord Pembroke.  The matter is settled once for all.”

“The matter is not settled!” I exclaimed.  “I will take up the theory where Cyril Graham left it, and I will prove to the world that he was right.”

“Silly boy!” said Erskine.  “Go home: it is after two, and don’t think about Willie Hughes any more.  I am sorry I told you anything about it, and very sorry indeed that I should have converted you to a thing in which I don’t believe.”

“You have given me the key to the greatest mystery of modern literature,” I answered; “and I shall not rest till I have made you recognise, till I have made everybody recognise, that Cyril Graham was the most subtle Shakespearian critic of our day.”

As I walked home through St James’s Park the dawn was just breaking over London.  The white swans were lying asleep on the polished lake, and the gaunt Palace looked purple against the pale-green sky.  I thought of Cyril Graham, and my eyes filled with tears.

II

It was past twelve o’clock when I awoke, and the sun was streaming in through the curtains of my room in long slanting beams of dusty gold.  I told my servant that I would be at home to no one; and after I had had a cup of chocolate and a
petit-pain
, I took down from the book-shelf my copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and began to go carefully through them.  Every poem seemed to me to corroborate Cyril Graham’s theory.  I felt as if I had my hand upon Shakespeare’s heart, and was counting each separate throb and pulse of passion.  I thought of the wonderful boy-actor, and saw his face sit every line.

Two sonnets, I remember, struck me particularly: they were the 53rd
 
and the
67th
.  In the first of these, Shakespeare, complimenting Willie Hughes on the versatility of his acting, on his wide range of parts, a range extending from Rosalind to Juliet, and from Beatrice to Ophelia, says to him –

What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you, but one, can every shadow lend

lines that would be unintelligible if they were not addressed to an actor, for the word ‘shadow’ had in Shakespeare’s day a technical meaning connected with the stage.  ‘The best in this kind are but shadows’, says Theseus of the actors in the
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, and there are many similar allusions in the literature of the day.  These sonnets evidently belonged to the series in which Shakespeare discusses the nature of the actor’s art, and of the strange and rare temperament that is essential to the perfect stage-player.  ‘How is it,’ says Shakespeare to Willie Hughes, ‘that you have so many personalities?’  and then he goes on to point out that his beauty is such that it seems to realise every form and phase of fancy, to embody each dream of the creative imagination – an idea that is still further expanded in the sonnet that immediately follows
, where, beginning with the fine thought,

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which
truth
doth give!

Shakespeare invites us to notice how the truth of acting, the truth of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry, giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal form.  And yet, in the 67th
Sonnet
, Shakespeare calls upon Willie Hughes to abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic life of painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble action and sincere utterance.

Ah! wherefore with infection should he live,
And with his presence grace impiety,
That sin by him advantage should achieve,
And lace itself with his society?
Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

It may seem strange that so great a dramatist as Shakespeare,  who realised his own perfection as an artist and his humanity as a man  on the ideal plane of stage-writing and stage-playing, should have written  in these terms about the theatre; but we must remember that in Sonnets CX
 
and CXI
 
Shakespeare shows us that he too was wearied  of the world of puppets, and full of shame at having made himself ‘a motley to the view’.  The 111th Sonnet
 
is especially bitter: –

O, for my sake do you with Fortune chide
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds,
That did not better for my life provide
Than public means which public manners breeds.
Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand:
Pity me, then, and wish I were renewed

and there are many signs elsewhere of the same feeling, signs familiar to all real students of Shakespeare.

One point puzzled me immensely as I read the Sonnets, and it was days before I struck on the true interpretation, which indeed Cyril Graham himself seems to have missed.  I could not understand how it was that Shakespeare set so high a value on his young friend marrying.  He himself had married young, and the result had been unhappiness, and it was not likely that he would have asked Willie Hughes to commit the same error.  The boy-player of Rosalind had nothing to gain from marriage, or from the passions of real life.  The early sonnets, with their strange entreaties to have children, seemed to me a jarring note.  The explanation of the mystery came on me quite suddenly, and I found it in the curious dedication.  It will be remembered that the dedication runs as follows:

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF
THESE INSUING SONNETS
MR. W. H. ALL HAPPINESSE
AND THAT ETERNITIE
PROMISED
BY
OUR EVER-LIVING POET
WISHETH
THE WELL-WISHING
ADVENTURER IN
SETTING
FORTH.
 
—— T. T.

Some scholars have supposed that the word ‘begetter’ in this dedication means simply the procurer of the Sonnets for Thomas Thorpe the publisher; but this view is now generally abandoned, and the highest authorities are quite agreed that it is to be taken in the sense of inspirer, the metaphor being drawn from the analogy of physical life.  Now I saw that the same metaphor was used by Shakespeare himself all through the poems, and this set me on the right track.  Finally I made my great discovery.  The marriage that Shakespeare proposes for Willie Hughes is the ‘marriage with his Muse’, an expression which is definitely put forward in the 82nd Sonnet
, where, in the bitterness of his heart at the defection of the boy-actor for whom he had written his greatest parts, and whose beauty had indeed suggested them, he opens his complaint by saying –

I’ll grant thou wert not married to my Muse.

The children he begs him to beget are no children of flesh and blood, but more immortal children of undying fame.  The whole cycle of the early sonnets is simply Shakespeare’s invitation to Willie Hughes to go upon the stage and become a player.  How barren and profitless a thing, he says, is this beauty of yours if it be not
used
:

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held:
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies.
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes.
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

You must create something in art: my verse ‘is thine, and
born
of thee; only listen to me, and I will
bring forth
eternal numbers to outlive long date’, and you shall people with forms of your own image the imaginary world of the stage.  These children that you beget he continues, will not wither away, as mortal children do, but you shall live in them and in my plays: do but
 

Make thee another self, for love of me.
That beauty still may live in thine or thee!

I collected all the passages that seemed to me to corroborate this view, and they produced a strong impression on me, and showed me how complete Cyril Graham’s theory really was.  I also saw that it was quite easy to separate those lines in which he speaks of the Sonnets themselves from those in which he speaks of his great dramatic work.  This was a point that had been entirely overlooked by all critics up to Cyril Graham’s day.  And yet it was one of the most important points in the whole series of poems.  To the Sonnets Shakespeare was more or less indifferent.  He did not wish to rest his fame on them.  They were to him his ‘slight Muse’, as he calls them, and intended, as Meres tells us, for private circulation only among a few, a very few, friends.  Upon the other hand he was extremely conscious of the high artistic value of his plays and shows a noble self-reliance upon his dramatic genius.  When he says to Willie
Hughes
:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in
eternal lines
to time thou growest;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee;

the expression ‘eternal lines’ clearly alludes to one of his plays that he was sending him at the time, just as the concluding couplet points to his confidence in the probability of his plays being always acted.  In his address to the Dramatic Muse (Sonnets C
 
and
CI
), we find the same feeling.

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spends thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?

he cries, and he then proceeds to reproach the mistress of Tragedy and Comedy for her ‘neglect of Truth in Beauty dyed’, and says –

Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so; for ‘t lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb,
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
 
— Then do thy office, Muse; teach thee how
 
— To make him seem long hence as he shows now.

It is, however, perhaps in the 55th Sonnet
 
that Shakespeare gives to this idea its fullest expression.  To imagine that the ‘powerful rhyme’ of the second line refers to the sonnet itself, is to entirely mistake Shakespeare’s meaning.  It seemed to me that it was extremely likely, from the general character of the sonnet, that a particular play was meant, and that the play was none other but
Romeo and Juliet
.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
That unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.
When wasteful wars shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Not Mars his sword nor wars quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
 
— So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
 
— You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.

It was also extremely suggestive to note how here as elsewhere Shakespeare promised Willie Hughes immortality in a form that appealed to men’s eyes – that is to say, in a spectacular form, in a play that is to be looked at.

For two weeks I worked hard at the Sonnets, hardly ever going out, and refusing all invitations.  Every day I seemed to be discovering something new, and Willie Hughes became to me a kind of spiritual presence, an ever-dominant personality.  I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep-sunken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands.  His very name fascinated me.  Willie Hughes!  Willie Hughes!  How musically it sounded!  Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare’s passion
¹
, the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage
²
, the delicate minion of pleasure
³
, the rose of the whole world
⁴
, the herald of the spring
⁵
decked in the proud livery of youth
⁶
, the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear
⁷
, and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare’s heart
⁸
as it was the keystone of his dramatic power?  How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his desertion and his shame! – shame that he made sweet and lovely
⁹
by the mere magic of his personality, but that was none the less shame.  Yet as Shakespeare forgave him, should not we forgive him also?  I did not care to pry into the mystery of his sin.

¹
Sonnet XX, 2.
²
Sonnet XXVI, 1.
³
Sonnet CXXVI, 9.
⁴
Sonnet CIX, 14.
⁵
Sonnet I, 10.
⁶
Sonnet II, 3.
⁷
Sonnet VIII, 1.
⁸
Sonnet XXII, 6.
⁹
Sonnet XCV, 1

His abandonment of Shakespeare’s theatre was a different matter, and I investigated it at great length.  Finally I came to the conclusion that Cyril Graham had been wrong in regarding the rival dramatist of the 80th Sonnet
 
as Chapman.  It was obviously Marlowe who was alluded to.  At the time the Sonnets were written, such an expression as ‘the proud full sail of his great verse’ could not have been used of Chapman’s work, however applicable it might have been to the style of his later Jacobean plays.  No: Marlowe was clearly the rival dramatist of whom Shakespeare spoke in such laudatory terms; and that — Affable familiar ghost
Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,

was the Mephistopheles of his
Doctor Faustus
.  No doubt, Marlowe was fascinated by the beauty and grace of the boy-actor, and lured him away from the Blackfriars Theatre, that he might play the Gaveston of his
Edward II
.  That Shakespeare had the legal right to retain Willie Hughes in his own company is evident from Sonnet LXXXVII where he says: –

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The
charter of thy worth
gives thee releasing;
My
bonds
in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving
.
Thyself thou gavest, thy own work then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes note again, on better judgment making.
 
— This have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
 
— In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.