Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated) (263 page)

“Then there was Pater, Pater the classic, Pater the scholar, who had already written the greatest English prose: I think a page or two of the greatest prose in all literature. Pater meant everything to me. He taught me the highest form of art: the austerity of beauty. I came to my full growth with Pater. He was a sort of silent, sympathetic elder brother. Fortunately for me he could not talk at all; but he was an admirable listener, and I talked to him by the hour. I learned the instrument of speech with him, for I could see by his face when I had said anything extraordinary. He did not praise me but quickened me astonishingly, forced me always to do better than my best — an intense vivifying influence, the influence of Greek art at its supremest.”

“He was the Gamaliel then?” I questioned, “at whose feet you sat?”

“Oh, no, Frank,” he chided, “everyone sat at my feet even then. But Pater was a very great man. Dear Pater! I remember once talking to him when we were seated together on a bench under some trees in Oxford. I had been watching the students bathing in the river: the beautiful white figures all grace and ease and virile strength. I had been pointing out how Christianity had flowered into romance, and how the crude Hebraic materialism and all the later formalities of an established creed had fallen away from the tree of life and left us the exquisite ideals of the new paganism....

“The pale Christ had been outlived: his renunciations and his sympathies were mere weaknesses: we were moving to a synthesis of art where the enchanting perfume of romance should be wedded to the severe beauty of classic form. I really talked as if inspired, and when I paused, Pater — the stiff, quiet, silent Pater — suddenly slipped from his seat and knelt down by me and kissed my hand. I cried:

“‘You must not, you really must not. What would people think if they saw you?’

“He got up with a white strained face.

“‘I had to,’ he muttered, glancing about him fearfully, ‘I had to — once....’”

I must warn my readers that this whole incident is ripened and set in a higher key of thought by the fact that Oscar told it more than ten years after it happened.

CHAPTER I
V

The most important event in Oscar’s early life happened while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford: his father, Sir William Wilde, died in 1876, leaving to his wife, Lady Wilde, nearly all he possessed, some £7,000, the interest of which was barely enough to keep her in genteel poverty. The sum is so small that one is constrained to believe the report that Sir William Wilde in his later years kept practically open house— “lashins of whisky and a good larder,” and was besides notorious for his gallantries. Oscar’s small portion, a little money and a small house with some land, came to him in the nick of time: he used the cash partly to pay some debts at Oxford, partly to defray the expenses of a trip to Greece. It was natural that Oscar Wilde, with his eager sponge-like receptivity, should receive the best academic education of his time, and should better that by travel. We all get something like the education we desire, and Oscar Wilde, it always seemed to me, was over-educated, had learned, that is, too much from books and not enough from life and had thought too little for himself; but my readers will be able to judge of this for themselves.

In 1877 he accompanied Professor Mahaffy on a long tour through Greece. The pleasure and profit Oscar got from the trip were so great that he failed to return to Oxford on the date fixed. The Dons fined him forty-five pounds for the breach of discipline; but they returned the money to him in the following year when he won First Honours in “Greats” and the Newdigate prize.

This visit to Greece when he was twenty-three confirmed the view of life which he had already formed and I have indicated sufficiently perhaps in that talk with Pater already recorded. But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, “One for whom the visible world alone exists,” endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of “the Confraternity of the faithless who
cannot
believe,”
to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.

Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story throned in the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared, to the worship of the beautiful.

Another dominant characteristic of the young man may here find its place.

While still at Oxford his tastes — the bent of his mind, and his temperament — were beginning to outline his future. He spent his vacations in Dublin and always called upon his old school friend Edward Sullivan in his rooms at Trinity. Sullivan relates that when they met Oscar used to be full of his occasional visits to London and could talk of nothing but the impression made upon him by plays and players. From youth on the theatre drew him irresistibly; he had not only all the vanity of the actor; but what might be called the born dramatist’s love for the varied life of the stage — its paintings, costumings, rhetoric — and above all the touch of emphasis natural to it which gives such opportunity for humorous exaggeration.

“I remember him telling me,” Sullivan writes, “about Irving’s ‘Macbeth,’ which made a great impression on him; he was fascinated by it. He feared, however, that the public might be similarly affected — a thing which, he declared, would destroy his enjoyment of an extraordinary performance.” He admired Miss Ellen Terry, too, extravagantly, as he admired Marion Terry, Mrs. Langtry, and Mary Anderson later.

The death of Sir William Wilde put an end to the family life in Dublin, and set the survivors free. Lady Wilde had lost her husband and her only daughter in Merrion Square: the house was full of sad memories to her, she was eager to leave it all and settle in London.

The
Requiescat
in Oscar’s first book of poems was written in memory of this sister who died in her teens, whom he likened to “a ray of sunshine dancing about the house.” He took his vocation seriously even in youth: he felt that he should sing his sorrow, give record of whatever happened to him in life. But he found no new word for his bereavement.

Willie Wilde came over to London and got employment as a journalist and was soon given almost a free hand by the editor of the society paper
The World
. With rare unselfishness, or, if you will, with Celtic clannishness, he did a good deal to make Oscar’s name known. Every clever thing that Oscar said or that could be attributed to him, Willie reported in
The World
. This puffing and Oscar’s own uncommon power as a talker; but chiefly perhaps a whispered reputation for strange sins, had thus early begun to form a sort of myth around him. He was already on the way to becoming a personage; there was a certain curiosity about him, a flutter of interest in whatever he did. He had published poems in the Trinity College magazine,
Kottabos
, and elsewhere. People were beginning to take him at his own valuation as a poet and a wit; and the more readily as that ambition did not clash in any way with their more material strivings.

The time had now come for Oscar to conquer London as he had conquered Oxford. He had finished the first class in the great World-School and was eager to try the next, where his mistakes would be his only tutors and his desires his taskmasters. His University successes flattered him with the belief that he would go from triumph to triumph and be the exception proving the rule that the victor in the academic lists seldom repeats his victories on the battlefield of life.

It is not sufficiently understood that the learning of Latin and Greek and the forming of expensive habits at others’ cost are a positive disability and handicap in the rough-and-tumble tussle of the great city, where greed and unscrupulous resolution rule, and where there are few prizes for feats of memory or taste in words. When the graduate wins in life he wins as a rule in spite of his so-called education and not because of it.

It is true that the majority of English ‘Varsity men give themselves an infinitely better education than that provided by the authorities. They devote themselves to athletic sports with whole-hearted enthusiasm. Fortunately for them it is impossible to develop the body without at the same time steeling the will. The would-be athlete has to live laborious days; he may not eat to his liking, nor drink to his thirst. He learns deep lessons almost unconsciously; to conquer his desires and make light of pain and discomfort. He needs no Aristotle to teach him the value of habits; he is soon forced to use them as defences against his pet weaknesses; above all he finds that self-denial has its reward in perfect health; that the thistle pain, too, has its flower. It is a truism that ‘Varsity athletes generally succeed in life, Spartan discipline proving itself incomparably superior to Greek accidence.

Oscar Wilde knew nothing of this discipline. He had never trained his body to endure or his will to steadfastness. He was the perfect flower of academic study and leisure. At Magdalen he had been taught luxurious living, the delight of gratifying expensive tastes; he had been brought up and enervated so to speak in Capua. His vanity had been full-fed with cloistered triumphs; he was at once pleasure-loving, vainly self-confident and weak; he had been encouraged for years to give way to his emotions and to pamper his sensations, and as the Cap-and-Bells of Folly to cherish a fantastic code of honour even in mortal combat, while despising the religion which might have given him some hold on the respect of his compatriots. What chance had this cultured honour-loving Sybarite in the deadly grapple of modern life where the first quality is will power, the only knowledge needed a knowledge of the value of money. I must not be understood here as in any degree disparaging Oscar. I can surely state that a flower is weaker than a weed without exalting the weed or depreciating the flower.

The first part of life’s voyage was over for Oscar Wilde; let us try to see him as he saw himself at this time and let us also determine his true relations to the world. Fortunately he has given us his own view of himself with some care.

In Foster’s
Alumni Oxonienses
, Oscar Wilde described himself on leaving Oxford as a “Professor of Æsthetics, and a Critic of Art” — an announcement to me at once infinitely ludicrous and pathetic. “Ludicrous” because it betrays such complete ignorance of life all given over to men industrious with muck-rakes: “Gadarene swine,” as Carlyle called them, “busily grubbing and grunting in search of pignuts.” “Pathetic” for it is boldly ingenuous as youth itself with a touch of youthful conceit and exaggeration. Another eager human soul on the threshold longing to find some suitable high work in the world, all unwitting of the fact that ideal strivings are everywhere despised and discouraged — jerry-built cottages for the million being the day’s demand and not oratories or palaces of art or temples for the spirit.

Not the time for a “professor of æsthetics,” one would say, and assuredly not the place. One wonders whether Zululand would not be more favourable for such a man than England. Germany, France, and Italy have many positions in universities, picture-galleries, museums, opera houses for lovers of the beautiful, and above all an educated respect for artists and writers just as they have places too for servants of Truth in chemical laboratories and polytechnics endowed by the State with excellent results even from the utilitarian point of view. But rich England has only a few dozen such places in all at command and these are usually allotted with a cynical contempt for merit; miserable anarchic England, soul-starved amid its creature comforts, proving now by way of example to helots that man cannot live by bread alone: — England and Oscar Wilde! the “Black Country” and “the professor of æsthetics” — a mad world, my masters!

It is necessary for us now to face this mournful truth that in the quarrel between these two the faults were not all on one side, mayhap England was even further removed from the ideal than the would-be professor of æsthetics, which fact may well give us pause and food for thought. Organic progress we have been told; indeed, might have seen if we had eyes, evolution so-called is from the simple to the complex; our rulers therefore should have provided for the ever-growing complexity of modern life and modern men. The good gardener will even make it his ambition to produce new species; our politicians, however, will not take the trouble to give even the new species that appear a chance of living; they are too busy, it appears, in keeping their jobs.

No new profession has been organized in England since the Middle Ages. In the meantime we have invented new arts, new sciences and new letters; when will these be organized and regimented in new and living professions, so that young ingenuous souls may find suitable fields for their powers and may not be forced willy-nilly to grub for pignuts when it would be more profitable for them and for us to use their nobler faculties? Not only are the poor poorer and more numerous in England than elsewhere; but there is less provision made for the “intellectuals” too, consequently the organism is suffering at both extremities. It is high time that both maladies were taken in hand, for by universal consent England is now about the worst organized of all modern States, the furthest from the ideal.

Something too should be done with the existing professions to make them worthy of honourable ambition. One of them, the Church, is a noble body without a soul; the soul, our nostrils tell us, died some time ago, while the medical profession has got a noble spirit with a wretched half-organized body. It says much for the inherent integrity and piety of human nature that our doctors persist in trying to cure diseases when it is clearly to their self-interest to keep their patients ailing — an anarchic world, this English one, and stupefied with self-praise. What will this professor of Æsthetics make of it?

Here he is, the flower of English University training, a winner of some of the chief academic prizes without any worthy means of earning a livelihood, save perchance by journalism. And journalism in England suffers from the prevailing anarchy. In France, Italy, and Germany journalism is a career in which an eloquent and cultured youth may honourably win his spurs. In many countries this way of earning one’s bread can still be turned into an art by the gifted and high-minded; but in England thanks in the main to the anonymity of the press cunningly contrived by the capitalist, the journalist or modern preacher is turned into a venal voice, a soulless Cheapjack paid to puff his master’s wares. Clearly our “Professor of Æsthetics and Critic of Art” is likely to have a doleful time of it in nineteenth century London.

Oscar had already dipped into his little patrimony, as we have seen, and he could not conceal from himself that he would soon have to live on what he could earn — a few pounds a week. But then he was a poet and had boundless confidence in his own ability. To the artist nature the present is everything; just for to-day he resolved that he would live as he had always lived; so he travelled first class to London and bought all the books and papers that could distract him on the way: “Give me the luxuries,” he used to say, “and anyone can have the necessaries.”

In the background of his mind there were serious misgivings. Long afterwards he told me that his father’s death and the smallness of his patrimony had been a heavy blow to him. He encouraged himself, however, at the moment by dwelling on his brother’s comparative success and waved aside fears and doubts as unworthy.

It is to his credit that at first he tried to cut down expenses and live laborious days. He took a couple of furnished rooms in Salisbury Street off the Strand, a very Grub Street for a man of fashion, and began to work at journalism while getting together a book of poems for publication. His journalism at first was anything but successful. It was his misfortune to appeal only to the best heads and good heads are not numerous anywhere. His appeal, too, was still academic and laboured. His brother Willie with his commoner sympathies appeared to be better equipped for this work. But Oscar had from the first a certain social success.