Oscar’s Growth to Originality About
The period of growth of any organism is the most interesting and most instructive. And there is no moment of growth in the individual life which can be compared in importance with the moment when a man begins to outtop his age, and to suggest the future evolution of humanity by his own genius. Usually this final stage is passed in solitude:
Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille,
Sich ein Charakter in dem Strome der Welt.
After writing a life of Schiller which almost anyone might have written, Carlyle retired for some years to Craigenputtoch, and then brought forth Sartor Resartus, which was personal and soul-revealing to the verge of eccentricity. In the same way Wagner was a mere continuator of Weber in Lohengrin and Tannhaeuser, and first came to his own in the Meistersinger and Tristan, after years of meditation in Switzerland.
This period for Oscar Wilde began with his marriage; the freedom from sordid anxieties allowed him to lift up his head and be himself. Kepler, I think, it is who praises poverty as the foster-mother of genius; but Bernard Palissy was nearer the truth when he said:— Pauvreté empêche bons esprits de parvenir (poverty hinders fine minds from succeeding). There is no such mortal enemy of genius as poverty except riches: a touch of the spur from time to time does good; but a constant rowelling disables. As editor of The Woman’s World Oscar had some money of his own to spend. Though his salary was only some six pounds a week, it made him independent, and his editorial work gave him an excuse for not exhausting himself by writing. For some years after marriage; in fact, till he lost his editorship, he wrote little and talked a great deal.
During this period we were often together. He lunched with me once or twice a week and I began to know his method of work. Everything came to him in the excitement of talk, epigrams, paradoxes and stories; and when people of great position or title were about him he generally managed to surpass himself: all social distinctions appealed to him intensely. I chaffed him about this one day and he admitted the snobbishness gaily.
“I love even historic names, Frank, as Shakespeare did. Surely everyone prefers Norfolk, Hamilton and Buckingham to Jones or Smith or Robinson.”
As soon as he lost his editorship he took to writing for the reviews; his articles were merely the résumé of his monologues. After talking for months at this and that lunch and dinner he had amassed a store of epigrams and humorous paradoxes which he could embody in a paper for The Fortnightly Review or The Nineteenth Century.
These papers made it manifest that Wilde had at length, as Heine phrased it, reached the topmost height of the culture of his time and was now able to say new and interesting things. His Lehrjahre or student-time may be said to have ended with his editorship. The articles which he wrote on “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “Pen, Pencil and Poison”; in fact, all the papers which in 1891 were gathered together and published in book form under the title of “Intentions,” had about them the stamp of originality. They achieved a noteworthy success with the best minds, and laid the foundation of his fame. Every paper contained, here and there, a happy phrase, or epigram, or flirt of humour, which made it memorable to the lover of letters.
They were all, however, conceived and written from the standpoint of the artist, and the artist alone, who never takes account of ethics, but uses right and wrong indifferently as colours of his palette. “The Decay of Lying” seemed to the ordinary, matter-of-fact Englishman a cynical plea in defence of mendacity. To the majority of readers, “Pen, Pencil and Poison” was hardly more than a shameful attempt to condone cold-blooded murder. The very articles which grounded his fame as a writer, helped to injure his standing and repute.
In 1889 he published a paper which did him even more damage by appearing to justify the peculiar rumours about his private life. He held the opinion, which was universal at that time, that Shakespeare had been abnormally vicious. He believed with the majority of critics that Lord William Herbert was addressed in the first series of Sonnets; but his fine sensibility or, if you will, his peculiar temperament, led him to question whether Thorpe’s dedication to “Mr. W.H.” could have been addressed to Lord William Herbert. He preferred the old hypothesis that the dedication was addressed to a young actor named Mr. William Hughes, a supposition which is supported by a well-known sonnet. He set forth this idea with much circumstance and considerable ingenuity in an article which he sent to me for publication in The Fortnightly Review. The theme was scabrous; but his treatment of it was scrupulously reserved and adroit and I saw no offence in the paper, and to tell the truth, no great ability in his handling of the subject.8
He had talked over the article with me while he was writing it, and I told him that I thought the whole theory completely mistaken. Shakespeare was as sensual as one could well be; but there was no evidence of abnormal vice; indeed, all the evidence seemed to me to be against this universal belief. The assumption that the dedication was addressed to Lord William Herbert I had found it difficult to accept, at first; the wording of it is not only ambiguous but familiar. If I assumed that “Mr. W.H.” was meant for Lord William Herbert, it was only because that seemed the easiest way out of the maze. In fine, I pointed out to Oscar that his theory had very little that was new in it, and more that was untrue, and advised him not to publish the paper. My conviction that Shakespeare was not abnormally vicious, and that the first series of Sonnets proved snobbishness and toadying and not corrupt passion, seemed to Oscar the very madness of partisanship.
He smiled away my arguments, and sent his paper to the Fortnightly office when I happened to be abroad. Much to my chagrin, my assistant rejected it rudely, whereupon Oscar sent it to Blackwoods, who published it in their magazine. It set everyone talking and arguing. To judge by the discussion it created, the wind of hatred and of praise it caused, one would have thought that the paper was a masterpiece, though in truth it was nothing out of the common. Had it been written by anybody else it would have passed unnoticed. But already Oscar Wilde had a prodigious notoriety, and all his sayings and doings were eagerly canvassed from one end of society to the other.
“The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” did Oscar incalculable injury. It gave his enemies for the first time the very weapon they wanted, and they used it unscrupulously and untiringly with the fierce delight of hatred. Oscar seemed to revel in the storm of conflicting opinions which the paper called forth. He understood better than most men that notoriety is often the forerunner of fame and is always commercially more valuable. He rubbed his hands with delight as the discussion grew bitter, and enjoyed even the sneering of the envious. A wind that blows out a little fire, he knew, plays bellows to a big one. So long as people talked about him, he didn’t much care what they said, and they certainly talked interminably about everything he wrote.
The inordinate popular success increased his self-confidence, and with time his assurance took on a touch of defiance. The first startling sign of this gradual change was the publication in Lippincott’s Magazine of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” It was attacked immediately in The Daily Chronicle, a liberal paper usually distinguished for a certain leaning in favour of artists and men of letters, as a “tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents — a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.”
Oscar as a matter of course replied and the tone of his reply is characteristic of his growth in self-assurance: he no longer dreads the imputation of viciousness; he challenges it: “It is poisonous, if you like; but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.”
When Oscar republished “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in book form in April, 1891, he sent me a large paper copy and with the copy he wrote a little note, asking me to tell him what I thought of the book. I got the volume and note early one morning and read the book until noon. I then sent him a note by hand: “Other men,” I wrote, “have given us wine; some claret, some burgundy, some Moselle; you are the first to give us pure champagne. Much of this book is wittier even than Congreve and on an equal intellectual level: at length, it seems to me, you have justified yourself.”
Half an hour later I was told that Oscar Wilde had called. I went down immediately to see him. He was bubbling over with content.
“How charming of you, Frank,” he cried, “to have written me such a divine letter.”
“I have only read a hundred pages of the book,” I said; “but they are delightful: no one now can deny you a place among the wittiest and most humorous writers in English.”
“How wonderful of you, Frank; what do you like so much?”
Like all artists, he loved praise and I was enthusiastic, happy to have the opportunity of making up for some earlier doubting that now seemed unworthy:
“Whatever the envious may say, you’re with Burke and Sheridan, among the very ablest Irishmen. . . .
“Of course I have heard most of the epigrams from you before, but you have put them even better in this book.”
“Do you think so, really?” he asked, smiling with pleasure.
It is worth notice that some of the epigrams in “Dorian Gray” were bettered again before they appeared in his first play. For example, in “Dorian Gray” Lord Henry Wotton, who is peculiarly Oscar’s mouthpiece, while telling how he had to bargain for a piece of old brocade in Wardour Street, adds, “nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” In “Lady Windermere’s Fan” the same epigram is perfected, “The cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
Nearly all the literary productions of our time suffer from haste: one must produce a good deal, especially while one’s reputation is in the making, in order to live by one’s pen. Yet great works take time to form, and fine creations are often disfigured by the stains of hurried parturition. Oscar Wilde contrived to minimise this disability by talking his works before writing them.
The conversation of Lord Henry Wotton with his uncle, and again at lunch when he wishes to fascinate Dorian Gray, is an excellent reproduction of Oscar’s ordinary talk. The uncle wonders why Lord Dartmoor wants to marry an American and grumbles about her people: “Has she got any?”
Lord Henry shook his head. “American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past,” he said, rising to go.
“They are pork-packers, I suppose?”
“I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor’s sake. I am told that pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after politics.”
All this seems to me delightful humour.
The latter part of the book, however, tails off into insignificance. The first hundred pages held the result of months and months of Oscar’s talk, the latter half was written offhand to complete the story. “Dorian Gray” was the first piece of work which proved that Oscar Wilde had at length found his true vein.
A little study of it discovers both his strength and his weakness as a writer. The initial idea of the book is excellent, finer because deeper than the commonplace idea that is the foundation of Balzac’s “Peau de Chagrin,” though it would probably never have been written if Balzac had not written his book first; but Balzac’s sincerity and earnestness grapple with the theme and wring a blessing out of it, whereas the subtler idea in Oscar’s hands dwindles gradually away till one wonders if the book would not have been more effective as a short story. Oscar did not know life well enough or care enough for character to write a profound psychological study: he was at his best in a short story or play.
One day about this time Oscar first showed me the aphorisms he had written as an introduction to “Dorian Gray.” Several of them I thought excellent; but I found that Oscar had often repeated himself. I cut these repetitions out and tried to show him how much better the dozen best were than eighteen of which six were inferior. I added that I should like to publish the best in “The Fortnightly.” He thanked me and said it was very kind of me.
Next morning I got a letter from him telling me that he had read over my corrections and thought that the aphorisms I had rejected were the best, but he hoped I’d publish them as he had written them.
Naturally I replied that the final judgment must rest with him and I published them at once.
The delight I felt in his undoubted genius and success was not shared by others. Friends took occasion to tell me that I should not go about with Oscar Wil............