ABSTRACT
It may sound wilful to say of a man who, more perhaps than any other of his generation, attacked the bourgeoisie with great if rather fantastic courage that his chief defect as an artist was want of taste. And yet, considering his work as a whole, that seems to be the truth about Oscar Wilde. He cared very much about art and said many brave and challenging things for it. He was preoccupied always with it, and as an artist himself he tried honourably to deal with an experience of life which, although it was turgid and forlorn, was real enough. Mere reality of experience, however, is not enough. Before he can create largely the artist must not only have his personal vitality of experience, but he must love that experience passionately, however dark its mood may be. In reading most of Wilde’s poetry, all his plays but one, and his critical studies, one feels, while all the time admiring a very rare executive gift, that here is a man who, for the most part, instead of standing bravely by his experience was trying to escape from it. This is not at all to suggest that he was a man lacking in common courage; few men have met disaster of fortune and temperament with so gallant a bearing. It is in a way easy for the protagonist in one of the great tragic movements of nature to meet fate fearlessly. But there is little enough of exaltation for the man who is destroyed not by passion but a merely trivial wasting of his own character. But, while Wilde did not lack courage of thatkind, he was deficient in that other courage which makes the artist loyal to himself at whatever cost. If the artist cannot approach universal beauty surely through the channels of his own emotional life, he is certain to fall into cynicism or sentimentality or both, and this is what Wilde did in most of his work. He was sensitive enough to the profound normal beauty of life, free play of character, charity, understanding, and the mystery of sacrifice. But he saw it all afar off, pathetically, as something which he cared for devotedly, but could not himself quite be out of the resources of his own nature. And so passion is replaced by mere wistfulness, and the tragic realisation at which he aimed is continually sentimentalised. And at moments when the artist’s awareness of this defect in himself left him with nothing but a forlorn sense that the beauty of which he knew so well was never quite truly his own, cynicism became his inevitable refuge. It is fair to say that this with Wilde did not happen often. As in the conduct of his own unhappy life, so in his art he did strive with courage towards what he knew to be the better reason. But the final issue remains that his work taken as a whole
in its brilliance and pathos misses the profounder qualities of humour and passion, and it must be remembered that this was not by deliberate intention.
