ABSTRACT
There was a coincidence last week in London. An exhibition of Whistler’s paintings was opened, and a book by Oscar Wilde was published; and all the critics are writing, and the gossips gossiping, very glibly, about the greatness of Whistler, and about the greatness of Oscar Wilde. Whistler during the ‘seventies and ’ eighties, and Oscar Wilde during the ‘eighties and early ’nineties, cut very prominent figures in London; and both were by the critics and the gossips regarded merely as clever farceurs. Both, apart from their prominence, were doing serious work; but neither was taken at all seriously. Neither was thanked. Whistler got a farthing damages; Oscar Wilde two years’ hard labour. None of the critics or gossips took exception to either verdict. Time has rolled on. Both men are dead. A subtly apocalyptic thing, for critics and gossips (especially in England), is the tomb; and praises are by envioushumanity sung the more easily when there is no chance that they will gratify the subjects of them. And so, very glibly, very blandly, we are all magnifying the two men whom we so lately belittled. M.Rodin was brought over to open the Whistler exhibition. Perhaps the nation will now commission him to do a statue of Oscar Wilde. Il ne manque que ça.1 Some of the critics, wishing to reconcile present enthusiasm with past indifference, or with past obloquy, have been suggesting that De Profundis is quite unlike any previous work of Oscar Wilde-a quite sudden and unrelated phenomenon. Oscar Wilde, according to them, was gloriously transformed by incarceration. Their theory comprises two fallacies. The first fallacy is that Oscar Wilde had been mainly remarkable for his wit. In point of fact, wit was the least important of his gifts. Primarily, he was a poet, with a life-long passion for beauty; and a philosopher, with a life-long passion for thought. His wit, and his humour (which was of an even finer quality than his wit), sprang from a very solid basis of seriousness, as all good wit or humour must. They were not essential to his genius; and, had they happened not to have been there at all, possibly his genius would, even while he himself was flourishing, have been recognised in England, where wisdom’s passport is dulness, and gaiety of manner damns. The right way of depreciating Oscar Wilde would have been to say that, beautiful and profound though his ideas were, he never was a real person in contact with realities. He created his poetry, created his philosophy: neither sprang from his own soul, or from his own experience. His ideas were for the sake of ideas, his emotions for the sake of emotions. This, I
take it, is just what Mr. Robert Ross means, when, in his admirable introduction to De Profundis he speaks of Oscar Wilde as a man of ‘highly intellectual and artificial nature.’ Herein, too, I find the key to an old mystery; why Oscar Wilde, so saliently original a man, was so much influenced by the work of other writers; and why he, than who none was more fertile in invention, did sometimes stoop to plagiarism. If an idea was beautiful or profound, he cared not what it was, nor whether it was his or another’s. In De Profundis was he, at length, expressing something that he really and truly felt? Is the book indeed a heartcry? It is pronounced so by the aforesaid critics. There we have the second fallacy.
