Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

All his life, my father had an intense leaning towards religious mysticism and was strongly attracted to the Catholic Church, into which he was received on his death bed in 1900. His remains now lie in the French National Cemetery of Père Lachaise.

Vyvyan Holland

THE STORIES OF OSCAR WILDE (#ulink_405c1e86-ac43-5425-9e96-0f0b291b429e)

Introduction by OWEN DUDLEY EDWARDS (#ulink_ccb7602e-2b7d-5e88-8bf3-9c51eabd193b)

THE Lake District of England may not suggest Oscar Wilde (although, with pleasing irony, his is the literary name most obviously prompted by Lake Windermere) but it doesn’t really matter where I witnessed it. It could have been anywhere. The date was about 25 July 1993. The people were adults and children, mostly Roman Catholics, of the Dominican Peace Action Group. The weather was an incessant downpour. The speaker was Sue Dowell, an Anglican Rector’s wife, talking about literary failure to think of children from the child’s standpoint, and then, for an example of a storyteller who saw things from a child’s interest (in all senses) rather than an adult’s, she offered to read the little ones a story. The room was split with infant yells of ‘The Selfish Giant’. She read it well, and her audience was the most silent and attentive it ever proved itself in the entire week. At the close there was one united sigh of rapture. It was perfect ecumenicism, transcending cultures, ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders – and ages. To my generation and the next, Wilde is an old friend – but to those-children, some half-a-century my junior, he was evidently a (fairly) old friend, less by his own name than as the man who wrote ‘The Selfish Giant’. His sensational biography, dazzling theatre, fin-de-siècle, fireworks of epigram, were all irrelevant. His future in the next century is secure in the hands of these truest of all lovers of Art for Art’s sake. It neatly disposes of the superstition that his literary survival is a spin-off of scandal.

‘I’m glad they didn’t ask for ‘The Happy Prince’,’ said Ms Dowell afterwards. ‘It always makes me cry.’ It was ‘The Selfish Giant’ which made Wilde himself cry when he told it, recalled his son Vyvyan in Son of Oscar Wilde (1954). His recollection is most valuable. Wilde’s success arose primarily from thinking of stories as things to tell.

It is hardly surprising. His mother was an Irish folklorist, his father was an Irish topographer. He himself graduated in classical scholarship whose earliest texts were the oral narratives of a probably illiterate Homer. It gave him a much more immediate sense of audience than most writers. This is not to say that the stories were first told to his two sons, though simple versions of them may have been: Cyril was almost three when the five stories in The Happy Prince and Other Tales were published in May 1888, Vyvyan one and a half. But they were written with the intention of telling them to his sons. They are stories from an unselfconscious father who knows how to move the storyteller in and out of the narrative with mild self-mockery, as opposed to some assertive male chauvinist brute thundering his own dignity and morality for the edification of his wretched offspring. Wilde is on the child’s side: but he knows the child will only be truly happy if it hates cruelty, treachery and poverty, if it loves loyalty, laughter – and love. These are stories by someone in love with love. As Tolstoy would say, it is where God is.

His sons were a projected audience for the stories, but not an imaginary one. He was already singing them to sleep with lullabies in the Irish language. We have therefore to think of Wilde’s rebellion against Victorian materialism being partially grounded in the older cultures that materialism claimed to supersede. He could play games with the English language because he stood on its frontier; however limited his Irish he was profoundly aware of it. It is noteworthy that the two most successful adaptations of Wilde’s work into another language are Patrick Pearse’s into Irish: Iosagán and Eoghainín na nÉan from ‘The Selfish Giant’ and ‘The Happy Prince’. Pearse was borrowing from a source Puritan Ireland forbad his acknowledging, but he was also taking the spirit of the stories back to the tongue whence it came.

Wilde in London society or in Paris Bohemia might seem far from Irish roots, but his impact was still that of the story-teller even when the story might be compressed into a sentence. And however clothed in raiment acceptable to fashionable London, the stories in almost all cases travel back to a Celtic folk-world dominated by ghosts and God: the Man Predestined to be a Murderer, the Murderer whose only Salvation can come from the Selfsacrifice of an Innocent, the Salvation of Body by Damnation of Soul – strange but undeniable descriptions of ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, of ‘The Canterville Ghost’, and of The Picture of Dorian Gray. They sparkle with comedy and epigrams; they toy with philosophy and lightly flick off profound social comment; they martial incidental figures with the precision of point visible in the pencils of his reluctant disciple Beardsley and his rebellious disciple Beerbohm. But go to the hearts of the stories and they play with ideas as old as time and as deep as hell, and yet may hope from time to time for heaven.

The true folk story rejects any genre division between comedy and tragedy just as the miracle play fell on its knees in slapstick and remained on them in worship. Wilde knew – and was ultimately to prove (as one may see from Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait) – that there is no tragedy greater than that of the weeping clown. Hamlet, Othello, Lear and Macbeth are either conscious or unconscious clowns at various times, and are set in deliberately comic contexts here and there. ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ speaks of how ‘Our Guildensterns play Hamlet for us, and our Hamlets have to jest like Prince Hal. The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.’ But Wilde also acknowledged the philosopher in Falstaff and the buffoon in Hamlet. So his own Canterville Ghost might render his audience defenceless by paralysing it with farce, and then strike with pity; and his ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ promenades on the verge of horror before saving its reader in laughter; and Dorian Gray goes to his death as we are still smiling over grace-notes of satire such as ‘young Lord Poole, Bournemouth’s eldest son’.

The last line no doubt inspired Evelyn Waugh’s Lord Tangent, son of Lord Circumference, destined to die so comically, just as Wilde inaugurates the wit of so many other comparable figures in our century from ‘Saki’ to Joe Orton, but unlike most of them it is not a wit which takes any pleasure in suffering and it holds out – far more than does the formally Roman Catholic Waugh – continual if desperate hopes of salvation. In their different ways the four stories of A House of Pomegranates turn on those hopes, even if the young King can only find it by the recognition of suffering, and the Star-Child by himself suffering enough to cut short his life, while the Dwarf and the Fisherman can only be saved by death itself. The satire on predestination in ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ is subsequently asserted in explicit language in The Picture of Dorian Gray: Dorian Gray can save himself, enchantment or no, but fails because he will not separate repentance from hypocrisy while it is in his power to do so. Perhaps the most neglected biographical item in Oscar Wilde’s life is that he was the nephew of three clergymen.

The origin of the stories in the art of story-telling accounts for one of their most startling dichotomies – dialogue and description. The exotic catalogues of outré phenomena might seem almost the antithesis of the rippling, quicksilver dialogue: but we must remember the catalogues were conceived of as spoken, as are those in Homer. Persons with access to a film of Micheál Mac Liammóir’s The Importance of Being Oscar can appreciate it from his rolling French rendition of Herod’s jewel speech in Salome. If a story’s pace seems to slow down in the reading of narrative, read it aloud. The dialogue of the stories is story-teller craft in itself, by a story-teller with a great gift for varying voices: in Dorian Gray, among other things, one can see the great modern master of comedy bursting the constraints of prose in his anxiety to realise himself fully in the theatre.

But the underlying question on how far the story is the narrator, and the work of art its performer, reaches its most subtle expression in the enlarged Portrait of Mr W. H. over which Wilde laboured for five years only to have its full version vanish from sight at the time of his trial. Wilde has, idiotically, been called a snob; but when it comes to snobbery, everyone – or almost everyone – was out of step but our Oscar. Scholarship virtually united in crediting Shakespeare with an Earl as the recipient of his sonnets: scholars split one another’s hairs as to which Earl, but agreed that it must be some Earl. Wilde insisted that the obvious place to look was in the poet’s own profession, and the obvious context the performance of his plays. Having found the most likely solution he then charmingly played with the emotional pressures of conviction in a scholarly thesis. Conversion brings loss of the converter’s faith, much as in the old folk stories the granting of a wish bankrupts its recipient. And we are left asking whether Shakespeare must remain in perpetual dependence on the Mr W. H. who interprets him just as Wilde can only be kept alive by his readers. But Mr W. H. was a boy actor, and Wilde’s future is in no doubt when left in the hands of the children. The converse is equally true: unless we be as little children we shall never fully enter the kingdom of Oscar Wilde.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (#ulink_9b1cf267-a9dd-57f0-bee7-8611fa0234b6)

The Preface

THE artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

1

THE studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pinkflowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

‘It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,’ said Lord Henry, languidly. ‘You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place.’

‘I don’t think I shall send it anywhere,’ he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. ‘No: I won’t send it anywhere.’

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whirls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. ‘Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion.’

‘I know you will laugh at me,’ he replied, ‘but I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.’

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.