Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study. Arthur Ransome

ignorance of a subject by demanding that we shall define it in a few words. "Say what you think of him in a sentence." If I could do that, do you think I should be going to the labour of writing a book? One cannot define in a sentence a man whom it has taken God several millions of years to make. In a dozen chapters it is no less impossible. The utmost one can do, and that only with due humility, is to make an essay in definition.

      Footnote

       Table of Contents

      [1] He died in 1852. Wilde wrote in 1888.

II

       Table of Contents

      BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY

      "The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records; but Lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told; and when it might be told, it is no longer known. The delicate features of the mind, the nice discriminations of character, and the minute peculiarities of conduct, are soon obliterated; and it is surely better that caprice, obstinacy, frolick, and folly, however they might delight in the description, should be silently forgotten, than that, by wanton merriment and unseasonable detection, a pang should be given to a widow, a daughter, a brother, or a friend. As the process of these narratives is now bringing me among my contemporaries, I begin to feel myself walking upon ashes under which the fire is not extinguished, and coming to the time of which it will be proper rather to say nothing that is false, than all that is true" (Samuel Johnson, in his "Life of Addison").

      Before proceeding to the main business of the book, an examination of Wilde's work, I wish to set before myself and my readers a summary biography which may hereafter be useful for our reference. Much of the life of Wilde is so bound up with his work as to be incapable of separate treatment; but, on the other hand, dates clog a page, and facts do not always enjoy their just value when dovetailed into criticism. In this chapter I shall set down the facts of Wilde's parentage and education, up to the time when it becomes possible and advisable to speak of his life and his work together. Thenceforward, I shall do little more than note the dates of events and publications (reserving to myself the right of repeating them when I find it convenient), and make, as it were, a skeleton that shall gather flesh from the ensuing pages of the book.

      Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, at 21, Westland Row, Dublin. His father was William Wilde, knighted in 1864, a celebrated oculist and aurist, a man of great intellectual activity and uncertain temper, a runner after girls, with a lusty enjoyment of life, and a delight in falling stars and thunderstorms. His mother, whose maiden name was Elgee, was a clever woman, who, when very young, writing as "Speranza" in a revolutionary paper, had tried to rouse Irishmen to the storming of Dublin Castle. She read Latin and Greek, but was ready to suffer fools for the sake of social adulation. She was clever enough to enjoy astonishing the bourgeois, but her cleverness seldom carried her further. When Wilde was born, she was twenty-eight and her husband thirty-nine. They were people of consideration in Dublin. His schoolfellows did not have to ask Wilde who his father was. It is said, that before Wilde's birth, his mother had hoped for a girl. He was a second son. His elder brother, William, became a journalist in London, and died in 1899. He had a sister, Isola, younger than himself, who died in childhood. Her death suggested the poem 'Requiescat.' To him, as to De Quincey, a sister brought the idea of mortality. There are exceptions to that fine rule of Hazlitt's brother: "No young man believes he shall ever die." De Quincey looking across his sister's death-bed through an open window on a summer day, and Wilde, thinking of

      "All her bright golden hair

      Tarnished with rust,

      She that was young and fair

      Fallen to dust,"

felt the fingers of death before their time. Like most of Wilde's early melodies, his lament is sung to a borrowed lyre, but the thing is so sweet that it seems ungracious to remember its indebtedness to Hood.[2]

      Both Sir William and Lady Wilde busied themselves in collecting folk-lore. Wilde in boyhood travelled with his father to visit ruins and gather superstitions. His childhood must have had a plentiful mythology. Wilde and his brother were not excluded from the extravagant conversations of their mother's salon. Any precocity they showed was encouraged, if only by that curious atmosphere of agile cleverness. There are no valuable anecdotes of his childhood, but it is said that his mother always thought that Oscar was less brilliant than her elder son.

      When he was eleven he was sent to the Portora Royal School at Enniskillen, where he behaved well, did not particularly distinguish himself, did not play games, read a great deal, and was very bad at mathematics. In the holidays he travelled with his mother in France. Leaving Portora in 1873, he went with a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin, where, in 1874, he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. In the same year he left Dublin for Oxford, matriculating at Magdalen and taking a scholarship. In 1876 he took a First Class in Classical Moderations, always a sufficient proof of sound learning, and, in 1878, he took a First Class in Literae Humaniores. In 1877 he travelled in Italy and went to Greece with Professor Mahaffy. This experience had great influence on his attitude towards art, filled the classical dictionary with life, and made the figures of mythology so luminous that he was tempted to overwork them. In 1878 he read the Newdigate Prize Poem in the Sheldonian Theatre.

      On leaving Oxford he brought to London a small income, a determination to conquer the town, and a reputation as a talker. He took rooms in the Adelphi. He adopted a fantastic costume to emphasize his personality, and, perhaps to excuse it, spoke of the ugliness of modern dress. In three years he had won the recognition of Punch, which, thenceforward, caricatured him several times a month.

      In 1881 he published his first book, a volume of poems, discussed in the next chapter. Five editions of it were immediately sold. His costume and identification with the æsthetic movement of that time determined his selection as a lecturer in America. The promoters of his tour there were, however, anxious to help not the æsthetic movement but the success of a play that laughed at it. He went to America in 1882, and again in 1883, on the latter occasion to see the production of Vera. On his return from the first visit he went to Paris, where he finished The Duchess of Padua, which was not published till 1908. In 1891 it was produced in New York, when twenty copies were printed for the actors and for private circulation. It is likely that in 1883, while in Paris, he began The Sphinx, upon which he worked at various periods before its publication in 1894.

      Returning to England, he took rooms in Charles Street, Haymarket, and lectured in the provinces. In 1884 he married Constance Mary Lloyd, who brought him enough money to enable him to take No. 16 Tite Street, Chelsea, which was his home until 1895. He wrote for a number of periodical newspapers, and, for two years, edited The Woman's World.

      In 1885 'The Truth of Masks' appeared as 'Shakespeare and Stage Costume' in The Nineteenth Century. In 1886 he began that course of conduct that was to lead to his downfall in 1895. In 1887 he published 'Lord Arthur Savile's Crime,' 'The Canterville Ghost,' 'The Sphinx without a Secret,' and 'The Model Millionaire,' which were issued together in 1891. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and other Tales. In 1889 'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.' appeared in Blackwood's Magazine. 'Pen, Pencil and Poison' appeared in The Fortnightly Review in 1889, 'The Decay of Lying' in The Nineteenth Century in the same year, and 'The Critic as Artist' in The Nineteenth Century in 1890. A House of Pomegranates and Intentions, in which these three essays were reprinted with 'The Truth of Masks,' were published in 1891. In the same year 'The Soul of Man under Socialism' appeared in The Fortnightly Review. The