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It is just this widened sympathy, this vitalization of other things in a story besides the hero that divides what is called romantic from what is called classical art. To Greek tragedy there was a background of the Fates; but nobody sympathized with them. In whatever is classical as opposed to romantic in modern art, we shall find a background of Fates with whom nobody sympathizes, in whom nobody believes. But all the world was alive to St. Francis. Shakespeare is myriad-mouthed as well as myriad-minded. Daffodils are alive for him no less than kings, and Iago is a man no less than Othello. And in all art that springs from the spirit, thought Wilde, "wherever there is a romantic movement in art, there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ." Wilde, thinking in prison of Christianity in art, saw through the stone walls the cathedral at Chartres in the blue morning mist, Dante and Virgil walking in hell, the painted ship of the ancient mariner idly rocking upon the painted ocean, Juliet leaning from her balcony, Pierre Vidal flying as a wolf before the hounds, the irises of Baudelaire, the bird-song of Verlaine, the breaking heart of Russian storytelling, Tannhauser in the Venusberg, and all the flowers and children who have laughed in a wind of song.

For the mind, as for love,

"Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage."

FOOTNOTES:

"L'exercice de la pens?e est un jeu, mais il faut que ce jeu soit libre et harmonieux."--REMY DE GOURMONT.

"All trials," wrote Wilde, "are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."

He asked too much, both from Nature and from himself. Society would indeed have none of him, as he had foreseen, but Nature could only harbour for a moment this liver in great cities who had told her that her use was to illustrate quotations from the poets, and had said that he preferred to have her captive on his walls in the canvases of Corot and of Constable, than to live in her cruder landscapes. He had never intended to make too elaborate an advance to her. He had learnt from Stevenson's letters that that ingenious man had "merely extended the sphere of the artificial by taking to digging." He knew that reading Baudelaire in a caf? would be more natural to him than an agricultural existence. He was determined, however, not to return to the extravagances of his life before prison, and he hoped that the country would help him to keep this resolve. He was to learn that "one merely wanders round and round within the circle of one's personality." When he left prison he did not know that one must keep moving, but hoped to choose a pleasant point in his personality, and stay there.

Released from prison on May 19, 1897, he crossed the Channel to Dieppe, where he stayed for some days, and drove about with Mr. Robert Ross and Mr. Reginald Turner, examining the surrounding villages, most of which seemed uninhabitable. At the end of a week he took rooms in the inn at the little hamlet of Berneval.

He had left prison with an improved physique, and, now that he was able to work, there was hope that he would not risk the loss of it by leaving this life of comparative simplicity. Suddenly, however, he flung aside his plans and resolutions, desperately explaining that his folly was inevitable. The iterated entreaty of a man whose friendship had already cost him more than it was worth, and a newly-felt loneliness at Berneval, destroyed his resolution. He became restless and went to Rouen, where it rained and he was miserable; then back to Dieppe; a few days later, with his poem still unfinished, he was in Naples sharing a momentary magnificence with the friend whose conduct he had condemned, whose influence he had feared.

To make such a definition I have borrowed two words from the terminology of physical science. Energy is described by physicists as kinetic and potential. Kinetic energy is force actually exerted. Potential energy is force that a body is in a position to exert. Applying these terms to language, without attempting too strict an analogy, I wish to define the medium of literature as a combination of kinetic with potential speech. There is no such thing in literature as speech purely kinetic or purely potential. Purely kinetic speech is prose, not good prose, not literature, but colourless prose, prose without atmosphere, the sort of prose that M. Jourdain discovered he had been speaking all his life. It says things. An example of purely potential speech may be found in music. I do not think it can be made with words, though we can give our minds a taste of it in listening to a meaningless but narcotic incantation, or a poem in a language that we do not understand. The proportion between kinetic and potential speech and the energy of the combination vary with different poems and with the poetry of different ages.

Let me take an example of fine poetry, and show that it does perform in itself this dual function of language. Let us examine the first stanza of Blake's "The Tiger":--

"Tiger! Tiger! burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"

It is impossible to deny the power of suggestion wielded by those four lines, a power utterly disproportionate to what is actually said. The kinetic base of that stanza is only the proposition to a supposed tiger of a difficult problem in metaphysics. But above, below, and on either side of that question, completely enveloping it, is the phosphorescence of another speech, that we cannot so easily overhear.

We can more accurately observe this change of attitude if we examine the early version of the ballad. This version, as it is now printed by the side of that originally published, represents the poem as it was when Wilde wrote to say that it was nearly finished. It is probably very like what the poem would have been if he had not broken short his stay at Berneval. The momentary retaste of his former life at Naples gave him the more decorative verses that were then added, and the contrast between the two moods made possible his disregard of the beliefs he once had held concerning the evil effect of a message on a work of art. At the same time, he realized at Naples how far he had departed from his old standards, and added a certain recklessness to his already altered equipment. For example, he had written at Berneval one stanza of direct statement that he had afterwards deleted with others from the first version that he sent to England:--

"The Governor was strong upon The Regulation Act: The Doctor said that Death was but A scientific fact: And twice a day the chaplain called And left a little tract."

At Naples he replaced it. He admits, in a letter to Mr. Ross, that "the poetry is not good," and says, "I have put 'The Governor was strict upon the Regulation Act'--I now think that strong is better. The verse is meant to be colloquial--G. R. Sims at best--and when one is going for a coarse effect, one had better be coarse. So please restore 'strong.'" I think that nothing could more clearly illustrate the difference between Wilde as artist before and after he was released. The change was radical, and appeared not only in the medium of his work but in its intention. He had once said that nothing was sadder in the history of literature than the career of Charles Reade, who, after writing "The Cloister and the Hearth," "wasted the rest of his life in a foolish attempt to be modern, to draw public attention to the state of our convict prisons." Now, he cheerfully labelled his ballad, "Poetry and Propaganda," and admitted that though the poem should end with the fifth canto, he had something to say and must therefore go on a little longer. He had once written for his own admiration, and, to his disadvantage, for that of people he might meet at dinner. He now wished to publish his ballad in one of the more widely read newspapers, to reach the sort of people who had shared his life in gaol. He had become anxious to speak and to be heard, and was no longer content to make and to be admired.

Little trace of the friction of change is left in the poem. It is true that in certain lights a reader may perceive that he is examining a palimpsest, and wonder what manner of writer he was whose writing is obliterated. But there is an energy in the ballad that swings even the more obvious propaganda into the powerful motion of the poetry. Nowhere else in Wilde's work is there such a feeling of tense muscles, of difficult, because passionate, articulation. And this was the effect that he was willing to achieve. The blemishes on the poem, its moments of bad verse, its metaphors only half conceived scarcely mar the impression. It is felt that a relaxed watchfulness is due to the effort of reticence. I know of no other poem that so intensifies our horror of mortality. Beside it Wordsworth's sonnets on Capital Punishment debate with aloof, respectable philosophy the expediency of taking blood for blood, and suggest the palliatives with which a tender heart may soothe the pain of its acquiescence. Even Villon, who, like Wilde, had been in prison, and, unlike Wilde, had been himself under sentence of death, is infinitely less actual. He sees only after death: the gibbet, the row of corpses, their heads hanging, the eyes picked from their sockets by the crows, a row of blackened, sun-dried bodies swinging in wind and rain. He sees that, and thinks it a pitiful spectacle, but his only prayer is "qu'enfer n'ayt de nous la maistrie!" For Wilde it is life that matters. After it, who knows? A pall of burning lime, a barren spot where might be roses. But he lives an hundred times life's last moments, and multiplies the agony of the man who dies in the hearts of all those others who feel with him how frail is their own perilous hold.

At the beginning of his career he had written republican poetry, but had prefaced it with the avowal:--

But for this, he says, nations might be wronged and he remain unmoved,

"... and yet, and yet, These Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things."

For several years this double attitude persisted, though, as Wilde left boyhood he left also the rage and the passions, if he had ever had them, that could only be mirrored by turbulent oceans and fiery revolutions. He was, however, increasingly troubled by the knowledge that he could not accept the comfortable belief of Dr. Pangloss, that this is the best of all possible worlds. If he had lived among the poor, he would, perhaps, have amused them by pointing out the undeserved misery of the rich. As he happened, mostly, to live among the rich, he stimulated their enjoyment of their position by reminding them of the insecurity of their tenure, of the existence of the poor, and of the inadequacy of the means adopted to eliminate them. At that time in England many charitable movements, now institutions, had only lately started upon their curious careers, and, as Wilde pointed out, men "tried to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor." Wilde suggested no remedies, but used his own clear perception of the difficulty, and the uneasiness of other people's minds, as a background for much delightful conversation, and for such stories as that of 'The Young King,' who sees in dreams the pain that is hidden in the pearl that the diver has brought for his sceptre, the toil woven into the golden tissues of his robes, and the blood that fills with light the rubies of his crown.

His work was done, and, after the writing of the ballad, he was impotent of any sustained effort, whether in life or in literature. He lost, however, little of his intellectual activity, and none of his power of enjoyment. When he was in Rome in the spring of 1900, he learnt how to use a photographic camera, and took innumerable photographs with a most childlike enthusiasm. He was blessed by the Pope, not once only but seven times. His pleasure in watching the ceremonies of the Church recalled the year when, as an Oxford undergraduate, he had half-hoped, half-feared to find salvation, or, at least, a religious experience.

In May he returned to Paris, where his life cannot but have been humiliating to one who had been "le Roi de la vie." Many doors were closed to him and others he was too proud to enter. He spent days and nights in caf?s, drank too much, and wasted his conversation on students who treated him without respect. He had sufficient money, but his extravagances often left him penniless. M. Stuart Merrill has a note from him asking for a very little sum, "afin de finir ma semaine." He was not starving, as has been suggested, nor was he entirely deserted by his friends, though most of the French writers ignored in misfortune the man they had worshipped in success. M. Paul Fort, almost the only French poet of whom in his last illness Wilde spoke with affection, spent much time with him, and remembers him not outwardly unhappy, less capable than he had been of concealing his depths, and interested in everything, like a child. Another Frenchman who saw him during these months thought him dazed, like a man who has had a blow on the head. The two opinions are not contradictory. They represent a man whose power of will has been suddenly taken from him. Wilde no longer picked and chose; he no longer, a critic in life as in art, directed his doings with intention and self-knowledge. He could no longer dominate life and twist her to the patterns he desired, but was become flotsam in a stream now obviously much stronger than himself. He could smile as he drifted, but he could not stop.

As the year went on, he fell ill, and though he rallied more than once, and never lost the brilliance and clarity of his intellect except in delirium, he grew steadily worse. His death was hurried by his inability to give up the drinking to which he had become accustomed. It was directly due to meningitis, the legacy of an attack of tertiary syphilis. For some months he had increasingly painful headaches. On October 10, he was operated upon. He rallied after the operation, and, a fortnight later, was in a condition to talk with wit and charm, as, for example, when he said that he was dying beyond his means. On October 29, he got up and went to a caf?. On the 30th, he was less well, though he drove in the Bois. Throughout November he grew steadily weaker, and was often hysterical and delirious. Specialists were called in consultation but could do little more than label the manner of his death. On November 29, a priest, brought by Mr. Robert Ross, baptized him into the Catholic Church, and administered extreme unction.

The following account of his last hours is taken from a letter written by Mr. Ross to a friend, ten days after Wilde's death. Mr. Reginald Turner had nursed Wilde for some time before his death and, with Mr. Ross and the proprietor of the hotel, was present when he died.

"About five-thirty in the morning a complete change came over him, the lines of the face altered, and I believe what is called the death-rattle began, but I had never heard anything like it before, it sounded like the horrible turning of a crank, and it never ceased until the end. His eyes did not respond to the light test any longer. Foam and blood came continually from his mouth.... From one o'clock we did not leave the room, the painful noise from the throat became louder and louder. destroyed letters to keep ourselves from breaking down. The two nurses were out and the proprietor of the hotel had come up to take their place; at 1.45 the time of his breathing altered. I went to the bedside and held his hand, his pulse began to flutter. He heaved a deep sigh, the only natural one I had heard since I arrived, the limbs seemed to stretch involuntarily, the breathing became fainter, he passed at ten minutes to two exactly."

On December 3, 1900, Oscar Wilde was buried in the Cemetery of Bagneux. On July 20, 1909, his remains were moved to P?re Lachaise.

FOOTNOTES:

After he left prison he took the name of Sebastian Melmoth.

For a longer but still inadequate discussion of the question, see an article in "The Oxford and Cambridge Review" for October, 1911.

H?tel d'Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux Arts.

AFTERTHOUGHT

There is a word, often applied to Wilde in his lifetime, that has, since his death, been used to justify a careless neglect of his work. That word is "pose." In all such popular characterizations there is hidden a distorted morsel of truth. Such a morsel of truth is hidden here. We need not examine the dull envy of brilliance, the envy felt by timid persons of a man who dared to display the hopes and the intentions that were making holiday within him, the envy that used that word as a reproach, and sought to veil the fact that it was a confession. But we shall do well to discover what it was beside that envy that made the word applicable to Wilde.

Wilde "posed" as an aesthete. He was an aesthete. He "posed" as brilliant. He was brilliant. He "posed" as cultured. He was cultured. The quality in him to which that word was applied was not pretence, though that was willingly suggested, but display. Wilde let people see, as soon as he could, and in any way that was possible, who and what he was or wished to be. No bushel hid his lamp. He arranged it where it could best be seen, and beat drums before it to summon the spectators. He had every quality of a charlatan, except one: the inability to keep his promises. Wilde promised nothing that he could not perform. But, because he promised so loudly, he earned the scorn of those whom charlatans do not outwit. He has even met with the scorn of charlatans, who cannot understand why he made so much noise when he really could do what he promised.

The noise and the display that were inseparable from any stage of Wilde's career, and were not without an indirect echo and repetition in his books, were partly due to the self-consciousness that was among his most valuable assets. He knew himself, and he knew his worth, and, conscious of an intellectual pre-eminence over most of his fellows, assumed its recognition, and was in a hurry to bring the facts level with his assumption. He had, more than most men, a dramatic conception of himself. "There is a fatality," says the painter of Dorian Gray, "about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows." Wilde was always profoundly conscious of his own "physical and intellectual distinction," not with the almost scornful consciousness of Poe, but with a deprecating pride and a sense of what was due to it from himself and from others. Wilde's "pose"--call it what you will--is easily adopted by talent since Wilde created it with genius. Its origin was a sense of the possession of genius, of being distinct from the rest of the world. Poe emphasized this distinction by looking at people from a distance. Wilde emphasized it by charming them, with a kind of desperate generosity. He knew that he had largesse to scatter, and not till the end of his life did he begin to feel that he had wasted it, that in him a vivid personality had passed through the world and was not leaving behind it a worthy memorial. This was not the common regret at having been unable to accomplish things. It was a regret at leaving insufficient proof of a power of accomplishment that he did not doubt, but had never exerted to the uttermost. In thinking of the virtuosity of Wilde's manner, a thing not at all common in English literature, we must remember the consciousness of power that wrapped his days in a bright light, served him sometimes as a mantle of invisibility, and made him loved and hated with equal vehemence. His tasks were always too easy for him. He never strained for achievement, and nothing requires more generosity to forgive than success without effort.

This consciousness of his power excused in him an extravagance that in a lesser man would have been laughable. He would have it recognised at all costs, for confirmation's sake. He needed admiration at once, from the world, from England, from London, from any small company in which he happened to be. The same desires whose gratification earned him the epithet "poseur," made him expend in conversation energies that would have multiplied many times the volume if not the value of his writings. He pawned much of himself to the moment, and was never able to redeem it.

He leaves three things behind him, a legend, his conversation, and his works. The legend will be that of a beautiful boy, so gifted that all things were possible to him, so brilliant that in middle age men still thought him young, stepping through imaginary fields of lilies and poisonous irises, and finding the flowers turned suddenly to dung, and his feet caught in a quagmire not only poisonous but ugly. It will include the less intimate horror of a further punishment, an imprisonment without the glamour of murder, as with Wainewright, or that of burglary, as with Deacon Brodie, but a hideous publication to the world of the sordid transformation of those imagined flowers. The lives of Villon and of a few saints can alone show such swift passage from opulence to wretchedness, from ease to danger, from the world to a cell. We are not here concerned to blame or palliate the deeds that made this catastrophe possible, but only to remark that to Wilde himself, in comparison with the life of his intellect, they probably seemed infinitely unimportant and insignificant. The life of the thinker is in thought, of the artist in art. He feels it almost unfair that mere actions should be forced into a position where they have power over his destiny. As time goes on, the legend will, no doubt, be modified. It is too dramatic to be easily forgotten.

"He played with the idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of Pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation."

Wilde improvised like that. A metaphor would suddenly grow more important in his eyes than the idea that had called it into being. The idea would vanish in the picture; the picture would elaborate itself and become story, and then, dissolving like a pattern in a kaleidoscope, turn to idea again, and allow him to continue on his way. Wilde talked tapestries, as he wrote them. He saw his conversation, and made other men see it. They thought him a magician.

And now that mouth is closed, from which, as from Alain Chartier's, "so many golden words have proceeded." Death has given the kiss of the Lady Anne of Brittany, and the glittering words are blown away, or fallen in the pages of other men's books to gild a meagre ground. In fifty years' time the last of those who heard him speak will be old men and dull of memory, or garrulous with tedious invention. The talk is gone. Wilde had no Boswell. All that largesse of genius has been carried away and spent, or thrown away and forgotten. A talker is like an actor. It is only possible to say, he was wonderful on such an evening, or on such another, and, as time goes on and this becomes matter of hearsay, why, it is as if his achievement had never been. For the flowers of his talk bloom only in dead men's memories, and have been buried with their skulls.

Wilde provides us with the rare spectacle of a man most of whose powers are those of a spectator, a connoisseur, a man for whom pictures are painted and books written, the perfect collaborator for whom the artist hopes in his heart; the spectacle of such a man, delighting in the delicacies of life no less than in those of art, and yet able to turn the pleasures of the dilettante and the amateur into the motives of the artist. In some ages, when talk has been more highly valued than in ours, he would have been ready to let his criticism die in the air: he would have been content that all who knew him should credit him with the power of doing wonderful things if he chose, and with the preference of touching with the tips of his fingers the baked and painted figurine over the modelling of it in cold and sticky clay. Such credit is not to be had in our time, and he had to take the clay in his fingers and prove his mastery. Besides, he had not the money that would have let him live at ease among blue china, books wonderfully bound, and men and women as strange as the moods it would have pleased him to induce. If he had been rich, I think it possible that he would have been a des Esseintes or a Dorian Gray, and left nothing but a legend and a poem or two, and a few curiosities of luxury to find their way into the sale-rooms.

These things were the toys of a critical spirit, of a critic as artist, of a critic who took up first one and then another form of art, and played with it almost idly, one and then another form of thought, and gave it wings for the pleasure of seeing it in the light; of a man of action with the eyes of a child; of a man of contemplation curious of all the secrets of life, not only of those that serve an end; of a virtuoso with a distaste for the obvious and a delight in disguising subtlety behind a mask of the very obvious that he disliked. His love for the delicate and the rare brought him into the power of things that are vulgar and coarse. His attempt to weave his life as a tapestry clothed him in a soiled and unbeautiful reality. Even this he was able to subdue. Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He touched nothing that he did not decorate. He touched nothing that he did not turn into a decoration.

I do not care to prophesy which in particular of these decorations, of these friezes and tapestries of vision and thought, will enjoy that prolongation of life, insignificant in the eternal progress of time, which, for us, seems immortality. Art is, perhaps, our only method of putting off death's victory, but what does it matter to us if the books that feed the intellectual life of our generation are stones to the next and manna to the generation after that? Of this, at least, we may be sure: whether remembered or no, the works that move us now will have an echo that cannot be denied them, unheard but still disturbing, or, perhaps, carefully listened for and picked out, among the myriad roaring of posterity along the furthest and least imaginable corridors of time.

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

EDGAR ALLAN POE

A CRITICAL STUDY

ARTHUR RANSOME

"This very interesting study."

TIMES.

"This book describes Poe's sad and extremely lonely life, with all its pride and morbidness, and it also gives a subtle and clear analysis of his brilliant gifts."

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