by Oscar Wilde
And they were wroth with him and said to him, ‘Thou hast led us into the desert that we might hearken to thee. Wilt thou send us away hungry, and the great multitude that thou hast made to follow thee?’
And he answered them and said, ‘I will not talk to you about God.’
And the multitude murmured against him and said to him, ‘Thou hast led us into the desert, and hast given us no food to eat. Talk to us about God and it will suffice us.’
But he answered them not a word. For he knew that if he spake to them about God he would give away his treasure.
And his disciples went away sadly, and the multitude of people returned to their own homes. And many died on the way.
And when he was alone he rose up and set his face to the moon, and journeyed for seven moons, speaking to no man nor making any answer. And when the seventh moon had waned he reached that desert which is the desert of the Great River. And having found a cavern in which a Centaur had once dwelt, he took it for his place of dwelling, and made himself a mat of reeds on which to lie, and became a hermit. And every hour the Hermit praised God that He had suffered him to keep some knowledge of Him and of His wonderful greatness.
Now, one evening, as the Hermit was seated before the cavern in which he had made his place of dwelling, he beheld a young man of evil and beautiful face who passed by in mean apparel and with empty hands. Every evening with empty hands the young man passed by, and every morning he returned with his hands full of purple and pearls. For he was a Robber and robbed the caravans of the merchants.
And the Hermit looked at him and pitied him. But he spake not a word. For he knew that he who speaks a word loses his faith.
And one morning, as the young man returned with his hands full of purple and pearls, he stopped and frowned and stamped his foot upon the sand, and said to the Hermit: ‘Why do you look at me ever in this manner as I pass by? What is it that I see in your eyes? For no man has looked at me before in this manner. And the thing is a thorn and a trouble to me.’
And the Hermit answered him and said, ‘What you see in my eyes is pity. Pity is what looks out at you from my eyes.’
And the young man laughed with scorn, and cried to the Hermit in a bitter voice, and said to him, ‘I have purple and pearls in my hands, and you have but a mat of reeds on which to lie. What pity should you have for me? And for what reason have you this pity?’
‘I have pity for you,’ said the Hermit, ‘because you have no knowledge of God.’
‘Is this knowledge of God a precious thing?’ asked the young man, and he came close to the mouth of the cavern.
‘It is more precious than all the purple and the pearls of the world,’ answered the Hermit.
‘And have you got it?’ said the young Robber, and he came closer still.
‘Once, indeed,’ answered the Hermit, ‘I possessed the perfect knowledge of God. But in my foolishness I parted with it, and divided it amongst others. Yet even now is such knowledge as remains to me more precious than purple or pearls.’
And when the young Robber heard this he threw away the purple and the pearls that he was bearing in his hands, and drawing a sharp sword of curved steel he said to the Hermit, ‘Give me, forthwith, this knowledge of God that you possess, or I will surely slay you. Wherefore should I not slay him who has a treasure greater than my treasure?’
And the Hermit spread out his arms and said, ‘Were it not better for me to go unto the uttermost courts of God and praise Him, than to live in the world and have no knowledge of Him? Slay me if that be your desire. But I will not give away my knowledge of God.’
And the young Robber knelt down and besought him, but the Hermit would not talk to him about God, nor give him his Treasure, and the young Robber rose up and said to the Hermit, ‘Be it as you will. As for myself, I will go to the City of the Seven Sins, that is but three days’ journey from this place, and for my purple they will give me pleasure, and for my pearls they will sell me joy.’ And he took up the purple and the pearls and went swiftly away.
And the Hermit cried out and followed him and besought him. For the space of three days he followed the young Robber on the road and entreated him to return, nor to enter into the City of the Seven Sins.
And ever and anon the young Robber looked back at the Hermit and called to him, and said, ‘Will you give me this knowledge of God which is more precious than purple and pearls? If you will give me that, I will not enter the city.’
And ever did the Hermit answer, ‘All things that I have I will give thee, save that one thing only. For that thing it is not lawful for me to give away.’
And in the twilight of the third day they came nigh to the great scarlet gates of the City of the Seven Sins. And from the city there came the sound of much laughter.
And the young Robber laughed in answer, and sought to knock at the gate. And as he did so the Hermit ran forward and caught him by the skirts of his raiment, and said to him: ‘Stretch forth your hands, and set your arms around my neck, and put your ear close to my lips, and I will give you what remains to me of the knowledge of God.’ And the young Robber stopped.
And when the Hermit had given away his knowledge of God, he fell upon the ground and wept, and a great darkness hid from him the city and the young Robber, so that he saw them no more.
And as he lay there weeping he was aware of One who was standing beside him; and He who was standing beside him had feet of brass and hair like fine wool. And He raised the Hermit up, and said to him: ‘Before this time thou hadst the perfect knowledge of God. Now thou shalt have the perfect love of God. Wherefore art thou weeping?’ And He kissed him.
ESSAYS, SELECTED JOURNALISM, LECTURES AND LETTERS
Introduction by
MERLIN HOLLAND
There is a perfectly understandable tradition in Collected Works of putting all the miscellaneous writings in a heterogeneous bundle at the end. They take on that forlorn air of the indigestible bits left on the side of a plate after a good meal – a necessary part of the whole but an acquired taste if consumed at all. To appreciate a more serious Oscar Wilde, though, we need to forget the conventional view (as one does in most things to do with Wilde) and see what many regard as leftovers with the eyes of the child, who invariably leaves the tastiest pieces until last.
Seriousness and Wilde for most of his non-academic readers are laughably incompatible. The popular view of the flamboyant, witty homosexual with his legacy of society comedies and a few children’s stories (he hated the idea and said they were ‘written, not for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty’) is still alive and in rude health. De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol are explained away as post-prison writings of a largely autobiographical nature; the poetry is, for the most part, seen as derivative and slight; The Picture of Dorian Gray qualifies for inclusion in the canon of lightweight Wilde on account of its sparkling dialogue and Gothic theme; and the rest of the writings tend to be ignored. This may seem a harsh judgement but I am afraid that a bibliography of Wilde’s writings in print over the last thirty years would prove my point. Publishers have pandered to public taste in Wilde, and Wilde at his most thought-provoking has not been in demand. Richard Ellmann edited a single-volume edition of Wilde’s critical writings twenty-five years ago and, apart from collected works, they have not been seen between two covers since. Isobel Murray’s editions for Oxford University Press have included some of the essays together with an eloquent plea in her introductions that we look at him in greater depth, but there is little evidence of it outside the academic world.
When Robert Ross, his literary executor, first had the Collected Works published in 1908, more than a third of its pages were taken up with Wilde’s essays, lectures and reviews. Including De Profundis they span the whole of his writing life from 1879 to 1897 and serve as a remarkable key to his intellectual development. This may sound an extravagant claim, but there is more of the unadorned Wilde to be found in them than anywhere else in his wo
rk; it was even said that Wilde himself had a higher opinion of his best essays than the rest of his writings. Of ‘The Decay of Lying’ he wrote to Violet Fane: ‘It is meant to bewilder the masses by its fantastic form; au fond it is of course serious’. For one who spent most of his time mocking the dull solemnity of the English, (in this essay in particular) it was, on the face of it an odd admission. In fact it is perfectly illustrative of the distinction he drew between the serious subject handled earnestly and the same treated with a lightness of touch, which turns it from a dumpling into a souffle. By 1891 when Intentions was published his souffles were superb.
‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’, it has to be said, is something of a dumpling. It was written in 1879 for the Chancellor’s Essay Prize at Oxford which, in the event, was never awarded. Long-winded and academic in style, it draws clearly on Wilde’s classical reading for his degree, though the breadth of his reading and his knowledge of modern historians was already impressive. While appearing to side with the rationality of historical criticism against primitive superstition and myth, there is a point at which one senses a sneaking admiration for the fictitious speeches which find their way into the narratives of Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus. The seeds are already sown for Vivian’s opening speech in ‘The Decay of Lying’ ten years on.
Similarly uncharacteristic of the later Wilde was the first lecture which he. gave on his American tour in 1882. Entitled ‘The English Renaissance’, in its first form it was over-long and over-theoretical. He had borrowed heavily from Ruskin, Morris and Pater, often verbatim, and attempted some kind of synthesis between the Whistler/Rossetti school of creative art and the more down-to-earth applications of the decorative arts movement as championed by Morris and Ruskin. The subtleties were lost on many in his American audiences who were often bored and showed it. Within a month the lecture had undergone a radical transformation to become ‘The Decorative Arts’ – shorter, simpler and altogether more appealing – which he fine-tuned, adding appropriate anecdotes as he travelled around the country. Kevin O’Brien (see bibliography) points out the disservice done by Robert Ross in reproducing his own edition of ‘The English Renaissance’ in the 1908 Collected Works when the final version of ‘The Decorative Arts’ (reproduced here) was the main lecture for his American tour from mid-February onwards. His second lecture, ‘The House Beautiful’, reserved for towns in which he had two engagements, was written during a week’s break from lecturing in Chicago. Engagingly colloquial and passably witty, it is much more along the stylistic lines of later Wilde but the content suffers from its reliance on the established opinions of others: the iconoclastic, individual Wilde has still to emerge.
Apart from providing him with a lifelong supply of gentle jibes at the Americans and their country and a perceptive and amusing lecture on his return, this baptism by fire seems to have confirmed for Wilde the importance of two stylistic principles which remain characteristic of nearly all his published work from then on. The power of humour to engage his audience, no matter how serious the subject matter, becomes a Wildean trademark. Writing to Marie Prescott early in 1883 about the comedy lines in Vera he says: ‘Never be afraid that by raising a laugh you destroy tragedy. On the contrary you intensify it. Drama appeals to human nature and must have as its ultimate basis the science of psychology and physiology. Now one of the facts of physiology is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite. So I cannot cut out my comedy lines. Besides, the essence of good dialogue is interruption.’
The play itself, incidentally, was a flop but the juxtaposition of humour and seriousness, of wit and erudition he later developed through his book reviews and journalism to culminate with superb effect in the dialogues of Intentions. The other matter of style was probably more of a reversion than an adoption. His lectures, which had started formal and stilted, took on a more relaxed almost conversational tone by the end of the tour and as they did, so the reviews became more favourable. Wilde, from the earliest days, was never more relaxed than in the drawing-room. His mother’s salon in Merrion Square had been famous for its conversation as had been his former classics tutor at Trinity, J.P. Mahaffy, whose book on the subject he reviewed (see ‘Aristotle at Afternoon Tea’), lamenting the fact that Mahaffy did not write as he talked. For Wilde it is a style which runs easily through the journalism, feels slightly restricted by the formality of those essays not in dialogue form, and by the time of Dorian Gray is almost pure theatre with chunks of Lord Henry’s and Dorian’s exchanges finding a second life in A Woman of No Importance. The logical conclusion, as Owen Dudley Edwards has pointed out in his introduction to the Stories, was for this master of conversation to burst the constraints of prose and finish up nightly addressing the largest drawing-room in London – the West End stage.
Of Wilde’s journalism there is but a selection reproduced here, a cross-section of book-reviews, short essays and theatre notices, no more than a tiny percentage of his total output. Over the years it has provided a fertile hunting-ground for critics chasing literary sources for Wilde’s work but not enough has been done to evaluate some of the subjective opinions so frequently voiced there. Researchers may well have been reluctant to take him at face value given the inherent irony of some of the articles. Can we trust the printed opinions of a man who says at the end of ‘The Truth of Masks’:’ Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true’? Nevertheless there are odd pieces which seem to have a place in the Wildean puzzle even if they do not have a reliable significance in their own right. At the end of the first paragraph of his 1885 notice of ‘A Handbook to Marriage’, he expresses firmly egalitarian views on marriage and women’s education. It is one of many instances. Another taken almost at random is from his regular column ‘Literary and Other Notes’ for The Woman’s World in December 1887 where he remarks on the success of two young women at university which ‘shows how worthy women are of that higher culture and education which has been so tardily and, in some instances, so grudgingly granted to them’. In isolation such remarks might be seen as condescending, but in their context, and taken together with other evidence throughout his writings of Wilde’s interest in women’s position in society, they are unusually advanced for the time. In the same article on the subject of educating the poor he wrote: ‘In these cold crowded cities of the North, the proper basis for morals, using the word in its wide Hellenic signification, is to be found in architecture not in books.’ In the light of current debate on the depersonalising effect of cheap inner city housing and its effect on crime, Wilde was surprisingly close to the mark.
Intentions is an uneven collection. ‘The Truth of Masks’ which had been published six years before as ‘Shakespeare and Stage Costume’ seems to have been added in as a make-weight piece. Wilde incorporated one or two changes into the original, together with a new conclusion which sounds as much of an afterthought as it indeed was. The title is changed to appear less pedestrian but promises more than it delivers. A short while after publication when approached for the French translation rights to the four essays, Wilde sensibly suggested substituting ‘The Soul of Man’.
His fascination with the artist and crime in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ has an uncomfortable premonitory ring about it. Some years before he had prepared a lecture on the Bristol forger Thomas Chatterton who clearly exercised a similar fascination on him. ‘One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin,’ he says. ‘The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art.’ Surprising perhaps that Wilde’s prosecutor, Ned Carson, didn’t bring that one up in court as well. It raises the interesting conjecture as to what extent his own excursions into the Victorian homosexual underworld were prompted by a Baudelairean nostalg
ie de la boue’–‘feasting with panthers’ as he later called it in De Profundis.
‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Decay of Lying’ are probably Wilde at his intellectually most sparkling. There is a deliciously subversive quality about both of them and presented in dialogue form he is able to take as many stances as he wishes, to argue with himself and still remain unaligned. The first, as Ellmann has pointed out, was an attempt to tweak Matthew Arnold’s nose over a famous lecture given in 1864 on ‘The Function of Criticism’ in which he stated that ‘the aim of criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is’. Wilde’s view is that the critic should see the object as it really is not. The critic should be freed from his subordinate role and eventually through knowledge become more creative than the creative artist himself, finally assuming a sort of Christ-like suffering through the burden of omniscience. ‘The Decay of Lying’, less ambitious in scope, argues against the contemporary trend towards realism, even naturalism in art – ‘our monstrous worship of facts’ as Wilde puts it. Throughout both essays there is a strong sense of his championing of the individual, the artist set apart by his beliefs and convictions which finds its ultimate expression in De Profundis.
The fanciful flights of ideas in the dialogues ‘iridescent with fancy and winged with paradox’ give way in ‘The Soul of Man’ to an entirely different approach. Wilde admits that his solution to encouraging the individual in a socialist society is Utopian, but as he says: ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’ Shaw recalled years later being told that Wilde had attended a socialist meeting in Westminster at which he had been speaking and how it had prompted Wilde to try his hand at an essay on socialism. The result, it is said, was ridiculed by the Fabians. It has never been difficult to raise objections to some of the arguments but it is increasingly clear almost exactly 100 years after it was written, that the tyranny of communism in Eastern Europe has been forced to give way to the acceptance of the individual even if not entirely on Wilde’s Utopian terms. More interesting still was Robert Ross’s discovery on going to Russia in 1911 that ‘The Soul of Man’ had become a best-selling tract and had gone through dozens of editions since Wilde’s death.
