Over the Tin Fence: A consideration of the life and work of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is one of those men of whom there are a few in each century, who seem to stand in a peculiarly close symbolic relation to their contemporary society. It has been said that Wilde lived out his art, that his contribution waspage 234 made by the creation of a personal myth, and not finally or adequately through any art form. But a true evaluation of his art cannot be made easily. The fog of passionate prejudice raised by his homosexuality, prejudice of the accusers and the defenders, is unlikely ever to subside completely. Perhaps what would remain if it did clear would be not unlike the sculptured figure that Epstein made for Wilde’s tombstone: the flying Assyrian effigy, crushed under the weight of its stone wings, and a diminutive cross standing in the air above it. It may be reasonably said, in objection to any semi-biographical approach to Wilde’s art, that his homosexuality is an irrelevant factor; but I disagree. The more one reads of Wilde the more apparent it becomes that his life and his art are bound together by hoops of steel; that in fact an interpretation of his art which ignores the homosexual issue must be totally academic. But even the toughest American and British critics have jibbed at this point. A severe shock to his moral nature tends always to deprive a modern man of his hard- won intellectual stability. Victorian society suffered this shock at the time of the trial of Wilde. They reacted to his moral lapses precisely in the manner of a mediaeval exorcist; except that Wilde was the demon to be bound and cast out. Their conception of human behaviour, progressive and Utopian, excluded the knowledge of the seed of moral evil in each person’s heart. And Wilde was crucified, not so much by the judgment of the self-righteous as by the uncontrollable fear of those whose conception of their own nature had been suddenly endangered. The same thread of hysteria is woven into the stuff of recent works about Wilde. Hesketh Pearson is concerned to prove that Wilde was in reality a fun-loving Oxonian who never grew up properly, and his homosexuality the naughtiness of a great, big boy. It is a comforting analysis. But André Gide, that shrewd, old French quean (who gives the only entirely convincing picture of Wilde the man) has spoken more authoritatively:

I believe to be utterly false what he (Maurois) repeats after so many others, or what he lets be assumed: that Wilde’s way of life was a dependence of his aestheticism and that he merely carried over into his habits his love of the artificial. I believe quite on the contrary that this affected aestheticism was for him merely an ingenious cloak to hide, while half revealing, what he could not let be seen openly; to excuse, provide a pretext, and even apparently motivate; but that the very motivation is but a pretence . . . . This artistic hypocrisy was imposed on him by respect, which was very keen in him, for the proprieties, and by the need of self-protection. . . .

Wilde’s writing, seen as the literary affectation of the lion of a clique, wearies one with interminable egotism; as the expression of the basic social and moral tensions of a man whose experience of the world is irremediably homosexual it assumes an entirely different aspect. Possibly Wilde’s early posture of art for art’s sake was undertaken lightheartedly; but the war on society of his mature years was defensive and real. He had set out to find his true self, and found it, over the tin fence, not only outside the structure ofpage 235 society, but also outside the boundaries set by his own moral code. The tension of this discovery lies behind his finest work, but finally became a deadlock which destroyed his personality. It has been stated often that Wilde’s end was tragic, as if the mechanical apparatus of a court of justice had struck him down. Only children in the knowledge of the world could suppose it. One can distinguish two clear stages in Wilde’s own view of his homosexuality – the first an intoxication, a sense of enormous vitality and freedom; the second a grinding of teeth against the pain – but in both he expresses the awareness of moving at a tangent to ordinary morality. He equates this movement with the development of his art – in the first stages, as expressed in ‘The Decay of Lying’, Apollonian –

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself . . . . Hers are the ‘forms more real than living man,’ and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies . . . . –

in the second stage, as expressed fragmentarily in ‘De Profundis,’ Dionysiac, through the experience of tragedy:

The two most deeply suggestive figures of Greek mythology were, for religion, Demeter, an earth goddess, not one of the Olympians, and for art, Dionysus, the son of a mortal woman to whom the moment of his birth had proved also the moment of her death.

The tragedy, for Wilde, was not imposed from without by a revengeful society; it was inherent in the processes of homosexual experience. The growing conviction that the Devil had him over a barrel, projected first in the Gothic fantasy of ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’, becomes conscious in ‘De Profundis’: ‘What seemed to the world and to myself my future I lost irretrievably when I let myself be taunted into taking the action against your father: I had, I dare say, lost it in reality long before that.’

The tragedy of Oscar Wilde, in its strictly personal aspect, cannot be regarded as exceptional. He had become a member, through circumstances largely outside his control, of the closed world of homosexuality, which in England, as in New Zealand, has its own language, its own hierarchies outside society, and a highly evolved organisation for defence. But his attempt at an ideological synthesis of the warring elements in his life and art places him in a different position from the homosexual whose art is purely a reflex of self-defence, hence sterile, and gives him (Wilde) a genuine symbolic relation to the society which he could not inhabit. This relation was not clear to me until I read, in the new Penguin edition, ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, ‘The Decay of Lying’, and the unexpurgated ‘De Profundis’. His political theory tends naturally toward anarchism rather than true socialism; but his sympathy with the English proletariat is a great deal more real than that of Shaw and Wells:

page 236

We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so. Charity they feel, to be a ridiculously inadequate mode of partial restitution, or a sentimental dole, usually accompanied by some impertinent attempt on the part of the sentimentalist to tyrannise over their private lives.

The natural sympathy of the non-conformer enabled Wilde to meet the miners of the Middle West on equal terms. He delighted in irritating the bourgeoisie; and they have had their prolonged revenge on him. He valued the tolerance of the English proletariat, who were acquainted with suffering and privation and did not regard the moral lapses of others as an assault on their own spiritual security:

The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man’s life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is ‘in trouble’ simply.

Few members of the working class have read ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’; but a great many know and value ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. The oppressed and inarticulate, the rejected debris of modern capitalist society, regarding Wilde as a spokesman, have set the seal of their approval on the Ballad by making it part of folk literature. In the figure of the hanged guardsman Wilde projects something of himself: the confused composite symbol of the criminal who through suffering becomes the holy victim, the scapegoat and sin-eater. Imaginatively he performs the act which in reality he was unable to make: an acceptance of divine Justice which frees the offender from the terror of human justice though not from its mechanical process:

He lay as one who lies and dreams
In a pleasant meadow-land.
The watchers watched him as he slept
And could not understand
How one could sleep so sweet a sleep
With a hangman close at hand.

The Ballad runs counter to Wilde’s earlier conception of art as Apollonian and self-renewing. It sacrifices balance to vigour, scope and sincerity. It is the one major poem which Wilde wrote.

It is now possible to understand the relation in which Wilde stood to the bourgeois society of his time. By his homosexuality he was committed to a situation which that society had not the tools to help him understand or solve. Hence his courageous though inadequate attempt to find integration throughpage 237 a philosophy of pure art, in which every relationship could be justified as a contribution to the unique whole of aesthetic experience. Those members of his audience who were totally committed to the social values of the time, values of thrift, conformity and prudent ambition, were obliged to regard him as either a poseur or a malignant iconoclast. He preferred the role of poseur as less onerous. The English have rarely appreciated the use of wit as a serious literary method, an oblique manipulation of material otherwise too hot to handle. Hence they considered Wilde’s paradoxes mere showmanship. They laughed at his plays as clever nonsense; they objected to his aesthetic theory as decadent or trivial posturing; they could not conceive that Wilde was trying to reconcile the profound antimonies of life and art by an oblique attack. His homosexuality seemed to them not the underlying condition which gave tension and significance to his work, but a gratuitous devilment proceeding from megalomania. To one group, therefore, he stood as a hideous example of what the artist could and would become if not tamed early. To a younger group (of which Katherine Mansfield was one) he stood as the liberator of those who in the sterility of the bourgeois home ‘sighed for the seducer’s coming, in the sun strokes of summer’.

In ‘De Profundis’ Wilde explores the spiritual crisis which has come to a head with his social denigration. The unexpurgated version must remove from any reader’s mind the illusion that Wilde’s homosexuality was a temporary or superficial deviation. He makes his own position quite clear:

When first I was put into prison some people advised me to try and forget who I was. It was ruinous advice. It is only by realising what I am that I have found comfort of any kind. Now I am advised by others to try on my release to forget that I have ever been in a prison at all. I know that would be equally fatal. . . . To regret one’s own experience is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.

On account of this statement, and others like it, Wilde is often accused of insincerity in his partial profession of Christian belief. But in fact ‘De Profundis’ derives its unique value and interest from Wilde’s perception of a genuine incompatibility between the moral and the aesthetic vision of life. Verlaine, in a similar situation, repented of both life and art (since his homosexuality was a component of the artist’s persona which he inhabited) and thus committed himself to an intolerable hypocrisy. Wilde recognised that the moment of aesthetic recognition, in which the artist draws triumphantly upon the undivided powers of flesh and spirit, annulled the moment of repentance. Nevertheless he was obsessed by an awareness that his aesthetic vision was being torn apart by the very powers, now demonic, which had generated its intensity; and that his one weapon, sensitivity, had begun to melt in the poisonous blood of the decapitated Gorgon. In reviewing the process of decay, he calls Alfred Douglas bitterly to account as the one personpage 238 most instrumental in leading him from the benign dream of Apollonian art to the harsh actuality of the homosexual underworld:

. . . I should have shaken you out of my life as a man shakes from his raiment a thing that has stung him . . . it was only in the mire that we met: and fascinating, terribly fascinating though the one topic round which your talk invariably centred was, still at the end it became quite monotonous to me. . . . But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place. Of course, I discern in all our relations not Destiny merely, but Doom: Doom that (always) walks swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood.

Yet ‘De Profundis’ is nothing if not the complaint of a wronged lover. Wilde accuses Alfred Douglas of behaviour based solely on selfish and sensual motives: this is the central theme of ‘De Profundis’: and it implies an ideal of homosexual friendship which would demand more altruism of the partners than is normally present in matrimony. Wilde’s argument, when the superficial recriminations have been shorn away, is essentially this: that Douglas, motivated by hatred of his father, has wantonly ruined Wilde’s life and reputation, and in so doing has revealed the ‘supreme vice of shallowness’. The picture he draws of Douglas is extraordinarily interesting, for it corresponds in its main detail to the type of the uncreative homosexual who is always active in literary politics and brings into being the lunatic fringe of literary Bohemia, troglodytic and rapacious, which works against the establishment of sane values. The seed of chaos in Wilde’s mind responded to the scorpion quality of Douglas, appalled and admiring, and flourished under its influence. Certainly he was physically attracted. His role, at least psychologically, was a passive one, for he had not the constant stimulus of hatred to sharpen an appetite for destruction; as a creative artist, his philosophy was at its most rebellious merely anarchist, not nihilist. He imagined, moreover, that he had a soul to lose. Wilde’s greatest misfortune was not perhaps that his aesthetic sensibility contained a permanent homosexual component, but that his deepest ties were finally made to a person devoid of any perception of the altruistic and compassionate aspects of homosexual love:

The day he (a solicitor’s clerk) came to receive my depositions and statements, he leant across the table – the prison warder being present – and having consulted a piece of paper which he pulled from his pocket, said to me in a low voice: ‘Prince Fleur de Lys wishes to be remembered to you.’ . . . You were in your own eyes still the graceful prince of a trivial comedy . . . .

It is possible that if Wilde had been able to avoid pederasty after his release from prison, if his chosen companion had not been Alfred Douglas, if he had not been bankrupt, if his incipient alcoholism had not gained an unbreakable control, he might have rehabilitated himself. A social rehabilitation would have been most improbable; but the Church has before now provided a refugepage 239 for people of widely differing temperaments, and such a solution seems to have been in his mind when he desired the attendance of a priest at his deathbed. The antimonies of life and art, unresolved in ‘De Profundis,’ remained unresolved for him. The significance of Wilde for our own generation is chiefly that he presents these antimonies in their most acute form and indicates that they cannot be resolved at any ordinary social level.

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