Meditations on Oscar Wilde

From chapter. 2 of The Picture of Dorian Grey:

'"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from the scientific point of view."

"Why?"

"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us. And yet--"

"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good boy," said the painter, deep in his work and conscious only that a look had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.

"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal- to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also..."'

Wilde's only novel set out to show that there are some alarming consequences lying at the end of this road. Most bizarrely to my mind, he repeated in his own life much of the Grey character's socially risky behaviour despite sketching in the book the horrific potential therein for social ostracisation and personal ruin. In this sense, the book is almost like his portrait, and in a limited way, upholds his view that life imitates art.

The Picture of Dorian Grey was critically ridiculed on release. One example of typical reviews came from the St. James Gazette: "The writer airs his cheap research among the garbage of the French Decadents like any drivelling pedant". Wilde defended himself in a letter, saying the book was being misunderstood, and the charge of wickedness by the media would only increase sales. "But, alas!", he went on, "They will find it a story with a moral ...a terrible moral... which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy".

From his writings there is no sense that Oscar Wilde would have been cruel or harbouring any intention to corrupt. On the contrary, it is easy to imagine that his gentleness, generosity and playfulness would have meant that the boys on the rack would have welcomed his visits compared to other clients, whatever else was entailed. (I believe it was evidence from some of these that decided the trial outcome?) He did not need to enter such a sordid world but his political vision was for equality and fraternity. Somehow his public disgrace has redemptive elements both for himself and for those in whose name he was accused.

The tale about the nightingale and the rose, and the one about the devoted friend, also strike me as shockingly hard-hitting, leaving an impression quite opposite to that formed from stories like The Little Prince or The Selfish Giant.

The poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol is about the prisoners sympathising with one chap who's murdered a girl and has just been hanged that evening.

IV…
But there were those amongst us all
Who walked with downcast head,
And knew that, had each got his due,
They should have died instead:
He had but killed a thing that lived,
Whilst they had killed the dead.

For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain,
And draws it from its spotted shroud,
And makes it bleed again,
And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,
And makes it bleed in vain!...


I also liked this verse,
V…
But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan…

All his poems can be read online here - http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/wor...495&pageno=114

It seems a shame that, disgraced as a famous older man, Oscar Wilde didn't get another chance when he'd become an even better human being. Maybe he could have saved the world if it could have forgiven him. Rather than being forgotten, he is more appreciated and loved now than ever; his spirit shines on.

Wilde's ideas about what it is to be an artist, all his insights about the role of emotions, creativity and contemplation, were lessons many others have since taken to heart. Wilde was the supreme verbal illusionist, and on a see-saw of extremes he shook up his readers, as in this prose poem:

1. THE ARTIST
ONE evening there came into his soul the desire to fashion an image of The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment. And he went forth into the world to look for bronze. For he could think only in bronze.

But all the bronze of the whole world had disappeared, nor anywhere in the whole world was there any bronze to be found, save only the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth For Ever.

Now this image he had himself, and with his own hands, fashioned, and had set it on the tomb of the one thing he had loved in life. On the tomb of the dead thing he had most loved had he set this image of his own fashioning, that it might serve as a sign of the love of man that dieth not, and a symbol of the sorrow of man that endureth for ever. And in the whole world there was no other bronze save the bronze of this image.

And he took the image he had fashioned, and set it in a great furnace, and gave it to the fire.

And out of the bronze of the image of The Sorrow that Endureth For Ever he fashioned an image of The Pleasure that Abideth for a Moment.http://www.literaturepage.com/read/w...tures-121.html


His upbringing was very priviledged. His academic ability in the study of classics was unequalled, and he dashed off his erudition of the ancient worlds, particularly Greek, with the greatest of ease. He returned often to Christian symbols and stories.

In The Critic As Artist Wilde said, "To know anything about oneself one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive...and so it is not our own life that we live but the lives of the dead and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy".

In The Soul of Man under Socialism, which is a misleading title as most of the essay is again about the life of an artist, he said, "For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are....Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy unjust surroundings."

How be-wilde-red his wife must have been by events especially if he did act the fond husband who sent her endearments like this:

Poem: To My Wife - With A Copy Of My Poems
I can write no stately poem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.

For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.

And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.

In his super-confident stylish pronouncements and infatuation with the pursuit of aesthetic indulgence, he's like a demi-god who fell to earth for a lifetime, not of this world, which might explain his profoundly enduring appeal as well as his fatally reckless behaviour.

Wilde wrote 'De Profundis' in prison as a letter to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas/'Bosie' which appears to be one of the very last, if not the last, of his published works.

He explained in 'De Profundis' that the authorities putting him on trial had no interest in his relations with the rentboy witnesses but wanted to punish him for trying to put the still powerful Marquess, Bosie's father, in prison. In the earlier part of the letter he himself sizes up Bosie and judges him to be a monstrously doomed and hate-filled bad boy, full of his family's faults but also conventionally disobedient to his family's wishes. Given that Oscar had set himself up as a protector to Bosie against the brutalities of his father, this is all a bit vindictive and disingenuous, even if Bosie was often an unloving cur. Also while Oscar does accept blame, it's after evaluating himself as the heroic golden child of art and society who entrusted himself innocently to the affections of someone vastly beneath him, only to be betrayed. Taking responsibility at this point for his entanglements doesn't appear easy. Others loved him but over these he chose the titled playboy, symbol of an empire's aggression. I believe they were playing out something bigger than themselves.

Some quotes farther into the epistle that speak for themselves -

"Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that."

"I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy...The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility...

...I don't regret for a single moment having lived for pleasure. I did it to the full, as one should do everything that one does. There was no pleasure I did not experience. I threw the pearl of my soul into a cup of wine. I went down the primrose path to the sound of flutes. I lived on honeycomb. But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting. I had to pass on. The other half of the garden had its secrets for me also.

Of course all this is foreshadowed and prefigured in my books. Some of it is in THE HAPPY PRINCE, some of it in THE YOUNG KING, notably in the passage where the bishop says to the kneeling boy, 'Is not He who made misery wiser than thou art'? a phrase which when I wrote it seemed to me little more than a phrase; a great deal of it is hidden away in the note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of DORIAN GRAY; in THE CRITIC AS ARTIST it is set forth in many colours; in THE SOUL OF MAN it is written down, and in letters too easy to read; it is one of the refrains whose recurring MOTIFS make SALOME so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad; in the prose poem of the man who from the bronze of the image of the 'Pleasure that liveth for a moment' has to make the image of the 'Sorrow that abideth for ever' it is incarnate. It could not have been otherwise. At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.

It is, if I can fully attain to it, the ultimate realisation of the artistic life. For the artistic life is simply self-development. Humility in the artist is his frank acceptance of all experiences, just as love in the artist is simply the sense of beauty that reveals to the world its body and its soul."

"If ever I write again, in the sense of producing artistic work, there are just two subjects on which and through which I desire to express myself: one is 'Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life': the other is 'The artistic life considered in its relation to conduct.' ..."

An online version is here - http://www.upword.com/wilde/de_profundis.html


Two films about Wilde's trial were released in 1960 - see the section 'similar films' in this link - http://www.answers.com/topic/oscar-wilde-film . Another came along in the '80s. Several of his works have been adapted for the big screen, including last year's effort with Dorian Gray which moved along smartly but maybe showed a bit too much.

The definitive biography is supposedly that by Richard Ellmann published in 1988 - http://www.amazon.com/Oscar-Wilde-Ri.../dp/0394759842.

He certainly left his mark, straddling worlds so publicly.

- goinghome