Oscar Wilde Page 3

  Wilde paused for some moments, let the effect of the tale work its way in me, and then resumed, “I don’t like your lips; they’re straight, like those of someone who has never lied. I want to teach you to lie, so that your lips may become beautiful and twisted like those of an antique mask.

  “Do you know what makes the work of art and what makes the work of nature? Do you know what makes them different? For, after all, the flower of the narcissus is as beautiful as a work of art—and what distinguishes them can not be beauty. Do you know what distinguishes them?—The work of art is always unique. Nature, which makes nothing durable, always repeats itself so that nothing which it makes may be lost. There are many narcissus flowers; that’s why each one can live only a day. And each time that nature invents a new form, she at once repeats it. A sea-monster in a sea knows that in another sea is another sea-monster, his like. When God creates a Nero, a Borgia or a Napoleon in history, he puts another one elsewhere; this one is not known, it little matters; the important thing is that one succeed; for God invents man, and man invents the work of art.

  “Yes, I know … one day there was a great uneasiness on earth, as if nature were at last going to create something unique, something truly unique—and Christ was born on earth. Yes, I know … but listen:

  “When, in the evening, Joseph of Arimathaea went down from Mount Calvary where Jesus had just died he saw a young man seated on a white stone and weeping. And Joseph approached him and said, ‘I understand that your grief is great, for certainly that Man was a just Man.’ But the young man answered, ‘Oh! that’s not why I’m weeping. I’m weeping because I too have performed miracles! I too have restored sight to the blind, I have healed paralytics and I have raised up the dead. I too have withered the barren fig-tree and I have changed water into wine … And men have not crucified me.’”

  And it seemed to me more than once that Oscar Wilde was convinced of his representative mission.

  The Gospel disturbed and tormented the pagan Wilde. He did not forgive it its miracles. The pagan miracle is the work of art: Christianity was encroaching. All robust artistic unrealism requires an earnest realism in life.

  His most ingenious apologues, his most disturbing ironies were designed to bring the two ethics face to face with one another, I mean pagan naturalism and Christian idealism, and to put the latter out of countenance.

  “When Jesus wished to return to Nazareth,” he related, “Nazareth was so changed that He no longer recognized His city. The Nazareth in which He had lived had been full of lamentations and tears; this city was full of bursts of laughter and singing. And Christ, entering the city, saw slaves loaded with flowers hastening toward the marble stairway of a house of white marble. Christ entered the house, and at the rear of a room of jasper He saw lying on a regal couch a man whose disheveled hair was entwined with red roses and whose lips were red with wine. Christ approached him, touched him upon the shoulder and said, “Why leadest thou this life?’ The man turned about, recognized Him and replied, ‘I was a leper; Thou hast healed me. Why should I lead another life?’

  “Christ went out of that house. And lol in the street he beheld a woman whose face and garments were painted, and whose feet were shod with pearls; and behind her walked a man whose coat was of two colors and whose eyes were laden with desire. And Christ approached the man, touched him upon the shoulder and said, ‘Why dost thou follow that woman and regard her thus?’ The man, turning about, recognized Him and replied, ‘I was blind; Thou hast healed me. What should I do otherwise with my sight?’

  “And Christ approached the woman. ‘The road which you follow,’ He said to her, ‘is that of sin; wherefore follow it?’ The woman recognized Him and laughingly said to Him, ‘The road which I follow is a pleasing one and Thou hast pardoned me all my sins.’

  “Then Christ felt His heart full of sadness and wished to leave that city. But as He was leaving it, He saw at length beside the moats of the city a youth who was weeping. Christ approached him, and touching his locks, said to him, ‘My friend, wherefore weepest thou?’

  “The youth lifted up his eyes, recognized Him, and replied, ‘I was dead and Thou hast raised me up; what should I do otherwise with my life?’”

  “Would you like me to tell you a secret?” Wilde began another day—it was at the home of Heredia; he had taken me aside in the midst of a crowded drawing-room—“a secret … but promise me not to tell it to anyone … Do you know why Christ did not love His mother?” This was spoken into my ear, in a low voice and as if ashamedly. He paused a moment, grasped my arm, drew back, and then bursting into laughter, said, “It’s because she was a virgin!…”

  Let me again be permitted to quote this tale, a most strange one and a tough nut for the mind to crack—it is a rare spirit that will understand the contradiction, which Wilde hardly seems to be inventing.

  “… Then there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.—And the soul of the sinner advanced stark naked before God.

  And God opened the book of the sinner’s life:

  ‘Certainly your life has been very bad: You have …(followed a prodigious, marvelous enumeration of sins).1—Since you have done all that, I am certainly going to send you to Hell.’

  ‘You can not send me to Hell.’

  ‘And why can I not send you to Hell?’

  ‘Because I have lived there all my life.’

  Then there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.

  ‘Well, since I can not send you to Hell, I am going to send you to Heaven.’

  ‘You can not send me to Heaven.’

  ‘And why can I not send you to Heaven?’

  ‘Because I have never been able to imagine it.’

  And there was a great silence in the Chamber of God’s Justice.”2

  One morning Wilde handed me an article to read in which a rather dull-witted critic congratulated him for “knowing how to invent pleasant tales the better to clothe his thought.”

  “They believe,” Wilde began, “that all thoughts are born naked … They don’t understand that I can not think otherwise than in stories. The sculptor doesn’t try to translate his thought into marble; he thinks in marble, directly.

  “There was a man who could think only in bronze. And one day this man had an idea, the idea of joy, of the joy which dwells in the moment. And he felt that he had to tell it. But in all the world; not a single piece of bronze was left; for men had used it all. And this man felt that he would go mad if he did not tell his idea.

  “And he thought about a piece of bronze on the grave of his wife, about a statue he had made to adorn the grave of his wife, of the only woman he had loved; it was the statue of sadness, of the sadness which dwells in life. And the man felt that he would go mad if he did not tell his idea.

  “So he took the statue of sadness, of the sadness which dwells in life; he smashed it and made of it the statue of joy, of the joy which dwells only in the moment.”

  Wilde believed in some sort of fatality of the artist, and that the idea is stronger than the man.

  “There are,” he would say, “two kinds of artist: one brings answers, and the other, questions. We have to know whether one belongs to those who answer or to those who question; for the kind which questions is never that which answers. There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.”

  And he would also say:

  “The soul is born old in the body; it is to rejuvenate it that the latter grows old. Plato is the youth of Socrates …”

  Then I remained for three years without seeing him again.

  1 The sc of scepticisme (scepticism) is pronounced as though it were s alone.—(Translator’s note.)

  1 The written version which he later made of this tale is, for a wonder, excellent.

  2 Since Villiers de l’Isle-Adam betr
ayed it, everybody knows, alas! the “great secret of the Church”: There is no Purgatory.

  II

  HERE BEGIN THE TRAGIC MEMORIES.

  A persistent rumor, growing with each of his successes (in London he was being played at the same time in three theatres), ascribed strange practices to Wilde; some people were so kind as to take umbrage at them with a smile, and others took no umbrage at all; it was claimed moreover that he took no pains to hide them, that, on the contrary, he flaunted them; some said, courageously; others, cynically; others, affectedly. I listened to this rumor with great astonishment. Nothing, since I had been associating with Wilde, could have ever made me suspect a thing.—But already, out of prudence, a number of former friends were deserting him. People were not yet repudiating him outright, but they no longer made much of having met him.

  An extraordinary chance brought our two paths together again. It was in January 1895. I was traveling; I was driven to do so by a kind of anxiety, more in quest of solitude than in the novelty of places. The weather was frightful; I had fled from Algiers toward Blidah; I was going to leave Blidah for Biskra. At the moment of leaving the hotel, out of idle curiosity, I looked at the blackboard where the names of the travelers were written. What did I see there?—Beside my name, touching it, that of Wilde … I have said that I was longing for solitude: I took the sponge and rubbed out my name.

  Before reaching the station, I was no longer quite sure whether a bit of cowardice might not have been hidden in this act; at once, retracing my steps, I had my valise brought up again and rewrote my name on the board.

  In the three years that I had not seen him (for I can not count a brief meeting at Florence the year before), Wilde had certainly changed. One felt less softness in his look, something raucous in his laughter and something frenzied in his joy. He seemed both more sure of pleasing and less ambitious to succeed in doing so; he was bolder, stronger, bigger. What was strange was that he no longer spoke in apologues; during the few days that I lingered in his company, I was unable to draw the slightest tale from him.

  I was at first astonished at finding him in Algeria.

  “Oh!” he said to me, “it’s that now I’m fleeing from the work of art; I no longer want to adore anything but the sun … Have you noticed that the sun detests thought; it always makes it withdraw and take refuge in the shade. At first, thought lived in Egypt; the sun conquered Egypt. It lived in Greece for a long time, the sun conquered Greece; then Italy and then France. At the present time, all thought finds itself pushed back to Norway and Russia, places where the sun never comes. The sun is jealous of the work of art.”

  To adore the sun, ah! was to adore life. Wilde’s lyrical adoration was growing wild and terrible. A fatality was leading him on; he could not and would not elude it. He seemed to put all his concern, his virtue, into overexaggerating his destiny and losing patience with himself. He went to pleasure as one marches to duty.—“My duty to myself,” he would say, “is to amuse myself terrifically.”

  Nietzsche astonished me less, later on, because I had heard Wilde say:

  “Not happiness! Above all, not happiness. Pleasure! We must always want the most tragic …”

  He would walk in the streets of Algiers, preceded, escorted, followed by an extraordinary band of ragamuffins; he chatted with each one; he regarded them all with joy and tossed his money to them haphazardly.

  “I hope,” he said to me, “to have quite demoralized this city.”

  I thought of the word used by Flaubert who, when someone asked him what kind of glory he was most ambitious of, replied, “That of demoralizer.”

  In the face of all this, I remained full of astonishment, admiration, and fear. I was aware of his shaky situation, the hostilities, the attacks, and what a dark anxiety he hid beneath his bold joy.1 He spoke of returning to London; the Marquis of Q … was insulting him, summoning him, accusing him of fleeing.

  “But if you go back there, what will happen?” I asked him. “Do you know what you’re risking?

  “One should never know that … They’re extraordinary, my friends; they advise prudence. Prudence! But can I have any? That would be going backwards. I must go as far as possible … I can not go further … Something must happen … something else …”

  Wilde embarked the following day.

  The rest of the story is familiar. That “something else” was hard labor.2

  1 One of those last Algiers evenings, Wilde seemed to have promised himself to say nothing serious. At length I grew somewhat irritated with his too witty paradoxes:

  “You’ve better things to say than witticisms,” I began, “You’re talking to me this evening as if I were the public. You ought rather talk to the public the way you know how to talk to your friends. Why aren’t your plays better? You talk away the best of yourself; why don’t you write it down?”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed at once, “but my plays are not at all good; and I don’t put any stock in them at all … But if you only knew what amusement they give!… Almost every one is the result of a wager. Dorian Grey too; I wrote it in a few days because one of my friends claimed that I could never write a novel. It bores me so much, writing!”—Then, suddenly bending over toward me; “Would you like to know the great drama of my life?—It’s that I’ve put my genius into my life; I’ve put only my talent into my works.”

  It was only too true. The best of his writing is only a pale reflection of his brilliant conversation. Those who have heard him speak find it disappointing to read him. Dorian Grey, at the very beginning, was a splendid story, how superior to the Peau de Chagrin! how much more significant! Alas! written down, what a masterpiece manqué”.— In his most charming tales there is too great an intrusion of literature. Graceful as they may be, one feels too greatly the affectation; preciosity and euphuism conceal the beauty of the first invention; one feels in them, one can never stop feeling, the three moments of their genesis; the first idea is quite beautiful, simple, profound and certainly sensational; a kind of latent necessity holds its parts firmly together; but from here on, the gift stops; the development of the parts is carried out factitiously; they are not well organized; and when, afterwards, Wilde works on his phrases, and goes about pointing them up, he does so by a prodigious overloading of concetti, of trivial inventions, which are pleasing and curious, in which emotion stops, with the result that the glittering of the surface makes our mind lose sight of the deep central emotion.

  2 I have invented nothing and arranged nothing in the last remarks I quote. Wilde’s words are present to my mind, and I was going to say to my ear. I am not claiming that Wilde clearly saw prison rising up before him; but I do assert that the dramatic turn which surprised and astounded London, abruptly transforming Wilde from accuser to accused, did not, strictly speaking, cause him any surprise. The newspapers, which were unwilling to see anything more in him than a clown, did their best to misrepresent the attitude of his defense, to the point of depriving it of any meaning. Perhaps, in some far-off time it will be well to lift this frightful trial out of its abominable filth.

  III

  AS SOON AS HE LEFT PRISON, OSCAR WILDE CAME BACK to France. At Berneval, a quiet little village in the neighborhood of Dieppe, a certain Sebastian Melmoth took up residence: it was he. As I had been the last of his French friends to see him, I wished to be the first to see him again. As soon as I could learn his address, I made haste.

  I arrived toward the middle of the day. I arrived without having announced myself. Melmoth, whom the good cheer of Thaulow called rather often to Dieppe, was not to return until evening. He did not return until the middle of the night.

  Winter was still lingering on. It was cold; it was ugly. All day long I roamed about the deserted beach, dejected and full of boredom. How could Wilde have chosen Berneval to live in? It was dismal.

  Night came. I returned to take a room in the hotel, the same one in which Melmoth was living, and moreover the only one in the place. The hotel, clean, and agreeably
situated, lodged only a few second-rate people, inoffensive associates in whose presence I had to dine. Sad society for Melmoth!

  Luckily I had a book. Dismal evening! Eleven o’clock … I was going to give up waiting, when I heard the roll of a carriage … M. Melmoth had arrived.

  M. Melmoth was chilled through and through. He had lost his overcoat on the way. A peacock feather which his servant had brought him the evening before (frightful omen) had presaged a misfortune; he was happy that it was not that. But he was shivering and the whole hotel was excited about getting a grog heated for him. He hardly said hello to me. Before the others at least, he did not want to seem moved. And my emotion almost at once subsided at finding Sebastian Melmoth so simply like the Oscar Wilde that he had been: no longer the lyrical madman of Algeria, but the gentle Wilde of before the crisis; and I found myself carried back not two years, but four or five years earlier; the same worn look, the same amused laugh, the same voice …

  He occupied two rooms, the two best in the hotel, and had had them tastefully arranged. Many books on the table, and among them he showed me my Nourritures Terrestres which had recently been published. A pretty Gothic Virgin, on a high pedestal, in the shadow …

  We were sitting near the lamp and Wilde was sipping his grog. I noticed then, in the better light, that the skin of his face had become red and common; that of the hands even more so, though they were again wearing the same rings; one, which he was very fond of, had a setting of an Egyptian scarab in lapis-lazuli. His teeth were atrociously decayed. We chatted. I spoke to him again of our last meeting in Algiers. I asked him whether he remembered that at the time he had almost predicted the catastrophe.

  “Isn’t it so,” I said, “that you knew to a certain extent what was in store for you in England; you had foreseen the danger and rushed into it?…”