39.   Il Piccolo della Sera,   March 24, 1909


Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome

  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. These were the high-
sounding titles that with youthful haughtiness he had printed on
the title-page of his first collection of poems, and in this
proud gesture, by which he tried to achieve nobility, are the
signs of his vain pretences and the fate which already awaited
him. His name symbolizes him: Oscar, nephew of King Fingal and
the only son of Ossian in the amorphous Celtic <Odyssey>, who was
treacherously killed by the hand of his host as he sat at table.
O'Flahertie, a savage Irish tribe whose destiny it was to assail
the gates of medieval cities; a name that incited terror in
peaceful men, who still recite, among the plagues, the anger of
God, and the spirit of fornication, in the ancient litany of the
saints: 'from the wild O'Flaherties, libera nos Domine.' Like
that other Oscar, he was to meet his public death in the flower
of his years as he sat at table, crowned with false vine leaves
and discussing Plato. Like that savage tribe, he was to break the
lance of his fluent paradoxes against the body of practical
conventions, and to hear, as a dishonoured exile, the choir of
the just recite his name together with that of the unclean.
  Wilde was born in the sleepy Irish capital fifty-five years
ago. His father was a ranking scientist, who has been called the
father of modern otology. His mother, who took part in the
literary-revolutionary movement of '48, wrote for the Nationalist
newspaper under the pseudonym 'Speranza', and incited the public,
in her poems and articles, to seize Dublin Castle. There are
circumstances regarding the pregnancy of Lady Wilde and the
infancy of her son which, in the eyes of some, explain in part
the unhappy mania (if it may be called that) which later dragged
him to his ruin; and at least it is certain that the child grew
up in an atmosphere of insecurity and prodigality.
  The public life of Oscar Wilde began at Oxford University,
where, at the time of his matriculation, a pompous professor
named Ruskin was leading a crowd of Anglo-Saxon adolescents to
the promised land of the future society -- behind a wheelbarrow.
His mother's susceptible temperament revived in the young man,
and, beginning with himself, he resolved to put into practice a
theory of beauty that was partly original and partly derived from
the books of Pater and Ruskin. He provoked the jeers of the
public by proclaiming and practising a reform in dress and in the
appearance of the home. He made lecture tours in the United
States and the English provinces and became the spokesman of the
aesthetic school, while around him was forming the fantastic
legend of the Apostle of Beauty. His name evoked in the public
mind a vague idea of delicate pastels, of life beautified with
flowers. The cult of the sunflower, his favourite flower, spread
among the leisured class, and the little people heard tell of his
famous white ivory walking stick glittering with turquoise
stones, and of his Neronian hair-dress.
  The subject of this shining picture was more miserable than the
bourgeois thought. From time to time his medals, trophies of his
academic youth, went to the pawnshop, and at times the young wife
of the epigrammatist had to borrow from a neighbour the money for
a pair of shoes. Wilde was constrained to accept a position as
editor of a very petty newspaper, and only with the presentation
of his brilliant comedies did he enter the short last phase of
his life -- luxury and wealth. <Lady Windermere's Fan> took
London by storm. In the tradition of the Irish writers of comedy
that runs from the days of Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard
Shaw, Wilde became, like them, court jester to the English. He
became the standard of elegance in the metropolis, and the annual
income from his writings reached almost half a million francs. He
scattered his gold among a series of unworthy friends. Every
morning he bought two expensive flowers, one for himself and one
for his coachman; and until the day of his sensational trial, he
was driven to the courtroom in a two-horse carriage with its
brilliantly outfitted coachman and powdered page.
  His fall was greeted by a howl of puritanical joy. At the news
of his condemnation, the crowd gathered outside the courtroom
began to dance a pavane in the muddy street. Newspaper reporters
were admitted to the prison, and through the window of his cell
fed on the spectacle of his shame. White bands covered up his
name on theatre billboards. His friends abandoned him. His
manuscripts were stolen, while he recounted in prison the pain
inflicted on him by two years of forced labour. His mother died
under a shadow. His wife died. He was declared bankrupt and his
goods were sold at auction. His sons were taken from him. When he
got out of prison, thugs urged on by the noble Marquis of
Queensbury were waiting in ambush for him. He was hunted from
house to house as dogs hunt a rabbit. One after another drove him
from the door, refusing him food and shelter, and at nightfall he
finally ended up under the windows of his brother, weeping and
babbling like a child.
  The epilogue came rapidly to an end, and it is not worth the
effort to follow the unhappy man from the slums of Naples to his
poor lodgings in the Latin Quarter where he died from meningitis
in the last month of the last year of the nineteenth century. It
is not worth the effort to shadow him, like the French spies did.
He died a Roman Catholic, adding another facet to his public life
by the repudiation of his wild doctrine. After having mocked the
idols of the market place, he bent his knees, sad and repentant
that he had once been the singer of the divinity of joy, and
closed the book of his spirit's rebellion with an act of
spiritual dedication. 

                    *      *      *      *

  This is not the place to examine the strange problem of the
life of Oscar Wilde, nor to determine to what extent heredity and
the epileptic tendency of his nervous system can excuse that
which has been imputed to him. Whether he was innocent or guilty
of the charges brought against him, he undoubtedly was a
scapegoat. His greater crime was that he had caused a scandal in
England, and it is well known that the English authorities did
everything possible to persuade him to flee before they issued an
order for his arrest. An employee of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs stated during the trial that, in London alone, there are
more than 20,000 persons under police surveillance, but they
remain footloose until they provoke a scandal. Wilde's letters to
his friends were read in court, and their author was denounced as
a degenerate obsessed by exotic perversions: 'Time wars against
you; it is jealous of your lilies and your roses','I love to see
you wandering through violet-filled valleys, with your
honey-coloured hair gleaming'. But the truth is that Wilde, far
from being a perverted monster who sprang in some inexplicable
way from the civilization of modern England, is the logical and
inescapable product of the Anglo-Saxon college and university
system, with its secrecy and restrictions.
  Wilde's condemnation by the English people arose from many
complex causes; but it was not the simple reaction of a pure
conscience. Anyone who scrutinizes the graffiti, the loose
drawings, the lewd gestures of those people will hesitate to
believe them pure at heart. Anyone who follows closely the life
and language of men, whether in soldiers' barracks or in the
great commercial houses, will hesitate to believe that all those
who threw stones at Wilde were themselves spotless. In fact,
everyone feels uncomfortable in speaking to others about this
subject, afraid that his listener may know more about it than he
does. Oscar Wilde's own defence in the <Scots Observer> should
remain valid in the judgment of an objective critic. Everyone, he
wrote, sees his own sin in Dorian Gray (Wilde's best known
novel). What Dorian Gray's sin was no one says and no one knows.
Anyone who recognizes it has committed it.
  Here we touch the pulse of Wilde's art -- sin. He deceived
himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of
neo-paganism to an enslaved people. His own distinctive
qualities, the qualities, perhaps, of his race -- keenness,
generosity, and a sexless intellect -- he placed at the service
of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back
the Golden Age and the joy of the world's youth. But if some
truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to
his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms rather than
syllogisms, to his assimilations of natures as foreign to his as
the delinquent is to the humble, at its very base is the truth
inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the
divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss
called sin.

                    *      *       *        *

  In his last book, <De Profundis>, he kneels before a gnostic
Christ, resurrected from the apocryphal pages of The House of
Pomegranates, and then his true soul, trembling, timid, and
saddened, shines through the mantle of Heliogabalus. His
fantastic legend, his opera -- a polyphonic variation on the
rapport of art and nature, but at the same time a revelation of
his own psyche -- his brilliant books sparkling with epigrams
(which made him, in the view of some people, the most penetrating
speaker of the past century), these are now divided booty.
  A verse from the book of Job is cut on his tombstone in the
impoverished cemetry at Bagneux. It praises his facility,
'eloquium suum', -- the great legendary mantle which is now
divided booty. Perhaps the future will also carve there another
verse, less proud but more pious:

           Partiti sunt sibi vestimenta mea et super
           vestem meam miserunt sortis.

                                        JAMES JOYCE