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<h2>CHAPTER XIX</h2> <h2>O. W.</h2> It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr—whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the note [Pg 213] of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana—or Oscariana—which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy," his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and "horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and spongers, his end might have been different. I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was Barbey d'Aurévilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably modelled—lace [Pg 214] cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations. But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne—(in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his Jumbos")—Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion element, is poor Huysmans's—just look into that masterpiece, A Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salomé is Flaubert in operetta form—his gorgeous Herodias watered down for uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece—which limps dramatically—would never have been seriously considered if not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, i. e., it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in [Pg 215] any particular. His Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error, yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very gay fancy. He wasn't an evil-minded man; he posed à la Byron and Baudelaire; but to hear his jolly laughter was to rout any notion of the morbid or the sinister. He was materialistic, he loved good cookery, old wines, and strong tobacco. Positively the best book Wilde ever inspired was The Green Carnation, by Robert Hichens, which book gossip avers set the ball rolling that fetched up behind prison-bars. In every-day life he was a charming, companionable, and very human chap, and, as Frederick James Gregg says, dropped more witty epigrams in an hour than Whistler did annually. The best thing Whistler ever said to Wilde was his claiming in advance as his own anything Oscar might utter; and here Whistler was himself borrowing an epigram of Baudelaire, as he borrowed from the same source and amplified the idea that nature is monotonous, nature is a plagiarist [Pg 216] from art, and all the rest of such paradoxical chatter and inconsequent humour. Both Whistler and Wilde have been taken too seriously—I mean on this side. Whistler was a great artist. Wilde was not. Whistler discoursed wittily, waspishly, but he wasn't knee-high to a grasshopper when confronted with Wilde. As for the tragic dénouement that has been thrashed to death by those who know, suffice to add that William Butler Yeats told me that he called at the Wilde home after the scandal had broken, and saw Willie Wilde, who roundly denounced his brother for his truly brave attitude—always attitudes with Oscar. He would not be persuaded to leave London, and perhaps it was the wisest act of his life, though neither the Ballad of Reading Gaol nor De Profundis carry conviction. Need I say that my judgment is personal? I have read in cold type that Pater was a "forerunner" of Wilde; that Wilde is a second Jesus Christ—which latter statement stuns one. (The Whitmaniacs are fond of claiming the same for Walt, who is not unlike that silly and sinister monster described by Rabelais as quite overshadowing the earth with its gigantic wings, and after dropping vast quantities of mustard-seed on the embattled hosts below flew away yawping: "Carnival, Carnival, Carnival!") For me, he simply turned into superior "journalism" the ideas of Swinburne, Pater, Flaubert, Huysmans, De Quincey, and others. If his readers [Pg 217] would only take the trouble to study the originals there might be less talk of his "originality." I say all this without any disparagements of his genuine gifts; he was a born newspaper man. Henry James calls attention to the fact that the so-called æsthetic movement in England never flowered into anything so artistically perfect as the novels of Gabriel d'Annunzio. Which is true; but he could have joined to the name of the Italian poet and playwright that of Aubrey Beardsley, the one "genius" of the "Eighteen-Nineties." Beardsley gave us something distinctly individual. Wilde, a veritable cabotin, did not—nothing but his astounding conversation, and that, alas! is a fast fading memory. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 218] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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