OSCAR WILDE
343
celebrated nature, Wilde, as a late romantic, deplored it. "A sun–
set is no doubt a beautiful thing," he said, "but perhaps its chief
use
is
to illustrate quotations from the English poets." And he re–
marked that Wordsworth "found in stones the sermons he had al–
ready hidden there." He said to a friend, "Nature is a foolish place
to look for inspiration in, but a charming one in which to forget one
ever had any."
The early romantics had upheld simplicity and directness as
virtues; Wilde declared these were not essential, and indicated his
own preference for complexity and even obscurity. "Our
Art
is of
the Moon and plays with shadows," he said with approval; he fol–
lowed Verlaine in calling for nuances, and in expressing distaste for
clear statement as for brute fact. The world of human experience
had palled, he decided, by the end of the century: "Life," Wilde
remarked, "is a great disappointment." (He had said the same of
the Atlantic Ocean and of Niagara Falls.) The point was not to
live life but to play with
it:
"It
is more difficult to tell about a
thing than to do it." The early romantics could still be aroused by
heroic action, but Wilde felt that action is useless or, if not useless,
vulgar, and that one's hopes for its outcome must almost certainly
be dashed. Therefore he had no heroes in the traditional sense: "The
one person who has more illusions than the dreamer," he said, "is
the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his
deeds nor their results." Wilde's hero was not Prometheus but the
dandy, Algernon Moncrieff, who prefered lying down to standing
up, and whose most disastrous passion was for cucumber sandwiches.
Even when Wilde advocated socialism he did so on the ingeniously
antisocial grounds that socialism
will
free us of the tedious responsi–
bility of looking after other people and enable us to worry only
about ourselves.
If
Blake considered his enemies wicked, Wilde found
his
to be absurd.
If
Byron had a dreadful secret which he could not
talk
about, Wilde had a secret he was always talking about. By
such broad and jaunty gestures he attempted to formulate his own
place.
Wilde could not fully understand his relation to his age, though
he perceived very early that he had one, because he never learned
to estimate either his powers or his desires accurately even in the
period when he supposed he had become humble. In a lofty passage
