346
RICHARD ELLMANN
fill, although he did not wish to be taken altogether seriously at it.
Sometimes he thought of his character as a palimpsest, with per–
versity scrawled over a fine original manuscript; as he said in the
sonnet "Helas," there had been a time when he possessed "ancient
wisdom and austere control," but he had sacrified them to become
"a stringed lute upon which all winds can play." (In a letter written
when he was twenty-three, he said, "I shift with every breath of
wind and am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever.") In
this
image, the Aeolian harp, which for the romantic poets was in tune
with nature, is in tune only with man's baser nature. Actually he
had never possessed either ancient wisdom or austere control, nor
had he ever been an Aeolian harp, for the capacity for self-surrender
(as opposed to wobbling) was one he did not possess. The maga–
zine
Punch
complained early in his career, "His name is Wilde, but
his poetry's tame." In pederasty he was polite, in self-immolation he
was impudent. Wilde liked to think of women as sphinxes without
secrets, of certain friends as egoists without egos, and so on, but
this sense of the flawed surface of others came from his being, him–
self, a romantic without full conviction. Rousseau described in
his
Confessions
real faults for which he felt real remorse, but Wilde
never particularizes his offenses, as if individual acts (except when
committed by Lord Alfred Douglas) had no importance in them–
selves, and he so empurples both his sense of guilt and his sense of
repentance that they lose reality.
Instead of becoming the scapegoat of his age, he became, some–
what involuntarily, his own scapegoat. He wished to betray himself,
but only a little, to destroy himself, but only a part. The role of
victim-Sebastian or Marsyas- was one among several, including
the dandy and the apostle of joy, that he aspired to play through.
In his early flirtation with Catholicism, he wrote a friend that he
would go to call on Newman "to burn my fingers a little more."
He half enticed the age to crucify him, half lost his nerve in the
process, meaning or almost meaning to pull back at the last. But
the age was unexpectedly eager (like most ages), and the right to
choose left him before he had time to exercise
it.
So he emulated
his father's disgrace, exceeded it even, and fulfilled his own half–
wish, no less felt for being passive and scarcely conscious, to kill
the success he loved but secretly impugned. It would be wrong to
