OSCAR WILDE
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assume that this image of destroying the object of affection came to
him only after his fall, to be expressed in "The Ballad of Reading
Gaol." In that poem the act of killing what we love is made largely
deliberate, as it is also in
Salome,
written in 1893; but in other
works Wilde, like his Lord Arthur Savile, blamed fate rather than
volition. In a poem written about 1880, "Humanitad," Wilde de–
clared that we are by nature our own enemies, that we are both
Judas and Christ, "the lips betraying and the life betrayed." The
same mixture of flaunting and fleeing appears in his conduct after
he was found guilty; there was time to escape to France, and his
friends urged him to go, but Wilde could not decide, and the half–
packed suitcase which the police found when they arrested him is a
kind of emblem of his state of mind. Wilde thought he detected a
similarity to himself in Hamlet, and his interpretation of Shakespeare's
play is very much in character; for Wilde Hamlet is a man who
spies on his own actions, who instead of trying to be "the hero of
his
own history wishes to be the spectator of his own tragedy." Yet
when all is said about the cross-cutting of Wilde's impulses, the force
of his personality (before prison life eroded away half of it) was
such that the spiteful age seems to be immolated with him, and one's
first association with that trying literary period is always Wilde,
pulpy, brilliant, will-less.
To read him today
is
to become aware in all his writing of
that hesitating, much-braked momentum which leads him towards
his pathetic fall. There is a certain trepidation mixed with the gay
versatility that samples all the literary forms in turn, not only those
he listed in
De Profundis
but others as well-fairy tales, a novel, a
play in French, a confession. He is apt to use the same witty re–
marks in different works, as if fearful he will lose his audience with–
out them, and aware that they will cover over deficiencies of plot
for the time being at least. In characterization he is only a little
interested, though he contributes a splendid character to English
comedy in the lounger who appears in most of his plays and in his
novel.
As
for the wit itself, its balance seems more hazardously main–
tained than we had thought; and while it pretends such arrogance,
it seeks with a nervous humility to please us. Wilde is not without
affection for the conventions he jocularly throws down; after he
leaves the room, as he knows, they will be put back in their place;
