348
RICHARD
ELLMANN
and Shaw was right in saying that Wilde's unconventionality
was
"the pedantry of conventionality." Wilde develops the theme that the
artist
is
at war with society, and goes on a lecture tour-and
to
America-to win society's applause for
it.
The amiability of his wit
is
admirable; his friends regarded it as one of his greatest virtues and
it is so; of all writers, Wilde was probably the best company. But
Whistler had a rancorous insight when he perceived that even kind–
ness had a weak point, a vulnerable man's unwillingness to take the
button off the foil.
Regarded more justly, this amiability came both from
his
temperament and from his convictions. He sensed that a perfervid
romanticism was out of date, and he was glad to summon up para–
doxes, akin to those Blake wrote down with indignation, in startling–
ly good humor. Wilde said in Paris later that Napoleon was greater
at St. Helena than he had been at Austerlitz, that in fact St. Helena
was the greatest subject in the world; he meant that defeated exile
was, for a writer as for a general, a greater theme than war. Direct
combat never attracted him. He was quick to declare that Shelley
was too rebellious, and his own "Sonnet to Liberty," composed at
an age (twenty-five) when he might have been expected to be
rash, is
clo~ly
hedged: it derides those who seek liberty more than
it praises them, and ends with the equivocal comment, "And yet, /
Those Christs that die upon the barricades, / God knows
it
I am
with them, in some things." He is attracted by the wildness of their
self-sacrifice in part because it outdoes his own. Their image fascin–
ates him, as did the image of Christ, not as has been said because
he fancies himself to be Christ, but because he knows he is not
Christ, he knows he will flub his own martyrdom.
The "Sonnet to Liberty" is a rather brief tribute after the odes
to liberty written earlier in the century, and it must be the only poem
on this subject written during these hundred years which ends so
discreetly. Yet when Wilde was asked in San Francisco
if
it
repre–
sented his political creed, he said no and blamed it on "the fire
of youth." The same embarrassment appears in Wilde's first play,
Vera,
where the heroine, who is a nihilist, proves in the end to
be
more sympathetic to benevolent despotism than to democracy. In–
stead of assassinating the Czar she kills herself and cries that in so
doing she has saved Russia. The young hero in Wilde's verse play,
