OSCAR WILDE
349
The Duchess of Padua,
experiences a similar change of heart. When
he learns that his father has been killed by the Duke of Padua, he
agrees at once to
kill
the duke. But at the last moment he shies away
from murder, and, with extraordinary love of verbal techniques,
simply leaves his victim a letter urging him to repent.
Much as Wilde liked to think of himself as a creature over–
come by passion, he was not capable of so unmitigated an energy,
and his preference for characters who generously pull back from
violence at the last moment suggests again how full he was of
checks, of rivulets rather than rivers of emotional force. In his
Newdigate prize poem, "Ravenna," he notes that Ravenna has
shown little interest in her own emancipation, and tells the city not
to wake from her slumbers ; it is enough that she rests there mocking
all human greatness. Next, as if to satisfy both worlds, he says the
city may yet wake. Then all verges off into dreamy contemplation.
Wilde's conscious rebellion was only against dullness, a quality
shared without partisanship by both conservatives and liberals. The
only weapon he cared to use against them was wit, anger being
something for old men, not young. Even the rigidity of old age
is
tolerable because it
is
funny, and Wilde makes no effort to do
more than point it out as preposterous. His model was a young
rebel who could keep his friends and be invited to dinner parties.
For Wilde, in fact, wit became a dandyism of the mind, his
special form to go with that other dandyism he so much admired
and imitated, the cadenced prose of Newman and Pater. His at–
tempts to copy their styles were unsuccessful because lacking in
subtlety. He is hypnotized by words of color like "white" or "purple"
(he wrote a woman poet that even Keats would have envied her
the phrase "purple barge in purple shadow on the seas"), by vague–
ly sinister words like "strange," "curious," or "monstrous." Expres–
sions already given up as dated by poets he adopts for his prose with–
out a scruple, and when he is not turning cliches upon their heads he
is
apt to be indulging in them without irony, as if to go the ro–
mantic poets, and even the Victorians, one better. Wilde's serious
conception of beauty always betrayed him; he was at his worst in
delineating his only ideal. Walt Whitman had told him as much
in Camden in 1882 when he countered Wilde's talk of beauty with
the businesslike comment that "beauty is a result, not an abstraction."
