LOUIS MENAND
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fresh, realistic. To consider this either a deliberate vacillation or a weakness
in need of shoring up is like complaining that Plato's
Republic,
since it is
clearly a work ofliterature, has no business condemning literature. Nobody
lives in the world of theory; there is no gravity there. Wilde knew this al–
most as well as Plato did, and better than some theoretical critics of our own
day.
Nor is a fascination with mysteries a betrayal of materialism. Wilde
wasn't interested in the aura of the Church - or, for that matter, in the aura
of the beautiful object - because he suspected it reflected a truth denied by
materialism; he made himself quite clear on this point several times. He was
interested because the religious experience, like the aesthetic experience,
though it is undeniably real to those who have it, seems to lie beyond the
explanatory reach of materialism's vocabulary, and it is the duty of the ma–
terialist to honor whatever is real in experience - as William
J
ames tried to
do in
The Varieties of Religious Experience,
and as Freud tried to do in
The
Future of an Illusion.
Wilde and Pater are often charged with having con–
fused religion with art, with having created a cult of the beautiful to substitute
for a cult of divinity. But there was nothing transcendentalist about their
aestheticism: it was founded on an entirely realistic recognition that the ex–
perience of art is qualitatively different from the experience of everything
else, and that something in the experience of art survives even a materialist's
analysis. "Everything will pass, and the world will perish," Mikhail Bakunin
(no transcendentalist) is supposed to have said shortly before his death in
1876, "but the Ninth Symphony will remain." To assume that the nineteenth
century's view of art was determined by its need to replace a godhead it
lacked the fortitude to live without is simple condescension - unless we feel
we understand completely ourselves how we make the distinction between
things that are art and things that are not.
*
*
*
The central event, which is also the central mystery, in Wilde's
life was his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father, the Mar–
quess of Queensberry, goaded Wilde into bringing the lawsuit that quickly
rebounded on him and led to his downfall. The relationship is mysterious be–
cause it is impossible to explain Wilde's fascination with Douglas, a man
whom W. H. Auden described as "a vicious, gold-digging, snobbish, anti–
Semitic, untalented little horror for whom no good word can be said," and
whom Wilde himself once referred to as a "gilded pillar of infamy." Douglas
was famous for his personal beauty - though to judge from photographs it
seems to have been beauty of a rather metallic sort - but he and Wilde
ceased having sexual relations fairly early, simply living together in various
hotels and country houses while each pursued his own conquests. Douglas did
