The Wisdom of Oscar Wilde – Read Now and Download Mobi
The Wisdom of
OSCAR WILDE
The Wisdom of
OSCAR WILDE
Philosophical Library
FOREWORD
Part I of this volume comprises epigrammatic quotations taken primarily from Oscar Wilde’s major works, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the three plays, A Woman of No Importance, Lady Windermere’s Fan, and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as well as from Wilde’s essays, reviews, and lectures. These quotations present Wilde in the guise of wit and epigrammatist.
Part II presents extended excerpts from plays, novels, and other writings. A few, including The Ballad of Reading Gaol, “The Selfish Giant,” and “The American Invasion,” are given in their entirety. They are arranged in chronological order, as published. These excerpts are a sampling of the breadth and depth of Wilde’s literary works.
Biographical Note
“The foremost wit of his age,” Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, being the second son of William Wilde, was born on October 16th, 1854, at 21 Westland Row, Dublin.
On leaving Portora Royal School at Enniskillen, he went in 1873 to Trinity College, Dublin, with a scholarship.
In the following year he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek. Later that year he gained a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. Here he gained a First Class in Classical Moderations and a First Class in Literae Humaniores.
On Leaving Oxford he came to London and lived in the Adelphi, where in 1881 he published his first book of poems.
Three years later he married Constance Mary Lloyd, and removed to 16 Tite Street, Chelsea, where he lived until his conviction in 1895.
On his release he went to live in France at Berneval-sur-Mer; later, in February 1898, he moved to Paris, and to Rome in 1900 where the Pope blessed him seven times.
His health was now rapidly deteriorating and on his return to Paris he was baptized into the Catholic Church on November 29th.
Next day, in the presence of his loyal friend Robert Ross, he died—“The Miser of sound and syllable, no less than Midas of his coinage.”
Oscar Wilde was buried on December 3rd, 1900, in the little cemetery of Bagneux, but in July, 1909, he was interred at Père Lachaise.
“He hath outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not and torture not again.”
CONTENTS
Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock (1885)
The Relation of Dress to Art (1885)
A Cheap Edition of a Great Man (1887)
An Appreciation of Dostoevski (1887)
An Appreciation of the Young W. B. Yeats (1889)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891)
A Woman of No Importance (1893)
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)
Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them, they will forgive us everything, even our gigantic intellects.
A Woman of No Importance
Memory in a woman is the beginning of dowdiness. One can always tell from a woman’s bonnet whether she has got a memory or not.
A Woman of No Importance
If a woman really repents, she has to go to a bad dressmaker, otherwise no one believes in her.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.
The Importance of Being Earnest
All men are married women’s property. That is the only true definition of what married women’s property really is....
A Woman of No Importance
My husband is a sort of promissory note. I am tired of meeting him.
A Woman of No Importance
Men always want to be a woman’s first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.
A Woman of No Importance
The Ideal Man! Oh, the Ideal Man should talk to us as if we were goddesses, and treat us as if we were children. He should refuse all our serious requests, and gratify every one of our whims. He should encourage us to have caprices, and forbid us to have missions. He should always say much more than he means, and always mean much more than he says.
A Woman of No Importance
Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
A Woman of No Importance
Nothing spoils romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.
A Woman of No Importance
One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell that, would tell one anything.
A Woman of No Importance
Lord Illingworth: What do you call a bad man?
Mrs. Allonby: The sort of man who admires innocence.
Lord Illingworth: And a bad woman?
Mrs. Allonby: Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets tired of.
A Woman of No Importance
Lord Illingworth: The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
Mrs Allonby: It ends with Revelations.
A Woman of No Importance
Young women of the present day seem to make it the sole object of their lives to be always playing with fire.
A Woman of No Importance
Mrs. Allonby: Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!
Lord Illingworth: Beautiful women never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people’s husbands!
A Woman of No Importance
Talk to every woman as if you loved her; and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of the first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect tact.
A Woman of No Importance
If you want to know what a woman really means—which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do—look at her, don’t listen to her.
A Woman of No Importance
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over matter.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance
Women are a fascinatingly wilful sex. Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
A Woman of No Importance
Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious; both are disappointed.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance
Lord Darlington: It’s a curious thing, Duchess, about the game of marriage—a game, by the way, that is going out of fashion—the wives have all the honours, and invariably lose the odd trick.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
And don’t make scenes, men hate them!
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Crying is the refuge of plain women but the ruin of pretty ones.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Lord Augustus: By Jove! you should have heard what [Arabella] said about Mrs. Erlynne. She didn’t leave a rag on her … I told her that didn’t matter much, as the lady in question has an extremely fine figure.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
London is full of women who trust their husbands. One can always recognise them. They look so thoroughly unhappy.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Lady Plymdale: Who is that well-dressed woman talking to Windermere?
Dumby: Haven’t got the slightest idea! Looks like an édition de luxe of a wicked French novel, meant specially for the English market.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
It takes a thoroughly good woman to do a thoroughly stupid thing.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
With a proper background women can do anything.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
If a woman wants to hold a man, she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Wicked women bother one. Good women bore one. That is the only difference between them.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
We women, as some one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if you ever love at all.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A woman will flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
There is no pleasure in taking in a husband who never sees anything.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
When a woman marries again, it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, jealousy, sin.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Women … inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces, and always prevent us from carrying them out.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over they propose to continue it.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
As long as [a woman] can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
She was a curious woman, whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
If a woman can’t make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.
“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”
The proper basis for marriage is a mutual misunderstanding.
“Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”
She tried to found a salon, and only succeeded in opening a restaurant.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
For the British cook is a foolish woman who should be turned for her iniquities into a pillar of salt which she never knows how to use.
“Dinners and Dishes”
Marriage is the one subject on which women agree and all men disagree.
“A Handbook to Marriage”
Our author, however, is clearly of the same opinion as the Scotch lassie who, on her father warning her what a solemn thing it was to get married, answered, “I ken that, father, but it’s a great deal solemner to be single.”
“A Handbook to Marriage”
Beauty, as some one finely said, is the purgation of all superfluities.
“More Radical Ideas Upon Dress Reform”
Miss Prism: Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Gwendolen: How absurd to talk of the equality of the sexes! Where questions of self-sacrifice are concerned, men are infinitely beyond us.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Bracknell: No woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating …
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lord Augustus: I prefer women with a past. They’re always so demmed amusing to talk to.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Cecil Graham: Why, I have met hundreds of good women. I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle-class education.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Always! That is a dreadful word. ... Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Women defend themselves by attacking, just as they attack by sudden and strange surrenders.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
A sentimentalist… is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Similarly in The Importance of Being Earnest
By persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.
The Importance of Being Earnest
After a good dinner one can forgive anyone, even one’s own relations.
A Woman of No Importance
Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.
A Woman of No Importance
There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to life. The old are in life’s lumber-room. But youth is the lord of life....
A Woman of No Importance
What you have to do at present is simply to fit yourself for the best society. A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.
A Woman of No Importance
A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life.
A Woman of No Importance
Lord Illingworth: But the happiness of a married man, my dear Gerald, depends on the people he has not married.
Gerald: But if one is in love?
Lord Illingworth: One should always be in love. That is the reason one should never marry.
A Woman of No Importance
The world has been made by fools that wise men should live in it!
A Woman of No Importance
Lady Windermere: Are all men bad?
Duchess of Berwick: Oh, all of them, my dear, all of them, without any exception. And they never grow any better. Men become old, but they never become good.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
My father would talk morality after dinner. I told him he was old enough to know better. But my experience is that as soon as people are old enough to know better, they don’t know anything at all.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
It’s most dangerous nowadays for a husband to pay any attention to his wife in public. It always makes people think that he beats her when they’re alone.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that’s so important nowadays.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Cecil Graham: What is a cynic?
Lord Darlington: A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance
When a man says [he has exhausted life] one knows that life has exhausted him.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance
A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I like men who have a future, and women who have a past.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Young men want to be faithful, and are not: old men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
The true perfection of man lies, not in what a man has, but what a man is.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Once at least in his life each man walks with Christ to Emmaus.
De Profundis
The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence....
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present, knows nothing of the age in which he lives.
“The Critic as Artist”
If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself—a rare type in our time,... you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctified your days.
“The Critic as Artist”
Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable.
“The Decay of Lying”
The value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Algernon: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Cecily: And of course a man who is much talked about is always very attractive.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Gwendolen: The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate, does he not? And I don’t like that. It makes men so very attractive.
The Importance of Being Earnest
When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.
“The Critic as Artist”
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
“The Critic as Artist”
The man who regards his past is a man who deserves to have no future to look forward to.
“The Critic as Artist”
Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
The true artist is the man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.
“The Critic as Artist”
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at.... But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is through Art, and through Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
“The Critic as Artist”
For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generation, and he to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?
“The Critic as Artist”
For the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.
“The Critic as Artist”
The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand Art. Charming people such as fishermen, shepherds, plough-boys, peasants and the like know nothing about Art, and are the very salt of the earth.
De Profundis
Beauty has as many meanings as man has moods.
“The Critic as Artist”
The true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
“The Critic as Artist”
Art is not something that you can take or leave. It is a necessity of human life.
“House Decoration”
Noble and beautiful designs are never the results of idle fancy or purposeless daydreaming. They come only as the accumulation of habits of long and delightful observation.
“House Decoration”
Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
“House Decoration”
All archaeological pictures that make you say “How curious!” all sentimental pictures that make you say “How sad!” all historical pictures that make you say “How interesting!” all such pictures that do not immediately give you such artistic joy as to make you say “How beautiful!” are bad pictures.
“Lecture to Art Students”
For an artist to marry his model is as fatal as a gourmet to marry his cook: the one gets no sittings, and the other gets no dinner.
“London Models”
Nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting. I say that only an artist is a judge of art; there is a wide difference.
“Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock”
The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral....
“Mr. Wilde’s Bad Case”
A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher.
“The Decay of Lying”
Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.
“The Decay of Lying”
To look at a thing is very different to seeing it. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence.
“The Decay of Lying”
If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.
“The Decay of Lying”
The only portraits in which one believes are portraits where there is very little of the sitter and a very great deal of the artist.
“The Decay of Lying”
In a very ugly and sensible age the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
“Pen, Pencil and Poison”
Also in “The Decay of Lying”
Neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.
“Pen, Pencil and Poison”
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.
“Lecture to Art Students”
But, you will say, modern dress, that is bad. If you cannot paint black cloth, you could not have painted silken doublets.
“Lecture to Art Students”
Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or dishonest tradesman.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has ever known.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
In France, in fact, they limit the journalist and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to [the public], and whenever it appears they get so angry and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions—one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral. What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
For an educated person’s ideas of Art are drawn naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
“The Decay of Lying”
All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.
“The Decay of Lying”
In art good intentions are not the smallest value. All bad art is the result of good intentions.
De Profundis
Art never expresses anything but itself.
“The Decay of Lying”
Paradox though it may seem—and paradoxes are always dangerous things—it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life.
“The Decay of Lying”
When Art is more varied, Nature will, no doubt, be more varied also.
“The Decay of Lying”
Art never expresses anything but itself.
“The Decay of Lying”
No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.
“The Decay of Lying”
Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.
“The Decay of Lying”
For there is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual.
“The Critic as Artist”
Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing.
“The Critic as Artist”
The difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is absolutely subjective.
“The Critic as Artist”
There are two ways of disliking art, Ernest. One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.
“The Critic as Artist”
For the real artist is he who proceeds, not from feeling to form, but from form to thought and passion.
“The Critic as Artist”
Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own.
“The Critic as Artist”
Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice.
“The Critic as Artist”
More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Algernon: Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a university. They do it so well in the daily papers.
The Importance of Being Earnest
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one’s self over poetry is an honour.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
There is no literary public in England except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all the people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
There is a great deal to be said in favour of reading a novel backwards. The last page is, as a rule, the most interesting....
“A Thought-Reader’s Novel”
We should all be much improved if we started the day with a fine passage of English poetry.
“A New Calendar”
A real philanthropist should recognize it as part of his duties to buy every new book of verse that appears.
“News from Parnassus”
One should not be too severe on English novels: they are the only relaxation of the intellectually unemployed.
“Pleasing and Prattling”
It is pleasanter to have the entree to Balzac’s society than to receive cards from all the duchesses in Mayfair.
“Balzac in English”
From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates.
“The Critic as Artist”
To the [poet] belongs life in its full and absolute entirely, not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.
“The Critic as Artist”
The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with facts under the guise of fiction.
“The Decay of Lying”
I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade shuld be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mr. Ruskin once described the characters in George Eliot’s novels as being like the sweepings of a Pentonville omnibus....
“The Decay of Lying”
We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.
“The Decay of Lying”
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.
“The Decay of Lying”
[Modern memoirs] are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
“The Critic as Artist”
As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.
“The Critic as Artist”
In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public calls an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Gwendolen: I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
The Importance of Being Earnest
I quite admit that modern novels have many good points. All I insist on is that, as a class, they are quite unreadable.
“The Decay of Lying”
Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible “points of view” his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
“The Decay of Lying”
Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lighning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do anything except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate.
“The Decay of Lying”
In modern days … the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common, and should, if possible, be discouraged.
“The Decay of Lying”
… it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry-tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any moral tale in the whole of literature.
“The Decay of Lying”
Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.
“The Decay of Lying”
Yes, writing has done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice.
“The Critic as Artist”
Gilbert: Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
“The Critic as Artist”
Ernest: But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
Gilbert: Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read. That is all.
“The Critic as Artist”
To have been well brought up is a great drawback nowadays. It shuts one out from so much.
A Woman of No Importance
Mrs. Erlynne: Don’t use ugly words, Windermere. They are vulgar.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune … to lose both looks like carelessness.
The Importance of Being Earnest
One must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.
The Importance of Being Earnest
One can survive everything, nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
A Woman of No Importance
Duty is what one expects from others, it is not what one does oneself.
A Woman of No Importance
Nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Similarly in “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime”
I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
There are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that others might pick them up.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I never talk during music, at least during good music. If one hears bad music, it is one’s duty to drown it in conversation.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself....
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best way of ending one.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”
The sure way of knowing nothing about life, is to try to make oneself useful.
“The Critic as Artist”
To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.
“The Critic as Artist”
A cultured Mahomedan once remarked to us, “You Christians are so occupied in misinterpreting the fourth commandment that you have never thought of making an artistic application of the second.”
“The Decay of Lying”
It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.
“The Critic as Artist”
There are things that are right to say, but that may be said at the wrong time and to the wrong people.
A Woman of No Importance
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
One should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn’t talk about a thing, it has never happened.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Society, civilised society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals....
The Picture of Dorian Gray
One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Cecil Graham: Oh! gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. Now, I never moralise. A man who moralises is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralises is invariably plain.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Lady Bracknell: Good-afternoon, dear Algernon, I hope you are behaving well.
Algernon: I’m feeling very well, Aunt Augusta.
Lady Bracknell: That’s not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Cecily: Pray do! I think that whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Cecily: This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manner. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
Gwendolen: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.
The Importance of Being Earnest
In point of fact, what is interesting about people in good Society … is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask.
“The Decay of Lying”
I can resist everything except temptation.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Hesitation of any kind is a sign of mental decay in the young, of physical weakness in the old.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Nowadays to be found intelligible is to be found out.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature … to sympathise with a friend’s success.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism.
De Profundis
Every little action of the common day makes or unmakes a character.
De Profundis
Those who have much are often greedy, those who have little always share.
De Profundis
The supreme vice is shallowness.
De Profundis
No one survives being over-estimated, nor is there any surer way of destroying an author’s reputation than to glorify him without judgment and to praise him without tact.
“Great Writers by Little Men”
Anybody can be reasonable, but to be sane is not common; and sane poets are as rare as blue lilies....
“A Note on Some Modern Poets”
How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions!
“The Critic as Artist”
What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
“The Critic as Artist”
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
Temperament is the primary requisite of the critic....
“The Critic as Artist”
He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always a sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity if not a decadence of morals.
“Pen, Pencil and Poison”
Gilbert: A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
“The Critic as Artist”
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Like all poetical natures, [Christ] loved ignorant people. He knew that in the soul of one who is ignorant there is always room for a great idea.
De Profundis
Cecily: I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Algernon: If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.
The Importance of Being Earnest
People have a careless way of talking about a “born liar,” just as they talk about a born poet. But in both cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion.
“The Decay of Lying”
Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful.
“The Decay of Lying”
Lying for the sake of the improvement of the young, which is the basis of home education, still lingers amongst us.
“The Decay of Lying”
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.
A Woman of No Importance
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefit of their experience.
“The American Invasion”
No office is too mean, no care too lowly for the thing we women love.
A Woman of No Importance
Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have merely to reform it.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods and sickly thoughts.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The very essence of romance is uncertainty.
The Importance of Being Earnest
In married life three is company, two is none.
The Importance of Being Earnest
The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The real drawback to marriage is that it makes one unselfish.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Every experience is of value, and, whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an experience.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failure.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self, and one always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in A Woman of No Importance
The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Those who are faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who know love’s tragedies.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The thing that lends to life its sordid security [is] the fact that one can never repeat exactly the same emotion.
“The Critic as Artist”
To have a capacity for a passion and not to realise it, is to make oneself incomplete and limited.
“The Critic as Artist”
The aim of Love is to love: no more, and no less.
De Profundis
There is no prison in any world into which Love cannot force an entrance.
De Profundis
The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion was never returned, she had kept all her illusions.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one’s worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one’s personality.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Dumby: It is perfectly brutal the way most women nowadays behave to men who are not their husbands.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Lord Darlington: Cecil, if one really loves a woman, all other women in the world become absolutely meaningless to one. Love changes one—I am changed.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Lady Bracknell: To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Chasuble: But is a man not equally attractive when married?
Miss Prism: No married man is ever attractive except to his wife.
Chasuble: And often, I’ve been told, not even to her.
The Importance of Being Earnest
I have always been of the opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Algernon: Divorces are made in heaven—
The Importance of Being Earnest
It is perfectly monstrous … the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
A Woman of No Importance
There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating—people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Like all people who try to exhaust a subject, he exhausted his listeners.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have shown, if indeed it required showing, that between the famous and the infamous there is but one step, if so much as one.
De Profundis
It is always with the best intentions that the worst work is done.
“The Critic as Artist”
We are dominated by the fanatic, whose worst vice is his sincerity.
“The Critic as Artist”
The old believe in everything; the middle-aged suspect everything; the young know everything.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.
“Mr. Oscar Wilde Again”
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
“The Decay of Lying”
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.
“The Critic as Artist”
When people talk to us about others they are usually dull. When they talk to us about themselves they are nearly always interesting, and if one could shut them up, when they become wearisome, as easily as one can shut up a book of which one has grown wearied, they would be perfect absolutely.
“The Critic as Artist”
Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.
“The Critic as Artist”
To know anything about oneself one must know all about others.
“The Critic as Artist”
The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
De Profundis
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their life a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
De Profundis
There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserves.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I like Wagner’s music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“[Basil Hallward] says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice.”
Lord Henry smiled. “People are very fond of giving away that which they need most themselves....”
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
“To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,” he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. “Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.”
The Picture of Dorian Gray
When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Gwendolen: Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.
The Importance of Being Earnest
It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the same stuff.
“The Decay of Lying”
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astonishing stupidity of optimism.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
But I like talking to a brick wall—it’s the only thing in the world that never contradicts me!
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
One should always be a little improbable.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
A Woman of No Importance
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
When people agree with me, I always feel I must be wrong.
“The Critic as Artist”
Similarly in Lady Windermere’s Fan
The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
To be popular, one must be a mediocrity.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is the passions about whose origins we deceived ourselves, that tyrannized most thoroughly over us.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
None of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
To reject one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development.
De Profundis
Considered as an instrument of thought, the English mind is coarse and undeveloped.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself.
“The Critic as Artist”
One should, of course, have no prejudices; but, as a great Frenchman remarked a hundred years ago, it is one’s business in such matters to have preferences, and when one has preferences, one ceases to be fair.
“The Critic as Artist”
If you wish to understand others, you must intensify your individualism.
“The Critic as Artist”
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
I have always been of the opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
“The Relation of Dress to Art”
Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity.
“The Decay of Lying”
After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own.
“The Critic as Artist”
Just as the philanthropist is the nuisance of the ethical sphere, so the nuisance of the intellectual sphere is the man who is so occupied in trying to educate others, that he has never had any time to educate himself.
“The Critic as Artist”
Gilbert: Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
“The Critic as Artist”
There is no reason why a man should show his life to the world. The world does not understand things.
De Profundis
The sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.
De Profundis
I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
When one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
His principles were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A moment may ruin a life.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Jack: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
The Importance of Being Earnest
We are beginning to be over-educated; at least everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.
“The Decay of Lying”
Pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after politics.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It was a fatal day when the public discovered that the pen is mightier than the paving-stone, and can be made as offensive as the brickbat.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Authority is as destructive to those who exercise it as it is to those on whom it is exercised.
“The Case of Warder Martin:
Some Cruelties of Prison Life”
Similarly in “The Soul of Man under Socialism”
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
“The Critic as Artist”
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
“The Critic as Artist”
There is no country in the world so much in need of unpractical people as this country of ours.
“The Critic as Artist”
What we want are unpractical people who see beyond the moment, and think beyond the day.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
“The Critic as Artist”
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
The one duty we owe to history is to re-write it.
“The Critic as Artist”
The one charm of the past is that it is past.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
As one reads history, not in the expurgated editioins written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment that it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. It obviously follows that the more punishment is inflicted the more crime is produced....
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Plato had pointed out before how extreme liberty of democracy always resulted in despotism....
“The Rise of Historical Criticism”
The English mind is always in a rage. The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians.
“The Critic as Artist”
As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possible admire them.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
We are often told that the poor are grateful for charity. Some of them are, no doubt, but the best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone one who has read history, is man’s original virtue.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendee voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
There is only one class in the community that thinks more about money than the rich, and that is the poor. The poor can think of nothing else. That is the misery of being poor.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.
A Woman of No Importance
Lord Illingworth: Moderation is a fatal thing.
Lady Hunstanton: Nothing succeeds like excess.
A Woman of No Importance
Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oh! what a lesson! and what a pity that in life we only get our lessons when they are of no use to us!
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
Actions are the first tragedy in life, words are the second.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Mrs. Erlynne: I thought I had no heart. I find I have, and a heart doesn’t suit me, Windermere. Somehow it doesn’t go with modern dress. It makes one look old. And it spoils one’s career at critical moments.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Ideals are dangerous things. Realities are better.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Only the shallow know themselves.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Time is waste of money.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!
The Importance of Being Earnest
Mrs. Allonby: Life, Lady Stutfield, is simply a mauvais quart d’heure made up of exquisite moments.
A Woman of No Importance
In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides itself and passion has its dreams.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
What people call insincerity is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
“The Critic as Artist”
[Good resolutions] are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The way of paradoxes is the way of truth.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Conscience and cowardice are really the same things....
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils.
“The Critic as Artist”
Charity creates a multitude of sins.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought or motion to which Sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.
De Profundis
Where there is Sorrow there is holy ground.
De Profundis
Still I believe that in the beginning God made a world for each separate man, and in that world which is within us we should seek to live.
Letter to Robert Ross, April 1, 1897
A fine theatre is a temple where all the muses may meet, a second Parnassus....
“Twelfth Night at Oxford”
As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
“The Critic as Artist”
It takes a thoroughly grasping age, such as that in which we live, to set above fine intellectual virtues, those shallow and emotional virtues that are an immediate practical benefit to itself.
“The Critic as Artist”
[The contemplative life] is the one great thing that could make our own age great also; for the real weakness of England lies, not in incomplete armaments or unfortified coasts, not in the poverty that creeps through sunless lanes, or the drunkenness that brawls in loathsome courts, but simply in the fact that her ideals are emotional and not intellectual.
“The Critic as Artist”
Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.
“The Critic as Artist”
Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.
“The Critic as Artist”
Criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.
“The Critic as Artist”
When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on....
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
The gamin in the gutter may be a necessity, but the gamin in discussion is a nuisance.
“More Radical Ideas upon Dress Reform”
The word practical is nearly always the last refuge of the uncivilised.
“Ideas upon Dress Reform”
It is not, Sir, by the mimes that the muses are to be judged.
“Puppets and Actors”
Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.
“The Decay of Lying”
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
“The Critic as Artist”
The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
“The Critic as Artist”
We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.
“The Critic as Artist”
People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
“The Critic as Artist”
If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.
De Profundis
Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.
De Profundis
All great ideas are dangerous.
De Profundis
Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.
De Profundis
To speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
De Profundis
It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible ...
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lord Windermere: Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults—ah!—there is the sting of life.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Lady Windermere: Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.
“The Decay of Lying”
England is the home of lost ideas.
“The Decay of Lying”
America is the noisiest country that ever existed.
“Impressions of America”
“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour’s cast-off clothes.
“Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?” inquired the Duchess.
“They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lady Hunstanton: What are American dry goods?
Lord Illingworth: American novels.
A Woman of No Importance
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I was disappointed with Niagara—most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
“Impression of America”
Lady Caroline: There are a great many things you haven’t got in America, I am told, Miss Worsley. They say you have no ruins, and no curiosities.
Mrs. Allonby (to Lady Stutfield): What nonsense! They have their mothers and their manners.
A Woman of No Importance
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The American man marries early, and the American woman marries often; and they get on extremely well together.
“The American Man”
Lady Caroline: These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the paradise of women.
Lord Illingworth: It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.
A Woman of No Importance
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
The strange thing about American civilisation is, that the women are most charming when they are way from their own country, the men most charming when they are at home.
“The American Man”
[American women] take their dresses from Paris, and their manners from Piccadilly, and wear both charmingly. They have a quaint pertness, a delightful conceit, a native self-assertion. They insist on being paid compliments and have almost succeeded in making Englishmen eloquent.... [They] can actually tell a story without forgetting the point—an accomplishment that is extremely rare among women of other countries.... They have however one grave fault— their mothers.
“The American Invasion”
Scandals are extremely rare in America, and should one occur, so paramount in society is female influence, that it is the man who is never forgiven.
“The American Man”
They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon [in Leadville] where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was a printed notice: “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”
“Impressions of America”
Nowadays we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant thing to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is, no one has yet discovered.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Stutfield: It must be terribly, terribly distressing to be in debt.
Lord Alfred: One must have some occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about.
A Woman of No Importance
My own business bores me to death. I always prefer other people’s.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The only horrible thing in life is ennui.... That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in Lady Windermere’s Fan
It seems to me we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
De Profundis
I assure you that the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or a near relation.
Letter to Robert Ross, April 1, 1897
It is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.
“The Critic as Artist”
England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.
“The Critic as Artist”
Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.
“The Critic as Artist”
Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is, of course, well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its advantages.
“The Decay of Lying”
Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
“The Critic as Artist”
Lady Bracknell: Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people that can’t get into it do that.
The Importance of Being Earnest
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society....
“The Decay of Lying”
Nowadays we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.
“The Critic as Artist”
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
“The Critic as Artist”
We live in the age of the over-worked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
“The Critic as Artist”
In the present state of England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good....
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Hélas!
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of god:
Is that time dead? Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
Requiescat
Tread light, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone.
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Requiescat
Tread light, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone.
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Originally appeared under this title in Pall Mall Gazette,
February 21, 1885. Reprinted from Miscellanies by Oscar
Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 63-67.
LAST night, at Prince’s Hall, Mr. Whistler made his first public appearance as a lecturer on art, and spoke for more than an hour with really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures of the kind. Mr. Whistler began his lecture with a very pretty aria on prehistoric history, describing how in earlier times hunter and warrior would go forth to chase and foray, while the artist sat at home making cup and bowl for their service. Rude imitations of nature they were first, like the gourd bottle, till the sense of beauty and form developed and, in all its exquisite proportions, the first vase was fashioned. Then came a higher civilisation of architecture and armchairs, and with exquisite design, and dainty diaper, the useful things of life were made lovely; and the hunter and the warrior lay on the couch when they were tired, and, when they were thirsty, drank from the bowl, and never cared to lose the exquisite proportion of the one, or the delightful ornament of the other; and this attitude of the primitive anthropophagous Philistine formed the text of the lecture and was the attitude which Mr. Whistler entreated his audience to adopt towards art. Remembering, no doubt, many charming invitations to wonderful private views, this fashionable assemblage seemed somewhat aghast, and not a little amused, at being told that the slightest appearance among a civilised people of any joy in beautiful things is a grave impertinence to all painters; but Mr. Whistler was relentless, and, with charming ease and much grace of manner, explained to the public that the only thing they should cultivate was ugliness, and that on their permanent stupidity rested all the hopes of art in the future.
The scene was in every way delightful; he stood there, a miniature Mephistopheles, mocking the majority! He was like a brilliant surgeon lecturing to a class composed of subjects destined ultimately for dissection, and solemnly assuring them how valuable to science their maladies were, and how absolutely uninteresting the slightest symptoms of health on their part would be. In fairness to the audience, however, I must say that they seemed extremely gratified at being rid of the dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr. Whistler that no matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such a thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight and half closing his eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a picture which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare to enjoy. Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off, with all the speed and splendour of fireworks, and the archaeologists, who spend their lives in verifying the birthplaces of nobodies, and estimate the value of a work of art by its date or its decay; at the art critics who always treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try and find out the plot; at dilettanti in general and amateurs in particular; and (O mea culpa!) at dress reformers most of all. ‘Did not Velasquez paint crinolines? What more do you want?’
Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr. Whistler turned to nature, and in a few moments convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank holidays, and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one that occurs in Corot’s letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces and the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.
Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to be lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things about them, Mr. Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage about Fusiyama on a fan, and made his bow to an audience which he had succeeded in completely fascinating by his wit, his brilliant paradoxes, and, at times, his real eloquence. Of course, with regard to the value of beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr. Whistler. An artist is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle. That an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l’horrible, is now a commonplace of the schools, the argot of the atelier, but I strongly deny that charming people should be condemned to live with magenta ottomans and Albert-blue curtains in their rooms in order that some painter may observe the side-lights on the one and the values of the other. Nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting. I say that only an artist is a judge of art; there is a wide difference. As long as a painter is a painter merely, he should not be allowed to talk of anything but mediums and megilp, and on those subjects should be compelled to hold his tongue; it is only when he becomes an artist that the secret laws of artistic creation are revealed to him. For there are not many arts, but one art merely—poem, picture and Parthenon, sonnet and statue— all are in their essence the same, and he who knows one knows all. But the poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche. However, I should not enjoy anybody else’s lectures unless in a few points I disagreed with them, and Mr. Whistler’s lecture last night was, like everything that he does, a masterpiece. Not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests will it be remembered, but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages—passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze those who had looked on Mr. Whistler as a master of persiflage merely, and had not known him as we do, as a master of painting also. For that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.
THE RELATION OF DRESS TO ART: A NOTE IN BLACK
AND WHITE ON MR. WHISTLER’S LECTURE
Originally appeared under this title in Pall Mall Gazette,
February 28, 1885. Reprinted from Miscellanies by Oscar
Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 68-72.
“HOW can you possibly paint these ugly three-cornered hats?” asked a reckless art critic once of Sir Joshua Reynolds. “I see light and shade in them,” answered the artist. “Les grands coloristes,” says Baudelaire, in a charming article on the artistic value of frock coats, “les grands coloristes savent faire de la couleur avec un habit noir, une cravate blanche, et un fond gris.”
“Art seeks and finds the beautiful in all times, as did her high priest Rembrandt, when he saw the picturesque grandeur of the Jews’ quarter of Amsterdam, and lamented not that its inhabitants were not Greeks,” were the fine and simple words used by Mr. Whistler in one of the most valuable passages of his lecture. The most valuable, that is, to the painter: for there is nothing of which the ordinary English painter needs more to be reminded than that the true artist does not wait for life to be made picturesque for him, but sees life under picturesque conditions always—under conditions, that is to say, which are at once new and delightful. But between the attitude of the painter towards the public and the attitude of a people towards art, there is a wide difference. That, under certain conditions of light and shade, what is ugly in fact may in its effect become beautiful, is true; and this, indeed, is the real modernité of art: but these conditions are exactly what we cannot be always sure of, as we stroll down Piccadilly in the glaring vulgarity of the noonday, or lounge in the park with a foolish sunset as a background. Were we able to carry our chiaroscuro about with us, as we do our umbrellas, all would be well; but this being impossible, I hardly think that pretty and delightful people will continue to wear a style of dress as ugly as it is useless and as meaningless as it is monstrous, even on the chance of such a master as Mr. Whistler spiritualising them into a symphony or refining them into a mist. For the arts are made for life, and not life for the arts.
Nor do I feel quite sure that Mr. Whistler has been himself always true to the dogma he seems to lay down, that a painter should paint only the dress of his age and of his actual surroundings: far be it from me to burden a butterfly with the heavy responsibility of its past: I have always been of opinion that consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative: but have we not all seen, and most of us admired, a picture from his hand of exquisite English girls strolling by an opal sea in the fantastic dresses of Japan? Has not Tite Street been thrilled with the tidings that the models of Chelsea were posing to the master, in peplums, for pastels?
Whatever comes from Mr. Whistler’s brush is far too perfect in its loveliness to stand or fall by any intellectual dogmas on art, even by his own: for Beauty is justified of all her children, and cares nothing for explanations: but it is impossible to look through any collection of modern pictures in London, from Burlington House to the Grosvenor Gallery, without feeling that the professional model is ruining painting and reducing it to a condition of mere pose and pastiche.
Are we not all weary of him, that venerable impostor fresh from the steps of the Piazza di Spagna, who, in the leisure moments that he can spare from his customary organ, makes the round of the studios and is waited for in Holland Park? Do we not all recognise him, when, with the gay insouciance of his nation, he reappears on the walls of our summer exhibitions as everything that he is not, and as nothing that he is, glaring at us here as a patriarch of Canaan, here beaming as a brigand from the Abruzzi? Popular is he, this poor peripatetic professor of posing, with those whose joy it is to paint the posthumous portrait of the last philanthropist who in his lifetime had neglected to be photographed,—yet he is the sign of the decadence, the symbol of decay.
For all costumes are caricatures. The basis of Art is not the Fancy Ball. Where there is loveliness of dress, there is no dressing up. And so, were our national attire delightful in colour, and in construction simple and sincere; were dress the expression of the loveliness that it shields and of the swiftness and motion that it does not impede; did its lines break from the shoulder instead of bulging from the waist; did the inverted wineglass cease to be the ideal of form; were these things brought about, as brought about they will be, then would painting be no longer an artificial reaction against the ugliness of life, but become, as it should be, the natural expression of life’s beauty. Nor would painting merely, but all the other arts also, be the gainers by a change such as that which I propose; the gainers, I mean, through the increased atmosphere of Beauty by which the artists would be surrounded and in which they would grow up. For Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets. There is not, for instance, a single delicate line, or delightful proportion, in the dress of the Greeks, which is not echoed exquisitely in their architecture. A nation arrayed in stove-pipe hats and dress-improvers might have built the Pantechnichon possibly, but the Parthenon never. And finally, there is this to be said: Art, it is true, can never have any other claim but her own perfection, and it may be that the artist, desiring merely to contemplate and to create, is wise in not busying himself about change in others: yet wisdom is not always the best; there are times when she sinks to the level of common-sense; and from the passionate folly of those—and there are many— who desire that Beauty shall be confined no longer to the bric-à-brac of the collector and the dust of the museum, but shall be, as it should be, the natural and national inheritance of all,—from this noble unwisdom, I say, who knows what new loveliness shall be given to life, and, under these more exquisite conditions, what perfect artist born? Le milieu se renouvelant, l’art se renouvelle.
Speaking, however, from his own passionless pedestal, Mr. Whistler, in pointing out that the power of the painter is to be found in his power of vision, not in his cleverness of hand, has expressed a truth which needed expression, and which, coming from the lord of form and colour, cannot fail to have its influence. His lecture, the Apocrypha though it be for the people, yet remains from this time as the Bible for the painter, the masterpiece of masterpieces, the song of songs. It is true he has pronounced the panegyric of the Philistine, but I fancy Ariel praising Caliban for a jest: and, in that he has read the Commination Service over the critics, let all men thank him, the critics themselves, indeed, most of all, for he has now relieved them from the necessity of a tedious existence. Considered, again, merely as an orator, Mr. Whistler seems to me to stand almost alone. Indeed, among all our public speakers I know but few who can combine so felicitously as he does the mirth and malice of Puck with the style of the minor prophets.
Originally appeared under this title in Court and Society
Review, March 23, 1887. Reprinted from Reviews by Oscar
Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 77-82.
A TERRIBLE danger is hanging over the Americans in London. Their future and their reputation this season depend entirely on the success of Buffalo Bill and Mrs. Brown-Potter. The former is certain to draw; for English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilisation. When they sight Sandy Hook they look to their rifles and ammunition; and, after dining once at Delmonico’s, start off for Colorado or California, for Montana or the Yellow Stone Park. Rocky Mountains charm them more than riotous millionaires; they have been known to prefer buffaloes to Boston. Why should they not? The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their “Hub,” as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustle and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there. Better the Far West with its grizzly bears and its untamed cow-boys, its free open-air life and its free open-air manners, its boundless prairie and its boundless mendacity! This is what Buffalo Bill is going to bring to London; and we have no doubt that London will fully appreciate his show.
With regard to Mrs. Brown-Potter, as acting is no longer considered absolutely essential for success on the English stage, there is really no reason why the pretty bright-eyed lady who charmed us all last June by her merry laugh and her nonchalant ways, should not—to borrow an expression from her native language—make a big boom and paint the town red. We sincerely hope she will; for, on the whole, the American invasion has done English society a great deal of good. American women are bright, clever, and wonderfully cosmopolitan. Their patriotic feelings are limited to an admiration for Niagara and a regret for the Elevated Railway; and, unlike the men, they never bore us with Bunkers Hill. They take their dresses from Paris and their manners from Piccadilly, and wear both charmingly. They have a quaint pertness, a delightful conceit, a native self-assertion. They insist on being paid compliments and have almost succeeded in making Englishmen eloquent. For our aristocracy they have an ardent admiration; they adore titles and are a permanent blow to Republican principles. In the art of amusing men they are adepts, both by nature and education, and can actually tell a story without forgetting the point—an accomplishment that is extremely rare among the women of other countries. It is true that they lack repose and that their voices are somewhat harsh and strident when they land first at Liverpool; but after a time one gets to love these pretty whirlwinds in petticoats that sweep so recklessly through society and are so agitating to all duchesses who have daughters. There is something fascinating in their funny, exaggerated gestures and their petulant way of tossing the head. Their eyes have no magic nor mystery in them, but they challenge us for combat; and when we engage we are always worsted. Their lips seem made for laughter and yet they never grimace. As for their voices, they soon get them into tune. Some of them have been known to acquire a fashionable drawl in two seasons; and after they have been presented to Royalty they all roll their R’s as vigorously as a young equerry or an old lady-in-waiting. Still, they never really lose their accent; it keeps peeping out here and there, and when they chatter together they are like a bevy of peacocks. Nothing is more amusing than to watch two American girls greeting each other in a drawing-room or in the Row. They are like children with their shrill staccato cries of wonder, their odd little exclamations. Their conversation sounds like a series of exploding crackers; they are exquisitely incoherent and use a sort of primitive, emotional language. After five minutes they are left beautifully breathless and look at each other half in amusement and half in affection. If a stolid young Englishman is fortunate enough to be introduced to them he is amazed at their extraordinary vivacity, their electric quickness of repartee, their inexhaustible store of curious catchwords. He never really understands them, for their thoughts flutter about with the sweet irresponsibility of butterflies; but he is pleased and amused and feels as if he were in an aviary. On the whole, American girls have a wonderful charm and, perhaps, the chief secret of their charm is that they never talk seriously except about amusements. They have, however, one grave fault—their mothers. Dreary as were those old Pilgrim Fathers who left our shores more than two centuries ago to found a New England beyond seas, the Pilgrim Mothers who have returned to us in the nineteenth century are drearier still.
Here and there, of course, there are exceptions, but as a class they are either dull, dowdy or dyspeptic. It is only fair to the rising generation of America to state that they are not to blame for this. Indeed, they spare no pains at all to bring up their parents properly and to give them a suitable, if somewhat late, education. From its earliest years every American child spends most of its time in correcting the faults of its father and mother; and no one who has had the opportunity of watching an American family on the deck of an Atlantic steamer, or in the refined seclusion of a New York boarding-house, can fail to have been struck by this characteristic of their civilisation. In America the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience. A boy of only eleven or twelve years of age will firmly but kindly point out to his father his defects of manner or temper; will never weary of warning him against extravagance, idleness, late hours, unpunctuality, and the other temptations to which the aged are so particularly exposed; and sometimes, should he fancy that he is monopolising too much of the conversation at dinner, will remind him, across the table, of the new child’s adage, “Parents should be seen, not heard.” Nor does any mistaken idea of kindness prevent the little American girl from censuring her mother whenever it is necessary. Often, indeed, feeling that a rebuke conveyed in the presence of others is more truly efficacious than one merely whispered in the quiet of the nursery, she will call the attention of perfect strangers to her mother’s general untidiness, her want of intellectual Boston conversation, immoderate love of iced water and green corn, stinginess in the matter of candy, ignorance of the usages of the best Baltimore society, bodily ailments and the like. In fact, it may be truly said that no American child is ever blind to the deficiencies of its parents, no matter how much it may love them.
Yet, somehow, this educational system has not been so successful as it deserved. In many cases, no doubt, the material with which the children had to deal was crude and incapable of real development; but the fact remains that the American mother is a tedious person. The American father is better, for he is never seen in London. He passes his life entirely in Wall Street and communicates with his family once a month by means of a telegram in cipher. The mother, however, is always with us, and, lacking the quick imitative faculty of the younger generation, remains uninteresting and provincial to the last. In spite of her, however, the American girl is always welcome. She brightens our dull dinner parties for us and makes life go pleasantly by for a season. In the race for coronets she often carries off the prize; but, once she has gained the victory, she is generous and forgives her English rivals everything, even their beauty.
Warned by the example of her mother that American women do not grow old gracefully, she tries not to grow old at all and often succeeds. She has exquisite feet and hands, is always bien chaussée et bien gantée and can talk brilliantly upon any subject, provided that she knows nothing about it.
Her sense of humour keeps her from the tragedy of a grande passion, and, as there is neither romance nor humility in her love, she makes an excellent wife. What her ultimate influence on English life will be it is difficult to estimate at present; but there can be no doubt that, of all the factors that have contributed to the social revolution of London, there are few more important, and none more delightful, than the American Invasion.
A CHEAP EDITION OF A GREAT MAN
[On a Biography of Rossetti]
Originally appeared under this title in Pall Mall Gazette,
April 18, 1887. Reprinted from Reviews by Oscar Wilde
(London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 148-53.
FORMERLY we used to canonise our great men; nowadays we vulgarise them. The vulgarisation of Rossetti has been going on for some time past with really remarkable success, and there seems no probability at present of the process being discontinued. The grass was hardly green upon the quiet grave in Birchington churchyard when Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. William Sharp rushed into print with their Memoirs and Recollections. Then came the usual mob of magazine-hacks with their various views and attitudes, and now Mr. Joseph Knight has produced for the edification of the British public a popular biography of the poet of the Blessed Damozel, the painter of Dante’s Dream.
It is only fair to state that Mr. Knight’s work is much better than that of his predecessors in the same field. His book is, on the whole, modestly and simply written; whatever its other faults may be, it is at least free from affectation of any kind; and it makes no serious pretence at being either exhaustive or definitive. Yet the best we can say of it is that it is just the sort of biography Guildenstern might have written of Hamlet. Nor does its unsatisfactory character come merely from the ludicrous inadequacy of the materials at Mr. Knight’s disposal; it is the whole scheme and method of the book that is radically wrong. Rossetti’s was a great personality, and personalities such as his do not easily survive shilling primers. Sooner or later they have inevitably to come down to the level of their biographers, and in the present instance nothing could be more absolutely commonplace than the picture Mr. Knight gives us of the wonderful seer and singer whose life he has so recklessly essayed to write.
No doubt there are many people who will be deeply interested to know that Rossetti was once chased round his garden by an infuriated zebu he was trying to exhibit to Mr. Whistler, or that he had a great affection for a dog called “Dizzy,” or that “sloshy” was one of his favourite words of contempt, or that Mr. Gosse thought him very like Chaucer in appearance, or that he had “an absolute disqualification” for whist-playing, or that he was very fond of quoting the Bab Ballads, or that he once said that if he could live by writing poetry he would see painting d—d! For our part, however, we cannot help expressing our regret that such a shallow and superficial biography as this should ever have been published. It is but a sorry task to rip the twisted ravel from the worn garment of life and to turn the grout in a drained cup. Better, after all, that we knew a painter only through his vision and a poet through his song, than that the image of a great man should be marred and made mean for us by the clumsy geniality of good intentions. A true artist, and such Rossetti undoubtedly was, reveals himself so perfectly in his work, that unless a biographer has something more valuable to give us than idle anecdotes and unmeaning tales, his labour is misspent and his industry misdirected.
Bad, however, as is Mr. Knight’s treatment of Rossetti’s life, his treatment of Rossetti’s poetry is infinitely worse. Considering the small size of the volume, and the consequently limited number of extracts, the amount of misquotation is almost incredible, and puts all recent achievements in this sphere of modern literature completely into the shade. The fine line in the first canto of Rose Mary:
What glints there like a lance that flees?
appears as:
What glints there like a glance that flees?
which is very painful nonsense; in the description of that graceful and fanciful sonnet Autumn Idleness, the deer are represented as “grazing from hillock eaves” instead of gazing from hillock-eaves; the opening of Dantis Tenebrae is rendered quite incomprehensible by the substitution of “my” for “thy” in the second line; even such a well-known ballad as Sister Helen is misquoted, and, indeed, from the Burden of Nineveh, the Blessed Damozel, the King’s Tragedy and Guido Cavalcanti’s lovely ballata, down to the Portrait and such sonnets as Love-sweetness, Farewell to the Glen, and A Match with the Moon, there is not one single poem that does not display some careless error or some stupid misprint.
As for Rossetti’s elaborate system of punctuation, Mr. Knight pays no attention to it whatsoever. Indeed, he shows quite a rollicking indifference to all the secrets and subtleties of style, and inserts or removes stops in a manner that is absolutely destructive to the lyrical beauty of the verse. The hyphen, also, so constantly employed by Rossetti in the case of such expressions as “hillock-eaves” quoted above, “hill-fire,” “birth-hour,” and the like, is almost invariably disregarded, and by the brilliant omission of a semicolon Mr. Knight has succeeded in spoiling one of the best stanzas in The Staff and Scrip—a poem, by the way, that he speaks of as The Staff and the Scrip (sic). After this tedious comedy of errors it seems almost unnecessary to point out that the earliest Italian poet is not called Ciullo D’Alcano (sic), or that The Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich (sic) is not the title of Clough’s boisterous epic, or that Dante and his Cycle (sic) is not the name Rossetti gave to his collection of translations; and why Troy Town should appear in the index as Tory Town is really quite inexplicable, unless it is intended as a compliment to Mr. Hall Caine who once dedicated, or rather tried to dedicate, to Rossetti a lecture on the relations of poets to politics. We are sorry, too, to find an English dramatic critic misquoting Shakespeare, as we had always been of opinion that this was a privilege reserved specially for our English actors.
We sincerely hope that there will soon be an end to all biographies of this kind. They rob life of much of its dignity and its wonder, add to death itself a new terror, and make one wish that all art were anonymous. Nor could there have been any more unfortunate choice of a subject for popular treatment than that to which we owe the memoir that now lies before us. A pillar of fire to the few who knew him, and of cloud to the many who knew him not, Dante Gabriel Rossetti lived apart from the gossip and tittle-tattle of a shallow age. He never trafficked with the merchants for his soul, nor brought his wares into the market-place for the idle to gape at. Passionate and romantic though he was, yet there was in his nature something of high austerity. He loved seclusion, and hated notoriety, and would have shuddered at the idea that within a few years after his death he was to make his appearance in a series of popular biographies, sandwiched between the author of Pickwick and the Great Lexicographer. One man alone, the friend his verse won for him, did he desire should write his life, and it is to Mr. Theodore Watts that we, too, must look to give us the real Rossetti. It may be admitted at once that Mr. Watts’s subject has for the moment been a little spoiled for him. Rude hands have touched it, and unmusical voices have made it sound almost common in our ears. Yet none the less is it for him to tell us of the marvel of this man whose art he has analysed with such exquisite insight, whose life he knows as no one else can know it, whom he so loyally loved and tended, and by whom he was so loyally beloved in turn. As for the others, the scribblers and nibblers of literature, if they indeed reverence Rossetti’s memory, let them pay him the one homage he would most have valued, the gracious homage of silence....
Abridged from a review of Injury and Insult that originally
appeared under the title “A
Batch of Novels” in Pall Mall
Gazette, May 2, 1887. Reprinted from Reviews by Oscar
Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 157-61.
OF the three great Russian novelists of our time Tourgenieff is by far the finest artist. He has that spirit of exquisite selection, that delicate choice of detail, which is the essence of style; his work is entirely free from any personal intention; and by taking existence at its most fiery-coloured moments he can distil into a few pages of perfect prose the moods and passions of many lives.
Count Tolstoi’s method is much larger, and his field of vision more extended. He reminds us sometimes of Paul Veronese, and, like that great painter, can crowd, without over-crowding, the giant canvas on which he works. We may not at first gain from his works that artistic unity of impression which is Tourgenieff’s chief charm, but once that we have mastered the details the whole seems to have the grandeur and the simplicity of an epic. Dostoieffski differs widely from both his rivals. He is not so fine an artist as Tourgenieff, for he deals more with the facts than with the effects of life; nor has he Tolstoi’s largeness of vision and epic dignity; but he has qualities that are distinctively and absolutely his own, such as a fierce intensity of passion and concentration of impulse, a power of dealing with the deepest mysteries of psychology and the most hidden springs of life, and a realism that is pitiless in its fidelity, and terrible because it is true. Some time ago we had occasion to draw attention to his marvellous novel Crime and Punishment, where in the haunt of impurity and vice a harlot and an assassin meet together to read the story of Dives and Lazarus, and the outcast girl leads the sinner to make atonement for his sin.
And by what a subtle objective method does Dostoieffski show us his characters! He never tickets them with a list nor labels them with a description. We grow to know them very gradually, as we know people whom we meet in society, at first by little tricks of manner, personal appearance, fancies in dress, and the like; and afterwards by their deeds and words; and even then they constantly elude us, for though Dostoieffski may lay bare for us the secrets of their nature, yet he never explains his personages away; they are always surprising us by something that they say or do, and keep to the end the eternal mystery of life.
Irrespective of its value as a work of art, this novel possesses a deep autobiographical interest also, as the character of Vania, the poor student who loves Natasha through all her sin and shame, is Dostoieffski’s study of himself. Goethe once had to delay the completion of one of his novels till experience had furnished him with new situations, but almost before he had arrived at manhood Dostoieffski knew life in its most real forms; poverty and suffering, pain and misery, prison, exile, and love, were soon familiar to him, and by the lips of Vania he has told his own story. This note of personal feeling, this harsh reality of actual experience, undoubtedly gives the book something of its strange fervour and terrible passion, yet it has not made it egotistic; we see things from every point of view, and we feel, not that fiction has been trammelled by fact, but that fact itself has become ideal and imaginative. Pitiless, too, though Dostoieffski is in his method as an artist, as a man he is full of human pity for all, for those who do evil as well as for those who suffer it, for the selfish no less than for those whose lives are wrecked for others and whose sacrifice is in vain. Since Adam Bede and Le Père Goriot no more powerful novel has been written than Insult and Injury....
From A House of Pomegranates and Other Tales by Oscar
Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 201-08.
EVERY afternoon, as they were coming from school, the children used to go and play in the Giant’s garden.
It was a large lovely garden, with soft green grass. Here and there over the grass stood beautiful flowers like stars, and there were twelve peach-trees that in the springtime broke out into delicate blossoms of pink and pearl, and in the autumn bore rich fruit. The birds sat on the trees and sang so sweetly that the children used to stop their games in order to listen to them. “How happy we are here!” they cried to each other.
One day the Giant came back. He had been to visit his friend the Cornish ogre, and had stayed with him for seven years. After the seven years were over he had said all that he had to say, for his conversation was limited, and he determined to return to his own castle. When he arrived he saw the children playing in the garden.
“What are you doing here?” he cried in a very gruff voice, and the children ran away.
“My own garden is my own garden,” said the Giant; “any one can understand that, and I will allow nobody to play in it but myself.” So he built a high wall all round it, and put up a notice-board.
TRESPASSERS
WILL BE
PROSECUTED
He was a very selfish Giant.
The poor children had now nowhere to play. They tried to play on the road, but the road was very dusty and full of hard stones, and they did not like it. They used to wander round the high wall when their lessons were over, and talk about the beautiful garden inside. “How happy we were there,” they said to each other.
Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still Winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. “Spring has forgotten this garden,” they cried, “so we will live here all the year round.” The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. “This is a delightful spot,” he said; “we must ask the Hail on a visit.” So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.
“I cannot understand why the Spring is so late in coming,” said the Selfish Giant, as he sat at the window and looked out at his cold white garden; “I hope there will be a change in the weather.”
But the Spring never came, nor the Summer. The Autumn gave golden fruit to every garden, but to the Giant’s garden she gave none. “He is too selfish,” she said. So it was always Winter there, and the North Wind, and the Hail, and the Frost, and the Snow danced about through the trees.
One morning the Giant was lying awake in bed when he heard some lovely music. It sounded so sweet to his ears that he thought it must be the King’s musicians passing by. It was really only a little linnet singing outside his window, but it was so long since he had heard a bird sing in his garden that it seemed to him to be the most beautiful music in the world. Then the Hail stopped dancing over his head, and the North Wind ceased roaring and a delicious perfume came to him through the open casement. “I believe the Spring has come at last,” said the Giant; and he jumped out of bed and looked out.
What did he see?
He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children’s heads. The birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing. It was a lovely scene, only in one corner it was still Winter. It was the farthest corner of the garden, and in it was standing a little boy. He was so small that he could not reach up to the branches of the tree, and he was wandering all round it, crying bitterly. The poor tree was still quite covered with frost and snow, and the North Wind was blowing and roaring above it. “Climb up! little boy,” said the Tree, and it bent its branches down as low as it could; but the boy was too tiny.
And the Giant’s heart melted as he looked out. “How selfish I have been!” he said; “now I know why the Spring would not come here. I will put that poor little boy on the top of the tree, and then I will knock down the wall, and my garden shall be the children’s playground for ever and ever.” He was really very sorry for what he had done.
So he crept downstairs and opened the front door quite softly, and went out into the garden. But when the children saw him they were so frightened that they all ran away, and the garden became Winter again. Only the little boy did not run, for his eyes were so full of tears that he did not see the Giant coming. And the Giant stole up behind him and took him gently in his hand, and put him up into the tree. And the tree broke at once into blossom, and the birds came and sang on it, and the little boy stretched out his two arms and flung them round the Giant’s neck, and kissed him. And the other children, when they saw that the Giant was not wicked any longer came running back, and with them came the Spring. “It is your garden now, little children,” said the Giant, and he took a great axe and knocked down the wall. And when the people were going to market at twelve o’clock they found the Giant playing with the children in the most beautiful garden they had ever seen.
All day long they played, and in the evening they came to the Giant to bid him good-bye.
“But where is your little companion?” he said: “the boy I put into the tree.” The Giant loved him the best because he had kissed him.
“We don’t know,” answered the children; “he has gone away.”
“You must tell him to be sure and come here to-morrow,” said the Giant. But the children said they did not know where he lived, and had never seen him before; and the Giant felt very sad.
Every afternoon, when school was over, the children came and played with the Giant. But the little boy whom the Giant loved was never seen again. The Giant was very kind to all the children, yet he longed for his first little friend, and often spoke of him. “How I would like to see him!” he used to say.
Years went over, and the Giant grew very old and feeble. He could not play about any more, so he sat in a huge armchair, and watched the children at their games, and admired his garden. “I have many beautiful flowers,” he said, “but the children are the most beautiful flowers of all.”
One winter morning he looked out of his window as he was dressing. He did not hate the Winter now, for he knew that it was merely the Spring asleep, and that the flowers were resting.
Suddenly he rubbed his eyes in wonder, and looked and looked. It certainly was a marvellous sight. In the farthest corner of the garden was a tree quite covered with lovely white blossoms. Its branches were all golden, and silver fruit hung down from them, and underneath it stood the little boy he had loved.
Downstairs ran the Giant in great joy, and out into the garden. He hastened across the grass, and came near to the child. And when he came quite close his face grew red with anger, and he said, “Who hath dared to wound thee?” For on the palms of the child’s hands were the prints of two nails, and the prints of two nails were on the little feet.
“Who hath dared to wound thee?” cried the Giant; “tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.”
“Nay!” answered the child; “but these are the wounds of Love.”
“Who art thou?” said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.
And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, “You let me play once in your garden; to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.”
And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.
AN APPRECIATION OF THE YOUNG W. B. YEATS
An abridgment of “Three New Poets,” which originally
appeared in Pall Mall Gazette, July 12, 1889. Reprinted from
Reviews (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 523-25
BOOKS of poetry by young writers are usually promissory notes that are never met. Now and then, however, one comes across a volume that is so far above the average that one can hardly resist the fascinating temptation of recklessly prophesying a fine future for its author. Such a book Mr. Yeats’s Wanderings of Oisin certainly is. Here we find nobility of treatment and nobility of subject matter, delicacy of poetic instinct and richness off imaginative resource. Unequal and uneven much of the work must be admitted to be. Mr. Yeats does not try to “out-baby” Wordsworth, we are glad to say; but he occasionally succeeds in “out-glittering” Keats, and, here and there, in his book we come across strange crudities and irritating conceits. But when he is at his best he is very good. If he has not the grand simplicity of epic treatment, he has at least something of the largeness of vision that belongs to the epical temper. He does not rob of their stature the great heroes of Celtic mythology. He is very naïve and very primitive and speaks of his giants with the air of a child.
In one or two places the music is faulty, the construction is sometimes too involved, and the word “populace” in the last line is rather infelicitous; but, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel in these stanzas the presence of the true poetic spirit.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890, 1891)
After about a quarter of an hour Hallward stopped painting, looked for a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long time at the picture, biting the end of one of his huge brushes, and frowning. “It is quite finished,” he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas.
Lord Henry came over and examined the picture. It was certainly a wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well.
“My dear fellow, I congratulate you most warmly,” he said. “It is the finest portrait of modern times. Mr. Gray, come over and look at yourself.”
The lad started, as if awakened from some dream. “Is it really finished?” he murmured, stepping down from the platform.
“Quite finished,” said the painter. “ And you have sat splendidly to-day. I am awfully obliged to you.”
“That is entirely due to me,” broke in Lord Henry. “Isn’t it, Mr. Gray?”
Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture, and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognised himself for the first time. He stood there motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before. Basil Hallward’s compliments had seemed to him to be merely the charming exaggerations of friendship. He had listened to them, laughed at them, forgotten them. They had not influenced his nature. Then had come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his terrible warning of its brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full reality of the description flashed across him. Yes, there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his hair. The life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a knife, and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. His eyes deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He felt as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.
“Don’t you like it?” cried Hallward at last, stung a little by the lad’s silence, not understanding what it meant.
“Of course he likes it,” said Lord Henry. “Who wouldn’t like it ? It is one of the greatest things in modern art. I will give you anything you like to ask for it. I must have it.”
“It is not my property, Harry.”
“Whose property is it?”
“Dorian’s, of course,” answered the painter.
“He is a very lucky fellow.”
“How sad it is!” murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. “How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!”
“You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil,” cried Lord Henry, laughing. “ It would be rather hard lines on your work.”
“I should object very strongly, Harry,” said Hallward.
Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. “I believe you would, Basil. You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you than a green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say.”
The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak like that. What had happened? He seemed quite angry. His face was flushed and his cheeks burning.
“Yes,” he continued, “I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”
Hallward turned pale, and caught his hand. “Dorian! Dorian!” he cried, “don’t talk like that. I have never had such a friend as you, and I shall never have such another. You are not jealous of material things, are you?—you who are finer than any of them!”
“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!” The hot tears welled into his eyes; he tore his hand away, and, flinging himself on the divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying.
“This is your doing, Harry,” said the painter, bitterly.
Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. “It is the real Dorian Gray—that is all.”
“It is not.”
“If it is not, what have I to do with it?”
“You should have gone away when I asked you,” he muttered.
“I stayed when you asked me,” was Lord Henry’s answer.
“Harry, I can’t quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have ever done, and I will destroy it. What is it but canvas and colour? I will not let it come across our three lives and mar them.”
Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid face and tear-stained eyes looked at him, as he walked over to the deal painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window. What was he doing there? His fingers were straying about among the litter of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something. Yes, it was for the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. He had found it at last. He was going to rip up the canvas.
With a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to Hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of the studio. “Don’t, Basil, don’t!” he cried. “It would be murder!”
“I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian,” said the painter, coldly, when he had recovered from his surprise. “I never thought you would.”
“Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I feel that.”
“Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and sent home. Then you can do what you like with yourself.” And he walked across the room and rang the bell for tea. “You will have tea, of course, Dorian? And so will you, Harry? Or do you object to such simple pleasures?”
“I adore simple pleasures,” said Lord Henry. “They are the last refuge of the complex. But I don’t like scenes, except on the stage. What absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational. I am glad he is not, after all: though I wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture. You had much better let me have it, Basil. This silly boy doesn’t really want it, and I really do.”
“If you let any one have it but me, Basil, I shall never forgive you!” cried Dorian Gray; “and I don’t allow people to call me a silly boy.”
“You know the picture is yours, Dorian. I gave it to you before it existed.”
“And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you don’t really object to being reminded that you are extremely young.”
“I should have objected very strongly this morning, Lord Henry.”
“Ah! this morning! You have lived since then.”
As the dawn was just breaking he found himself close to Covent Garden. The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an anodyne for his pain. He followed into the market, and watched the men unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some cherries. He thanked him, and wondered why he refused to accept any money for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. A long line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and yellow and red roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge jade-green piles of vegetables. Under the portico, with its grey sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bare-headed girls, waiting for the auction to be over. Others crowded round the swinging doors of the coffeehouse in the Plazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings. Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked, and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds.
After a little while, he hailed a hansom, and drove home. For a few moments he loitered upon the door-step, looking round at the silent Square with its blank, close-shuttered windows, and its staring blinds. The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke was rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.
In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge’s barge, that hung from the ceiling of the great oak-panelled hall of entrance, lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire. He turned them out, and, having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had decorated for himself, and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise. Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had taken the buttonhole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate. Finally he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.
He turned round, and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The bright dawn flooded the room, and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced, and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry’s many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?
He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt, that the whole expression had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was horribly apparent.
He threw himself into a chair, and began to think. Suddenly there flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward’s studio the day the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly. He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been fulfilled? Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the touch of cruelty in the mouth.
Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl’s fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him? But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of torture. His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now.
But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look at it again?
No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it. Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to think so.
Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel smile. Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white roses would die. For every sin that he committed a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness. But he would not sin. The picture, changed or unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more—would not, at any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil Hallward’s garden had first stirred within him the passion for impossible things. He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends, marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She must have suffered more than he had. Poor child! He had been selfish and cruel to her. The fascination that she had exercised over him would return. They would be happy together. His life with her would be beautiful and pure.
He got up from his chair, and drew a large screen right in front of the portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. “How horrible!” he murmured to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. When he stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. The fresh morning air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. He thought only of Sibyl. A faint echo of his love came back to him. He repeated her name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell, and in a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down.
He waited impatiently for him to go. The man seemed to take an interminable time over everything.
As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen, and drew it back. No; there was no further change in the picture. It had received the news of Sibyl Vane’s death before he had known of it himself. It was conscious of the events of life as they occurred. The vicious cruelty that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was. Or was it indifferent to results? Did it merely take cognizance of what passed within the soul? He wondered, and hoped that some day he would see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he hoped it.
Poor Sibyl! What a romance it had all been! She had often mimicked death on the stage. Then Death himself had touched her, and taken her with him. How had she played that dreadful last scene? Had she cursed him, as she died? No; she had died for love of him, and love would always be a sacrament to him now. She had atoned for everything, by the sacrifice she had made of her life. He would not think any more of what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the theatre. When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent on to the world’s stage to show the supreme reality of Love. A wonderful tragic figure? Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy tremulous grace. He brushed them away hastily, and looked again at the picture.
He felt that the time had really come for making his choice. Or had his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for him—life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins—he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the burden of his shame: that was all.
A feeling of pain crept over him, as he thought of the desecration that was in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had sat before the portrait, wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as it seemed to him at times. Was it to alter now with every mood to which he yielded? Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair? The pity of it! The pity of it!
For a moment he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that existed between him and the picture might cease. It had changed in answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged. And, yet, who, that knew anything about Life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught? Besides, was it really under his control? Had it indeed been prayer that had produced the substitution? Might there not be some curious scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire, might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love of strange affinity? But the reason was of no importance. He would never again tempt by a prayer any terrible power. If the picture was to alter, it was to alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely into it?
For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul. And when winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.
He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture, smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was already waiting for him. An hour later he was at the Opera, and Lord Henry was leaning over his chair.
A COLD RAIN began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly in the dipping mist. The public-houses were just closing and dim men and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. From some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. In others, drunkards brawled and screamed.
Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead, Dorian Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city, and now and then he repeated to himself the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day they had met, “To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.” Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.
The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it. The gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy. Once the man lost his way, and had to drive back half a mile. A steam rose from the horse as it splashed up the puddles. The side-windows of the hansom were clogged with a gray-flannel mist.
“To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul!” How the words rang in his ears! His soul, certainly, was sick to death. Was it true that the senses could cure it? Innocent blood had been spilt. What could atone for that? Ah! for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one. Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken to him as he had done? Who had made him a judge over others? He had said things that were dreadful, horrible, not to be endured.
On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him, at each step. He thrust up the trap, and called to the man to drive faster. The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him. His throat burned, and his delicate hands twitched nervously together. He struck at the horse madly with his stick. The driver laughed, and whipped up. He laughed in answer, and the man was silent.
The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black web of some sprawling spider. The monotony became unbearable, and, as the mist thickened, he felt afraid.
Then they passed by lonely brickfields. The fog was lighter here, and he could see the strange bottle shaped kilns with their orange fan-like tongues of fire. A dog barked as they went by, and far away in the darkness some wandering seagull screamed. The horse stumbled in a rut, then swerved aside, and broke into a gallop.
After some time they left the clay road, and rattled again over rough-paven streets. Most of the windows were dark, but now and then fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamp-lit blind. He watched them curiously. They moved like monstrous marionettes, and made gestures like live things. He hated them. A dull rage was in his heart. As they turned a corner a woman yelled something at them from an open door, and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred yards. The driver beat at them with his whip.
It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. Certainly with hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray shaped and reshaped those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he had found in them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and justified, by intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would still have dominated his temper. From cell to cell of his brain crept the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all man’s appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre. Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song. They were what he needed for forgetfulness. In three days he would be free.
Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane. Over the low roof and jagged chimney stacks of the houses rose the black masts of ships. Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to the yards.
“Somewhere about here, sir, ain’t it?” he asked huskily through the trap.
Dorian started, and peered round. “This will do,” he answered, and, having got out hastily, and given the driver the extra fare he had promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay. Here and there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman. The light shook and splintered in the puddles. A red glare came from an outward-bound steamer that was coaling. The slimy pavement looked like a wet mackintosh.
He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if he was being followed. In about seven or eight minutes he reached a small shabby house, that was wedged in between two gaunt factories. In one of the top windows stood a lamp. He stopped, and gave a peculiar knock.
After a little time he heard steps in the passage, and the chain being unhooked. The door opened quietly, and he went in without saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the shadow as he passed. At the end of the hall hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street. He dragged it aside, and entered a long, low room which looked as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. Shrill flaring gas jets, dulled and distorted in the flyblown mirrors that faced them, were ranged round the walls. Greasy reflectors of ribbed tin backed them, making quivering discs of light. The floor was covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and there into mud, and stained with dark rings of spilt liquor. Some Malays were crouching by a little charcoal stove playing with bone counters and showing their white teeth as they chattered. In one corner, with his head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the tawdrily-painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two haggard women mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his coat with an expression of disgust. “He thinks he’s got red ants on him,” laughed one of them, as Dorian passed by. The man looked at her in terror and began to whimper.
At the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a darkened chamber. As Dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the heavy odour of opium met him. He heaved a deep breath, and his nostrils quivered with pleasure. When he entered, a young man with smooth yellow hair, who was bending over a lamp, lighting a long thin pipe, looked up at him, and nodded in a hesitating manner.
“You here, Adrian?” muttered Dorian.
“Where else should I be?” he answered, listlessly. “None of the chaps will speak to me now.”
“I thought you had left England.”
“Darlington is not going to do anything. My brother paid the bill at last. George doesn’t speak to me either.... I don’t care,” he added, with a sigh. “As long as one has this stuff, one doesn’t want friends. I think I have had too many friends.”
Dorian winced, and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of some new joy. They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. From time to time he seemed to see the eyes of Basil Hallward looking at him. Yet he felt he could not stay. The presence of Adrian Singleton troubled him. He wanted to be where no man would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.
“I am going on to the other place,” he said, after a pause.
“On the wharf?”
“Yes.”
“That mad-cat is sure to be there. They won’t have her in this place now.”
Dorian shrugged his shoulders. “I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting. Besides, the stuff is better.”
“Much the same.”
“I like it better. Come and have something to drink. I must have something.”
“I don’t want anything,” murmured the young man.
“Never mind.”
Adrian Singleton rose up wearily, and followed Dorian to the bar. A half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a hideous greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers in front of them. The women sidled up, and began to chatter. Dorian turned his back on them, and said something in a low voice to Adrian Singleton.
A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one of the women.
“We are very proud to-night,” she sneered.
“For God’s sake don’t talk to me,” cried Dorian, stamping his foot on the ground. “What do you want? Money? Here it is. Don’t ever talk to me again.”
Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman’s sodden eyes, then flickered out, and left them dull and glazed. She tossed her head, and raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers. Her companion watched her enviously.
“It’s no use,” sighed Adrian Singleton. “I don’t care to go back. What does it matter? I am quite happy here.”
“You will write to me if you want anything, won’t you?” said Dorian, after a pause.
“Perhaps.”
“Good-night, then.”
“Good-night,” answered the young man, passing up the steps, and wiping his parched mouth with a handkerchief.
Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face. As he drew the curtain aside a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips of the woman who had taken his money. “There goes the devil’s bargain!” she hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice.
“Curse you!” he answered, “don’t call me that.”
She snapped her fingers. “Prince Charming is what you like to be called, ain’t it?” she yelled after him.
The drowsy sailor leapt to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly round. The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear. He rushed out as if in pursuit.
Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain. His meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult. He bit his lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad. Yet, after all, what did it matter to him? One’s days were too brief to take the burden of another’s errors on one’s shoulders. Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man Destiny never closed her accounts.
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning-star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.
Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mien, and soul hungry for rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his step as he went, but as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him often as a short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going, he felt himself suddenly seized from behind, and before he had time to defend himself he was thrust back against the wall, with a brutal hand round his throat.
He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched the tightening fingers away. In a second he heard the click of a revolver, and saw the gleam of a polished barrel pointing straight at his head, and the dusky form of a short thick-set man facing him.
“What do you want?” he gasped.
“Keep quiet,” said the man. “If you stir, I shoot you.”
“You are mad. What have I done to you?”
“You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane,” was the answer, “and Sibyl Vane was my sister. She killed herself. I know it. Her death is at your door. I swore I would kill you in return. For years I have sought you. I had no clue, no trace. The two people who could have described you were dead. I knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call you. I heard it to-night by chance. Make your peace with God, for to-night you are going to die.”
Dorian Gray grew sick with fear. “I never knew her,” he stammered. “I never heard of her. You are mad.”
“You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane, you are going to die.” There was a horrible moment. Dorian did not know what to say or do. “Down on your knees!” growled the man. “I give you one minute to make your peace—no more. I go on board to-night for India, and I must do my job first. One minute. That’s all.”
Dorian’s arms fell to his side. Paralysed with terror, he did not know what to do. Suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain. “Stop,” he cried. “How long ago is it since your sister died? Quick, tell me!”
“Eighteen years,” said the man. “Why do you ask me? What do years matter?”
“Eighteen years,” laughed Dorian Gray, with a touch of triumph in his voice. “Eighteen years! Set me under the lamp and look at my face!”
James Vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant. Then he seized Dorian Gray and dragged him from the archway.
Dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to show him the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen, for the face of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of boyhood, all the unstained purity of youth. He seemed little older than a lad of twenty summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than his sister had been when they had parted so many years ago. It was obvious that this was not the man who had destroyed her life.
He loosened his hold and reeled back. “My God! my God!” he cried, “and I would have murdered you!”
Dorian Gray drew a long breath. “You have been on the brink of committing a terrible crime, my man,” he said, looking at him sternly. “Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own hands.”
“Forgive me, sir,” muttered James Vane. “I was deceived. A chance word I heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track.”
“You had better go home, and put that pistol away, or you may get into trouble,” said Dorian, turning on his heel, and going slowly down the street.
James Vane stood on the pavement in horror. He was trembling from head to foot. After a little while a black shadow that had been creeping along the dripping wall moved out into the light and came close to him with stealthy footsteps. He felt a hand laid on his arm and looked round with a start. It was one of the women who had been drinking at the bar.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” she hissed out, putting her haggard face quite close to his. “I knew you were following him when you rushed out from Daly’s. You fool! You should have killed him. He has lots of money, and he’s as bad as bad.”
“He is not the man I am looking for,” he answered, “and I want no man’s money. I want a man’s life. The man whose life I want must be nearly forty now. This one is little more than a boy. Thank God, I have not got his blood upon my hands.”
The woman gave a bitter laugh. “Little more than a boy!” she sneered. “Why, man, it’s nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what I am.”
“You lie!” cried James Vane.
She raised her hand up to heaven. “Before God I am telling the truth,” she cried.
“Before God?”
“Strike me dumb if it ain’t so. He is the worst one that comes here. They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It’s nigh on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn’t changed much since then. I have though,” she added, with a sickly leer.
“You swear this?”
“I swear it,” came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth. “But don’t give me away to him,” she whined; “I am afraid of him. Let me have some money for my night’s lodging.”
He broke from her with an oath, and rushed to the corner of the street, but Dorian Gray had disappeared. When he looked back, the woman had vanished also.
IT was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm, and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. He heard one of them whisper to the other, “That is Dorian Gray.” He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. He had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. What a laugh she had!—just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dress and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.
When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.
Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood—his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that, of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?
Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not “Forgive us our sins,” but “Smite us for our iniquities,” should be the prayer of a man to a most just God.
The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that night of horror, when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: “The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to himself. Then he loathed his own beauty, and, flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.
It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that. It was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. James Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby Churchyard. Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. The excitement, such as it was, over Basil Hallward’s disappearance would soon pass away. It was already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. The murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell, his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do it. It was nothing to him.
A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.
As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. He would go and look.
He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the door a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face and lingered for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.
He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome—more loathsome, if possible, than before—and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilt. Then he trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these? And why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped—blood even on the hand that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up, and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess, who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad. They would shut him up if he persisted in his story. ... Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? … No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity’s sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognised that now.
But this murder—was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be burdened by his past? Was he really to confess? Never. There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself—that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and, without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it.
There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms. Two gentlemen, who were passing in the Square below, stopped, and looked up at the great house. They walked on till they met a policeman, and brought him back. The man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was all dark. After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico and watched.
“Whose house is that, constable?” asked the elder of the two gentlemen.
“Mr. Dorian Gray’s, sir,” answered the policeman.
They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. One of them was Sir Henry Ashton’s uncle.
Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.
After about quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the balcony. The windows yielded easily; their bolts were old.
When they entered they found, hanging upon the wall, a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognised who it was.
Originally appeared under the title “Mr. Wilde’s Bad Case”
in St. James’s Gazette, June 26, 1890. Reprinted from
Miscellanies (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969, pp. 135-36.
I
MR. WILDE’S BAD CASE
(St. James’s Gazette, June 26, 1890.)
To the Editor of the St. James’s Gazette.
SIR,—I have read your criticism of my story, The Picture of Dorian Gray; and I need hardly say that I do not propose to discuss its merits or demerits, its personalities or its lack of personality. England is a free country, and ordinary English criticism is perfectly free and easy.
Besides, I must admit that, either from temperament or taste, or from both, I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticised from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate; and it is to the confusion between the two that we owe the appearance of Mrs. Grundy, that amusing old lady who represents the only original form of humour that the middle classes of this country have been able to produce.
What I do object to most strongly is that you should have placarded the town with posters on which was printed in large letters:—
MR. OSCAR WILDE’S
LATEST ADVERTISEMENT:
A BAD CASE.
Whether the expression “A Bad Case” refers to my book or to the present position of the Government, I cannot tell. What was silly and unnecessary was the use of the term “advertisement.”
I think I may say without vanity—though I do not wish to appear to run vanity down—that of all men in England I am the one who requires least advertisement. I am tired to death of being advertised—I feel no thrill when I see my name in a paper. The chronicle does not interest me any more. I wrote this book entirely for my own pleasure, and it gave me very great pleasure to write it. Whether it becomes popular or not is a matter of absolute indifference to me. I am afraid, Sir, that the real advertisement is your cleverly written article. The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral, and your réeclame will, I have no doubt, largely increase the sale of the magazine; in which sale I may mention with some regret, I have no pecuniary interest.—I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE.
16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, JUNE 25.
From Intentions by Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908;
reprinted by Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 150-54.
GILBERT. Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and aesthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
It is sometimes said by those who understand neither the nature of the highest Criticism nor the charm of the highest Art, that the pictures that the critic loves most to write about are those that belong to the anecdotage of painting, and that deal with scenes taken out of literature or history. But this is not so. Indeed, pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, they rank with illustrations, and even considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it. For the domain of the painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought. The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology. And how inadequately does he do it then, asking us to accept the torn turban of the Moor for the noble rage of Othello, or a dotard in a storm for the wild madness of Lear! Yet it seems as if nothing could stop him. Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious. I do not say that poet and painter may not treat of the same subject. They have always done so, and will always do so. But while the poet can be pictorial or not, as he chooses, the painter must be pictorial always. For a painter is limited, not to what he sees in nature, but to what upon canvas may be seen.
And so, my dear Ernest, pictures of this kind will not really fascinate the critic. He will turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world. It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist’s life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is the reason why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret. This, also, is the explanation of the value of limitations in art. The sculptor gladly surrenders imitative colour, and the painter the actual dimensions of form, because by such renunciations they are able to avoid too definite a presentation of the Real, which would be mere imitation, and too definite a realisation of the Ideal, which would be too purely intellectual. It is through its very incompleteness that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone, which, while accepting both reason and recognition as stages of apprehension, subordinates them both to a pure synthetic impression of the work of art as a whole, and, taking whatever alien emotional elements the work may possess, uses their very complexity as a means by which a richer unity may be added to the ultimate impression itself. You see, then, how it is that the aesthetic critic rejects those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final. Some resemblance, no doubt, the creative work of the critic will have to the work that has stirred him to creation, but it will be such resemblance as exists, not between Nature and the mirror that the painter of landscape or figure may be supposed to hold up to her, but between Nature and the work of the decorative artist. Just as on the flowerless carpets of Persia, tulip and rose blossom indeed and are lovely to look on, though they are not reproduced in visible shape or line; just as the pearl and purple of the sea-shell is echoed in the church of St. Mark at Venice; just as the vaulted ceiling of the wondrous chapel at Ravenna is made gorgeous by the gold and green and sapphire of the peacock’s tail, though the birds of Juno fly not across it; so the critic reproduces the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art’s unity.
A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE (1893)
They rise and proceed to go off. SIR JOHN offers to carry LADY STUTFIELD’s cloak.
LADY CAROLINE: John! If you would allow your nephew to look after Lady Stutfield’s cloak, you might help me with my work-basket.
Enter LORD ILLINGWORTH and MRS. ALLONBY.
SIR JOHN: Certainly, my love.
Exeunt.
MRS. ALLONBY: Curious thing, plain women are always jealous of their husbands, beautiful women never are!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Beautiful women never have time. They are always so occupied in being jealous of other people’s husbands.
MRS. ALLONBY: I should have thought Lady Caroline would have grown tired of conjugal anxiety by this time! Sir John is her fourth!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: So much marriage is certainly not becoming. Twenty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage make her something like a public building.
MRS. ALLONBY: Twenty years of romance! Is there such a thing?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Not in our day. Women have become too brilliant. Nothing spoils a romance so much as a sense of humour in the woman.
MRS. ALLONBY: Or the want of it in the man.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You are quite right. In a Temple every one should be serious, except the thing that is worshipped.
MRS. ALLONBY: And that should be man?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Women kneel so gracefully; men don’t.
MRS. ALLONBY: You are thinking of Lady Stutfield!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I assure you I have not thought of Lady Stutfield for the last quarter of an hour.
MRS. ALLONBY: Is she such a mystery?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: She is more than a mystery—she is a mood.
MRS. ALLONBY: Moods don’t last.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: It is their chief charm.
Enter HESTER and GERALD.
GERALD: Lord Illingworth, every one has been congratulating me, Lady Hunstanton and Lady Caroline, and … every one. I hope I shall make a good secretary.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You will be the pattern secretary, Gerald. (Talks to him.)
MRS. ALLONBY: You enjoy country life, Miss Worsley?
HESTER: Very much, indeed.
MRS. ALLONBY: Don’t find yourself longing for a London dinner-party?
HESTER: I dislike London dinner-parties.
MRS. ALLONBY: I adore them. The clever people never listen, and the stupid people never talk.
HESTER: I think the stupid people talk a great deal.
MRS. ALLONBY: Ah, I never listen!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: My dear boy, if I didn’t like you I wouldn’t have made you the offer. It is because I like you so much that I want to have you with me.
Exit HESTER with GERALD.
Charming fellow, Gerald Arbuthnot!
MRS. ALLONBY: He is very nice; very nice indeed. But I can’t stand the American young lady.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Why?
MRS. ALLONBY: She told me yesterday, and in quite a loud voice too, that she was only eighteen. It was most annoying.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything.
MRS. ALLONBY: She is a Puritan besides-----
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Ah, that is inexcusable. I don’t mind plain women being Puritans. It is the only excuse they have for being plain. But she is decidedly pretty. I admire her immensely. (Looks steadfastly at MRS. Allonby.)
MRS. ALLONBY: What a thoroughly bad man you must be!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: What do you call a bad man?
MRS. ALLONBY: The sort of man who admires innocence.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: And a bad woman?
MRS. ALLONBY: Oh! the sort of woman a man never gets tired of.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You are severe—on yourself.
MRS. ALLONBY: Define us as a sex.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Sphinxes without secrets.
MRS. ALLONBY: Does that include the Puritan women?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Do you know, I don’t believe in the existence of Puritan women? I don’t think there is a woman in the world who would not be a little flattered if one made love to her. It is that which makes women so irresistibly adorable.
MRS. ALLONBY: You think there is no woman in the world who would object to being kissed?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Very few.
MRS. ALLONBY: Miss Worsley would not let you kiss her.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Are you sure?
MRS. ALLONBY: Quite.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: What do you think she’d do if I kissed her?
MRS. ALLONBY: Either marry you, or strike you across the face with her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face with her glove?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Fall in love with her, probably.
MRS. ALLONBY: Then it is lucky you are not going to kiss her!
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Is that a challenge?
MRS. ALLONBY: It is an arrow shot into the air.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Don’t you know that I always succeed in whatever I try ?
MRS. ALLONBY: I am sorry to hear it. We women adore failures. They lean on us.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You worship successes. You cling to them.
MRS. ALLONBY: We are the laurels to hide their baldness.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: And they need you always, except at the moment of triumph.
MRS. ALLONBY: They are uninteresting then.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: How tantalising you are? (A pause.)
MRS. ALLONBY: Lord Illingworth, there is one thing I shall always like you for.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Only one thing? And I have so many bad qualities.
MRS. ALLONBY: Ah, don’t be too conceited about them. You may lose them as you grow old.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I never intend to grow old. The soul is born old but grows young. That is the comedy of life.
MRS. ALLONBY: And the body is born young and grows old. That is life’s tragedy.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Its comedy also, sometimes. But what is the mysterious reason why you will always like me?
MRS. ALLONBY: It is that you have never made love to me.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I have never done anything else.
MRS. ALLONBY: Really? I have not noticed it.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: How unfortunate! It might have been a tragedy for both of us.
MRS. ALLONBY: We should each have survived.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation.
MRS. ALLONBY: Have you tried a good reputation?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: It is one of the many annoyances to which I have never been subjected.
MRS. ALLONBY: It may come.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Why do you threaten me?
MRS. ALLONBY: I will tell you when you have kissed the Puritan.
Enter Footman.
FRANCIS: Tea is served in the Yellow Drawing-room, my lord.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Tell her ladyship we are coming in.
FRANCIS: Yes, my lord. (Exit.)
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Shall we go in to tea?
MRS. ALLONBY: Do you like such simple pleasures?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex. But, if you wish, let us stay here. Yes, let us stay here. The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden.
MRS. ALLONBY: It ends with Revelations.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: You fence divinely. But the button has come off your foil.
MRS. ALLONBY: I have still the mask.
LORD ILLINGWORTH: It makes your eyes lovelier.
MRS. ALLONBY: Thank you. Come.
LORD ILLINGWORTH (sees MRS. Arbuthnot’s letter on table, and takes it up and looks at envelope): What a curious handwriting! It reminds me of the handwriting of a woman I used to know years ago.
MRS. ALLONBY: Who?
LORD ILLINGWORTH: Oh! no one. No one in particular. A woman of no importance. (Throws letter down, and passes up the steps of the terrace with MRS. Allonby. They smile at each other.)
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1895)
LADY BRACKNELL and Algernon go into the music-room, Gwendolen remains behind.
JACK: Charming day it has been, Miss Fairfax.
GWENDOLEN: Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me so nervous.
JACK: I do mean something else.
GWENDOLEN: I thought so. In fact, I am never wrong.
JACK: And I would like to be allowed to take advantage of Lady Bracknell’s temporary absence …
GWENDOLEN: I would certainly advise you to do so. Mamma has a way of coming back suddenly into a room that I have often had to speak to her about.
JACK (nervously): Miss Fairfax, ever since I met you I have admired you more than any girl… I have ever met since … I met you.
GWENDOLEN: Yes, I am quite well aware of the fact. And I often wish that in public, at any rate, you had been more demonstrative. For me you have always had an irresistible fascination. Even before I met you I was far from indifferent to you. (Jack looks at her in amazement.) We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals. The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines, and has now reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love some one of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence. The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you. The name, fortunately for my peace of mind, is, as far as my own experience goes, extremely rare.
JACK: You really love me, Gwendolen?
GWENDOLEN: Passionately!
JACK: Darling! You don’t know how happy you’ve made me.
GWENDOLEN: My own Ernest! (They embrace.)
JACK: But you don’t really mean to say that you couldn’t love me if my name wasn’t Ernest?
GWENDOLEN: But your name is Ernest.
JACK: Yes, I know it is. But supposing it was something else? Do you mean to say you couldn’t love me then?
GWENDOLEN (glibly): Ah! that is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical speculations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them.
JACK: Personally, darling, to speak quite candidly, I don’t much care about the name of Ernest.... I don’t think the name suits me at all.
GWENDOLEN: It suits you perfectly. It is a divine name. It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations.
JACK: Well, really, Gwendolen, I must say that I think there are lots of other much nicer names. I think Jack, for instance, a charming name.
GWENDOLEN: Jack? … No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations.... I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would have a very tedious life with him. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest.
JACK: Gwendolen, I must get christened at once—I mean we must get married at once. There is no time to be lost.
GWENDOLEN: Married, Mr. Worthing?
JACK (astounded): Well… surely. You know that I love you, and you led me to believe, Miss Fairfax, that you were not absolutely indifferent to me.
GWENDOLEN: I adore you. But you haven’t proposed to me yet. Nothing has been said at all about marriage. The subject has not even been touched on.
JACK: Well… may I propose to you now?
GWENDOLEN: I think it would be an admirable opportunity. And to spare you any possible disappointment, Mr. Worthing, I think it only fair to tell you quite frankly beforehand that I am fully determined to accept you.
JACK: Gwendolen!
GWENDOLEN: Yes, Mr. Worthing, what have you got to say to me?
JACK: You know what I have got to say to you.
GWENDOLEN: Yes, but you don’t say it.
JACK: Gwendolen, will you marry me? (Goes on his knees.)
GWENDOLEN: Of course I will, darling. How long you have been about it! I am afraid you have had very little experience in how to propose.
JACK: My own one, I have never loved anyone in the world but you.
GWENDOLEN: Yes, but men often propose for practice. I know my brother Gerald does. All my girl-friends tell me so. What wonderfully blue eyes you have, Ernest! They are quite, quite blue. I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present.
Enter LADY BRACKNELL.
LADY BRACKNELL: Mr. Worthing! Rise, sir, from this semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous.
GWENDOLEN: Mamma! (He tries to rise; she restrains him.) I must beg you to retire. This is no place for you. Besides, Mr. Worthing has not quite finished yet.
LADY BRACKNELL: Finished what, may I ask?
GWENDOLEN: I am engaged to Mr. Worthing, mamma. (They rise together.)
LADY BRACKNELL: Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself…. And now I have a few questions to put to you, Mr. Worthing!
JACK: I shall be charmed to reply to any questions, Lady Bracknell.
GWENDOLEN: You mean if you know the answers to them. Mamma’s questions are sometimes peculiarly inquisitorial.
LADY BRACKNELL: I intend to make them very inquisitorial. And while I am making these inquiries, you, Gwendolen, will wait for me below in the carriage.
Gwendolen (reproachfully): Mamma!
LADY BRACKNELL: In the carriage, Gwendolen!
GWENDOLEN goes to the door. She and Jack blow kisses to each other behind Lady Bracknell’s back. Lady Bracknell looks vaguely about as if she could not understand what the noise was. Finally turns round.
Gwendolen, the carriage!
GWENDOLEN: Yes, mamma. (Goes out, looking back at Jack.) Lady Bracknell (sitting down): You can take a seat, Mr. Worthing.
Looks in her pocket for note-book and pencil.
JACK: Thank you, Lady Bracknell, I prefer standing.
LADY BRACKNELL (pencil and note-book in hand): I feel bound to tell you that you are not down on my list of eligible young men, although I have the same list as the dear Duchess of Bolton has. We work together, in fact. However, I am quite ready to enter your name, should your answers be what a really affectionate mother requires. Do you smoke?
JACK: Well, yes, I must admit I smoke.
LADY BRACKNELL: I am glad to hear it. A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is. How old are you?
JACK: Twenty-nine.
LADY BRACKNELL: A very good age to be married at. I have always been of opinion that a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. Which do you know?
JACK (after some hesitation): I know nothing, Lady Bracknell.
LADY BRACKNELL: I am pleased to hear it. I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. What is your income?
JACK: Between seven and eight thousand a year.
LADY BRACKNELL (makes a note in her book): In land, or in investments?
JACK: In investments, chiefly.
LADY BRACKNELL: That is satisfactory. What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.
JACK: I have a country house with some land, of course, attached to it, about fifteen hundred acres, I believe; but I don’t depend on that for my real income. In fact, as far as I can make out, the poachers are the only people who make anything out of it.
LADY BRACKNELL: A country house! How many bedrooms? Well, that point can be cleared up afterwards. You have a town house, I hope? A girl with a simple, unspoiled nature, like Gwendolen, could hardly be expected to reside in the country.
JACK: Well, I own a house in Belgrave Square, but it is let by the year to Lady Bloxham. Of course, I can get it back whenever I like, at six months’ notice.
LADY BRACKNELL: Lady Bloxham? I don’t know her.
JACK: Oh, she goes about very little. She is a lady considerably advanced in years.
LADY BRACKNELL: Ah, nowadays that is no guarantee of respectability of character. What number in Belgrave Square?
JACK: 149.
LADY BRACKNELL (shaking her head): The unfashionable side. I thought there was something. However, that could easily be altered.
JACK: Do you mean the fashion, or the side?
LADY BRACKNELL (sternly): Both, if necessary, I presume. What are your politics?
JACK: Well, I am afraid I really have none. I am a Liberal Unionist.
LADY BRACKNELL: Oh, they count as Tories. They dine with us. Or come in the evening at any rate. You have, of course, no sympathy of any kind with the Radical Party?
JACK: Oh! I don’t want to put the asses against the classes, if that is what you mean, Lady Bracknell.
LADY BRACKNELL: That is exactly what I do mean… ahem!.. Are your parents living?
JACK: I have lost both my parents.
LADY BRACKNELL: Both?… To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune… to lose both seems like carelessness. Who was your father? He was evidently a man of some wealth. Was he born in what the Radical papers call the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of the aristocracy?
JACK: I am afraid I really don’t know. The fact is, Lady Bracknell, I said I had lost my parents. It would be nearer the truth to say that my parents seemed to have lost me.... I don’t actually know who I am by birth. I was … well, I was found.
LADY BRACKNELL: Found!
JACK: The late Mr. Thomas Cardew, an old gentleman of a very charitable and kindly disposition, found me, and gave me the name of Worthing, because he happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket at the time. Worthing is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort.
LADY BRACKNELL: Where did the charitable gentleman who had a first-class ticket for this seaside resort find you?
JACK (gravely): In a hand-bag.
LADY BRACKNELL: A hand-bag?
JACK (very seriously): Yes, Lady Bracknell. I was in a handbag—a somewhat large, black leather hand-bag, with handles to it—an ordinary hand-bag in fact.
LADY BRACKNELL: In what locality did this Mr. James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this ordinary hand-bag?
JACK: In the cloak-room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own.
LADY BRACKNELL: The cloak room at Victoria Station?
JACK: Yes. The Brighton line.
LADY BRACKNELL: The line is immaterial. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in good society.
JACK: May I ask you then what you would advise me to do? I need hardly say I would do anything in the world to ensure Gwendolen’s happiness.
LADY BRACKNELL: I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.
JACK: Well, I don’t see how I could possibly manage to do that. I can produce the hand-bag at any moment. It is in my dressing-room at home. I really think that should satisfy you, Lady Bracknell.
LADY BRACKNELL: Me, sir! What has it do to with me? You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel. (Jack starts indignantly.) Kindly open the door for me sir. You will of course understand that for the future there is to be no communication of any kind between you and Miss Fairfax.
LADY BRACKNELL sweeps out in majestic indignation. Algernon, from the other room, strikes up the Wedding March.
THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL (1898)
1
HE DID not wear his scarlet coat,
For blood and wine are red,
And blood and wine were on his hands
When they found him with the dead,
The poor dead woman whom he loved,
And murdered in her bed.
He walked amongst the Trial Men
In a suit of shabby grey;
A cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay;
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.
I walked, with other souls in pain,
Within another ring,
And was wondering if the man had done
A great or little thing,
When a voice behind me whispered low,
“That fellows’s got to swing.”
Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel;
And, though I was a soul in pain,
My pain I could not feel.
I only knew what hunted thought
Quickened his step, and why
He looked upon the garish day
With such a wistful eye;
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter word.
Some with a flattering look,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
He does not die a death of shame
On a day of dark disgrace,
Nor have a noose about his neck,
Nor a cloth upon his face,
Nor drop feet foremost through the floor
Into an empty space.
He does not sit with silent men
Who watch him night and day;
Who watch him when he tries to weep,
And when he tries to pray;
Who watch him lest himself should rob
The prison of its prey.
He does not wake at dawn to see
Dread figures throng his room,
The shivering Chaplain robed in white,
The Sheriff stern with gloom,
And the Governor all in shiny black,
With the yellow face of Doom.
He does not rise in piteous haste
To put on convict-clothes,
While some coarse-mouthed Doctor gloats, and notes
Each new and nerve-twitched pose,
Fingering a watch whose little ticks
Are like horrible hammer-blows.
He does not feel that sickening thirst
That sands one’s throat, before
The hangman with his gardener’s gloves
Comes through the padded door,
And binds one with three leathern thongs,
That the throat may thirst no more.
He does not bend his head to hear
The Burial Office read,
Nor, while the anguish of his soul
Tells him he is not dead,
Cross his own coffin, as he moves
Into the hideous shed.
He does not stare upon the air
Through a little roof of glass:
He does not pray with lips of clay
For his agony to pass;
Nor feel upon his shuddering cheek
The kiss of Caiaphas.
2
Six weeks the guardsman walked the yard,
In the suit of shabby grey:
His cricket cap was on his head,
And his step seemed light and gay,
But I never saw a man who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky,
And at every wandering cloud that trailed
Its ravelled fleeces by.
He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling
Hope In the cave of black Despair:
He only looked upon the sun,
And drank the morning air.
He did not wring his hands nor weep,
Nor did he peek or pine,
But he drank the air as though it held
Some healthful anodyne;
With open mouth he drank the sun
As though it had been wine!
And I and all the souls in pain,
Who tramped the other ring,
Forgot if we ourselves had done
A great or little thing,
And watched with gaze of dull amaze
The man who had to swing.
For strange it was to see him pass
With a step so light and gay,
And strange it was to see him look
So wistfully at the day,
And strange it was to think that he
Had such a debt to pay.
For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
That in the spring-time shoot;
But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
With its adder-bitten root,
And, green or dry, a man must die
Before it bear its fruit!
The loftiest place is that seat of grace
For which all worldlings try:
But who would stand in hempen band
Upon a scaffold high,
And through a murderer’s collar take
His last look at the sky?
It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!
So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.
At last the dead man walked no more
Amongst the Trial Men,
And I knew that he was standing up
In the black dock’s dreadful pen,
And that never would I see his face
For weal or woe again.
Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.
A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.
3
In Debtor’s Yard the stones are hard,
And the dripping wall is high,
So it was there he took the air
Beneath the leaden sky,
And by each side a Warder walked,
For fear the man might die.
Or else he sat with those who watched
His anguish night and day;
Who watched him when he rose to weep,
And when he crouched to pray;
Who watched him lest himself should rob
Their scaffold of its prey.
The Governor was strong upon
The Regulations Act:
The Doctor said that Death was but
A scientific fact:
And twice a day the Chaplain called,
And left a little tract.
And twice a day he smoked his pipe,
And drank his quart of beer:
His soul was resolute, and held
No hiding-place for fear;
He often said that he was glad
The hangman’s day was near.
But why he said so strange a thing
No warder dared to ask:
For he to whom a watcher’s doom
Is given as his task,
Must set a lock upon his lips,
And make his face a mask.
Or else he might be moved, and try
To comfort or console:
And what should Human Pity do
Pent up in Murderers’ Hole?
What word of grace in such a place
Could help a brother’s soul?
With slouch and swing around the ring
We trod the Fools’ Parade!
We did not care: we knew we were
The Devil’s Own Brigade:
And shaven head and feet of lead
Make a merry masquerade.
We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.
We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill:
But in the heart of every man
Terror was lying still.
So still it lay that every day
Crawled like a weed-clogged wave:
And we forgot the bitter lot
That waits for fool and knave,
Till once, as we tramped in from work,
We passed an open grave.
With yawning mouth the yellow hole
Gaped for a living thing;
The very mud cried out for blood
To the thirsty asphalte ring:
And we knew that ere one dawn grew fair
Some prisoner had to swing.
Right in we went, with soul intent
On Death and Dread and Doom:
The hangman, with his little bag,
Went shuffling through the gloom:
And I trembled as I groped my way
Into my numbered tomb.
That night the empty corridors
Were full of forms of Fear,
And up and down the iron town
Stole feet we could not hear,
And through the bars that hide the stars
White faces seemed to peer.
He lay as one who lies and dreams
In a pleasant meadow-land,
The watchers watched him as he slept,
And could not understand
How one could sleep so sweet a sleep
With a hangman close at hand.
But there is no sleep when men must weep
Who never yet have wept:
So we—the fool, the fraud, the knave—
That endless vigil kept,
And through each brain on hands of pain
Another’s terror crept.
Alas! it is a fearful thing
To feel another’s guilt!
For, right within, the Sword of Sin
Pierced to its poisoned hilt,
And as molten lead were the tears we shed
For the blood we had not split.
The warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Grey figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.
All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.
The grey cock crew, the red cock crew,
But never came the day:
And crooked shapes of Terror crouched,
In the corners where we lay:
And each evil sprite that walks by night
Before us seemed to play.
They glided past, they glided fast,
Like travellers through a mist:
They mocked the moon in a rigadoon
Of delicate turn and twist,
And with formal pace and loathsome grace
The phantoms kept their tryst.
With mop and mow, we saw them go,
Slim shadows hand in hand:
About, about, in ghostly rout
They trod a saraband:
And the damned grotesques made arabesques,
Like the wind upon the sand!
With the pirouettes of marionettes,
They tripped on pointed tread:
But with flutes of Fear they filled the ear,
As their grisly masque they led,
And loud they sang, and long they sang,
For they sang to wake the dead.
“Oho!” they cried, “The world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the secret House of Shame.”
No things of air these antics were,
That frolicked with such glee:
To men whose lives were held in gyves,
And whose feet might not go free,
Ah! wounds of Christ! they were living things
Most terrible to see.
Around, around, they waltzed and wound;
Some wheeled in smirking pairs;
With the mincing step of a demirep
Some sidled up the stairs:
And with subtle sneer, and fawning leer,
Each helped us at our prayers.
The morning wind began to moan,
But still the night went on:
Through its giant loom the web of gloom
Crept till each thread was spun:
And, as we prayed, we grew afraid
Of the Justice of the Sun.
The moaning wind went wandering round
The weeping prison-wall:
Till like a wheel of turning steel
We felt the minutes crawl:
O moaning wind! what had we done
To have such a seneschal?
At last I saw the shadowed bars,
Like a lattice wrought in lead,
Move right across the whitewashed wall
That faced my three-plank bed,
And I knew that somewhere in the world
God’s dreadful dawn was red.
At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.
He did not pass in purple pomp,
Nor ride a moon-white steed.
Three yards of cord and a sliding board
Are all the gallows’ need:
So with rope of shame the Herald came
To do the secret deed.
We were as men who through a fen
Of filthy darkness grope:
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or to give our anguish scope:
Something was dead in each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride:
With iron heel it slays the strong,
The monstrous parricide!
We waited for the stroke of eight:
Each tongue was thick with thirst:
For the stroke of eight is the stroke of Fate
That makes a man accursed,
And Fate will use a running noose
For the best man and the worst.
We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man’s heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!
With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair,
Like the sound that frightened marshes hear
From some leper in his lair.
And as one sees most fearful things
In the crystal of a dream,
We saw the greasy hempen rope
Hooked to the blackened beam,
And heard the prayer the hangman’s snare
Strangled in to a scream.
And all the woe that moved him so
That he gave that bitter cry,
And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
4
There is no chapel on the day
On which they hang a man:
The Chaplain’s heart is far too sick,
Or his face is far too wan,
Or there is that written in his eyes
Which none should look upon.
So they kept us close till nigh on noon,
And then they rang the bell,
And the warders with their jingling keys
Opened each listening cell,
And down the iron stair we tramped,
Each from his separate Hell.
Out into God’s sweet air we went,
But not in wonted way,
For this man’s face was white with fear,
And that man’s face was grey,
And I never saw sad men who looked
So wistfully at the day.
I never saw sad men who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon the little tent of blue
We prisoners called the sky,
And at every happy cloud that passed
In such strange freedom by.
But there were those amongst us all
Who walked with downcast head,
And knew that, had each got his due,
They should have died instead:
He had but killed a thing that lived,
Whilst they had killed the dead.
For he who sins a second time
Wakes a dead soul to pain,
And draws it from its spotted shroud,
And makes it bleed again,
And makes it bleed great gouts of blood,
And makes it bleed in vain!
Like ape or clown, in monstrous garb
With crooked arrows starred,
Silently we went round and round
The slippery asphalte yard;
Silently we went round and round,
And no man spoke a word.
Silently we went round and round,
And through each hollow mind
The Memory of dreadful things
Rushed like a dreadful wind,
And Horror stalked before each man,
And Terror crept behind.
The warders strutted up and down,
And watched their herd of brutes,
Their uniforms were spick and span,
And they wore their Sunday suits,
But we knew the work they had been at,
By the quicklime on their boots.
For where a grave had opened wide,
There was no grave at all:
Only a stretch of mud and sand
By the hideous prison-wall,
And a little heap of burning lime,
That the man should have his pall.
For he has a pall, this wretched man,
Such as few men can claim:
Deep down below a prison-yard,
Naked for greater shame,
He lies, with fetters on each foot,
Wrapt in a sheet of flame!
And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day,
It eats the flesh and bone by turns,
But it eats the heart alway.
For three long years they will not sow
Or root or seedling there:
For three long years the unblessed spot
Will sterile be and bare,
And look upon the wondering sky
With unreproachful stare,
They think a murderer’s heart would taint
Each simple seed they sow.
It is not true! God’s kindly earth
Is kindlier than men know,
And the red rose would but blow more red,
The white rose whiter blow.
Out of his mouth a red, red rose!
Out of his heart a white!
For who can say by what strange way,
Christ brings His will to light,
Since the barren staff the pilgrim bore
Bloomed in the great Pope’s sight?
But neither milk-white rose nor red
May bloom in prison-air;
The shard, the pebble, and the flint,
Are what they give us there:
For flowers have been known to heal
A common man’s despair.
So never will wine-red rose or white,
Petal by petal, fall
On that stretch of mud and sand that lies
By the hideous prison-wall,
To tell the men who tramp the yard
That God’s Son died for all.
Yet though the hideous prison-wall
Still hems him round and round,
And a spirit may not walk by night
That is with fetters bound,
And a spirit may but weep that lies
In such unholy ground,
He is at peace—this wretched man—
At peace, or will be soon:
There is no thing to make him mad,
Nor does Terror walk at noon,
For the lampless Earth in which he lies
Has neither Sun nor Moon.
They hanged him as a beast is hanged!
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.
The warders stripped him of his clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:
And with laughter loud they heaped the shroud
In which the convict lies.
The Chaplain would not kneel to pray
By his dishonoured grave:
Nor mark it with that blessed Cross
That Christ for sinners gave,
Because the man was one of those
Whom Christ came down to save.
Yet all is well; he has but passed
To Life’s appointed bourne:
And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.
5
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.
But this I know, that every Law
That men hath made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother’s life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.
This too I know—and wise it were
If each could know the same—
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.
With bars they blur the gracious moon,
And blind the goodly sun;
And they do well to hide their Hell,
For in it things are done
That Son of God nor son of Man
Ever should look upon!
The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.
For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.
Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is a foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.
The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.
But though lean Hunger and green Thirst
Like asp with adder fight,
We have little care of prison fare,
For what chills and kills outright
Is that every stone one lifts by day
Becomes one’s heart by night.
With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.
And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.
And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.
And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper’s house
With the scent of costliest nard.
Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?
And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.
The man in red who reads the Law
Gave him three weeks of life,
Three little weeks in which to heal
His soul of his soul’s strife,
And cleanse from every blot of blood
The hand that held the knife.
And with tears of blood he cleansed the hand,
The hand that held the steel:
For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:
And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ’s snow-white seal.
6
In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.
And there, till Christ call forth the dead,
In silence let him lie:
No need to waste the foolish tear,
Or heave the windy sigh:
The man had killed the thing he loved,
And so he had to die.
And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. Few men hold such a position in their own lifetime and have it so acknowledged. It is usually discerned, if discerned at all, by the historian, or the critic, long after both the man and his age have passed away. With me it was different. I felt it myself, and made others feel it. Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.
The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.
Along with these things, I had things that were different. I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensations. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housestops. I ceased to be Lord over myself. I was no longer the Captain of my Soul, and did not know it. ... I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute Humility. ...
I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at: terrible and impotent rage: bitterness and scorn: anguish that wept aloud: misery that could find no voice: sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said:
Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark
And has the nature of Infinity.
But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived: the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had anyone told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, a Vita Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot give it away, and another may not give it to one. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.
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