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THE NEW HELLENISM OF OSCAR WILDE

In Act II of Wilde's A Woman of No Importance the following dialogue occurs:—

Mrs. Allonby: The American girl has been giving us a lecture.

Lord Illingworth: Really? All Americans lecture, I believe. I suppose it is something in their climate. What did she lecture about?

Mrs. Allonby: Oh, Puritanism, of course.

Eventually, however, the young Puritan accepts the woman of no importance as her mother-in-law.

In this paper we shall give Wilde an American lecture on his false Hellenism; but accept him, in part, in spite of his theory. "The fact of a man's being a prisoner is nothing against his style," says Wilde in Pen, Pencil, and Poison. The fact of Wilde's being Hellenistic is not everything against his Hellenism, but it is something.

Moreover, Wilde lectured himself. When he was in condition he defended Art for Art's Sake, the New Hellenism, and the New Individualism with all the conviction of England's chief advocate of those tenets. When he was discouraged, or recovering from excesses, or languishing in prison, or when the true artist in him suddenly saw the false, he cried out against himself and his theories with a fervor like unto Bunyan's in Grace Abounding. Wilde's poetry is his record of disillusion. Once he cries (in Humanitad):

But we are Learning's changelings, know by rote
The clarion watchword of each Grecian school
And follow none, the flawless sword that smote
The pagan Hydra is an effete tool

Which we ourselves have blunted, what man now

Shall scale the august ancient heights and to old
Reverence bow?

Not Wilde, surely, as he confesses in the same poem:
And yet I cannot tread the portico

And live without desire, fear, and pain,
Or nurture that wise calm which long ago
The grave Athenian master taught to men,
Self-poised, self-centred, and self-comforted,
To watch the world's vain phantasies go by
with unbowed head.

Rather he yielded himself to the full flood of unrestraint and let himself drift on the uncharted seas, that wind and sun and storm might blow and warm and wrack him and leave their mark upon him :

For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die,-

he sings in The Ballad of Reading Gaol. In Helas!, his prologue to the Poems of 1881, he wavers momentarily

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringèd lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away

Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?

I

But at once he is off again on his mad quest of Beauty, Liberty, Life, and Pleasure. "I amused myself," he says in De Profundis, "with being a flâneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. 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 certain joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths."

In The Picture of Dorian Gray Lord Henry declares that if one man were to realize himself completely the world would so gain in joy as to blot out mediævalism and attain to the Hellenic ideal,-"to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal, it may be." This advance over Hellenism, even, Wilde calls the New Hellenism. He uses the term in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, but sets forth his conception more clearly in L'Envoi and in The English Renaissance. In the former he points out that Ruskin's æsthetic system is ethical always; whereas "we who are no longer with him" have passed on into that "serene House of Beauty" where "the rule of art is the rule of beauty," - wherein dwells "the gladness that comes, not from the rejection, but the absorption, of all passion." In The English Renaissance he defines his New Hellenism still more specifically, by synthesizing those hard-won analytical terms, Classical and Romantic. "It is really from the union of Hellenism," says he, "in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventitive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the art of

the nineteenth century in England, as from the marriage of Faust and Hellen of Troy sprang the beautiful boy Euphorion." Now no better characterization of nineteenth-century eclecticism exists than that. But Wilde at once qualifies. Instead of including the elements of strength and poise that normally accompany classicism, he rejects them for the sole ideals of Art and Beauty. All else he demolishes, in the name of Liberty, with paradox. "The way of paradoxes," he says elsewhere, "is the way of truth. To test Reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them."

Out of the agony and humility of the De Profundis, it is only just to add, emerges a new self leading the old self: his New Individualism, his New Hellenism in the leash of the eternal Individualism, the eternal Hellenism,- for we are not of those who doubt Wilde's repentance: yet all of him remains at the service of Art for Art's Sake. This, his most cherished theory, goes with him to the grave. He declares himself more of an individualist than ever. "Christ is the most supreme of individualists," he adds. He records a wish to write of Christ as the precursor of the romantic movement in life and of the artistic life considered in its relation to conduct. Then he praises the Greeks because they never chattered about sunsets; only to cry out at the end for the Mystical in Art, the Mystical in Life; a chastened Pagan reaching out for the Soul in Things.

"The Germans," according to Nicoll and Seccombe in their History of English Literature, "have taken Wilde's Art for Art theories seriously and have produced and criticized his Salomé and other paradoxically intense but insincere æsthetic products with amazing gravity." Our American Puritanism might conceivably show with equal gravity that Wilde's Art for Art theories were sufficiently weak morally to lead in themselves to his downfall. Wilde anticipated such a possibility. "People point to Reading Gaol," says he in De Profundis, "and say, 'That is where the artistic life leads a man.' Well," answers our irrepressible individualist, caught, as he says he is, for forgetting his Individualism and for calling on society to punish the Marquis of Queensbury for libeling him, "it might lead to worse places"; whereupon he shows that sorrow will make him a greater artist than before.

Since the world has condemned his morals, since the Germans have discussed his Art for Art's Sake, and since Wilde has anticipated and partly answered the question of the artistic life in its relation to conduct, we content ourselves here with pointing out how well equipped he was in the Classics, especially in Greek; and how little they really influenced his Art, except as they substantiated his own theories and satisfied his cravings for Romanticism. All else in the Classic temper was perfect to him, but unattainable.

Wilde's college record in Classics was of the highest. He was an "A" student. He read Classics with all the facility of a paragon. So easy were Latin and Greek authors to him that he seldom paused to ask just what they meant. He was far too glib for that. Besides, he had theories of what they should mean. His The Rise of Historical Criticism illustrates both points. He wrote the paper in competition for the Chancellor's English Essay at Oxford, in 1879. It is an uninspired piece of work, dry and formal, indeed, and was not accepted. "Historical criticism," says he, "is a part of that complex working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against authority." He finds this tendency entirely Greek. He declares the Roman respect for tradition "fatal to any rise of that spirit of revolt against authority, the importance of which, as a factor in intellectual progress, we have already seen." His highest commendation is reserved for Polybius, the historian of Roman institutions, whom he praises for his rationalistic method. Heroditus and Thucydides are treated at some length; Plutarch, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus are touched upon. Plato and Aristotle are considered conventionally. Homer, Eschylus, Euripides, Xenophon, Hesiod, Pindar, Corinna, Strabo, Heraclitus, Euhemerus, Zeno, Epicurus, Ennius, Lucretius, Cicero, Minucius Felix, and St. Augustine are mentioned.

The flower of Wilde's classical appreciation and art criticism is contained in Intentions, a continuation and expansion, in part, of his Rise of Historical Criticism. With sufficient cigarettes and reassurances that the moon is not looking, he insinuates the names, at least, of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Lucian, Herodotus, Pausanias, Virgil, Horace, Cic

ero, Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny, and Fronto. All illustrate for him the antiquity of criticism; whence he advances to his own theory that the critic is an artist, inasmuch as he gazes on Art, then reacts and creates Art in describing Art. Whether the critic sees what the artist had in mind is of little moment: he sees something. Pater's interpretation of the Monna Lisa fulfils this ideal.

Indeed, much of Wilde's Art for Art's Sake came direct from Pater.' What he did not absorb from his master, however, was Pater's reverence for Plato,—his endless pilgrimage towards an understanding of the Greek spirit in the greatest of the Greeks.' Wilde's heart goes out, rather, to Theocritus, Sappho, Catullus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Cicero's Letters, and the more picturesque portions of Homer and Suetonius. Of the Greek Anthology he says finely: "The beautiful poems contained in this collection seem to me to hold the same position in regard to the Greek dramatic literature as do the delicate litttle figurines of Tanagra to the Phidian marbles, to be quite as necessary for the complete understanding of the Greek spirit." Truly they are, but in time these little things came to usurp for Wilde the places of the big things. In like manner, he was always on the point of realizing the full power of Shakespeare and Dante and never quite accomplishing his intentions.

The defects of Wilde's Hellenism are strikingly apparent in his Greek poems. Here Beauty and Liberty decline, at the worst, into Ugliness and Libertinage. Even structurally these poems stagger with intoxication. At the same time they flash forth illuminated lines and passages, glowing with beauty and art.

But Homer E. Woodbridge in Poet-Lore has written so well of Wilde's poetry, pro and con, that we have nothing to add. Turning to his prose, and granting Wilde his donnée of a New Hellenism of Art and Beauty, we find him often artistic and often beautiful. If we cannot admit that his paradoxes, except

1 For the relations of Pater and Wilde, see Dr. Edouard J. Bock's Walter Pater's Einfluss Auf Oscar Wilde (Bonn, 1913).

'Plato is too ethical for Wilde. When Socrates, for example, discusses art in the first book of the Republic he shows that Art for Art's Sake is Art for Conduct's sake and Art for the Object's sake.

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