Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde confused life and work, trying to manage his own existence artistically. He was a very prominent character, the main exponent of English Decadentism, as Baudelaire was for France and d’Annunzio for Italy; indeed, we can say that Wilde was English aestheticism.

By Decadentism we mean a literary genre and an attitude that permeates the entire end of the century. The term was first used by Verlaine, referring to impressionist painting. In England romanticism is undermined by the Victorian compromise which is based on English greatness, on philanthropy, on trust in science. The ideals of equality and freedom are set aside, the novel by Dickens and Thackeray reigns, focused on the step up and always with a happy ending. The backbone of economic England is the merchant class which embraces Calvinist and Puritanical moralism. The judgment of society becomes more important than the divine one, sex is taboo. A law is promulgated against male homosexuals (not against females because no one has the courage to explain to the queen that there are also homosexual women) Wilde will end up in jail, in Reading Gaol precisely, because he will admit to being homosexual. Wilde doesn’t bother to hide his tendencies, convinced of the need to break down moralistic conventions in favor of experiences. He flaunts his friendship with his Basil, that is Lord Alfred Douglas, the great passion of his life. The process that will result from this friendship will mean his as a writer and as a man. It is a tragedy of which Wilde will be aware from the outset and which seems almost sought after by him. At the trial he will not excuse himself in the name of the legitimacy of his being gay. He will personally pay for his ideas and will give the last, definitive brushstroke to an artistic life, not free, however, from the sense of guilt, which is found in all decadent poets, including d’Annunzio.

Since, therefore, all romantic ideals are in crisis, an attempt is made to replace them with sensations, thus aestheticism is born. Sensations are no longer understood as the lowest part of man but are re-evaluated in a gnoseological perspective as a form of knowledge. English decadentism is a new romantic flare that burns with sensations. Wilde, born in 1854, is culturally Anglo-Irish, influenced by mid-nineteenth-century Dublin culture, the aestheticizing movements of Oxford and France. The puritanical component is completely missing in him, his approach to life is in the sense of enjoyment.

Wilde overshadows important painters and poets such as the Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne, with whom aestheticism has a more subterranean life, while he advertises it and brings into the salons, where he takes hold with his life, the conversation, attitudes. But all his contemporary artists enter his circle and influence him. Morris embodies a practical aestheticism that would like to change life and link it to art. Ruskin advocates a return to individual beauty, to Hellenic models, to Nordic Gothic. Pater wants liberation from Christianity, which prevents man from sensually enjoying earthly life. He tends “to art for art’s sake”, understood as an aesthetic and no longer spiritual research. Dante Gabriel Rossetti hopes for the restoration of essential and non-mannered Pre-Raphaelite painting. In reality, his trait will be Botticellian, languid, refined, with a murky and melancholy sensualism that reflects the weariness, discomfort, lack of ideals of the time. Stylnovistic love is sensualized and Rossetti’s Beatrice has just that mix of innocence and perversity that Wilde likes so much. Swinburne is the greatest poet of English decadence, he proposes the return to paganism, to the fullness of life enjoyed and lived in all his experiences.

Characteristic of Wilde’s early works is the decadent admiration of the Renaissance and of Shakespeare, which inspired his early poems.

O listen ere the searching sun

Show to the world my sin and shame

(San Miniato)

To drift with every passion till my soul

Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play

(Helas!)

“Requiescat”, written in memory of a little sister who died at the age of sixteen, is a typical Pre-Raphaelite expression, with something gothic.

T

Tread lightly, 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 buried here,

Heap earth upon it.

The lily is ambiguous, it is an innocent flower but with an intense perfume, here it becomes a symbol of sexuality, like Pascoli’s “nocturnal jasmine”. In the poem Madonna mia, where we find the image of the lily (as also in Ave Maria Gratia Plena) we have a clear example of Pre-Raphaelite Stilnovism.

And longing eyes half veiled by slumberous tears

Like bluest waters seen through mists of rain […]

And white Throat, whiter than the silvered dove,

Through whose wan marble creeps one purple vein.

In Ave Maria Gratia Plena the image of the kneeling Madonna, “a kneeling girl with passionless pale face” refers us to an aesthetic, graceful concept of religion. The whole scene is without passion, an act of pure beauty. Wilde tends to confuse ethics with aesthetics and the Catholic Church attracts English aestheticism because it appeals to the senses, among vestments, icons, hymns and the unnerving smells of incense.

It refers to Shelley, D’Annunzio and Whistler’s paintings, the yellow painting In the gold room, with impressionist images and correspondence between sounds and colors.

Her ivory hands on the ivory keys

Strayed in a fitful fantasy,

Like the silver gleam when the poplar trees

Rustle their pale leaves listlessly,

Or the drifting foam of a restless sea

When the waves show their teeth in the flying breeze

Her gold hair fell on the wall of gold

Like the delicate gossamer tangles spun

On the burnished disk of the marigold

Or the sunflower turning to meet the sun

When the gloom of the jealous night is done

And the spear of the lily is aureoled.

And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine

Burned like the ruby fire set

In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,

Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,

Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet

With the spilt out blood of the rose-red wine.

Anche in Le Panneau c’è una descrizione, appunto, da pannello decorativo:

Under the rose tree’s dancing shade

There stands a little ivory girl,

Pulling the leaves of pink and pearl

With pale green nails of polished jade.

With “The harlots house”, from 1885, Wilde goes beyond the mere decoratorism of his beginnings, conveying a message of disgust and weariness for the “deboscery”:

Love passed into the house of lust.

He does it with words like harlot, cigarette and automatons, which are new to the poetry of the time. The barrage of automatons reminds us of Mary Shelley, Poe and Baudelaire. Much more successful and melancholic is “To L.L.”, dedicated to his wife and to the sense of guilt that hovers in the poet’s soul after the end of family and love. It is no longer the Pre-Raphaelite style that saturates the poetry with smells and colours, but a sad and crepuscular atmosphere, which reminds us of D’Annunzio’s “The Rain in the Pine Grove”.

Could we dig up this long-buried treasure,

Were it worth the pleasure,

We never could learn love’s song,

We are parted too long.

Could the passionate past that is fled

Call back its dead,

Could we live it all over again,

Were it worth the pain!

I remember we used to meet

By an ivied seat,And you warbled each pretty word

With the air of a bird;

And your voice had a quaver in it,

Just like a linnet,

And shook, as the blackbird’s throat

With its last big note;

And your eyes, they were green and grey

Like an April day,

But lit into amethyst

When I stooped and kissed;

And your mouth, it would never smile

For a long, long while,

Then it rippled all over with laughter

Five minutes after.

You were always afraid of a shower,

Just like a flower:

I remember you started and ran

When the rain began.

I remember I never could catch you,

For no one could match you,

You had wonderful, luminous, fleet,

Little wings to your feet.

I remember your hair — did I tie it?

For it always ran riot -

Like a tangled sunbeam of gold:

These things are old.

I remember so well the room,

And the lilac bloom

That beat at the dripping pane

In the warm June rain;

And the colour of your gown,

It was amber-brown,

And two yellow satin bows

From your shoulders rose.

And the handkerchief of French lace

Which you held to your face -

Had a small tear left a stain?

Or was it the rain?

On your hand as it waved adieu

There were veins of blue;

In your voice as it said good-bye

Was a petulant cry,

‘You have only wasted your life.’

(Ah, that was the knife!)

When I rushed through the garden gate

It was all too late.

Could we live it over again,

Were it worth the pain,

Could the passionate past that is fled

Call back its dead!

Well, if my heart must break,

Dear love, for your sake,

It will break in music, I know,

Poets’ hearts break so.

But strange that I was not told

That the brain can hold

In a tiny ivory cell

God’s heaven and hell.

And here we are at “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, from 1898, which comes from a deep and heartfelt pain. The theme is the impression aroused in prison by the arrival of a man sentenced to death, a soldier who killed his woman in his sleep because he was drunk. The images and atmosphere are reminiscent of Coleridge’s romanticism. Here Wilde detaches himself from decadent selfishness — that sees life as an experience of personal refinement — in favor of a feeling of togetherness.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves

By each 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!

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 with a sigh:

For each man kills the thing he loves

Yet each man does not die.

The author oscillates between overcoming common morals and feelings of guilt also connected to the fear of death.

Wilde also wrote many fairy tales, born with his children, in the quiet years of marriage, before the trial and prison. Here too the eternal conflict between aesthetics and ethics is debated. “The Happy Prince” narrates the unnatural but pure love between a swallow and a statue. “The Nightingale and the Rose” is also based on the love-death union, so dear to the decadent — as well as to the Italian “Scapigliati”, including the almost forgotten Igino Hugh Tarchetti. Love, Wilde tells us, cannot exist without sacrifice. In “The Selfish Giant” there is a sense of morbidity that relates to an excessive interest in children found in the Victorian period.

According to Wilde, in literature there is a need for fantastic power, in his essays he opposes realism and criticizes Émile Zola.

The only real people are the people who never existed.

Life imitates art and not the other way around, it is shapeless, the order is given to it only by the artistic activity of man. Art expresses nothing but itself. Criticism is more creative than creation, the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of art what the artist did not put there.

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.

The difference between Romanticism and Decadentism is that ideals have been lost in the latter. Gautier, Pater, Baudelaire, Mallarmè, Morris, Ruskin, Rimbaud, Huysman, with their poisoned, nervous and corrupt fin de siècle sensitivity, constitute the second romantic-decadent flame, which opposes the sadness of a petty and monotonous life, based on Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Man is moved by an immanent and evil will, and lives an ugly reality that must be replaced with a beautiful lie. Nature is the genetic makeup that is imposed on us, artifice our free choice.

“The Portrait of Dorian Gray” is an almost gothic horror novel, perhaps absorbed by the attendance of Le Fanù and Maturin. The portrait represents old age and the turpitude of the soul. The story tells of Dorian Gray, an innocent, beautiful and sensitive young man, who knows the corrupter Henry Wotton, cynical, debauched, tired of life and pleasures. From Wildian’s point of view, the corruption wrought by Wotton on Gray is an initiation into the life of the senses, into knowledge of the world through pleasure. The state of mind of the protagonists is rendered through sensations: exhausting smells, sounds, languid, suffocating but not unpleasant atmospheres, as in D’Annunzio’s “Il Piacere”. In the preface Wilde states:

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

All of Dorian Gray is a dangerous symbol for anyone who perceives it, a decadent message of refined hedonism. How far, asks the author, can an aesthete go before becoming a monster like the portrait? Henry Wotton’s library is a liberty style paradise, Dorian discovers Wagner and is overwhelmed by it. Henry Wotton is struck by the candor of Dorian, so ready to be molded, initiated into the “new hedonism”, the joy of living, the rediscovery of the body, the Hellenistic renaissance. Wotton is tired of physical pleasures and wants to enjoy through the fresh senses of Dorian and through the plagiarism of other people’s souls.

The harmony of body and soul — what immense value is in it! We in our foolishness have separated the two and invented a realism which is vulgar and an idealism which is vacuous.

Henry lashes out against the respectable, Victorian, industrialized society, he understands that it is the environment that inhibits Dorian, repressing him. The work of corruption is also revelation. Where realism is devoid of soul and romanticism too ideal, hedonism starts from the exaltation of the senses and reaches the overcoming of the spirit-matter dualism that alienates man. The “new hedonism” resembles Renaissance Neo-Platonism plus Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Through the refinement of the senses it leads to the ideal. There is no good or bad, only beautiful or ugly. You can heal the soul with the senses — and the senses with the soul — pleasure leads to a knowledge that no religion and no philosophical doctrine can offer.

The whole novel is a tangle of contradictions that represent Wilde’s conflicted mind, a gymnasium of eternal conflicts between immorality and consequent guilt. When an esthete, an egoist, performs a good deed, he does it to experience a new sensation — and this is part of hedonism — or because he plays the comedy of goodness to complete the artistic creation of his life.

The plot of the novel is Faustian. Marlowe’s Faust made his pact with the devil for the thirst for knowledge, Goethe’s for love, Wilde’s for pleasure. But the consummation of the loving act (eros) leads to guilt and therefore to expiation through death (thanatos). Dorian Gray’s life is not happy, there is always a curb that spoils the tasting of earthly pleasures, he is cold and icy. He doesn’t become a real aesthete because he never has a body and a soul at the same time. The new hedonism fails.

The surface of the novel is made up of the plot, the elegance of the style, the homosexuality that hovers undeclared. The symbol is an invitation to break with the puritanical conventions of society, to enjoy the fruit of life beyond good and evil. This hedonistic doctrine, however, does not hold up, it leads to brutalization, unhappiness, to the monster who, in the end, dies like all the monsters of the gothic novel. The language is overloaded, refined, suffocating, suggestive.

I conclude with “The Picture of Mr W.H.”, a short story from 1989. Mr W.H. is the one to whom Shakespeare dedicated his works, probably the boy he was in love with. Wilde connects it to his love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas. In common with “The Picture of Dorian Gray” we have the triangle of men who move in an atmosphere of morbid friendship tending towards homosexuality, and the central figure of the handsome fatal young man, capable of unleashing a hurricane in the artist’s love life.