Arthur Ransome

“ Wilde was a kind of Wainewright, to whom his own life was very important. He saw art as self-expression and life as self-development. He felt that his life was material on which to practise his powers of creation, and handled it and brooded over it like a sculptor planning to make a dancing figure out of a pellet of clay. Even after its catastrophe he was still able to speak of his life as of a work of art, as if he had seen it from outside. Indeed, to a surprising extent, he had been a spectator of his own tragedy. ”

“ Wilde provides us with the rare spectacle of a man most of whose powers are those of a spectator, a connoisseur, a man for whom pictures are painted and books written, the perfect collaborator for whom the artist hopes in his heart; the spectacle of such a man, delighting in the delicacies of life no less than in those of art, and yet able to turn the pleasures of the dilettante and the amateur into the motives of the artist. ”

“ In whatever is classical as opposed to romantic in modern art, we shall find a background of Fates with whom nobody sympathizes, in whom nobody believes. But all the world was alive to St. Francis. Shakespeare is myriad-mouthed as well as myriad-minded. Daffodils are alive for him no less than kings, and Iago is a man no less than Othello. And in all art that springs from the spirit, thought Wilde, "wherever there is a romantic movement in art, there somehow, and under some form, is Christ, or the soul of Christ." ”

“ The lives of Villon and of a few saints can alone show such swift passage from opulence to wretchedness, from ease to danger, from the world to a cell. We are not here concerned to blame or palliate the deeds that made this catastrophe possible, but only to remark that to Wilde himself, in comparison with the life of his intellect, they probably seemed infinitely unimportant and insignificant. The life of the thinker is in thought, of the artist in art. ”

“ The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Salomé, The Importance of Being Earnest, one or two of the fairy tales, and De Profundis, are surely enough with which to challenge the attention of posterity.
These things were the toys of a critical spirit, of a critic as artist, of a critic who took up first one and then another form of art, and played with it almost idly, one and then another form of thought, and gave it wings for the pleasure of seeing it in the light; of a man of action with the eyes of a child; of a man of contemplation curious of all the secrets of life, not only of those that serve an end ”

“ In the case of such a writer as Wilde, whose books are the by-products of a life more important than they in his own eyes, it is not only legitimate but necessary for understanding to look at books and life together as at a portrait of an artist by himself, and to read, as well as we may, between the touches of the brush. It is not that there is profit in trying to turn works of art into biographical data, though that may be a fascinating pastime. It is that biographical data cannot do other than assist us in our understanding of the works of art. ”

“ They were free to do all this, and for a creed he taught them that criticism is itself a creative art, perhaps the most creative of the arts, certainly an art to be practised with no less delicate care than that of the maker of poems, the teller of stories, the painter of pictures, the man who captures a melody, or the man who shapes a dream in stone. ”

“ In thinking of the virtuosity of Wilde's manner, a thing not at all common in English literature, we must remember the consciousness of power that wrapped his days in a bright light, served him sometimes as a mantle of invisibility, and made him loved and hated with equal vehemence. His tasks were always too easy for him. He never strained for achievement, and nothing requires more generosity to forgive than success without effort. ”

“ But the crudity of those pitiable little scraps of proffered information is not so remarkable as that of the presumptuous attempt to read a book as if it had fallen like manna from heaven, and that of the gross dullness of perception that can allow a man to demand of a poem or a picture that it shall itself compel him fully to understand it. To gain the privilege of a just appreciation of a man's books (if, indeed, such an appreciation is possible) we must know what place they took in his life, and handle the rough material that dictated even their most ethereal tissue. ”

“ Control is never lost, and, when the play is done, when we return to it in our waking dreams, we return to that elevation only given by the beautiful, undisturbed by the vividness, the clearness with which we realise the motive of passion playing its part in that deeper motive of doom, that fills the room in which we read, or the theatre in which we listen, with the beating of the wings of the angel of death. ”

“ They set their excellence as a barrier between themselves and life. Not for a moment will they forget that they are the creatures of art: not for a moment will they leave that calm air for the dust and turmoil of human argument. Wilde was never so sure of his art as in this dialogue, where Ernest, that ethereal Sancho Panza, and Gilbert, that rather languid Don Quixote, tilt for their hearer's joy. They share the power of visualization that made Wilde's own talk like a continuous fairy tale. ”

“ I therefore changed my original intention, and, while concerned throughout with Wilde as artist and critic rather than as criminal, read his biographers and talked with his friends that I might be so far from forgetting as continually to perceive behind the books the spectacle of the man, vividly living his life and filling it as completely as he filled his works with his strange and brilliant personality.
It is too easy to talk glibly of the choice between life and literature. No choice can be made between them. ”

“ These good women, these unselfish, pseudonymous mothers, these men of wit and fashion discomfited to make a British holiday; their temptations, their sacrifices, their defeats, are not taken from any drama played in Wilde's own mind. He saw them and their adventures quite impersonally; and no good art is impersonal. Salomé kissing the pale lips of Iokanaan may once have moved him when he saw her behind the ghostly footlights of that secret theatre in which each man is his own dramatist, his own stage-manager, and his own audience. ”

“ There is nothing in the master strong enough to impose itself upon the pupil. When Keats, full of admiration, imitates Leigh Hunt, he is not very heavily impeded in his search for Keats. But when Wilde blows the horn of Morris, an echo from that Norseman's lungs throws out of harmony the notes of his disciple. When he touches Rossetti's lute his melody is blurred by the thrum of the strings that the Italian's fingers have so lately left. In fifty years' time it will, perhaps, be safe to imitate Swinburne. ”

“ There is a public glory in the art of the theatre, a direct and immediate applause that is nearer to the face-to-face praise and visible worship that is won by conversation than the discreet approval of readers of books. Of all the arts that of the drama is most likely to attract the talker for talk's sake. By its means he can set his fancies moving on the boards, fling his metaphors dressed and coloured on a monstrous screen, and entertain a thousand listeners at once. Hazlitt never wrote a play ”

“ He has been told to forget who he is; life in prison almost compels him to rebellion; but he has learnt that only by remembering his identity, by shifting to his own shoulders the burden of his disaster, and by an absolute acceptance of all that has happened in and to him, will he be able to win the pride that humility confers and that rebellion makes impossible.
This purpose, to give his life the unity he demanded from a poem; these motives, of suffering and humility, run waveringly through De Profundis, carrying with them here and there fragments of mournful experience. ”

“ Gilbert, in 'The Critic as Artist,' complains that "we are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them," he continues. "They are the mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one and the ashes to another, but the soul is out of their reach." ”

“ The simultaneous speech of Cecily and Gwendolen is no insult to our intelligence, nor do we boggle for a moment over the delightful impossibility of Lane. We are caught from the beginning by a spirit of delicate fun. We busy ourselves in the intrigues, and would on no account draw back. The Importance of Being Earnest is to solid comedy what filigree is to a silver bowl. We are relieved of our corporeal envelopes, and share with Wilde the pleasure of sporting in the fourth dimension. ”

“ The whole is greater than its part, and literature is at once the child and the stimulus of life, inseparable from it. But, beside art, life has other activities, all of which aspire to the self-consciousness that art makes possible. The artist himself, for all his gift of tongues, is not blinded by the descending light to the plastic qualities of the existence that fires his words and is itself intensified by his speech. ”

“ Our ideal Japan has existed only in the minds of the artists who saw it, and when we cross the seas to look for it, we find nothing but a few fans and coloured lanterns. But that is not enough. We continually see lovely things in nature, strangely like the things we see in books and pictures. There is plagiary here, on one side or on the other, and, with almost ecstatic courage, Vivian announces that, so far from art holding the mirror to nature (a view advanced by Hamlet as a proof of his insanity) , nature imitates art. ”

“ In Wilde's case we compare a row of volumes, themselves remarkable, with a life that was the occupation of an agile and vivid personality for which a cloistered converse with itself was not enough, a personality that loved the lights and the bustle, the eyes and ears of the world, and the applause that does not have to wait for print. ”

“ Wilde wears his like a flower. Walpole is without breadth, or depth, and equals only as a gossip Wilde's enchanting freedom as a juggler with ideas. Wilde was indolent and knew it. Indolence was, perhaps, the only sin that stared him in the face as he lay dying, for it was the only one that he had committed with a bad conscience. It had lessened his achievement, and left its marks on what he had done. Even in his best work he is sometimes ready to secure an effect too easily. "Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning," may be regarded as an example of such effects. ”

“ Wilde keeps aloof from rich and poor alike, and, throughout a long paper, more carelessly written than most of his, is simply speculating upon what art can gain by social reform, and of what kind that reform must be, if art is not to be left in a worse case than before it. The essay is like notes from half a dozen charming, and, at that time, daring talks, thrown together, and loosely brought into some sort of unity by a frail connecting thread.
In its airy distance from practical politics, nothing could be more dissimilar than The Soul of Man from the two letters to The Daily Chronicle. ”

“ Wit is a little heartless, a little jarring, when flashed over a crisis of conscience, even when we know that the agitated politician is only a figure cut from an illustrated paper and mounted on cardboard. And passion, whether of repentance or of indignation, is a little outré in a picture-gallery where Lord Illingworth has said that a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. ”

“ It is for that reason that we are warned to make no graven images, lest we should commit ourselves to a God of a single mood. It was quite natural that the Christ whom Wilde saw, as he sat on the wooden bench in his cell and turned the pages of his Greek Testament, should be a Christ who showed that in all the acts of his life there had been hope, a Christ who perceived "the enormous importance of living completely for the moment," swept aside the tyranny of orthodoxy, and "regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection." ”

“ They are not books for every day, nor even for every night. We keep them for rare moments, as we keep in a lacquer cabinet some crystal-shrined thread of subtle perfume, or some curious gem, to be a solace in a mood that does not often recur, or, perhaps, to be an instrument in its evocation. Dorian Gray, for all its faults, is such a book. ”