Charles Grolleau

“ Wilde himself gives us the key to his errors and his weakness:
“Human life is the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there is nothing else of any value. It is true that as one watches life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one cannot wear over one’s face a mask of glass nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshappen dreams. ”

“ These opinions of Rebell questionable though they may be, show us plainly something of the charm and the weakness of Wilde.
A perfect artist desiring to leave his mark on the temple-columns of Fame must not live among his fellow men ambitious to taste the bitterness and the sweetness alike of every caress of existence, but submit himself pitilessly to the thraldom of the writing desk. Some authors may produce masterpieces amidst the busy throng; but there are others who lose all power of creation unless they shut themselves up for a time and live severely by rote. ”

“ On many occasions Wilde actually brought the companions of his abominable rites and sinful joys to his own home, and indulged in his frightful propensities beneath the roof of the house which sheltered his own sons and their most unhappy mother. Could the man capable of this atrocity possess a normal mind? Can Oscar Wilde, who committed moral suicide and made of himself a social pariah, be regarded as a sane man? London society is not so strict nor straight-laced that it will not forgive much laxity in its devoted votaries. ”

“ And yet, strange as it may seem, progress cannot be made save by way of paradox, whilst much vaunted common sense—the prized virtue of the imbecile—perpetuates the humdrum routine of daily life. The truth is, we refuse to allow anyone to come and outrage our intellectual sluggishness, or our morality, ready-made like second-hand clothes in a dealer’s shop, or the stupid security of our sheepish preconceptions.
Looked at squarely, that was the veritable crime in the minds of those who sat in judgment on Oscar Wilde. ”

“ How wonderful the whole world becomes to one! To note the curious, hard logic of passion and the emotional, coloured life of the intellect—to observe where they meet, and where they separate, at what point they are in unison and at what point they are in discord—there is a delight in that! What matter what the cost is? One can never pay too high a price for any sensation. ”

“ Fortunately for Oscar Wilde, the French took another view of the attitude to adopt towards a man who has offended against society, and who has been punished for it. Never by a word or a hint did they show that they remembered that offence, which, in their view, had been atoned for and wiped out. Oscar Wilde remained for them always un grand homme, un maître, a distinguished man, to be treated with deference and respect and, because he had suffered much, with sympathy. ”

“ Thus his attitude, towards life and towards art, was untouched by his conduct; his perfectly just and essentially dignified assertion of the artist’s place in the world of thought and the place of beauty in the material world being in nowise invalidated by his own failure to create pure beauty or to become a quite honest artist. A talent so vividly at work as to be almost genius was incessantly urging him into action, mental action. ”

“ The life and death of Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, poseur and convict, can only fittingly be summarised as a tragedy. Every misspent life is a tragedy more or less; but how much more tragic appear the elements of despair and disaster when the victim to his own vices is a man of genius exercising a considerable influence upon the thought and culture of his day, and possessing every advantage which birth, education, talent and station can bestow? ”

“ What a grievous error would it be on our part not to feel something of that immense and exhaustive love of beauty which haunted the soul of Wilde until the bitter end? However artificial his work may appear at the first glance, there is still sufficient left of the man which was incomparable. ”

“ None but an artist could have written the admirable pages on Shakespeare, Greek Art, and other elevated themes that are to be found in the works of Oscar Wilde.
[Pg xxviii] More than an artist was he, who noted down the suggestive thought: that the humility of the matter of a work of art is an element of culture. If therefore, we hear him exclaim that “thought is a sickness,” we must bear in mind that this is simply an analysis of the phrase: “We live in a period whose reading is too vast to allow it to become wise, and which thinks too much to be beautiful.” ”

“ And now, having become so newly acquainted with what is pitiful, and what seems most unjust, in the arrangement of human affairs, it has gone, not unnaturally, to an extreme, and taken, on the one hand, humanitarianism, on the other realism, at more than their just valuation, in matters of art. It is that odd instinct of the intellect, the necessity of carrying things to their furthest point of development, to be more logical than either life or art, two very wayward and illogical things, in which conclusions do not always follow from premises. ”

“ In ordinary table-talk we meet nothing more than ghosts of new-born ideas fore-doomed to perish. The jokes of a wit seldom survive the speaker. When we quote the epigrams of Wilde, it is as if we were exhibiting in a glass case, a collection of beautiful butterflies, whose wings have lost the brilliancy of their once gaudy colours. Lively talk pleases, because of the man who utters it, and we are impressed also by the gestures which accompany his frothy discourse. ”

“ I blame equally as much those who take it upon themselves to praise man, as those who make it their business to blame him, together with others who think that he should be perpetually amused; and only those can I approve who seek for truth with tear-filled eyes.
Pascal.
In “De Profundis,” that harmonious and last expression of the perfect artist, Wilde seems, in a single page to have concentrated in guise of supreme confession, all the pain and passion that stirred and sobbed in his soul. ”

“ Those who might be tempted to search in his work for an echo however feeble, of a new message to mankind, will be grievously disappointed. The technical cleverness of Wilde is undeniable, but the magnificent dress in which he has clothed it appears to us to have been borrowed. He has brought us neither remedy nor poison; he leads us nowhere, but at the same time we are conscious that he has been everywhere. No companion of ours is he, but all the companions we hold dear he has known. ”

“ Throughout the whole course of his existence, he persistently sought after and that with impunity, all sorts of excitants that could at last no longer be disguised under the name of experiences—and no doubt, others more terrible still that fall under no human laws, would have come finally to swell the ranks of their forerunners—and then, had the hand of Destiny not arrested him in his course, he would have wound up by descending so low that the artistic life of his soul would have been forever extinguished. ”

“ Intentions is far from containing anything but mere paradoxes. Those that we find there are at any rate of very diverse kinds. Some are pure verbal amusements, and may be thrust aside after the moment’s attention that they snatched from our surprise. Others belong to a nobler family of ideas and awaken in us the lasting and fecund astonishment of the paradox which is born sound and healthy, because it concerns a new truth. ”

“ He who uses his intellect to serve only his sensuality can produce nothing elaborate but what is artificial. Such is the dilemma of Wilde, whose collections of writings is like a painted stage-scene, mere garish canvas, behind which there is never anything substantial. ”

“ Oscar Wilde had desired to live a pagan’s free and untramelled life in Twentieth-century England, forgetful of the enormous fact that no longer may we live pagan-wise, for the shadow of the Cross has shed a steadily increasing gloom over the conditions that enlivened the joyous existence of olden times. ”

“ Sir Edward Clarke—pained, surprised, shocked—consented to a verdict for the Marquis of Queensberry and the great libel case was at an end. The defendant left the court proudly erect, conscious that he had been the means of saving his son and of eradicating from society a canker which had been rotting it unnoticed, except by a few, for a very long time. Oscar Wilde left the court a ruined and despised man. People—there were one or two left who were loyal to him—turned aside from him with loathing. ”

“ The leopard cannot change his spots and neither can the lion his skin. Even in his beautiful book, “De Profundis”—surely the most extraordinary volume of recent years—the man’s character is writ so plainly that he who runs may read. Man of letters, man of fashion, man of hideous vices, Oscar Wilde remained to the last moment of his murdered life, a self-conscious egotist. ”

“ Wilde may truly be denominated the last representative of that English art of the XIXth. century, which beginning with Shelley, continuing with the Pre-Raphaelites and culminating with the American painter, Whistler, endeavours purposely to set forth an ideal and elegant expression of the world.
The mistake of these men lies in the belief that Art was made for Life; whereas it is, as a matter of fact, quite the contrary. Life has no other value, except as subject-matter, for poet and painter. ”

“ Imagine if you can, an enormous wheel in the interior of which exist cunningly arranged winding steps. Wilde, mounting on one of the steps, would immediately set the wheel in motion by the movement of his feet; then the steps follow each other under the feet in rapid and regular evolution, thus forcing the legs to a precipitous action which becomes laborious, enervating, and even maddening after a few minutes. ”