UNIV. OF CALIFORNIA

I

INTRODUCTORY

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." That is not a warning lightly to be disregarded. No stirring up of dust and ashes is excusable, and none but brutish minds delight in mud-pies mixed with blood. I had no body-snatching ambition. Impatient of such criticism of Wilde as saw a law-court in The House of Pomegranates, and heard the clink of handcuffs in the flowing music of Intentions, I wished, at first, to write a book on Wilde's work in which no mention of the man or his tragedy should have a place. I remembered that he thought Wainewright, the poisoner and

AIMROLLLOSCAR WILDE

essayist, too lately dead1 to be treated in "that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance." To-day it is Wilde who is too near us to be seen without a blurring of perspectives. Some day it will be possible to write of him with the ecstatic acquiescence that Nietzsche calls Amor Fati, as we write of Cæsar Borgia sinning in purple, Cleopatra sinning in gold, and Roberto Greene hastening his end by drab iniquity and grey repentance. But not yet. He only died a dozen years ago. I planned an artificial ignorance that should throw him to a distance where his books alone would represent him.

I was wrong, of course. Such wilful evasion would have been foolish in a contemporary critic of Shelley, worse than foolish in a critic of Wilde. An artist is unable to do everything for us. He gives us his work as a locked casket. Sometimes the wards are very simple and all the world have keys to fit; sometimes they are intricate and subtle, and the casket is only to be opened by a few, though all may taste imperfectly the precious essences distilling through the hinges. Sometimes, when our knowledge of an artist and of the conditions under which he wrote have been entirely forgotten, there are no keys, and the work of art remains a closed casket, like much early poetry, of which we can only say that it is cunningly made and that it has a secret. Why do we try to pierce the✓ obscurity that surrounds the life of Shakespeareth if not because an intenser (I might say a more accurate) enjoyment of his writings may be given us by a fuller knowledge of the existence out of which he wrote? It is for this that we study the Elizabethan theatre, and print upon our minds a picture of the projecting stage, the gallants smoking pipes and straddling their stools, the flag waving from above the tiled roof. We would understand his technique, but, still more, while we lack directer evidence, we would use these hints about the furniture of his mind's eye in moments of composition. Writers of Wordsworth's generation realized, at least subconsciously, that a work of art is not independent of knowledge. They tried to help us by printing at the head of a poem information about the circumstances of its conception. When a poet tells us that a sonnet was composed "on Westminster Bridge," or "suggested by Mr. Westell's views of the caves, etc., in Yorkshire," he is trying to ease for us the task of æsthetic reproduction to which his poem is a stimulus. There is a crudity about such obvious assistance, and