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Bonk * -^ 7 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT INTENTIONS THE DECAY OF LYING PEN PENCIL AND POISON THE CRITIC AS ARTIST THE TRUTH OF MASKS BY OSCAR WILDE NEW YORK BRENTANO'S 1905 Copyright, 1905, by Brentano's THE DE VINNE PRESS INTENTIONS i L CONTENTS PAGE Introduction vii .* The Decay of Lying . i Pen, Pencil, and Poison 57 The Critic as Artist, Part 1 93 The Critic as Artist, Part II 151 The Truth of Masks 219 INTRODUCTION Paradox is never so absolutely king as when you try to determine the separate ways of life and of literature. The poet lives his life, you say, and that is one matter ; the poem lives its life, and that is quite another matter. Between the writer and his writings the discriminating must observe di- vorce. Then, directly contradicting, is the theory of the goodly who are touched with the taint of Puritanism. Every written line, these hold, is the intimate expression of self. The sinner can- not write other than sinful things. The farther you fare, if you would reach dogma on this point, the deeper will you mire. Paradox alone rules. And rules nowhere so supremely as in the case of Oscar Wilde. If, on the one hand, we plead that it is the man's letters, not his life, that posterity should cherish ; on the other, it is folly for us to forget how completely, in Wilde, the artist — viii INTRODUCTION chose life as well as letters for expressing self. " Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it," wrote Wilde in his marvellous essay on Wainewright marvellous in itself, and more so for the tragic thaumaturgy by which Time made of it a prophecy of Wilde's own fate ! — and Charles Whibley, later, echoed with " there is an art of life, as there are arts of colour, form, and speech." Yet, if we incline to consider Wilde as the artist in life, if we recall his career as aesthete, as triumphant dandy, as successful playwright, we have also to remember the tragedy, the prison, the dismal, horrid crum- bling to a sordid death. Inextricably mingled are his living and his writing; yet to consider his prose, his plays, his poetry, only by the light of his prison and its aftermath, were a.z stupid as to imagine that one may ever quite read any page of his without finding there some echo of a personahty. No man whose energy, whose del:Vht in a personal pose, and whose paradoxic inf .tuation with art could make such an impress on the time and the land he lived in can be erased by any act of his own, or by our volition, from the world's chronicle. If his triumphs were gorgeous ; if he turned the fogs of London into rose-gardens for his fancy; if in vanity and impertinence he had ruled his world as INTRODUCTION IX a monarch, dictating in taste and thought and lan- guage, he was to taste, later, the depths of despair, and pain; his soul, once so arrogant in its scorn of human emotion, was to suffer sorrow, and shame and contempt. The mood of the triumphant dandy we have in his earlier, that of the self-pitying suf- ferer, in his later writings. In life, as in letters, he was always the man of his mood, the artist in atti- tudes. One must take him, if one can, at the par- ticular mood that best pleases one. While it is my mind now to concern myself only with that mood of Wilde's in which he produced the essays in IntentionSy it was scarce possible to come to this without touching, however lightly, upon the perplexing, paradoxic problem of the man's life and its bearing on his art. Just as all his living w-.,S' a paradox, so the relation between that living and his writing must ever remain one. A month after Wilde's death, when Puritan ears were to all intenu closed against his name, I pub- lished an argumeii-i seeking to disestablish the con- nection between his noble artistic achievement and the cloud under which his name still lay. That was, of course, special pleading. Now, barely five years later. Time has nobly fulfilled all I then fore- cast. It takes no courage now, as then, upon the news of his death, to admit one's appreciation of X INTRODUCTION Oscar Wilde's artistic accomplishment. In con- tinental Europe no play is more frequently per- formed at this writing than Wilde's Salome ; his books and his plays are everywhere conspicuous. Colder critical perspective of Time and Comparison has not diminished the regard for his writings. The posthumous publication of certain prison let- ters of his called De Profundis tended, but the other day, to darken counsel somewhat. Here, again, was the gaping wound laid open, the tor- tured soul writhing to find itself amid its countless attitudes. Here what had been arrogance was turned to pity, and to a pagan, yet piteous, inter- pretation of the Christ ; yet here, still, was the pose, the attitude, the unquenchable artist in attitudes. Nothing, in the case before us, can be thrown away. It is as futile to consider the life alone as the letters alone. All was of a piece. Yet the happy mean, the discriminating way, is, having in mind the art his life assumed, to consider as dis- tinctly as possible the art he put on paper. His life was as complete a work of art, with heights and depths, triumphs and tragedies, as was ever composed. There, then, is one Magnum Opus. Some will like it, some loathe it ; some, in reading his written art, will like to forget his acted art, some will recall it gladly: you see, do what one INTRODUCTION XI will, one proceeds in circles, issuing always upon paradox. Paradox and moods,'it is always these in the case of Wilde. And never more so than in the case of his essays. His fairy tales, his poetry, notably The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his exquisite plays — living still not only in themselves, but as models to later playwrights —have my full meed of appreciation, yet it is in his essays that I find him at his best. Here the wisdom under his paradox is most dis- coverable. Here, forgetting his life, one may most clearly discern his most characteristic attitude toward life. Here, in Intentions, are the most precious utterances of this amateur in art and life. Jewels of wit and paradox are in these pages scattered so profusely, that if once one start to pick them up, one may not stop, save for sheer weari- ness. Truly one may declare, as William Watson does of Lowell, that the brilliance " is so great and so ubiquitous that it pays the not inconsiderable penalty of diverting our attention from the real soundness that underlies it all. So dazzling is the flash, and at times so sharp the report, that we scarcely notice the straightness of the aim." In that portion of the bookish world about us that fashions its verdicts upon academic formula the existence of any essayists save Lamb, Montaigne, Xll INTRODUCTION and Stevenson is slurred. Yet of essayists who have done memorable things, critically, in our own time, there are at least three : Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and George Moore. All have said trenchant things memorably. Often impertinent, yet never negli- gible. Intentions is magnificent with impertinences, but also with truths. As a book, it has splendidly the sincerity '"of Wilde's insincerity. It constantly makes ridiculous the petty formulas of petty dog- matists. Observe Richard Burton, not of New Arabian Nights, but of New England, declaring that " in the essay an author stands self-revealed ; he may mask behind some other forms, in some mea- sure; but commonplaceness, vulgarity, thinness of nature, are in this kind instantly unccvered. The essay is for this reason a severe te'^t." 'In the very first essay in Intentions, the o- '^ entitled The Decay of Lying, Wilde se^ aL awry that assertion about the mask and what' it hides ; he declares that what is interesting about people " is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask." How, before the nimbleness of this creature of masks and moods, can we for any length of time observe the stolid solemnity of the dogma- tists and the dealers in the sententious ? We are in a land of masks and moods. Literature is the advertisement of one's attitude ; INTRODUCTION Xlll toward life. It is the record of a mood. It is the impress, writ in wax, of some mask we wore at some moment. It is a quantity of conflicting things. It is revelation, and it is masquerade. What- ever it is, literature is something of which the essays in Intentions must ever be accounted types : irritating, i isincere, paradoxic, but — indubi- tably literature. Epigram jostles contradiction truth elbows the fantastic; paradox plays through every inte val yet these remain ; essays arrestingly entertaining, eminently readable. Upc n the style of Intentions there is little need to dwell ; bril- liant, inconsequent, mannered, it is ever the essence of the man himself. This style was the man you ; can, if you will, read him in every line of it. Here are all the triumphant moods of his triumphant, arrogant years, expressed in glittering epigram and luminous diction just as in the style of The ; Ballad of Reading Gaol you may mark the prison bars, and in that ot Oe Profundis you may hear the cry of a soul desperately at' °mpting to achieve sincerity through a chastened bou/.

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