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POEMS

It is a relief to turn from a list of bibliographical and biographical dates to the May-day colouring of a young man's first book; to forget for a moment the suffering that is nearly twenty years ahead, and to think of "undergraduate days at Oxford; days of lyrical ardour and of studious sonnet-writing; days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and musical repetitions of the ballade, and the villanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes and its curious completeness; days when one solemnly sought to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written; delightful days, in which, I am glad to say, there was far more rhyme than reason." It is too easy to forget this note in Wilde's personality, that he sounded again and again, and that was not cracked even by the terrible experiences whose symbol was imprisonment. To the end of his life Wilde retained the enthusiasm, the power of self-abandon to a moment of emotion, the delight in difficult beauty, in accomplished loveliness, that made his Oxford years so happy a memory, and give his first book a savour quite independent of its poetical value.

Ballade and villanelle, rondeau and triolet, the names of these French forms were enough to set the key for a young craftsman's reverie. But the university at that time was full of lively influences. Walter Pater's "Renaissance" had not long left the press. Its author, that grave man, was to be met in his panelled rooms, ready to advise, to point the way to rare books, and to talk of the secrets of his art. Pater in those days was a new classic, the private possession of those young men who found his books "the holy writ of beauty." The new classics of the generation before—Tennyson and Arnold and Browning—had not yet faded into that false antiquity that follows swift upon the heels of popular recognition. The scholar gipsy had not long been given his place in the mythology of "Oxford riders blithe," and the trees in Bagley Wood were still a little tremulous at his presence. Browning's "The Ring and the Book" had been published ten years before. Queen Victoria's approval of Tennyson may have somewhat marred him in the eyes of youthful seekers after subtlety, but the early poems offered a pleasant opportunity for discriminating appreciation. It was not very long since Swinburne "had set his age on fire by a volume of very perfect and very poisonous poetry." Morris, the first edition of whose "Defence of Guenevere," though published in 1857, was not exhausted till thirteen years later, was a master not yet so widely admired as to deny to his disciples the delight of a personal and almost daring loyalty. Rossetti's was a still more powerful influence.

All these factors must be remembered in any attempt to reconstruct the atmosphere in which Wilde wrote his early poems. Nor must we forget that when Wilde entered that atmosphere as an undergraduate he had an unusual training behind him. He had known another university, and carried away from it a gold medal for Greek. He was an Irishman whose nationality had been momentarily intensified by his revolutionary mother and his own name. And, perhaps still more important, he was a very youthful cosmopolitan, had been often abroad, knew a good deal of French poetry, and had been able to date one of his earliest poems from that light-hearted Avignon where the Popes once held their court, and whence the dancing on the broken bridge has sent a merry song throughout the world.

It is curious to see this young lover of Théophile Gautier and old intricate rhyme-forms, winning the Newdigate Prize for a poem in decasyllabic couplets on a set subject. Many bad and a few good poets have won that prize, and it constitutes, I suppose, a sort of academic recognition that a man writes verse. Wilde was always pleased with recognition, of whatever quality, and was, perhaps, induced to compete on finding himself curiously favoured by the subject chosen for the year, which happened to be Ravenna. He had visited Ravenna on his way to Greece in the previous long vacation, and so was equipped with memories denied to his rivals. He saw the city "across the sedge and mire," when they could only see her on the map. He knew "the lonely pillar, rising on the plain" where Gaston de Foix had died. And, in Italian woods, he had actually watched, hoping to see and hear

"Some goat-foot Pan make merry minstrelsy

Amid the reeds! some startled Dryad-maid

In girlish flight! or lurking in the glade,

The soft brown limbs, the wanton treacherous face

Of woodland god!"

The wordy piece of rhetoric that was published after winning him the prize is enriched by some pictorial effects that are almost effects of poetry. But the best that can or need be said of the whole is, that it is an admirable prize poem.

Three years later he published his first book.

Poems, bound in white vellum, decorated with gold, and beautifully printed, contains work done before and after Ravenna. The most obvious quality of this work, and that which is most easily and most often emphasized, is its richness in imitations. But there is more in it than that. It is full of variations on other men's music, but they are variations to which the personality of the virtuoso has given a certain uniformity. Wilde played the sedulous ape with sufficient self-consciousness and sufficient failure to show that he might himself be somebody. His emulative practice of his art asks for a closer consideration than that usually given to it. Let me borrow an admirable phrase from M. Remy de Gourmont, and say that a "dissociation of ideas" is necessary in thinking of imitation. To describe a young poet's work as derivative is not the same thing as to condemn it. All work is derivative more or less, and to pour indiscriminate contempt on Wilde's imitations because they are imitations, is to betray a lamentable ignorance of the history of poetry. There is no need too seriously to defend this early work. Wilde's reputation can stand without or even in spite of it. But it is worth while to notice that the worst it suggests is that young poets should be very careful to be bad critics, since they always do ill if they imitate the best contemporary models. They do better to copy poetasters, whom they must believe to be Miltons. When Coleridge admires Bowles, makes forty transcriptions from his poems for distribution among his friends, and imitates him as wholeheartedly as he can, he will but gain in comparison with his original. 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. It is not so at present.

Even in springing from the ground of prose into the air of song, it is wise to choose ground that age has worn or that is not itself remarkable. When Coleridge reads Purchas—

"In Xamdu did Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground with a wall, wherein are fertile Meddowes, pleasant Springs, delightfule Streames, and all sorts of beasts of chase and game, and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure"——

and rewrites it—

"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph the sacred river ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills.

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery"——

he works a true magic, bringing two out of one, and setting beside Purchas something that we can independently enjoy. Purchas died so long ago. He and Coleridge have different worlds behind them. But when Wilde remembers a passage in his favourite book, written not a dozen years before, and asks why he should not make personal to himself the description of the manifold life of Mona Lisa, that ends, "all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes"; when he prefixes two verses of explanation to a rhymed elaboration of that sentence—

"But all this crowded life has been to thee

No more than lyre, or lute, or subtle spell

Of viols, or the music of the sea

That sleeps, a mimic echo, in the shell"——

he only puts it out of drawing. It is impossible to avoid a comparison, because Pater and Wilde are so close together, alike in time and feeling.

'Eleutheria,' a section at the beginning of the book, includes a number of discreet sacrifices on the altar of Milton. Here Wilde does much better. Some of these exercises, which are among the most interesting he wrote, suggest a new view of the morale of imitation. With Wilde in this mood, imitation (to use one of those renewals of popular sayings that were the playthings of his mind), was the sincerest form of parody. Now parody is a branch of criticism. The critics of the music-hall stage are those favourite comedians who imitate their fellow-actors. Lewis Carroll is a negligible critic neither of Longfellow nor of Tennyson. Parody's criticism is too often facile, seeking applause by the readiest means, holding up to ridicule rather than to examination faults rather than excellences, exaggerating tricks of manner and concerning itself not at all with personality. Wilde's parodies are at once more valuable and more sincere. He tries to catch not only the letter but the spirit, and does indeed present a clearer view of Milton than is contained in many academic essays. An accusation of mere plagiary is made impossible by his openness. He writes a sonnet on Milton, a sonnet on Louis Napoleon, and then, matching even the title of his model, a sonnet on the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria. Let me print the sonnet "On the Late Massacre in Piedmont":—