Supplementary reading About Oscar Wilde

by Jorge Luis Borges

To mention Wilde's name is to mention a dandy who was also a poet; it is to evoke the image of a gentleman dedicated to the paltry aim of startling people by his cravats and his metaphors. It is also to evoke the notion of art as a select or secret game—like the work of Hugh Vereker and Stefan George—and the poet as an industrious monstrorum artifex (Pliny, XXVIII, 2). It is to evoke the weary twilight of the nineteenth century and the oppressive pomp one associates with a conservatory or a masquerade ball. None of these evocations is false, but I maintain that they all correspond to partial truths and contradict, or overlook, well-known facts.

For example, consider the notion that Wilde was a kind of symbolist. A great many facts support it: around 1881 Wilde directed the Aesthetes and ten years later, the Decadents; Rebecca West falsely accused him (Henry James, III) of imposing the stamp of the middle class on the Decadents; the vocabulary of the poem "The Sphinx" is studiously magnificent; Wilde was a friend of Schwob and of Mallarme. But one important fact refutes this notion: in verse or in prose Wilde's syntax is always very simple. Of the many British writers, none is so accessible to foreigners. Readers who are incapable of deciphering a paragraph by Kipling or a stanza by William Morris begin and end Lady Windermere's Fan on the same afternoon. Wilde's metrical system is spontaneous or simulates spontaneity; his work does not include a single experimental verse, like this solid and wise Alexandrine by Lionel Johnson: Alone with Christ, desolate else, left by mankind.

Wilde's technical insignificance can be an argument in favor of his intrinsic greatness. If his work corresponded to the sort of reputation he had, it would consist merely of artifices like Les Palais Nomades or Los crepusculos del jardin, which abound in Wilde – remember Chapter XI of Dorian Gray or "The Harlot's House" or "Symphony in Yellow" – but his use of adjectives gave him a certain notoriety. Wilde can dispense with those purple patches – a phrase attributed to him by Ricketts and Hesketh Pearson, but which had already appeared elsewhere earlier. The fact that it was attributed to Wilde confirms the custom of linking his name to decorative passages.

Reading and rereading Wilde through the years, I notice something that his panegyrists do not seem to have even suspected: the provable and elementary fact that Wilde is almost always right. The Soul of Man under Socialism is not only eloquent; it is just. The miscellaneous notes that he lavished on the Pall Mall Gazette and the Speaker are filled with perspicuous observations that exceed the optimum possibilities of Leslie Stephen or Saintsbury. Wilde has been accused of practicing a kind of combinatorial art, in the manner of Raymond Lully; that is perhaps true of some of his jokes ("one of those British faces that, once seen, are always forgotten"), but not of the belief that music reveals to us an unknown and perhaps real past (The Critic as Artist), or that all men kill the thing they love (The Ballad of Reading Gaol), or that to be repentant for an act is to modify the past (De Profundis), or that (and this is a belief not unworthy of Leon Bloy or Swedenborg) there is no man who is not, at each moment, what he has been and what he will be (ibid.)¹

I do not say this to encourage my readers to venerate Wilde; but rather to indicate a mentality that is quite unlike the one generally attributed to Wilde. If I am not mistaken, he was much more than an Irish Moreas; he was a man of the eighteenth century who sometimes condescended to play the game of symbolism. Like Gibbon, like Johnson, like Voltaire, he was an ingenious man who was also right. He was "remarkable for the rapidity with which he could utter fatal words."² He gave the century what the century demanded – comedies larmoyantes for the many and verbal arabesques for the few – and he executed those dissimilar things with a kind of negligent glee. His perfection has been a disadvantage; his work is so harmonious that it may seem inevitable and even trite. It is hard for us to imagine the universe without Wilde's epigrams; but that difficulty does not make them less plausible.

An aside: Oscar Wilde's name is linked to the cities of the plain; his fame, to condemnation and jail. Nevertheless (this has been perceived very clearly by Hesketh Pearson) the fundamental spirit of his work is joy. On the other hand, the powerful work of Chesterton, the prototype of physical and moral sanity, is always on the verge of becoming a nightmare. The diabolical and the horrible lie in wait on his pages; the most innocuous subject can assume the forms of terror. Chesterton is a man who wants to regain childhood; Wilde, a man who keeps an invulnerable innocence in spite of the habits of evil and misfortune.

Like Chesterton, like Lang, like Boswell, Wilde is among those fortunate writers who can do without the approval of the critics and even, at times, without the reader's approval, and the pleasure we derive from his company is irresistible and constant.

"About Oscar Wilde." From Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Ruth L. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 83-85.

Fairy Tales. Traditional narratives deriving mostly from oral cultures that probably had their roots in the Middle Ages, or ever earlier. In the 17th and 18th centuries many such stories were taken from European folklore and adapted for publication with the genuine – or sometimes ironic – intention of making them available for children. The 19th and 20th centuries saw the development of composed ‘literary’ fairy tales.

The Happy Prince and other Tales (1888)… all explore the price paid in human suffering for beauty, art, power and wealth, and the corresponding salvation offered by selfless love. In the title story, the statue of the Happy Prince gives away his jewels and gold leaf to help the poor children, while his friend the Swallow stays in the north to keep him company and dies of cold, in sharp contrast to the insensitivity of the human characters. Wilde’s two sons were born in 1885 and 1886, and the direct tone he uses strongly reflects the oral tradition of storytelling, whilst the skilful economy of form and the sharp inflections of the language indicate the more sophisticated ‘adult’ meanings of literary fairy tales. In the context of Wilde’s own life, ‘The Selfish Giant’, with its motifs of the Giant’s selfishness, his secret garden, and the wounded little boy he learned to love, has a poignant resonance which was effectively used in Julian Mitchell’s screenplay for the 1997 film “Wilde”.

From The Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English. – Cambridge: University Press, 2001. - P.318.