Books: Intentions
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Oscar Wilde >> Intentions
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'These high and gusty relishes of life
Have no allayings of mortality.'
It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the
utterance of a man who had a true passion for letters. 'To see and
hear and write brave things,' this was his aim.
Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man's
genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series
of articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful
pseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his day.
Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of
the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness
or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These
disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time
he seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of 'kind,
light-hearted Wainewright,' whose prose is 'capital.' We hear of
him entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir
Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit-diner.
Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and
his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale
lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were
regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in
literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of
being different from others. There was something in him of
Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre. At times he reminds us of Julien
Sorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles
Lamb's. 'Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,'
he tells us, and he goes on to describe how on that day he had been
ill, and had hated the face of man and woman, and yet found himself
looking with intellectual interest across the table at the young
writer beneath whose affectations of manner there seemed to him to
lie so much unaffected sensibility, and speculates on 'what sudden
growth of another interest' would have changed his mood, had he
known of what terrible sin the guest to whom Lamb paid so much
attention was even then guilty.
His life-work falls naturally under the three heads suggested by
Mr. Swinburne, and it may be partly admitted that, if we set aside
his achievements in the sphere of poison, what he has actually left
to us hardly justifies his reputation.
But then it is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a
personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy
sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised
that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than
the arts that seek to express it. Nor is his work without
interest. We hear of William Blake stopping in the Royal Academy
before one of his pictures and pronouncing it to be 'very fine.'
His essays are prefiguring of much that has since been realised.
He seems to have anticipated some of those accidents of modern
culture that are regarded by many as true essentials. He writes
about La Gioconda, and early French poets and the Italian
Renaissance. He loves Greek gems, and Persian carpets, and
Elizabethan translations of Cupid and Psyche, and the
Hypnerotomachia, and book-binding and early editions, and wide-
margined proofs. He is keenly sensitive to the value of beautiful
surroundings, and never wearies of describing to us the rooms in
which he lived, or would have liked to live. He had that curious
love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle
artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if
not a decadence of morals. Like Baudelaire he was extremely fond
of cats, and with Gautier, he was fascinated by that 'sweet marble
monster' of both sexes that we can still see at Florence and in the
Louvre.
There is of course much in his descriptions, and his suggestions
for decoration, that shows that he did not entirely free himself
from the false taste of his time. But it is clear that he was one
of the first to recognise what is, indeed, the very keynote of
aesthetic eclecticism, I mean the true harmony of all really
beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner.
He saw that in decorating a room, which is to be, not a room for
show, but a room to live in, we should never aim at any
archaeological reconstruction of the past, nor burden ourselves
with any fanciful necessity for historical accuracy. In this
artistic perception he was perfectly right. All beautiful things
belong to the same age.
And so, in his own library, as he describes it, we find the
delicate fictile vase of the Greek, with its exquisitely painted
figures and the faint [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
finely traced upon its side, and behind it hangs an engraving of
the 'Delphic Sibyl' of Michael Angelo, or of the 'Pastoral' of
Giorgione. Here is a bit of Florentine majolica, and here a rude
lamp from some old Roman tomb. On the table lies a book of Hours,
'cased in a cover of solid silver gilt, wrought with quaint devices
and studded with small brilliants and rubies,' and close by it
'squats a little ugly monster, a Lar, perhaps, dug up in the sunny
fields of corn-bearing Sicily.' Some dark antique bronzes contrast
with the pale gleam of two noble Christi Crucifixi, one carved in
ivory, the other moulded in wax.' He has his trays of Tassie's
gems, his tiny Louis-Quatorze bonbonniere with a miniature by
Petitot, his highly prized 'brown-biscuit teapots, filagree-
worked,' his citron morocco letter-case, and his 'pomona-green'
chair.
One can fancy him lying there in the midst of his books and casts
and engravings, a true virtuoso, a subtle connoisseur, turning over
his fine collection of Mare Antonios, and his Turner's 'Liber
Studiorum,' of which he was a warm admirer, or examining with a
magnifier some of his antique gems and cameos, 'the head of
Alexander on an onyx of two strata,' or 'that superb altissimo
relievo on cornelian, Jupiter AEgiochus.' He was always a great
amateur of engravings, and gives some very useful suggestions as to
the best means of forming a collection. Indeed, while fully
appreciating modern art, he never lost sight of the importance of
reproductions of the great masterpieces of the past, and all that
he says about the value of plaster casts is quite admirable.
As an art-critic he concerned himself primarily with the complex
impressions produced by a work of art, and certainly the first step
in aesthetic criticism is to realise one's own impressions. He
cared nothing for abstract discussions on the nature of the
Beautiful, and the historical method, which has since yielded such
rich fruit, did not belong to his day, but he never lost sight of
the great truth that Art's first appeal is neither to the intellect
nor to the emotions, but purely to the artistic temperament, and he
more than once points out that this temperament, this 'taste,' as
he calls it, being unconsciously guided and made perfect by
frequent contact with the best work, becomes in the end a form of
right judgment. Of course there are fashions in art just as there
are fashions in dress, and perhaps none of us can ever quite free
ourselves from the influence of custom and the influence of
novelty. He certainly could not, and he frankly acknowledges how
difficult it is to form any fair estimate of contemporary work.
But, on the whole, his taste was good and sound. He admired Turner
and Constable at a time when they were not so much thought of as
they are now, and saw that for the highest landscape art we require
more than 'mere industry and accurate transcription.' Of Crome's
'Heath Scene near Norwich' he remarks that it shows 'how much a
subtle observation of the elements, in their wild moods, does for a
most uninteresting flat,' and of the popular type of landscape of
his day he says that it is 'simply an enumeration of hill and dale,
stumps of trees, shrubs, water, meadows, cottages and houses;
little more than topography, a kind of pictorial map-work; in which
rainbows, showers, mists, haloes, large beams shooting through
rifted clouds, storms, starlight, all the most valued materials of
the real painter, are not.' He had a thorough dislike of what is
obvious or commonplace in art, and while he was charmed to
entertain Wilkie at dinner, he cared as little for Sir David's
pictures as he did for Mr. Crabbe's poems. With the imitative and
realistic tendencies of his day he had no sympathy and he tells us
frankly that his great admiration for Fuseli was largely due to the
fact that the little Swiss did not consider it necessary that an
artist should paint only what he sees. The qualities that he
sought for in a picture were composition, beauty and dignity of
line, richness of colour, and imaginative power. Upon the other
hand, he was not a doctrinaire. 'I hold that no work of art can be
tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not
it be consistent with itself is the question.' This is one of his
excellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters so different as
Landseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a
phrase now classical, he is trying 'to see the object as in itself
it really is.'
However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease
in his criticisms of contemporary work. 'The present,' he says,
'is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first
perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me. I must look at them
through Time's telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit of
a MS. poem is uncertain; "print," as he excellently says, "settles
it." Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture.' He is
happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens
and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo;
happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What is
Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our English
school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies
of pointing out to the young student the artistic possibilities
that lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.
In his judgments on the great Italian Masters, says De Quincey,
'there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in
one who spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books.'
The highest praise that we can give to him is that he tried to
revive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw that no amount
of art lectures or art congresses, or 'plans for advancing the fine
arts,' will ever produce this result. The people, he says very
wisely, and in the true spirit of Toynbee Hall, must always have
'the best models constantly before their eyes.'
As is to be expected from one who was a painter, he is often
extremely technical in his art criticisms. Of Tintoret's 'St.
George delivering the Egyptian Princess from the Dragon,' he
remarks:-
The robe of Sabra, warmly glazed with Prussian blue, is relieved
from the pale greenish background by a vermilion scarf; and the
full hues of both are beautifully echoed, as it were, in a lower
key by the purple-lake coloured stuffs and bluish iron armour of
the saint, besides an ample balance to the vivid azure drapery on
the foreground in the indigo shades of the wild wood surrounding
the castle.
And elsewhere he talks learnedly of 'a delicate Schiavone, various
as a tulip-bed, with rich broken tints,' of 'a glowing portrait,
remarkable for morbidezza, by the scarce Moroni,' and of another
picture being 'pulpy in the carnations.'
But, as a rule, he deals with his impressions of the work as an
artistic whole, and tries to translate those impressions into
words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for the
imaginative and mental effect. He was one of the first to develop
what has been called the art-literature of the nineteenth century,
that form of literature which has found in Mr. Ruskin and Mr.
Browning, its two most perfect exponents. His description of
Lancret's Repas Italien, in which 'a dark-haired girl, "amorous of
mischief," lies on the daisy-powdered grass,' is in some respects
very charming. Here is his account of 'The Crucifixion,' by
Rembrandt. It is extremely characteristic of his style:-
Darkness--sooty, portentous darkness--shrouds the whole scene:
only above the accursed wood, as if through a horrid rift in the
murky ceiling, a rainy deluge--'sleety-flaw, discoloured water'--
streams down amain, spreading a grisly spectral light, even more
horrible than that palpable night. Already the Earth pants thick
and fast! the darkened Cross trembles! the winds are dropt--the air
is stagnant--a muttering rumble growls underneath their feet, and
some of that miserable crowd begin to fly down the hill. The
horses snuff the coming terror, and become unmanageable through
fear. The moment rapidly approaches when, nearly torn asunder by
His own weight, fainting with loss of blood, which now runs in
narrower rivulets from His slit veins, His temples and breast
drowned in sweat, and His black tongue parched with the fiery
death-fever, Jesus cries, 'I thirst.' The deadly vinegar is
elevated to Him.
His head sinks, and the sacred corpse 'swings senseless of the
cross.' A sheet of vermilion flame shoots sheer through the air
and vanishes; the rocks of Carmel and Lebanon cleave asunder; the
sea rolls on high from the sands its black weltering waves. Earth
yawns, and the graves give up their dwellers. The dead and the
living are mingled together in unnatural conjunction and hurry
through the holy city. New prodigies await them there. The veil
of the temple--the unpierceable veil--is rent asunder from top to
bottom, and that dreaded recess containing the Hebrew mysteries--
the fatal ark with the tables and seven-branched candelabrum--is
disclosed by the light of unearthly flames to the God-deserted
multitude.
Rembrandt never painted this sketch, and he was quite right. It
would have lost nearly all its charms in losing that perplexing
veil of indistinctness which affords such ample range wherein the
doubting imagination may speculate. At present it is like a thing
in another world. A dark gulf is betwixt us. It is not tangible
by the body. We can only approach it in the spirit.
In this passage, written, the author tells us, 'in awe and
reverence,' there is much that is terrible, and very much that is
quite horrible, but it is not without a certain crude form of
power, or, at any rate, a certain crude violence of words, a
quality which this age should highly appreciate, as it is its chief
defect. It is pleasanter, however, to pass to this description of
Giulio Romano's 'Cephalus and Procris':-
We should read Moschus's lament for Bion, the sweet shepherd,
before looking at this picture, or study the picture as a
preparation for the lament. We have nearly the same images in
both. For either victim the high groves and forest dells murmur;
the flowers exhale sad perfume from their buds; the nightingale
mourns on the craggy lands, and the swallow in the long-winding
vales; 'the satyrs, too, and fauns dark-veiled groan,' and the
fountain nymphs within the wood melt into tearful waters. The
sheep and goats leave their pasture; and oreads, 'who love to scale
the most inaccessible tops of all uprightest rocks,' hurry down
from the song of their wind-courting pines; while the dryads bend
from the branches of the meeting trees, and the rivers moan for
white Procris, 'with many-sobbing streams,'
Filling the far-seen ocean with a voice.
The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling
horn of Aurora's love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight
on the top of Hymettus. The foreground of our subject is a grassy
sunburnt bank, broken into swells and hollows like waves (a sort of
land-breakers), rendered more uneven by many foot-tripping roots
and stumps of trees stocked untimely by the axe, which are again
throwing out light-green shoots. This bank rises rather suddenly
on the right to a clustering grove, penetrable to no star, at the
entrance of which sits the stunned Thessalian king, holding between
his knees that ivory-bright body which was, but an instant agone,
parting the rough boughs with her smooth forehead, and treading
alike on thorns and flowers with jealousy-stung foot--now helpless,
heavy, void of all motion, save when the breeze lifts her thick
hair in mockery.
From between the closely-neighboured boles astonished nymphs press
forward with loud cries -
And deerskin-vested satyrs, crowned with ivy twists, advance;
And put strange pity in their horned countenance.
Laelaps lies beneath, and shows by his panting the rapid pace of
death. On the other side of the group, Virtuous Love with 'vans
dejected' holds forth the arrow to an approaching troop of sylvan
people, fauns, rams, goats, satyrs, and satyr-mothers, pressing
their children tighter with their fearful hands, who hurry along
from the left in a sunken path between the foreground and a rocky
wall, on whose lowest ridge a brook-guardian pours from her urn her
grief-telling waters. Above and more remote than the Ephidryad,
another female, rending her locks, appears among the vine-festooned
pillars of an unshorn grove. The centre of the picture is filled
by shady meadows, sinking down to a river-mouth; beyond is 'the
vast strength of the ocean stream,' from whose floor the
extinguisher of stars, rosy Aurora, drives furiously up her brine-
washed steeds to behold the death-pangs of her rival.
Were this description carefully re-written, it would be quite
admirable. The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is
excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the
same aim. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not
from life, but from each other.
His sympathies, too, were wonderfully varied. In everything
connected with the stage, for instance, he was always extremely
interested, and strongly upheld the necessity for archaeological
accuracy in costume and scene-painting. 'In art,' he says in one
of his essays, 'whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing
well'; and he points out that once we allow the intrusion of
anachronisms, it becomes difficult to say where the line is to be
drawn. In literature, again, like Lord Beaconsfield on a famous
occasion, he was 'on the side of the angels.' He was one of the
first to admire Keats and Shelley--'the tremulously-sensitive and
poetical Shelley,' as he calls him. His admiration for Wordsworth
was sincere and profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake.
One of the best copies of the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience'
that is now in existence was wrought specially for him. He loved
Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and
Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch. And to him all the arts were
one. 'Our critics,' he remarks with much wisdom, 'seem hardly
aware of the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting,
nor that any true advancement in the serious study of one art co-
generates a proportionate perfection in the other'; and he says
elsewhere that if a man who does not admire Michael Angelo talks of
his love for Milton, he is deceiving either himself or his
listeners. To his fellow-contributors in the London Magazine he
was always most generous, and praises Barry Cornwall, Allan
Cunningham, Hazlitt, Elton, and Leigh Hunt without anything of the
malice of a friend. Some of his sketches of Charles Lamb are
admirable in their way, and, with the art of the true comedian,
borrow their style from their subject:-
What can I say of thee more than all know? that thou hadst the
gaiety of a boy with the knowledge of a man: as gentle a heart as
ever sent tears to the eyes.
How wittily would he mistake your meaning, and put in a conceit
most seasonably out of season. His talk without affectation was
compressed, like his beloved Elizabethans, even unto obscurity.
Like grains of fine gold, his sentences would beat out into whole
sheets. He had small mercy on spurious fame, and a caustic
observation on the FASHION FOR MEN OF GENIUS was a standing dish.
Sir Thomas Browne was a 'bosom cronie' of his; so was Burton, and
old Fuller. In his amorous vein he dallied with that peerless
Duchess of many-folio odour; and with the heyday comedies of
Beaumont and Fletcher he induced light dreams. He would deliver
critical touches on these, like one inspired, but it was good to
let him choose his own game; if another began even on the
acknowledged pets he was liable to interrupt, or rather append, in
a mode difficult to define whether as misapprehensive or
mischievous. One night at C-'s, the above dramatic partners were
the temporary subject of chat. Mr. X. commended the passion and
haughty style of a tragedy (I don't know which of them), but was
instantly taken up by Elia, who told him 'THAT was nothing; the
lyrics were the high things--the lyrics!'
One side of his literary career deserves especial notice. Modern
journalism may be said to owe almost as much to him as to any man
of the early part of this century. He was the pioneer of Asiatic
prose, and delighted in pictorial epithets and pompous
exaggerations. To have a style so gorgeous that it conceals the
subject is one of the highest achievements of an important and much
admired school of Fleet Street leader-writers, and this school
Janus Weathercock may be said to have invented. He also saw that
it was quite easy by continued reiteration to make the public
interested in his own personality, and in his purely journalistic
articles this extraordinary young man tells the world what he had
for dinner, where he gets his clothes, what wines he likes, and in
what state of health he is, just as if he were writing weekly notes
for some popular newspaper of our own time. This being the least
valuable side of his work, is the one that has had the most obvious
influence. A publicist, nowadays, is a man who bores the community
with the details of the illegalities of his private life.
Like most artificial people, he had a great love of nature. 'I
hold three things in high estimation,' he says somewhere: 'to sit
lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect; to be shadowed
by thick trees while the sun shines around me; and to enjoy
solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood. The country
gives them all to me.' He writes about his wandering over fragrant
furze and heath repeating Collins's 'Ode to Evening,' just to catch
the fine quality of the moment; about smothering his face 'in a
watery bed of cowslips, wet with May dews'; and about the pleasure
of seeing the sweet-breathed kine 'pass slowly homeward through the
twilight,' and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheep-bell.' One
phrase of his, 'the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth,
like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,' is
curiously characteristic of his temperament, and this passage is
rather pretty in its way:-
The short tender grass was covered with marguerites--'such that men
called DAISIES in our town'--thick as stars on a summer's night.
The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a
high dusky grove of elms at some distance off, and at intervals was
heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown
seeds. The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine;
not a cloud streaked the calm aether; only round the horizon's edge
streamed a light, warm film of misty vapour, against which the near
village with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with
blinding whiteness. I thought of Wordsworth's 'Lines written in
March.'
However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who
penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian
influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir,
one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age.
How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell
us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his
terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has
unfortunately been lost to us. Even in later days, too, he was
always reticent on the matter, and preferred to speak about 'The
Excursion,' and the 'Poems founded on the Affections.' There is no
doubt, however, that the poison that he used was strychnine. In
one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud, and which
served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands,
he used to carry crystals of the Indian nux vomica, a poison, one
of his biographers tells us, 'nearly tasteless, difficult of
discovery, and capable of almost infinite dilution.' His murders,
says De Quincey, were more than were ever made known judicially.
This is no doubt so, and some of them are worthy of mention. His
first victim was his uncle, Mr. Thomas Griffiths. He poisoned him
in 1829 to gain possession of Linden House, a place to which he had
always been very much attached. In the August of the next year he
poisoned Mrs. Abercrombie, his wife's mother, and in the following
December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie, his sister-in-
law. Why he murdered Mrs. Abercrombie is not ascertained. It may
have been for a caprice, or to quicken some hideous sense of power
that was in him, or because she suspected something, or for no
reason. But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by
himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about 18,000 pounds,
for which they had insured her life in various offices. The
circumstances were as follows. On the 12th of December, he and his
wife and child came up to London from Linden House, and took
lodgings at No. 12 Conduit Street, Regent Street. With them were
the two sisters, Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie. On the evening
of the 14th they all went to the play, and at supper that night
Helen sickened. The next day she was extremely ill, and Dr.
Locock, of Hanover Square, was called in to attend her. She lived
till Monday, the 20th, when, after the doctor's morning visit, Mr.
and Mrs. Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly, and then went
out for a walk. When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.
She was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair
hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-
law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an
artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose
work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey says
that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us
hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no
accomplices.
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