‘By each let this be heard’
proclaims the pitying prisoner, lamenting that though ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, whether inadvertently or
penitently, through insincerity or bitterness, violence, lust or greed, ‘each man does not die’. This morbid
multitude reminds the reader of the plethora of personal ways, prosaic or
appalling, in which ‘each man kills the
thing he loves’, an unconscious undercurrent in much of Wilde’s prose. It
is a repeated refrain in The Ballad of
Reading Gaol, his ‘unhappy elegy’
about the execution of a man who has murdered his beloved wife. It was written
in 1898 after Wilde’s release from prison, during which he penned De Profundis, a delicate and lengthy
letter to his beloved, Lord Alfred Douglas. In this, an exploration into the
tragic majestic travesty of love’s murderous and empowering aspects is begun,
through philosophical introspection and self-review.
The
events leading to his imprisonment, as described in De Profundis, form a defence of Wilde’s valiant nature. He believed
that a mutual love existed between himself and Douglas, which he refers to as a
‘destructive’ and ‘fatal friendship’. It is difficult to
see how the love that Wilde worked hard to nurture during his anguish in gaol,
the love whose ‘only aim is to love’,
could be comparable with any love that the odious Douglas returned, which Wilde
never doubts. Whether or not Wilde’s life was curtailed by the strain of his
last years, there can be little doubt that Douglas caused Wilde’s removal from
the life he knew and cherished; Douglas could have made greater sacrifices to
prevent Wilde’s misery of monotonous, death-like, lifeless imprisonment, which
is perhaps the least ‘kind’ manner of
murder, for prisoners take so long to ‘grow
cold’. This contrast between the love borne him and the love he bears in
return, is the crucial contradiction which makes it difficult to unmitigatedly
agree or disagree with such an unequivocal and sophisticated statement. By
encompassing such markedly different manifestations of feeling within the same
word, ‘love’, it is no surprise that it seems that love can have wildly varying
effects.
Douglas
had a stultifying effect on Wilde’s art, for whom art was the ‘secret of life’. Wilde’s creative
faculty was dead in Douglas’s presence, which Wilde attributes to Douglas’ ‘[supremely vicious]’ ‘shallowness’ and
having ‘no imagination’. Douglas was
probably initially attracted to Wilde by the combination of the art in his work
and character, and yet he destroyed both. Unconsciously, Wilde must have killed
Douglas’ art too by dwarfing his schoolboy attempts, although Wilde blames the
festering hate for the Marquess of Queensbury that fettered Douglas’
imagination. Wilde held himself responsible for allowing his own ‘great nature’ to be slowly consumed by
a rather ‘smaller’ one; Wilde
overshadowed his protégé and lover, who consequently turned on Wilde, bitterly
telling him that he had no ‘intellectual
obligation’ to him and that Wilde was ‘only
interesting while on a pedestal’.
There
is a premonition of this in The Picture
of Dorian Gray, Wilde’s most major prose work and sole novel, exceptional
in the amount of controversy it caused, the density of its writing, the number
of epigrams to be savoured, and the richness of its texture and comment on life
and art. Basil Hallward’s human inspiration, Dorian Gray, eventually proves
very damaging to Basil’s art. What attracts the artist to his sitter is a
superficial and beauteous purity which is never corrupted on the surface,
despite the pollution within. While they are together, Basil is able to
transcend his previous work by using Gray’s mere ‘countenance’ and presence as an entry to the world of beauty he is
seeking to access with his art. Without him, his ‘sick Muse’ ‘lacked … matter’
and is too ‘enfeebled’ to regain even
its former impetus. Basil is responsible for the loss of his own art, both by
painting Gray and introducing him to Wootton, just as Wilde is responsible for
the disasters wrought upon his own life by his draining darling, Douglas.
Three
of Wilde’s prose characters love and try to selfishly cling to beauty, and in
doing so kill it for themselves and others. It is somewhat ironic to find this
in the words of the champion of the aesthetic movement. Dorian Gray, the
selfish giant and the Star-child exemplify this grasping desire for a beauty
that should be shared, cherished and inspire gratitude and humility; instead,
it perishes eventually, only to be restored at the end, if deserved.
The
star-child, like the Fisherman, loses and regains his soul, symbolised by his ‘comeliness’, of which he was so ‘enamoured’ that he would ‘laugh for the pleasure he had in his
fairness’. However, ‘he grew proud,
and cruel, and selfish’, ‘gave
hatred’ and ‘[brought] pain into
God’s world’. His beauty withered, for the Star-Child was ‘evil’ and ‘[forgot his] love’, with his ‘feet’
‘set in the ways of sin’, only to be
re-forged bright and new by the ‘bitter
fire of his testing’. He was ‘[given]
love’, and having ‘[received] back
his Soul, must keep it with him for ever’ both a ‘punishment’ and ‘reward’. For the Star-Child, ‘so great had been his suffering’ that
he died ‘after the space of three years’
from the ‘wounds of love’, but like
with The Fisherman and his Soul, the
reader feels little sadness at the end of a tale of reformation wrought by
love, where the Star-child’s beloved beggar mother is elevated by his love. It
is interesting that despite Wilde’s occasional portrayal of love as a
self-destructive force, he also shows that ‘aught
prevails against it’ when sheltered in the ‘fullness’ of a loving ‘heart’.
The
more overtly morally instructive Wilde attempts to be, the simpler his
language, as though writing for the benefit of children. This is apparent with
his absolutes of good and bad, like ‘cruelty’, ‘love’, ‘evil’ and justice (for
instance, in the form of birth-rights or the afterlife). We only glimpse the
artistic, ornate treasury of his language truly when he delves into a
non-Christian, aesthetic value system, such as the seductive intricacy and
splendour of the descriptions of Riches and experiences encountered by the
Fisherman’s wandering Soul. Although life is ‘very dear to all’, ‘yet love
is better than life’; the Nightingale’s sacrifice, tragic in its futility,
also makes us consider whether perhaps there is something even more ‘wonderful’ and ‘precious’ than simply the ‘passion
in the soul of a man and a maid’, with her song ‘of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in
the tomb’. This is further indication that Wilde is assuming different
manners, levels and intensities of love, despite his universal use of the term.
Gray does actually kill Basil himself,
although it is debatable whether love is present. This is an aspect of the
investigations into the nature of the ambiguous and multi-faceted ‘love’
pervading much of Wilde’s writing. Basil’s initial devotion to, and adoration
of, Gray are usually seen as symptoms of love. However, even this is more of a
selfish clinging to Gray’s ‘nature’
and ‘countenance’ which inspires him
so, and thus not truly traditional ‘love’.
What
is certain is that Gray loved Basil’s art, especially the painting into which
Basil had ironically also imprisoned his own soul, which was why it was not
displayed in the first place. Having given Basil’s ‘invention light’, Gray extinguishes or voraciously devours it;
this is similar to the stifling effect that Douglas has on Wilde, who takes art
so seriously that it is a necessary ‘anodyne’
for him.
Basil
also kills Gray eventually by giving him the means to his own destruction in
the form of eternal youth. Perhaps without our harness of death and suffering,
we would all be loveless immortals, for ‘pain
is the Lord of this world, nor is there anyone who escapes from its net’.
Without being able to kill the thing we love, would we be able to love?
Wilde’s
novel contains the most conventional example of (professed) love, in the form
of ‘flattering words’, leading to
death as a result of being unrequited. Dorian Gray is portrayed as being all
but the physical cause of the death of Sibyl Vane. It is more complicated
though, because it could be that he ‘[loves]
too little’, and it is his lack of love that kills her ‘without a sigh’ on his part. Sibyl Vane plays Shakespearean lovers
admirably until her love and passion is channelled into life; hers is a world
of lovers who feel in the traditional manner of: ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as thee’. Indeed, it is
partly this that so enthrals Gray, attracting his perverted, passionate, pure
but painfully experimental and transient ‘love’. Gray alleges to be ‘too much in love’ with Sibyl Vane. In
fact, it is probably nothing more than the ‘greatest
romance of [his] life’, or as Wootton phrases it, an ‘exquisite’ ‘grande passion’,
to be savoured merely as a potent, complex and intensely interesting emotion.
Wilde seems to condemn this attitude later in De Profundis when he states unequivocally and repeatedly, ‘The supreme vice is shallowness’.
Dorian Gray is also an example of a
person who truly loves himself, although it is difficult to distinguish his
‘self’ from his youth. Both die eventually, ironically by his own hand. Gray
kills his own soul, first by banishing it to languish in his portrait forever,
petulantly pledging ‘everything’,
even ‘my soul’, for ‘there is nothing in the whole world I would
not give’ ‘to be always young, and the picture … to grow old’ and ‘horrible and dreadful’. The vehemence
in this over-stated longing to ‘remain
always young’ is mirrored by the Fisherman’s[2]
equally naïve willingness to ‘surrender
heaven’ for the ‘gladness’ that ‘shall be mine’ if able to rid himself
of the ‘noblest part of man’ of which
he has ‘no need’. Both ‘pay the price’, which seems ‘but a little thing’ for the ‘terrible thing’ they do. Just as the
Fisherman tells his Soul, ‘go wherever thou
wilt, but trouble me not’, both are wracked by the sorrows of ‘the unseen violence of the’ estranged ‘soul’, as evidenced by the frequency of
the contact maintained, culminating in the eventual desire to either embrace or
destroy the offending spirit forever, in ignorance of their real ‘need of it’.
Gray finds meaning in leading life as a
work of art (for boredom is the bane of immortality), or at least in seeing all
others’ lives as a work of art, while his own hidden painting becomes steadily
more hideous. Art’s forum is restricted to mere ‘beautiful’ ‘form’ and ‘selfish’ surface, insufficient for the ‘great’ ‘power of the love … within’ the Fisherman which proves his
salvation. The description, ‘style’
without ‘feeling’, ‘sacrifice’ or ‘sincerity’, could be equally applied to art or its
personification, Dorian Gray. The Fisherman is initially seduced by the
physical, as is Gray, who is further enticed by the intellectualism and caprice
of aestheticism (which is perhaps less ‘base’), but the Fisherman placed his
faith in love, and ‘love is better’,
allowing him to ‘be at peace’ for ‘the fires cannot destroy it, nor can the
waters quench it’. The Fisherman’s Faustian bargain was not consummated
with the devil, and is mitigated because he only ‘for love’s sake forsook God’, and though he was ‘slain by God’s judgement’, ‘his Soul found an entrance and entered in’
to his ‘brake’ ‘heart’ before death.
Besides
the conflict between the polarities of acceptance and rejection of the statement,
there are various intermediary positions. For instance, the story of Lord
Arthur Savile’s crime allows further rewriting of Wilde’s words. Rather than:
‘For each man kills the
thing he loves’
this
story, where Lord Arthur’s burning love, combined with too much superstitious
faith in a cheiromancer’s eventually self-fulfilling prophecy, was sufficient
to show that sometimes:
‘Each man kills for the thing he loves’.
The
case of Gray and Vane could be inverted, seeing from the perspective of the
object, like the little dwarf[3]
who himself is killed of a ‘broken heart’,
by ‘the thing he loves’. The cruel
Infanta, whose childish heartless desire for amusement and fascination for
beauty (and its delightful deformities) is reminiscent of Gray, for her only
interest in the dwarf lies in his performance and novelty. Love, because of its
power to produce pleasure or pain, induces vulnerability, in the beloved, or
the lover (in this case, the hapless dwarf). To an extent, the nature and
relationship of ‘each man’ and his
object of love determine their ‘fate’,
just as the ‘sensational’ disaster of
Wilde’s descent was predicted by concerned friends.
‘How
can my Muse want subject to invent,
While thou does breathe, that pour’st into my
verse
Thine own sweet argument’
‘Make
thee another self, for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee!’
Wilde
toyed with religion, even somewhat irreverently reworking Christianity from an
aesthetic standpoint. He appreciated the potency of the biblical myth,
especially the story of the crucifixion. He attributed to Christ and his
consummate tragedy a great deal of influence over art through the centuries.
This pre-occupation with the Christ-figure is shared with Nietzsche (it could
be flippantly noted that Nietzsche was killed by the thing with which he loved, through syphilis), whose own sole novel delivered
Zarathustra’s messianic message; there is a resonance in their works over
certain essential ideas concerning great natures ‘who have realised themselves’, aspiring to a higher mode of
individualistic existence. It is difficult to know whether these ideas of love
would be applicable to such a superman. Judas demonstrated man’s capacity to
kill the greatest object and subject of man’s love, God’s son. As the supreme
embodiment of humanity, Christ’s ability to love selflessly and
indiscriminately in response indicates that it is a quality of each individual
imperfect man, rather than love, which leads to this tragedy of love’s death at
the hands of its lover. In two of Wilde’s stories, a child-like Christ figure
appears. The Star-child is born seemingly from the heavens to poverty, blessed
by a divine beauty and educated by suffering which he tries to alleviate for
others in later life at his own expense. He is punished with ugliness, in
retribution for his primary sin, that of pride in his own youthful beauty. The
selfish giant encounters a little boy, who re-appears after an absence with
marks on his hands and feet, who takes him to his own heavenly ‘garden’. There seems to be a
correlation between these and other figures in Wilde’s literature. Dorian Gray
is himself a perverted embodiment of this fine and beautiful nature which
undergoes a transformation, only to repent later. In Gray’s case, an ascent
into Paradise is prohibited for ‘[sending
his] soul away’, the ‘sin which may
not be forgiven’. Our soul is ‘given
to us by God that we should nobly use it’; for those who try, perhaps they
are blessed with Christ’s true love, which does not kill.
There
is no doubt that Wilde provides many examples, in his prose alone, of instances
where ‘each man kills the thing he loves’.
This is almost a truism, insofar as few of us are able to preserve perfectly
what is most dear to us, whether in the form of youth, children or a
relationship, either inadvertently through faults like a lack of communication
or because we spite ourselves in a moment of anger. However, Wilde’s prose
certainly does not admit clear-cut support for his own statement.
De Profundis
provides much of the material for a defence based on examples in life of where
love provides powerful motive and sustenance for life. Wilde’s own life of
martyrdom, partly resulting from his love for Lord Alfred, is a touching
example of the driving force for good love provided, sometimes aided, empowered
or re-directed by art. In Wilde’s unfortunate and regrettable case, love was
also commensurately self-destructive: he was killed by the thing he loved.
Wilde
was too refined an artist to often use as blunt an instrument as plot to
express his refined sentiments, although the obvious examples like Sibyl’s
suicide and the Reading gaol murderer were meant to illustrate that the ‘obscure deaths of the heart’ hold true
in a less subtle way too. In the case of this excerpt from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, to say that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’ is deliberately bitter and
unhappy, in keeping with the tone and content of the whole poem. It is very
prophetic. He employs no immortal qualifiers like ‘always’ or ‘ever’, but the ‘wistful’ words still have a sense of
the pre-destined or containing something inherent in the nature of ‘love’.
Towards the end of his life, a worrying number of proleptically ironic hints
and indications of what was to come become apparent in hindsight. He believed
the gods to be particularly active in his ‘fate’,
or as he preferred to refer to it in his bleaker moments, doom. As a fascinated
student of a fascinating life, he would have known that whether every man always kills his love is immaterial; pervading his prose is the
genuine feeling that love can easily kill or cure. Perhaps love could be
divided according to the criterion of selfishness. An egotistical love or ‘vile’ love of the body may destroy its
object, whereas a selfless love of the mind can destroy itself, or at least
leave the lover vulnerable, as happened to Wilde: ‘we are by nature our own enemies’, ‘the lips betraying and the lips betrayed’. This sense of doom
accompanying love adds a morbid twist to the light-hearted epigram, ‘To love oneself is the beginning of a
lifelong romance’[4].
Wilde was often given to making somewhat
grandiose statements, which he sometimes complemented with a different, perhaps
even contradictory, statement. The insight of his profound comment, ‘an artistic truth is one whose contrary is
also true’, allows him to assert the truth of the title quotation, and its
falseness, simultaneously and congruously. Indeed, the obvious contradictions
between support and dissent provided by his prose works indicate some
ambivalence, and acknowledgement that his own assertion is not an immortal, immutable
truth, but just such an inherently paradoxical ‘artistic truth’.
Wilde
lost so much at the end of his life: the ‘success
he loved’, fortune and friends. His
triumph was that he chose to forfeit them at his own expense, for the sake of
his art, and his love. The abiding message is his belief that truly, ‘Love is stronger than both’ ‘Life’ and ‘Death’, for its dualistic nature leads to a sort of destructive,
disruptive, heavenly creativity. This is in concord with the conclusion that
there is considerable support in Wilde’s prose for the assertion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, and
yet it is also frequently inverted and inflected.
Oscar Wilde: Plays, prose writings and
poems (published by David Campbell Publishers Ltd for
Everyman’s Library – first pub. 1930)
Picture of Dorian Gray
– Oscar Wilde (published by Wordsworth Editions Limited – 1992)
Oscar Wilde: Complete short fiction
(published by the Penguin Group, edited by Ian Small – 1994)
Oscar Wilde
(by Richard Ellmann, published by the Penguin Group – 1987)
Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage
(published by Routledge & Kegan Paul Limited, edited by Karl Beckson –
1970)
[1] The lines quoted run:
‘Why should false painting imitate his cheek
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?’
[2] The Fisherman and his Soul from A House of Pomegranates
[3] The Birthday of the Infanta from A House of Pomegranates
[4] An Ideal Husband, III