The case calls for conjecture of a metaphysical nature. Umar, as we know, professed the Platonic and Pythagorean doctrine of the transition of the soul through many incarnations; with the passing of the centuries, his soul possibly found its reincarnation in England to fulfill, in a remote Germanic language with Latin overtones, the literary destiny that in Nishapur had been pushed aside by mathematics. Isaac Luria the Lion demonstrated that the soul of a dead man can enter the lost spirit of another to maintain or instruct him. Perhaps the spirit of Umar lodged, around 1857, in FitzGerald’s. In the Rubáiyát, we read that the history of the universe is a spectacle which God conceives, stages, and then contemplates; this speculation (the technical name for it is pantheism) would permit us to believe that the Englishman could have re-created the Persian, since both were, in essence, God, or momentary faces of God.
More probable, and no less marvelous than these almost supernatural conjectures, is the assumption of a benevolent destiny. At times, the clouds take the shape of mountains or lions; by analogy, the wistfulness of Edward FitzGerald, and a manuscript on yellowing paper, in purple characters, forgotten in a vault of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, assume, for the good of us all, the shape of the poem.
Any collaboration is mysterious. This one, of an Englishman and a Persian, was more so than any other, because the two were very different, and in life might not have achieved friendship; it was death and vicissitude and time that brought it about that one should know of the other and both become a single poet.
— Translated by Alastair Reid
On Oscar Wilde
To speak Wilde’s name is to speak of a dandy who was also a poet; it is to evoke the image of a gentleman dedicated to the meager proposition of shocking by means of cravats and metaphors. It is also to evoke the notion of art as an elite or occult game—as in the tapestries of Hugh Vereker or of Stefan George—and the poet as a laborious “monstrorum artifex” [maker of monsters] (Pliny, XXVIII). It is to evoke the tired crepuscule of the nineteenth century, with its oppressive pomp of hothouse and masked ball. None of these evocations is false, but all of them, I maintain, correspond to partial truths, and contradict or disregard well-known facts.
Let us consider, for example, the idea that Wilde was a kind of symbolist. A nebula of circumstances supports it: in 1881, Wilde was the leader of the aesthetes, and ten years later of the decadents; Rebecca West perfidiously accuses (Henry James , III ) of giving the second of these two sects “the middle-class touch”; the vocabulary of the poem “The Sphinx” is studiously magnificent; Wilde was a friend to Schwob and to Mallarmé. The notion is refuted, however, by an essential fact: 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 single paragraph by Kipling or a stanza of William Morris begin reading Lady Windermere’s Fan and finish it that same afternoon. Wilde’s meter is spontaneous, or seeks to appear spontaneous; his complete work does not include a single experimental line such as this hard and wise Alexandrine by Lionel Johnson:
“Alone with Christ, desolate else, left by mankind.”
Wilde’s technical insignificance may be an argument in favor of his intrinsic greatness. If Wilde’s work corresponded to the nature of his fame, it would consist merely of artifices, after the fashion of Les Palais nomades or Los crepusculos deljardin. In Wilde’s work such artifices are numerous—we can mention the eleventh chapter of Dorian Gray or “The Harlot’s House” or “Symphony in Yellow”—but their adjectival nature is obvious. Wilde can do without these “purple patches,” a phrase Ricketts and Hesketh Pearson credit him with coining, but which is already inscribed in the preamble to Cicero’s In Pisonem. This misattribution is proof of the custom of linking the notion of decorative passages to Wilde’s name.
Reading and rereading Wilde over the years, I note a fact that his panegyrists seem not even to have suspected: the elementary and demonstrable fact that Wilde is nearly always right. “The Soul of Man under Socialism” is not only eloquent; it is correct. The miscellaneous notes he so copiously contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette and the Speaker abound in limpid observations that exceed the very best abilities of Leslie Stephen or Saintsbury. Wilde has been accused of practicing a kind of ars combinatoria, in the manner of Ramón Llull; this may be applicable to certain of his jokes (“One of those British faces which, once seen, are always forgotten”) but not to the pronouncement 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 repent of an action is to modify the past (De Profundis), or that—and the statement is not unworthy of León Bloy or Swedenborg21—there is no man who is not, at each moment, all that he has been and will be (De Profundis). I do not transcribe these lines so that the reader may revere them; I produce them as signs of a mentality that differs greatly from the one generally attributed to Wilde. If I am not mistaken, he was much more than a sort of Irish Moréas; he was a man of the eighteenth century who occasionally condescended to the games of symbolism. Like Gibbon, like Johnson, like Voltaire, he was a wit; a wit who was also right. He existed “in order, at last, to speak fateful words, in short, a classic.”22 He gave the century what the century demanded—comedies larmoyantes for the majority and verbal arabesques for the few—and he accomplished these dissimilar things with a kind of negligent felicity. Perfection has injured him; his work is so harmonious that it can seem inevitable and even banal. It takes an effort for us to imagine the universe without Wilde’s epigrams; that difficulty does not make them any less plausible.
A passing observation. The name of Oscar Wilde is linked to the cities of the plain; his glory, to condemnation and jail. Yet (and Hesketh Pearson has sensed this well), the fundamental flavor of his work is happiness. By contrast, the estimable work of Chesterton, that prototype of physical and moral health, is always on the point of becoming a nightmare. Horrors and things diabolical lurk within it; the most innocuous page can take on the forms of terror. Chesterton is a man who wishes to recover childhood; Wilde, a man who retains, despite the habits of wickedness and misfortune, an invulnerable innocence.
Like Chesterton, like Lang, like Boswell, Wilde is one of the fortunates who can forego the approval of critics and even, at times, of the reader, because the delight we derive from his company is constant and irresistible.
Translated by Esther Allen
On Chesterton
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree. . .
Chesterton: A Second Childhood
Edgar Allan Poe wrote stories of pure fantastic horror or pure bizarrerie; he invented the detective story. That is no less certain than the fact that he did not combine the two genres. He did not inflict on C. Auguste Dupin the task of solving the ancient crime of the Man of the Crowd or of explaining the image that terrified the masked Prince Prospero in the chamber of black and scarlet. On the other hand, Chesterton lavished such tours de force with passion and joy. Each story in the Father Brown Saga presents a mystery, proposes explanations of a demoniacal or magical sort, and then replaces them at the end with solutions of this world. Skill is not the only virtue of those brief bits of fiction; I believe I can perceive in them an abbreviation of Chesterton’s life, a symbol or reflection of Chesterton. The repetition of his formula through the years and through the books (The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Poet and the Lunatics, The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond) seems to confirm that this is an essential form, not a rhetorical artifice. These notes are an attempt to interpret that form.
But first we must reconsider some facts that are perhaps too well known. Chesterton was a Catholic, he believed in the Middle Ages of the Pre-Raphaelites (“Of London, small and white, and clean”). Like Whitman, Chesterton thought that the mere fact of existing is so prodigious that no misfortune should exempt us from a kind of cosmic gratitude. That may be a just be
lief, but it arouses only limited interest; to suppose that it is all Chesterton offers is to forget that a creed is the underlying factor in a series of mental and emotional processes and that a man is the whole series. In Argentina, Catholics exalt Chesterton, freethinkers reject him. Like every writer who professes a creed, Chesterton is judged by it, is condemned or acclaimed because of it. His case is not unlike that of Kipling, who is always judged with reference to the English Empire.
Poe and Baudelaire proposed the creation of a world of terror, as did Blake’s tormented Urizen; it is natural for their work to teem with the forms of horror. In my opinion, Chesterton would not have tolerated the imputation of being a contriver of nightmares, a monstrorum artifex (Pliny, XXVIII, 2), but he tends inevitably to revert to atrocious observations. He asks if perchance a man has three eyes, or a bird three wings; in opposition to the pantheists, he speaks of a man who dies and discovers in paradise that the spirits of the angelic choirs have, every one of them, the same face he has;23 he speaks of a jail of mirrors; of a labyrinth without a center; of a man devoured by metal automatons; of a tree that devours birds and then grows feathers instead of leaves; he imagines (The Man Who Was Thursday, VI) “that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something—say a tree—that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself—a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked.” He defines the near by the far, and even by the atrocious; if he speaks of eyes, he uses the words of Ezekiel (1:22) “the terrible crystal”; if of the night, he perfects an ancient horror (Apocalypse 4:6) and calls it a “monster made of eyes.” Equally illustrative is the tale How I Found the Superman. Chesterton speaks to the Superman’s parents; when he asks them what the child, who never leaves a dark room, looks like, they remind him that the Superman creates his own law and must be measured by it. On that plane he is more handsome than Apollo; but viewed from the lower plane of the average man, of course—Then they admit that it is not easy to shake hands with him, because of the difference in structure. Indeed, they are not able to state with precision whether he has hair or feathers. After a current of air kills him, several men carry away a coffin that is not of human shape. Chesterton relates this teratological fantasy as a joke.
These examples, which could easily be multiplied, prove that Chesterton restrained himself from being Edgar Allan Poe or Franz Kafka, but something in the makeup of his personality leaned toward the nightmarish, something secret, and blind, and central. Not in vain did he dedicate his first works to the justification of two great gothic craftsmen, Browning and Dickens; not in vain did he repeat that the best book to come out of Germany was Grimm’s Fairy Tales. He reviled Ibsen and defended Rostand (perhaps indefensibly), but the Trolls and the creator of Peer Gynt were the stuff his dreams were made of. That discord, that precarious subjection of a demoniacal will, defines Chesterton’s nature. For me, the emblems of that struggle are the adventures of Father Brown, each of which undertakes to explain an inexplicable event by reason alone.24 That is why I said, in the first paragraph of this essay, that those stories were the key to Chesterton, the symbols and reflections of Chesterton. That is all, except that the “reason” to which Chesterton subjected his imaginings was not precisely reason but the Catholic faith or rather a collection of Hebrew imaginings that had been subjected to Plato and Aristotle.
I remember two opposing parables. The first one is from the first volume of Kafka’s works. It is the story of the man who asks to be admitted to the law. The guardian of the first door says that there are many other doors within,25 and that every room is under the watchful eye of a guardian, each of whom is stronger than the one before. The man sits down to wait. Days and years go by, and the man dies. In his agony he asks, “Is it possible that during the years I have been waiting, no one has wanted to enter but me?” The guardian answers, “No one has wanted to enter this door because it was destined for you alone. Now I shall close it.” (In the ninth chapter of The Trial Kafka comments on this parable, making it even more complicated.) The other parable is in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. People gaze enviously at a castle guarded by many warriors; a guardian at the door holds a book in which he will write the name of the one who is worthy of entering. An intrepid man approaches the guardian and says, “Write my name, sir.” Then he takes out his sword and lunges at the warriors; there is an exchange of bloody blows; he forces his way through the tumult and enters the castle. Chesterton devoted his life to the writing of the second parable, but something within him always tended to write the first.
The Labyrinths of the
Detective Story and Chesterton
The English live with the turmoil of two incompatible passions: a strange appetite for adventure and a strange appetite for legality. I write “strange” because, for a criollo, they are both precisely that. Martin Fierro, the sainted army deserter, and his pal Cruz, the sainted police deserter, would be astonished, swearing and laughing at the British (and American) doctrine that the law is infallibly right; yet they would never dare to imagine that their miserable fate as cutthroats was interesting or desirable. For a criollo, to kill is to “disgrace oneself.” It is one of man’s misfortunes, and in itself neither grants nor diminishes virtue. Nothing could be more opposite to “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” by the “morbidly virtuous” De Quincey or to the “Theory of the Moderate Murder” by the sedentary Chesterton.
Both passions—for physical adventure and for rancorous legality—find satisfaction in the current detective narrative. Its prototypes are the old serials and current dime novels about the nominally famous Nick Carter, smiling and hygienic athlete, that were engendered by the journalist John Coryell on an insomniac typewriter that dispatched 70,000 words a month. The genuine detective story—need I say it?—rejects with equal disdain both physical risk and distributive justice. It serenely disregards jails, secret stairways, remorse, gymnastics, fake beards, fencing, Charles Baudelaire’s bats, and even the element of chance. In the earliest examples of the genre (“The Mystery of Marie Roget,” by Edgar Allan Poe, 1842) and in one of the most recent ones (Unravelled Knots, by the Baroness Orczy), the story is limited to the discussion and abstract resolution of a crime, often far from the event or many years after it. The everyday methods of police investigation—fingerprints, torture, accusation—would seem like solecisms there. One might object to the conventionality of this rejection, but the convention here is irreproachable: it does not attempt to avoid difficulties, but rather to impose them. It is not a convenience for the writer, like the confused confidants in Jean Racine or theatrical asides. The detective novel to some degree borders on the psychological novel (The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, 1868; Mr. Digweed and Mr. Lumb by Eden Phillpotts, 1934). The short story is of a strict, problematic nature; its code could be the following:
A.) A discretional limit of six characters. The reckless infraction of this law is responsible for the confusion and tedium of all detective movies. In every one we are presented with fifteen strangers, and it is finally revealed that the evil one is not Alpha, who was looking through the keyhole, nor Beta, who hid the money, nor the disturbing Gamma, who would sob in the corners of the hallway, but rather that surly young Upsilon, whom we’d been confusing with Phi, who bears such a striking resemblance to Tau, the substitute elevator operator. The astonishment this fact tends to produce is somewhat moderate.
B.) The declaration of all the terms of the problem. If my memory (or lack of it) serves me, the varied infraction of this second law is the favorite defect of Conan Doyle. It involves, at times, a few particles of ashes, gathered behind the reader’s back by the privileged Holmes, and only derivable from a cigar made in Burma, which is sold in only one store, which is patronized by only one customer. At other times, the cheating is more serious. It involves a guilty party, horribly unmasked at the last moment, who turns out to
be a stranger, an insipid and torpid interpolation. In honest stories, the criminal is one of the characters present from the beginning.
C.) An avaricious economy of means. The final discovery that two characters in the plot are the same person may be appealing—as long as the instrument of change turns out to be not a false beard or an Italian accent, but different names and circumstances. The less delightful version—two individuals who imitate a third and thus provide him with ubiquity—runs the certain risk of heavy weather.