My
business
as an artist was with Ariel.
Oscar Wilde - Poetry
To have made such an appeal would have been
from the individualist point of view bad enough, but what excuse can
there ever be put forward for having made it? Of course once I had put
into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, 'Have
you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now
appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised
to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to. ' The result
is I am in gaol. Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by such
ignoble instruments, as I did.
The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand art.
Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and
the like, know nothing about art, and are the very salt of the earth. He
is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind,
mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force
when he meets it either in a man or a movement.
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil
things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then,
from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach
them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. The danger was
half the excitement. . . .
My business as an artist was with Ariel. I
set myself to wrestle with Caliban. . . .
A great friend of mine--a friend of ten years' standing--came to see me
some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what
was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite
innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what
he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite
charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice,
still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless
he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could
not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It
was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his
friendship on false pretences.
Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in _Intentions_, are as limited in
extent and duration as the forces of physical energy. The little cup
that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no more, though all the
purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to the brim, and the treaders
stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes of the stony vineyards of Spain.
There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are
the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable
to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The
martyr in his 'shirt of flame' may be looking on the face of God, but to
him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the
whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or
the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the fall
of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe. Great
passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by
those who are on a level with them.
* * * * *
I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view
of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than
Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's
college friends. They have been his companions.
from the individualist point of view bad enough, but what excuse can
there ever be put forward for having made it? Of course once I had put
into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, 'Have
you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now
appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised
to the full. You shall abide by what you have appealed to. ' The result
is I am in gaol. Certainly no man ever fell so ignobly, and by such
ignoble instruments, as I did.
The Philistine element in life is not the failure to understand art.
Charming people, such as fishermen, shepherds, ploughboys, peasants and
the like, know nothing about art, and are the very salt of the earth. He
is the Philistine who upholds and aids the heavy, cumbrous, blind,
mechanical forces of society, and who does not recognise dynamic force
when he meets it either in a man or a movement.
People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil
things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then,
from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach
them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. The danger was
half the excitement. . . .
My business as an artist was with Ariel. I
set myself to wrestle with Caliban. . . .
A great friend of mine--a friend of ten years' standing--came to see me
some time ago, and told me that he did not believe a single word of what
was said against me, and wished me to know that he considered me quite
innocent, and the victim of a hideous plot. I burst into tears at what
he said, and told him that while there was much amongst the definite
charges that was quite untrue and transferred to me by revolting malice,
still that my life had been full of perverse pleasures, and that unless
he accepted that as a fact about me and realised it to the full I could
not possibly be friends with him any more, or ever be in his company. It
was a terrible shock to him, but we are friends, and I have not got his
friendship on false pretences.
Emotional forces, as I say somewhere in _Intentions_, are as limited in
extent and duration as the forces of physical energy. The little cup
that is made to hold so much can hold so much and no more, though all the
purple vats of Burgundy be filled with wine to the brim, and the treaders
stand knee-deep in the gathered grapes of the stony vineyards of Spain.
There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are
the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable
to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The
martyr in his 'shirt of flame' may be looking on the face of God, but to
him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the
whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or
the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the fall
of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe. Great
passions are for the great of soul, and great events can be seen only by
those who are on a level with them.
* * * * *
I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view
of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than
Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They are Hamlet's
college friends. They have been his companions.
