Art itself

ANN WORDSWORTH

The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde edited by Richard Ellmann (W. H. Allen 50s) Uncollected Prose by W. B. Yeats: Volume 'One, First Reviews and Articles 1886-1896 collected and edited by John P. Frayne (Macmillan 160s) The gravely nagging tones of Matthew Arnold brought no frisson to Victorian hearts. The chill was felt more in Pater. It was dangerous to see knowledge as a 'series of impressions, unstable, flickering, incon- stant,'—but Pater felt the danger too and cut later editions of Studies in the History of the Renaissance. `I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.' His scruples were not universally felt. By the time Lord Alfred Douglas was editing The Spirit Lamp, a magazine for the pleasure of Oxford decadents, the opportunities for being misled had much increased and it was possible for him to disclaim 'any intention or desire to provide wholesome food for the many, Bovril and The Isis for them.'

The subversive force behind this is Oscar Wilde, chiefly his feeling that 'the basis of life, the energy of life as Aristotle called it, is simply the desire for expression'. True, Arnold had said 'to have the sense of crea- tive activity is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive', but this was different: narcissistic, anti-bourgeois in its coolly alienated disdain, but with none 01 Arnold's ceaseless perturb about the moral aspects of philistinism. No need for hbmilies when the thing itself could be so mockinelY patronised: the stifling prudery, Mrs Grundy, 'that amusing old lady who repre- sents the only original form of humour that the middle class has produced': the compla- cent moral anguish about materialism, 'there is only one class in the community that thinks more abou• money than the rich and that is the poor'; the gruesome expiations of social realism, 'genre enntryettf, which degrades

the visible arts into the obvious arts' and supposes 'the sun always rises in the East- End'.

People's need for their individuality is the basis of Wilde's socialism. Poverty stunts. Wilde understood both the reality of ex- ploitation and the irrelevance of charity: 'It is immoral to use private property to allevi- ate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property'. But escape from the 'peremptory, unreasonable, degrad- ing tyranny of Want' is not enough if it only leads to another servitude. He dreaded totalitarianism. Like Heine in Je crams . . . he feared for art if the 'sombre iconoclasts' rose only to avenge. His social criticism and his theories of art are meshed. Art can liber- ate: the self emerges, fragile and glittering, from the encasements of ordinary life, in itself the only complement to art. 'It is the spectator, not life, that Art really mirrors'— spectator or voyeur, corrupted or enhanced, no matter. Illicitly moved, according to the dictates of society, artist and critic recreate the self in the unreal of Art.

In his short reviews, Wilde praises arti- ficiality rather gracefully. Henley's line 'The green sky's minor thirds' is 'a very refresh- ing bit of affectation in a volume where there is so much that is natural'. Later, in Inten- tions, he approvingly quotes Corot's aphor- ism 'Landscape is the mood of a man's mind', and separates art from all its old hangers-on : nature, realism, ethics.

'You would acknowledge', insists Cyril, inviting epatement with docile readiness, 'that Art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time?'

'Certainly not. Art never expresses any- thing but itself'.

The florid, imaginative precision gives one great pleasure. Wilde is. after all, as well as funny, right. 'Good people exasperate one's reason, bad people stir one's imagination'. The transformation of Dr Jekyll reads dangerously like an experiment out of Lancet'. 'The brotherhood of man is no mere poet's dream: it is a most depressing and humiliating reality'. He is quite wrong only about William Morris's translation of The Odyssey. He praises it grandly and then, just for the sake of a quibble with Morris over the colour of Odysseus' hair, quotes as if they were good, lines that are pure stuffed owl if ever there was:

But when he had thoroughly washed him, and the oil about him had shed, lie did upon him the raiment the gift of the maid unwed. But Athene, Zeus-begotten, dealt with him in such wise, • That bigger was his seeming and mightier to all eyes, With the hair on his head crisp curling as the bloom of the daffodil.

It is very useful to have the early reviews, the famous essays, the preface to Dorian Gray and the press correspondence over it, the literary exchanges between Carson and Wilde, all in one volume. It means as well as reading Wilde for pleasure, one is bound also to be looking for a steady burn of thought. In his interesting introduction, Richard Ellmann sees Wilde as anticipating Roland Barthes and Northrop Frye in his sense of the creativity of criticism, and Genet in his willing assumption of the criminal self and its lot.

It is unfortunate that Wilde thought ballads expressed 'the pathos of provincial- ism'. For Yeats, the Irish past, heroic and

magic, authenticated his whole need for a

new poetic. The London literary scene was too introverted: 'At once the fault and the beauty of the nature-description of most modern poets is that for them the stars, and streams, the leaves, and the animals, are only masks behind which go on the sad soliloquies of a nineteenth century egoism'. And he also thought it so jaded: 'the poetry of black coffee and cigarettes, of absinthe and the skirt dance'—no wonder 'irritated silence' fell on the Rhymers' Club when Yeats ex- pounded the dependence of all great art and literature upon 'conviction and heroic life'.

Contemporary Irish poetry, in Yeats's ever. hopeful reviews, was not merely antiquarian.

like pre-Raphaelite mediaevalism; it was grounded in actuality and in the long, loaded. primordial memories of the Irish people 'Sheer hope and fear, joy and sorrow made the poems and not any mortal men or women'. Yeats is messianic: 'If we can but take that history and those legends and turn them into dramas, poems, and stories full of the living soul of the present. and make them massive with conviction and profound with reverie, we may deliver that new great utter ance for which the world is waiting'.

Obviously Yeats's theories of poetry are ot more interest than the work he is reviewing.

During the ten years this book covers, both his identification with Irish legend and his editing of Blake are important to him as a poet. Blake in particular sharpened his vision- ary eyes and saved him from becoming owl- ish in his chosen twilight.

Nationalism and the particular blood- memories of the Celts may not be the urgen- cies one cares for most. Yeats is very much on guard though against partisanship, and tried steadily to lift Irish culture out of bitterness and mere nostalgia. The literary- political controversies he aroused are well described by Professor Frayne who precedes each article and review by useful notes There is a touch of briskness in his introduc- tion which most hooks on Yeats are too reverent to include. Still, editors are not to be blamed if their impatience at Yeats's appalling handwriting and copying occasion- ally shows. His misquotinf in reviews is almost compulsive and at times disconcert- ing. The substitution of 'clover' for 'plover'

probably distresses only pedants and natural- ists—watching 'the fadoques and fibeem (golden and green clover) rising and lying. lying and rising, as they do on a fine night', for listening to 'the sharp whistle of the

fadogues and flibeens (golden and green plover) rising and lying, lying and rising, as they do on a calm night'. But it is odd not to know whether Verlaine's `voluminous tender- ness' is the basis of 'immortality' or immor- ality'.