The Pathos of Proximity[1]
Alexander S. Kaun
Pulldown the shades. Turn out the lights. So. We do not want loud electricity. We shall have a jewelled light. For I am rich to-night. Come, let us recline on Bagdad cushions and Teheran rugs (“Only savages sit”, Mme. Zinovyeva, the Russian Lesbian, told us), and I shall scatter over the fantastic patterns jewels and stones. How softly they illumine the thick dark—these varicolored glowflies, these streams of wine, emerald wine, and amethyst wine, and wine of topazes “yellow as the eyes of tigers, and topazes pink as the eyes of a wood pigeon, and green topazes that are as the eyes of cats”, and wine of opals “that burn always with an icelike flame”, and wine of onyxes that are like “the eyeballs of a dead woman”, and wine streams of sapphires and chrysolites and rubies and turquoises and ambers and pearls.... I am rich to-night, and we shall bathe our eyes in quivering rainbows, and our fingers shall wander lightly through dimly-jewelled ripples, stirring up old visions, exotic unhuman faces, enchanting monsters, dancing rhythmic words, fantastic moonlit thoughts.
What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night?
What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night?
What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night?
What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night?
What songless tongueless ghost of sin crept through the curtains of the night?
“In exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world are passing in dumb show before us. Things that we have dimly dreamed of are suddenly made real. Things of which we have never dreamed are gradually revealed.”
Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!
Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!
Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!
Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!
Lift up your large black satin eyes which are like cushions where one sinks!
Fawn at my feet, fantastic Sphinx, and sing me all your memories!
A symphony of memories. A life as brilliant and as swift as a meteor. A life of no shadows. Sun and flowers. A continuous rainbow. An Apollonian race over iridescent rose-and-azure-clouds. A sudden plunge over hideous precipice. The song broken. Yet the chord vibrates.
Uneasiness. The moon filters through the stained embrasure.
Regardez la lune ... On dirait une femme qui sort d’un tombeau. Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu’elle cherche des mortes.... Elle ressemble à une petite princesse qui porte un voile jaune, et des pieds d’argent. Elle ressemble à une princesse qui a des petites colombes blanches.... On dirait qu’elle danse.... On dirait une femme hystérique, une femme hystérique qui va cherchant des amants partout. Elle est nue aussi. Elle est toute nue. Les nuages cherchent à la vêtir, mais elle ne veut pas. Elle chancelle à travers les nuages comme une femme ivre....... Cachez la lune! Cachez les étoiles!
Regardez la lune ... On dirait une femme qui sort d’un tombeau. Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu’elle cherche des mortes.
... Elle ressemble à une petite princesse qui porte un voile jaune, et des pieds d’argent. Elle ressemble à une princesse qui a des petites colombes blanches.... On dirait qu’elle danse.
... On dirait une femme hystérique, une femme hystérique qui va cherchant des amants partout. Elle est nue aussi. Elle est toute nue. Les nuages cherchent à la vêtir, mais elle ne veut pas. Elle chancelle à travers les nuages comme une femme ivre....
... Cachez la lune! Cachez les étoiles!
No, it is not the moon that causes the uneasiness. It is that Egyptian scarabæus in lapis lazuli that bedims the scattered jewels and enveils me in sadness. An image beckons to me out of the ultramarine glimmer, an image of a king, a lord, possessor of a golden tongue and of a scintillating mind, yet an image repulsive in its carnal vulgarity, its dull inexpressive eyes, its fat jowl, its unreserved mouth. On a stout, democratic finger guffaws the scarabæus.
Lights! Turn on the lights.
I have been sybariticizing with thirteen beautiful little volumes of Oscar Wilde, recently published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons. It is a useful, although often painful, ordeal—ventilating the store-room of your old gods. There was a time when I worshipped Wilde unqualifiedly. As a freshman I wrote a pathetic paper in which I demanded the canonization of the author ofDe Profundis. Alas, I have come to discern spots on the sun.
As a decorative artist Wilde has no flaws. The perfect design applied in his multifarious productions makes one compare him to the titans of the High Renaissance: Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. The graceful form justifies even his obvious moral-fairy-tales, even his unoriginal, Keats-esque and Poe-esque poems. It is for the style that we accept hisDe Profundis, that insincerest attempt for sincerity. But Wilde strove for more than mere external artistic effect. In his critical essays he lifted the critic to the heights of co- and re-creation, and instructed him to demand from a work of art eternal values. “The critic rejects those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reveries and moods and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true and no interpretation final.” We, his disciples in aesthetic valuations, come to ourmaster with his own criterion, and find him on more than one occasion grievously wanting in the requirements that he had set up for the artist. He either has no message to deliver, as in his clever plays, or he delivers his message in such an outspoken way that no field is left for suggestion or imaginative interpretation. He had transgressed Mallarmé’s maxim—“To name is to kill; to suggest is to create” not only inThe Ballad of Reading Gaol, the work that belongs to the crushed, semi-penitent Wilde; he committed this unpardonable sin in his masterpiece,Salomé! That wonderful harmonious ghastliness, woven out of moods and motives, surcharged with suggestive tragedy and fatalism, suddenly breaks into a criminal vulgarity through the introduction of a “real” dead head, which drives away illusion and atmosphere, and strikes your nostrils with the odor of theatrical grease paint.
The rehabilitation of Oscar Wilde was imposed upon the Anglo-Saxon world by the continent, especially by Germany, the expropriator of English geniuses, where the production of Wilde’s plays has rivalled in frequency those of Shakespeare. I know of a German pundit who chose as a topic for his doctor’s dissertations “The Influence of Pater on Oscar Wilde”. But continental depreciation is as fast as Anglo-Saxon appreciation is slow. Neue Zeiten, neue Vögel; neue Vögel, neue Lieder. European literature in recent decades has had more meteors than stars. Wilde’s flash is rapidly vanishing. You may call me a Cassandra, but I venture a prophecy that soon Wilde will find his peaceful place in American colleges alongside with Austen, Eliot, Meredith, etc.
Saloméwill always remain one of the world’s great symphonies,—a symphony in which the motive of doom rends your soul from the first sound to the last.Poems in Prosewill never lose their charm as ivory-carved bits of ideal conversation—the art in which Wilde was supreme, the art that is almost unknown in this country where it is substituted by talk. His other works are doomed to be time’s victims. Not because they are worthless, but for the reason of their adaptability. One must be a prophet, a Nietzsche, who hurls his seeds over many generations, in order to endure. Wilde was aware of this danger, and he wished to be misunderstood, but he lacked the profundity for such a merit. He did not mirror his age; but he had realized the potentialities of his age, had popularized them to such a degree that they have become the possession of the crowd. We are not any longer dazzled by the clever witticisms in hisPlays; they have become almost commonplace. Even the graceful, radiatingIntentionsappear to us somewhat obvious. Why?—It is the pathos of proximity! Wilde’s paradoxes,mots, theories, have proven so appropriate, adaptable, and digestible for our age, that it took only one decade to absorb them into our blood and marrow. Cleverism for the sake of cleverism has come to be an epidemic in our days; cleverists find Wilde an inexhaustible source for parasitic exploitation. Our Hunekers (and under this appellativeI have in mind the legions of our omniscient boulevardiers-critics) don a Wildesque robe, and have little trouble in passing as genuine before the good-natured public. Unfortunately the constitution of the Hunekers is too weak to absorb Wilde’s big truths; they prefer the digestible chaff.
Adaptability spells forgetability. Crime and punishment.
[1]The Works of Oscar Wilde in 13 volumes. Ravenna edition. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.