In
the same play the husband chases his wife with a drawn sword, the wife
remarking at intervals "I am not gay." Now there may really be an idea
in this; the idea of human misfortune coming most cruelly upon the
optimism of innocence; that the lonely human heart says, like a child at
a party, "I am not enjoying myself as I thought I should." But it is
plain that unless one thinks of this idea (and of this idea only) the
expression is not in the least unsuccessful pathos; it is very broad and
highly successful farce. Maeterlinck and the decadents, in short, may
fairly boast of being subtle; but they must not mind if they are called
narrow.
This is the spirit of Wilde's work and of most of the literary work done
in that time and fashion. It is, as Mr. Arthur Symons said, an attitude;
but it is an attitude in the flat, not in the round; not a statue, but
the cardboard king in a toy-theatre, which can only be looked at from
the front. In Wilde's own poetry we have particularly a perpetually
toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short or
just going too far. "Plant lilies at my head" has something wrong about
it; something silly that is not there in--
"And put a grey stone at my head"
in the old ballad.
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