Ransome's “critical study”

I AM not going to trouble the reader with an account of the ''Life and Works" of Mr. Arthur Ransome, one of whose claims to fame lies in the fact that he was a defendant in the Ransome trial. His critical study of Oscar Wilde is a lumbering, apologetic performance dedicated to Robert Ross and with an evident regard for the opinions of Ross even where criticism is concerned. The passages in it which I held to be libellous upon myself have been expunged, and, according to Ransome, this was done with a view to sparing my feelings. The edition current among the public, however, is not published by the original publishing house, but by another firm, and both this firm and Mr. Ransome will, doubtless, be startled to hear that if they had ventured to insert the passages of which I complained in the edition for which they are responsible I should have immediately served writs for libel upon them and taken my chances of another ''evisceration" in the witness-box.

Possibly Mr. Ransome had no inkling of this when he put his wonderfully magnanimous note to the new edition, but his publishers are wise people.

Ransome's “Critical Study” at a shilling, has been planted on Smith's stalls and at all the shilling bookselling booths throughout the country, ever since the trial, with the name ''Oscar Wilde" printed large on the dust cover, and the name of “Ransome" not quite so large. I am going to take the edition as it stands, because the original edition was withdrawn by the publishers and can only have had a very limited circulation. It deals with the facts of Wilde's life in the briefest way, and is devoted mainly to a pretentious discussion of Wilde's writings.

I may best sum up its critical announcements by saying that they are all of them what Ross would have liked them to be. Beginning with the poems, Ransome assures us that “Ravenna" is an admirable prize poem. He tells us that Wilde's early poems are “rich in imitations" and full of "variations of other men's music," adding that they are variations to which the personality of the virtuoso has given "a certain uniformity." "Certain" is good, in view of the fact that these poems are most distinctly not uniform in any single quality which appertains to poetry.

Of Wilde's apings of Milton he says: "Some of those exercises, which are among the most interesting he wrote, suggest the new view of the morale of imitation" ; and he goes on to tell us that “Wilde made himself, as it were, the representative poet of his period. People who had heard of Rossetti and Swinburne, but never read them, were able to recover their self-respect by purchasing Wilde”.

Was ever such arrant nonsense put before a confiding public, even at a shilling? Mr. Ransome was in swaddling clothes when Wilde's early volume was going through its five editions, otherwise he would know that for one person who ''recovered his self-respect" by purchasing Wilde there were fifty persons who were purchasing and reading Swinburne and Rossetti without worrying about their self-respect at all.

Mr. Ransome is full of admiration for the early poems as a body. He cannot deny that “the young man's verse was grossly derivative," or that Milton, Dante, Marlowe, Keats, Browning and others “make up a goodly list of sufferers by this light-hearted corsair's piracies," but he asks the reader to believe that Wilde's plagiarism was a really pretty gift and all to the advantage of letters, and that the poems are to be valued as the early work of a great man and, for that matter, a great poet.

I should have wished that Mr. Ransome might have given us a more explicit condemnation of the moral aspect of “The Sphinx." His final remark is that ''it is as if a man were finding solace for his feverish hands in the touch of cool, hard stones, and at the same time stimulating his fever by the sexual excitement of contrast between the over-sensitive and the utterly insensible"—whatever this may mean.

On the prose Mr. Ransome spreads his butter very thick and, by way of apology and blessing for "Dorian Gray," he has the following specious paragraphs: “Perhaps the reason why it was so loudly accused of immorality was that in the popular mind luxury and sin are closely allied, and the unpardonable mannerism that made him preach in a parable against the one, did not hide his wholehearted delight in describing the other." .... “‘Dorian Gray,' for all its faults, is such a book. It is unbalanced; and that is a fault. It is a mosaic, hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and took and used in his work whatever scrap of jasper or porphyry or broken flint was put into his hand; and that is not a virtue. But in it there is an individual essence, a private perfume, a colour whose secret has been lost. There are moods whose consciousness that essence, perfume, colour is needed to intensify."

And all this—mind you—of a book which Wilde himself called "poisonous," and which Mr. Ransome's own publishers, Messrs. Methuen, declined to include at any price in their various editions of Wilde's works. There is a great deal to pretty much the same effect about “Intentions" and the plays. Everything that Wilde has done is wonderful from the Ransome point of view, and his literary faults and failings are beautifully explained away or made the occasion for the handing up of bouquets, until we come right down to the appended somewhat mild reproof:

"In 1889, before the maleficent flood of gold was poured upon him, he had become accustomed to indulge the vice that, openly alluded to in the days and verses of 'Catullus,' is generally abhorred and hidden in our own."

I have previously shown that Ransome goes out of his way in another place to indicate that Wilde's best work was done during the period when he was “an habitual devotee" to the vice in question, and he is not content even with this subtle hint, but goes on to suggest that Wilde's knowledge of his own infamy may have induced in him “a heightened ardour of production." I am aware that the impropriety of this sort of criticism can be readily explained away on the ground that it is honest or scientific; but the fact remains that such criticism must convey some vague suggestion that the literary result—in Wilde's case, at least—was an excuse for the vice. Such an impression should not be derivable from what professes to be a “critical study'' of literary work.

It is the custom of all persons who wish to defend dubious or immoral publications, such as I judge some of Wilde's works to be, to assert that the same thing is done in France—which country they assert to be the Mother of all the Arts—and that nobody complains and no harm has accrued. If this were true of the French or any other people I do not know that it would be good argument; but, as a matter of fact, it is not true. Frenchmen have undoubtedly been the greatest sinners in the composition of undesirable books, and that they are beginning to reap what they have sown is quite evident from the condition of French public morals to-day. France admits that the greatest of her social problems at the moment lies in the utterly vicious and decadent tendencies of French youth, particularly of the lower and middle classes. But Frenchmen are beginning to perceive that just as the apache and the adolescent criminal are the direct outcome of the neglect of religious and moral teaching in the French national schools, so the unsavoury intellectual art-mongers and Wilde-worshippers who are so thick upon the ground in middle-class French society owe themselves, in the main, to the pernicious literature upon which the French law places no check.

It may be useful to remember here that even in that great and glorious centre of artistic freedom—Paris—the authorities declined to allow the proposed monument to be erected over Wilde's grave in Pere la Chaise until certain modifications had been made in the work. It was a bitter blow to some of the Wilde faction, but the authorities of Paris were inexorable, and those responsible for the monument learned a lesson that they could not do as they liked, even in France. I do not say that Mr. Ransome has anything to do with this, but I do say that anybody who, by so much as a word or a phrase, minimises Wilde's vices or vicious writing in the name of Art is not sufficiently alive to the danger of one of the most scandalous movements that has ever excited and betrayed mankind.