I am weeping. I am weeping because I too have wrought miracles. I also have
given sight to the blind, I have healed the palsied and I have raised the dead;
I too have caused the barren fig tree to wither away and I have turned water
into wine . . . and yet they have not crucified me.'"
At the time this apologue amused me; in the light of later events it assumed a
tragic significance. Oscar Wilde ought to have known that in this world every
real superiority is pursued with hatred, and every worker of miracles is sure
to be persecuted. But he had no inkling that the Gospel story is symbolic--the
life-story of genius for all time, eternally true. He never looked outside
himself, and as the fruits of success were now sweet in his mouth, a pursuing
Fate seemed to him the most mythical of myths. His child-like self-confidence
was pathetic. The laws that govern human affairs had little interest for the
man who was always a law unto himself. Yet by some extraordinary prescience,
some inexplicable presentiment, the approaching catastrophe cast its shadow
over his mind and he felt vaguely that the life-journey of genius would be
incomplete and farcical without the final tragedy: whoever lives for the highest
must be crucified.
It seems memorable to me that in this brief summer of his life, Oscar Wilde
should have concerned himself especially with the life-story of the Man of
Sorrows who had sounded all the depths of suffering. Just when he himself was
about to enter the Dark Valley, Jesus was often in his thoughts and he always
spoke of Him with admiration. But after all how could he help it? Even Dekker
saw as far as that:
"The best of men
That e'er wore earth about Him."
This was the deeper strain in Oscar Wilde's nature though he was always
disinclined to show it. Habitually he lived in humorous talk, in the epithets
and epigrams he struck out in the desire to please and astonish his hearers.
One evening I learned almost by chance that he was about to try a new experiment
and break into a new field.
|