ON THE EVENING of 24 November 1886, Wilde gave a lecture on the poet Thomas Chatterton at Birkbeck College, London. It was a freezing night and there was one of those legendary Victorian pea-soupers. When Wilde emerged out of the thick fog into the hall at Birkbeck he found, to his amazement, an audience of eight hundred people gathered there. He assumed they had come out of a genuine interest in Chatterton, but they may also have been drawn by the chance to hear him.1 After his lecture tour of America in 1882, and his subsequent tour of England, Wilde had become renowned as a public speaker.
Wilde was in love with Chatterton’s legend and writings; so ‘ardent’ a ‘Chattertonian’ was he that he made a pilgrimage to Bristol, the poet’s native town, just prior to his lecture, to imbibe the ‘ancient spirit of the place’ that had so moved his hero.2 Through his immersion in the literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and an exquisite sensitivity to the spirit of the past, Chatterton had composed, in the 1760s, pastiches of medieval poetry and then passed them off as the original work of a fifteenth-century monk Thomas Rowley. So marvellous were his poems and so expert the medieval charactery in which he inscribed them that he convinced scholars of their authenticity. Only much later, after Chatterton’s early death at the age of seventeen in a London garret (‘the most tremendous tragedy in history,’ according to Wilde)3 would his works be widely dismissed as plagiarisms and forgeries.
In his lecture Wilde seems to be outlining a writerly ideal, and fashioning for himself a model of authorship. Chatterton, he says, began by saturating himself in the literature of the Middle Ages, then he became proficient in imitating its finest exponents. Having completed his apprenticeship he proceeded to pen his ‘own’ works. He effortlessly absorbed the language of his contemporaries too: he could scribble off, by the yard, ‘polished lines like Pope, satire like Churchill . . . [and emotive verse like] Gray, Collins, Macpherson’. Chatterton assimilated the language of others and then abandoned himself to its ebbs and flows, surfing on the waves of words that rose and fell within him.
Wilde characterised the ‘marvellous boy’ of English literature as an author ‘of the type of Shakespeare and Homer: a dramatist [who] claimed for the artist freedom of mood’. The poet’s forgeries and imitations were motivated by ‘the desire for artistic self-effacement’4 rather than by kleptomania or creative sterility. They were also inspired by the delight Chatterton took in playing with the poetic postures and styles of his literary precursors. Rather than expressing a unified and ‘authentic’ self in a single and sincere voice, Chatterton’s poetry was a polyphonic wall of sound.
When Wilde composed his works he surrounded himself with books. A friend remembered him writing a poem ‘with a botanical work in front of him from which he . . . [selected] the names of flowers most pleasing to the ear to plant in his garden of verse’.5 Aubrey Beardsley’s caricature of Wilde, ‘Oscar Wilde at Work’, shows the author at his desk surrounded by mountains of books.
As if to signal his dependence on his sources, books make cameo appearances throughout Wilde’s oeuvre: ‘The Critic as Artist’ begins when Gilbert asks the laughing Ernest what he has found so funny in the volume he is reading. And then there is the bookishness of Wilde’s works themselves, which are saturated with references to writers and their books. Wilde marshals the names of so many authors and volumes in his dialogues that they sometimes read like the catalogue of a library – of Wilde’s library, to be precise. At one point in ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ the narrator describes himself taking down several books from his library shelves and poring over them. This is doubtless a mirror image of Wilde himself in the act of writing his essay-story, when he must have repeatedly gone over to his shelves in search of the many quotations that appear in the piece.
Aubrey Beardsley’s caricature ‘Oscar Wilde At Work’.
The image of Wilde prowling round his library in search of quotations and inspiration might, along with Beardsley’s caricature, stand as an emblem of his authorship. Wilde’s idea of composition was essentially pre-Romantic: like a writer of the Renaissance or of the classical period, he believed that books, not life, ought to be the chief inspiration for literature. The author’s task was to adapt and conflate, in novel and exciting ways, the books they read, rather than create original works that expressed their ‘authentic’ self or related their personal experiences.
Wilde used the terms ‘originality’ and ‘original genius’ in a pejorative sense. The Brontës were far too original to be great, he said; they were always at the ‘mercy of genius’. Wilde meant that, denied an education in the great literary works of the Western canon, the sisters had been forced to draw exclusively upon reserves of subjective thought and experience. Yet more than that was required to create a work of art. ‘It is not,’ Wilde declared, ‘everyone who says “I, I” who can enter into the kingdom of art.’6 True literary geniuses were indeed never original. Shakespeare was the greatest of all authors precisely because he worked within an existing literary tradition, taking fragments of his reading and shaping them into song.7
Wilde looked back to the era before the early nineteenth century, when the Romantics had made egotism all the rage, to a time when literature was seen as the inspired and dextrous work of the craftsman-like reader-writer. Artisan authors – for whom Chatterton was the patron saint – began their apprenticeship by imitating the best literary models: imitation and admiration being, in Wilde’s words, ‘the portal to all great things’.8* For Wilde, imitation had nothing to do with plagiarism or lack of originality, for no one could ever be truly original. Every author was ‘the child of someone else’, in so far as all writers copied, consciously or otherwise, from their predecessors. True originality could ‘be found rather in the use made of a model than in the rejection of all models’;10 and great poets were those capable of drawing new music from reeds that had been ‘touched by other lips’.11
Wilde’s own poetry is a chorus of echoes. In one poem he adopts the vigorous tone and imagery of the seventeenth-century poet John Milton, in another he plays gently on the lyre of Keats. The reader is continually dazzled by the range of Wilde’s reading and the repertoire of styles and tones at his command. The poems are essentially dramatic performances; examples of what Wilde called ‘literary acting’. He impersonates his favourite authors just as, in conversation, he sometimes mimicked his friends.12 On one occasion, Wilde characterised the Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson as ‘a beast [who] fed off books’,13 because of his gift for digesting the words of his literary heroes and regurgitating them in his own writing. He might have been describing himself. And it is here, perhaps, that the true significance of Wilde’s habit of eating books is revealed – he gobbled them up to nourish his own writings.
Wilde’s works display a literary sensibility keenly susceptible to the influence of others: on one occasion, he even claimed to have ‘been influenced by all the books’ he had read.14 He admired Pater’s gift for mimicry, praising his ability to echo, in his critical prose, ‘the colour and accent and tone’ of whichever writer he happened to be analysing.15 In his own reviews, Wilde himself sometimes exhibits a similar facility.
Wilde’s unfinished undergraduate essay ‘The Women of Homer’ is in part an appraisal of Symonds’s Studies of the Greek Poets (Second Series), and in part a general introduction to the heroines of the Iliad and the Odyssey.16 In it, Wilde attempts to out-Symonds Symonds by copying his idiosyncratic brand of impressionistic criticism and his lush poetic style. ‘And so’, Wilde writes, ‘ . . . following the cunning Circe and the enchantress Calypso . . . we come face to face with Nausicaa . . . it is like leaving a hot conservatory for the fresh spring air, or a crowded gaslit room for the soft breezes and silver glories of the night.’ These musical, metaphoric lines might have come straight out of Studies. In fact, they probably did. They resoundingly echo Symonds’s own comments on Nausicaa: ‘Odysseus,’ he says, then ‘passes . . . into the company of this real woman. It is like coming from a land of dreams into a dewy garden when the sun has risen.’17
In the course of Dorian Gray, Wilde imitates and parodies exponents of countless genres such as the Gothic novel and dandy literature, as well as several varieties of popular Victorian fiction such as the ‘magic picture novel’ and the ‘mesmeric novel’. The catalogue of sources and inspirations for Wilde’s novel is constantly being augmented by scholars: it includes books as diverse as Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Balzac’s Le Peau du chagrin [The Wild Ass’s Skin] and the volumes of Irish folk tales collected by Wilde’s parents.*
Before embarking on a new work Wilde required a literary model to follow. Thus the plays of the ‘Belgian Shakespeare’, Maurice Maeterlinck, provided the prototype for his Salomé. Wilde always needed to immerse himself in the style and the language of a genre before he worked in it.
Books by other authors created the appropriate mood in which Wilde could compose, warming him up, as it were, before his writerly performance; he told one acquaintance that he began each working day by reading a few pages from Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony.18 Like Chatterton, Wilde first absorbed a language then gave himself up to its ebbs and flows, allowing its internal movements and momentum to lead him forward. A friend, for whom Wilde invented one of his spoken stories, witnessed him in this blessed, trance-like state of inspiration: ‘On and on’ Wilde went, ‘the pure diction, the delicate imagery . . .’ flowing out of lips that curved into a smile. ‘Was this prose,’ the listener wondered, ‘or was this poetry in a new measure? A sense of his mastery of the strange instrument held me in a stillness of delight.’19
During a debate at the Oxford Union in 1881, the undergraduate Oliver Elton famously denounced Wilde’s Poems as a catalogue of literary thefts from Byron, Donne, Sidney, Swinburne, Morris, Shakespeare and other poets.20 The artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler echoed the accusation when he condemned Wilde as a shameless literary thief who only had ‘the courage of the opinions of others’. Beardsley repeats the charge in his caricature ‘Oscar Wilde at Work’, which mischievously hints that Wilde borrowed brazenly from his favourite books.
Perhaps Wilde’s critics simply failed to understand his ancient conception of authorship. Their opinions belong, after all, to the post-Romantic period in which self-expression, originality and sincerity were often used as the touchstones of literary criticism. And yet their indictments cannot be dismissed so easily, because Wilde certainly did steal from other writers, and not only out of a desire to imitate or to echo them.21
On occasion, Wilde was the most playful of plagiarists. He included Whistler’s accusation that he only had the ‘courage of the opinions of others’ in one of his critical dialogues, without mentioning his source. When Whistler read the piece he took the bait and once again charged the author with plagiarism, this time using the quotation as evidence. Wilde’s so-called plagiarisms are also often deliberate allusions. When he echoes Pater in the early chapters of Dorian Gray, he clearly intends the reader to recognise the references. Dorian is seduced by Lord Henry’s hedonistic creed, which he borrows wholesale from the notorious conclusion to the Renaissance. Invoking the Oxford don creates a thematic resonance, bringing to the reader’s mind a whole series of Pater’s phrases and ideas. Wilde was gratified when his readers identified such intentional echoes, pronouncing himself ‘charmed’ when an acquaintance recognised his allusions to Flaubert.22
Some of Wilde’s plagiarisms were probably unconscious. His famous comparison of dining with male prostitutes to ‘feasting with panthers’23 has been traced back to the line ‘I supped with Lions and Panthers’ from Balzac’s Lost Illusions. But was Wilde aware of his source?
And yet, and yet . . . Wilde did sometimes stoop to downright plagiarism, especially in his early works, incorporating the phrases of other writers into his writings, sometimes verbatim, with out an acknowledgement of any kind. The poem Ravenna is a cento made up of his own poetry and lines taken from other authors. His talk on Chatterton, too, vividly demonstrates his magpie method of composition. In preparing it Wilde literally cut out and then pasted into his lecture notes excerpts from two Chatterton biographers. He crosses out the occasional line or substitutes a word to improve the style of these extracts; in his talk he presumably read them out as though they were his own invention.
There were, however, extenuating circumstances. Wilde did not envisage the reissue of Ravenna in the sort of anthology that has made its plagiarisms palpable. His lectures too, were oral works, which cannot be subjected to conventional criteria of plagiarism; nor did he ever intend publishing them. None of these mitigating factors apply, however, to the notorious Chapter 11 of Dorian Gray, in which Wilde copied out verbatim phrases from works on embroidery and jewellery, in his grand tour of his hero’s eclectic artistic taste.24
Wilde defended his plagiarisms with customary nonchalance and wit. ‘It is only the unimaginative who ever invents,’ he remarked. ‘The true artist is known by what he annexes, and he annexes everything.’ ‘Of course I plagiarise,’ he confessed to a friend. ‘It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St Antoine without signing my name at the end of it . . . All the “Best Hundred Books” bear my signature in this manner.’25 Wilde held that plagiarism only existed where the imitator failed to surpass his source in brilliance: ‘When I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden,’ he explained, ‘I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.’26
Wilde’s plagiarism illustrates the intimate connection between his reading and his writing. Without books to feed on, and without their silent physical companionship, perhaps he would never have penned a line. He may even have regarded his volumes as amulets which he needed close by him in order to compose. On one occasion he asked a friend to bring him a copy of Thackeray’s The History of Henry Esmond while he was writing a play set in the same historical period as the novel.27 Presumably he thought it would help him with the style of his drama, but the book may have acted as a talisman as well as a tool.
A literary tradition, Wilde believed, was based on a sort of communism of ideas and motifs.28 ‘Never say you have “adapted” anything . . .’ he advised a writer. ‘Appropriate what is already yours – for to publish anything is to make it public property.’29 Chatterton was, in his view, fully entitled to filch lines from his predecessors, just as Coleridge was justified in stealing from Chatterton, and Scott from Coleridge, and so on down the entire roll call of nineteenth-century poets which ended, of course, with Wilde himself.30 To Wilde, a literary tradition was a confraternity of cutpurses, and the only way to gain admission was by breaking and entering.
Wilde was gratified when his own writings inspired other authors. He was ‘cheered’ when he read Max Beerbohm’s tale The Happy Hypocrite, which uses Dorian Gray as a model. Before reading it, Wilde had, ‘always been disappointed that my story had suggested no other work of art in others. For whenever a beautiful flower grows in a meadow or lawn, some other flower, so like it that it is differently beautiful, is sure to grow beside it, all flowers and all works of art having a curious sympathy for each other.’31
* Translation was helpful for the fledgling writer too, as Wilde knew from personal experience. Some of his first poetical efforts were superb English renditions of classical texts; at university, he dazzled his peers with his Greek compositions. In these exercises he was asked to mimic the styles of ancient authors. In some undergraduate notes he thus translates passages of Shakespeare and Wordsworth into a variety of Greek verse modelled on Euripides.9
* This list displays the promiscuity of a taste that encompassed popular fiction as well as high art. An essential part of Wilde’s genius may have been his ability to find inspiration in the ‘lowest’ as well as in the highest cultural sources, and in his gift for creating literary worlds in which these elements coexist in harmony, or at least in a delirious state of ‘streaky bacon’ contrast. In this sense, Wilde’s works are microcosms of his dazzlingly miscellaneous library at Tite Street.