REVIEWS. MANQUE. "The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde." London: Methuen. 1908. 12 vols. 12s. 6d. net each. Oscar Wilde, we are told in Mr. Robert Ross's dedication of "The Duchess of Padua," "never regarded his works as an adequate expression of his extraordinary genius and his magnificent intellectual endowment".

Fully to measure that disappointment one must refer to Wilde's estimate of himself, given in his last deeply interesting volume: "The gods had given me almost everything," he tells us; "I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy and philosophy an art; I altered the minds of men, and the colours of things ... whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty; ... I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase and all existence in an epigram." That is a large claim to make, made, be it remembered, not in the boastful hour of victory, but by a sad man looking back upon the wreckage of his ambitions and the cynical hypocrisy which had fed upon his friendship. To suchan estimate it is easy to understand that the sum of what he left behind him, even could he have seen it in the amplitude of this admirable edition, must have seemed inadequate.

And reviewing in succession these stately volumes, that supreme test of a writer's vitality, one is impressed by that very disappointment which their author has recorded. Reading, as they appeared, those brilliant, often perversely brilliant, essays of his, the stories and studies on which he lavished such fastidious workmanship, or listening to the acute observation, the assured finish of his plays, one was always most conscious of an expectation, a prevision almost, that his next work would claim, above the admiration one must lavish, the tribute of a masterpiece. And these volumes, even while they explain the fallacy of that expectation, more than confirm one's remembrance of the wonderful level of accomplishment on which almost all his work was done.

There is "Vera" indeed, a play of almost comical ineptitude, which might be described as offering not only no promise, but even a repudiation of what was to come; and there is "The Duchess of Padua", which is only better by the superiority of its models. But after these, how few lapses there are in the determination of the art or the dignity of the craftsmanship! Even those earlier fables, published with "The Happy Prince", have the sureness of touch, the glow of colour, which distinguished his work to the end. Indeed, the effect of his work suffers, when much of it is taken, by that uniformity of excellence, combined as it was, pictorially, with a somewhat limited palette; though imitation may convey a false impression, since his most frequent failing was an inability to impose a limit, to check an exuberance in idea and scene.

He was passionately sensitive to colour, he responded to every allurement of luxury, his feeling for them both, expressed repeatedly in his depiction of splendid materials and especially of gems, kept him too continuously in an expensive atmosphere. He renders it magnificently, with as sumptuous a pomp and as discriminating a refinement as did the masters whom he admired, but he renders it too often. He could only describe simplicity in terms of excess; he made even asceticism seem voluptuous; and though there was often vital truth in his point of view, his work would have frequently gained by suppressing it. It suffered in restfulness from his inability to use less than the full range of colour, and by the extreme rarity of cool pages.

Wilde is thus a surprisingly tiring author to read straight through, even though he is least fatiguing when most intellectual, and the effect is due to the pitch in tone and colour at which his work is sustained. In sheer intellectual exhibition his prose is of a clarity which often makes one wonder from what depth of thought it comes. The showman's social gift, with which personally he was so strikingly endowed, taught him how in literature to dress his shop window as though he were a mere clever retailer of other men's goods. There seemed to be no waste products in his mind, no lumber of raw material, no refuse of doubt and obstinate questioning. Even in "De Profundis", though he was seeing as he had never seen, he was seeing clearly; the mists of many a great obscurity had never dimmed his view. This clear conscious competence is Wilde's most characteristic attribute in argument. In his speech it was even more apparent than in his writing, since he set store by seeming never at a dead end, never without an explanation. It makes the reading of most of his critical work a perpetual entertainment, but it takes from it that gravity of understanding which gives the critic as artist his highest value. But it is probable that Wilde will be remembered longer as a dramatist than as critic or a poet. His poetry has, in an even fuller measure than the rest of his work, the quality of distinction, but it has likewise than the rest of it even less of spontaneity.

In drama it seemed as if he were about to break with tradition and his contemporaries, even though the first two of his plays were almost sedulously imitative, and only the last gave definite promise of emancipation. Of "Vera" nothing more need be said: one can only regret that international dishonesty in letters compels its inclusion in this edition. "The Duchess of Padua", which contains as little of Wilde's peculiar endowment, gives a hint of that sense of the theatre by which he concealed so effectively his undramatic temperament. It was to that sense that as a playwright he owed most of his success. He could not create character, though he could draw it with the most admirable definition, and even his draughtsmanship was only interested within an extremely narrow range. He had the flimsiest hold on the vitality of his puppets, but what a grip he took of their ideas! He makes us forget how completely ignorant we are of what in any crisis they would feel or do in our triumphant certainty of foretelling what they would say. As might be expected of such a gift, he is most successful where he has least to show: it is the gift of portraiture, not creation. We know his minor characters because he knew them; we are in doubt about the major because he made them—or, perhaps one should say, made them up. It was a very limited world, theatrically, at any rate, which interested him, and the same figures, sometimes with trifling, sometimes—as for example the Lords Illingworth and Darlington—with significant changes, do duty more than once. It was a corrupt world too, but its weakness, even theatrically, lay in its being insincere: it is for ever tapping its breast to prove its hollowness, even the hollowness of its disillusion. The economy in character is matched by an economy of incident; there never was a successful playwright who could do without so much. Tenuity of interest could scarcely go further than in "A Woman of No Importance".

That Wilde was tiring of his own dexterity, that he was on the way to a less monotonous source of wit, his last essay in drama seemed to indicate. Yet it is "Salome", written some years earlier, and with a scarcely expectant eye on performance, which may probably prove his most enduring monument. It is not a great play; it is a play almost entirely of atmosphere, but of an atmosphere most wonderfully contrived and sustained, which is not even imperilled by the conception of Herod as a comic character. It escapes by its period Wilde's unsavoury appreciation of his own century, and by its language his fatiguing pursuit of epigram. It is not in the French of a Frenchman, but it is a mobile, lucid and theatrically effective tongue. It reads well, and it plays, as may be seen in almost any European country but its author's, with a suggestively Eastern impressiveness which is not, however, of the East. It holds one other suggestion—a significant one—for the critic who remembers how shortly it was written after the appearance of "Les Aveugles" and "La Princesse Maleine". The recipe which Maeterlinck supplied for the production of atmosphere is used with an audacious fraternal indifference to the indication of its source. Such suggestions, used as a rule with the same indifference, one meets frequently throughout these volumes. Gautier, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Tolstoi, Verlaine were all laid under contribution.

Wilde was a discriminating and retentive reader; he cared only for the best, not even for all of that; and to what he most admired he paid the compliment of imitation. How close and quick and friendly that imitation was may perhaps be best seen in his poems, by a comparison for example of the first two stanzas of "Charmides", that rich and vivid piece of work, with the last two of "The Scholar Gipsy". It might be shown that Wilde often improves, technically, on his teachers, since for technique he had always the tenderest feeling, but one misses even in the improvement the freshness of that eternal morning of the imagination in which such things must be conceived. One misses, too, consequent on the limitations of his likings and in spite of his range of subjects, a real intimacy of acquaintance with the springs of life, a deficiency which he unaware reveals in his last pathetic volume, when through the surface of things on which he had been unprofitably feeding the verities he had forgotten were thrust into his face.