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A STUD Y OF 
 OSCAR WILDE 
 
 By 
 Walter Winston Kenilworth 
 
 AUTHOR OF "psychic CONTROL THROUGH SELF-KNOWLESGHE, 
 
 "thoughts on THINGS PSYCHIC," " THE LIFE 
 
 OF THE SOUL," ETC., ETC 
 
 4. 
 
 R. F. FENNO & COMPANY 
 
 18 EAST 17th STREET :: NEW YORK 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1912 BY 
 
 R. F. FENNO & COMPANY 
 
 A Study oj Oscar Wilde'' 
 
 £CI.A319567 
 
a @tuD? of meat mim 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Foreword , 9 
 
 Impressions 15 
 
 Reflections .j 29 
 
 Revelations 43 
 
 Intentions 59 
 
 Aspirations 73 
 
 Realizations e-. 89 
 
 Illuminations ....[. , 103 
 
 Conclusions • 5 121 
 
 Afterword ,,■ , 137 
 
FOREWOED 
 
 The Angel of Death has already come 
 and gone for the personality of Oscar 
 Wilde some years since, but it has not, nor 
 can it touch the immortality of his 
 thought or of his soul. These are eternal, 
 joyous off-shootings of the Soul of God. 
 Earthly judgment may praise or censure 
 the man of whom this is written, but it 
 cannot interfere with the judgment of 
 Him who wots of poets' ways even, verily, 
 as His Very Own. And in the fulfill- 
 ment of things it has come to pass that 
 the present generation sanctions the 
 greatness and the wisdom of Oscar 
 Wilde, whom his own generation failed 
 to understand. Now he is seen to have 
 been the philosopher throughout, under 
 the happy disguise of the dramatist, the 
 artist and the satirist. And underlying 
 all his literature there is now recognized 
 
 9 
 
FOEEWORD 
 
 to have been the personal greatness and 
 the personal sincerity of the man. His 
 life proves the text, "A prophet is not a 
 prophet in his own land/' and Oscar 
 Wilde felt himself more at oneness with 
 his nature, it may be said, in the romantic 
 atmosphere of France than in the conven- 
 tion-ridden society of England at which 
 he directed the analytical powxr and the 
 wit of his dramatic faculties. 
 
 That he has enriched the English lan- 
 guage goes without saying. That the 
 English-speaking peoples are indebted to 
 him for this goes, likewise, without say- 
 ing. In the light of a newer criticism 
 Oscar Wilde will be seen to have also been 
 the prophet of the modern social gospel. 
 And in the "De Profundis'^ and in "The 
 Soul of Man Under Socialism'' we have 
 not only the moulder of fine sentences, 
 but the heart and very soul of a man. 
 Some have spoken of Oscar Wilde, saying 
 that he was ever the man of attitudes and, 
 
 10 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 tliat lie posed. Verily lie was that, but 
 each attitude was a poem, a perfect work 
 of idealism and each pose a masterpiece 
 of human life, and each attitude and each 
 pose was of the genuineness and of the 
 greatness of life. And all his attitudes 
 and all his poses spoke more widely and 
 more beautifully of the souFs existence 
 and of the existence of an ideal world and 
 of ideal things than do all the noisy and 
 clap-trap formalities of life as it is com- 
 monly lived. And they spoke also and 
 more deeply of real human sincerity and 
 of true human idealism. 
 
 In the realms of art, where life is most 
 real, Oscar Wilde has rendered imperish- 
 able service to his age in having assisted 
 it to reconstruct its theories regarding 
 the meaning and functions of art. He 
 read life through the beauty and reality 
 of art. Art was even the medium through 
 which he observed the philosophical 
 world. The problems of philosophy he 
 
 11 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 accepted and interpreted as problems of 
 art, and therefore solved them the easier. 
 In poetry Oscar Wilde gave birth to a 
 new style and, above all, to a new spirit 
 and to a new method of treatment. 
 
 But this work is to serve rather as an 
 understanding of the man through a con- 
 sideration of his literature. It purposes 
 a revelation of the man, and it purposes 
 to show that surmounting all the great- 
 ness of any outward expression was the 
 greatness and the genius of the man him- 
 self. It is the man who concerns us ; let 
 this be in the nature of an understanding! 
 
 The Author. 
 
 12 
 
Smptessifonsf 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 "A man should be judged, not by his caste or creed, 
 The meat he eats, the vintage that he drinks; 
 Not by the way he fights or loves or sins 
 But by the quality of thoughts he thinks." 
 
 Like a great flame bound by tbe dark- 
 ness its own intensity cannot illumine, 
 was the soul of Oscar Wilde in tbe atmos- 
 phere of his own age. A soul that stood 
 alone, dwelling within its own genius, 
 living upon its own glory — that, indeed, 
 he was. In what a great darkness did he 
 go down into death ! And how true, with 
 regard even unto himself, is that terrible 
 summary he made of the complex person- 
 ality : 
 
 "For he who lives more lives than one 
 More deaths than one must die." 
 
 How strikingly was this applicable of 
 his very own nature ! What lives he led ; 
 they were a hundred or more rolled into 
 one burning flame of personality. Each 
 
 15 
 
IMPKESSIONS 
 
 episode of liis varied career was, in itself, 
 a life. For within him was such sensi- 
 tiveness of soul and delicacy of response 
 of soul that what is a day's experience to 
 the soul of average vision was to him in- 
 communicable worlds of pain or joy. The 
 poet's nature is the nature of a thousand 
 souls in one, — and Oscar Wilde was a 
 poet among them. To him the ordinary 
 sunset was worlds of flame, and the shin- 
 ing of the moon on any common night 
 was, to him, the door-way to great heav- 
 ens in the spiritual repose. 
 
 Who shall gauge the depths of any sin- 
 gle soul! Who shall say of it, "in this 
 motive there was genius, or in this in- 
 tention there was the light of the seven 
 deaths of sin." There is no judge of these 
 things but Divinity; and shall any man 
 proclaim himself such a judge! Who 
 aspires to divinity, verily let him judge! 
 Shall any man say unto another, "'Yea, 
 verily, this didst thou mean; unto this 
 
 16 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 pass liast tliou come in thy thought !" If 
 so, indeed, let the anathema be upon him, 
 — unless he be God ! Who is his brother's 
 keeper in these centuries 'of sin, when 
 every man stands guilty because of the 
 Time's own poverty of soul! 
 
 The rascal and the hypocrite went with 
 the publican into the temple and they 
 said, "Behold, O assemblies of men, who 
 are greater than we! See ye not that 
 we are saints!" And with folded hands 
 they accepted the tithes that the fools of 
 men offered them. But there came into 
 the temple and unto these same assem- 
 blies of men one who carried the fires of 
 the Most High in his hand, and in whose 
 eyes shone worlds of spiritual flame and 
 upon whose brow were written, in tem- 
 pestuous light the words, "Behold, I am 
 the spokesman of the creation of God!" 
 But these assemblies of men who live on 
 small thoughts and petty standards of 
 things cried out : "Get thee gone !" 5Snd 
 
 17 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 therewith they took up the sacred vessels 
 of the temple and the furniture thereof 
 and they cast them upon the spokesman 
 of God and he fell in that place, and the 
 world cried out joyously, "Behold, he is 
 dead!'' 
 
 Indeed, he of whom this is written was 
 a spokesman of God, for is not every poet 
 the spokesman of God! And what shall 
 we say of great poets! Shall they he 
 judged by those standards that men set 
 up — and yet, though having set them up 
 in the public highways of their thought, 
 nevertheless defile them for the man who 
 can '^afford/^ and thus escape. O terrible, 
 diabolically terrible are the standards of 
 our times! Who are the judges of men? 
 Aye, they who seem pious, but within 
 themselves are cess-pools of iniquity. 
 They wear the garments of great piety, 
 but their souls are leperous. Aye, damn 
 the smallness of men ! O for that Super- 
 Man of whom great Friederich Nietschze 
 
 18 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 dreamed ! But then these pious men and 
 these same assemblies of man-fools pro- 
 claimed this arch-apostle of the New Age 
 a fool ! Shall the soul have any chance in 
 the kingdom of the judges of men! 
 
 Behold a great wave of light came upon 
 the world, and so great was the light that 
 men perceived it as darkness, but what 
 cares the light for the blindness of the 
 eyes of men ! Every poet is a member of 
 that body of greater things for whicK 
 Christ sacrificed himself upon the cross 
 and for which Shelley wrote his songs. 
 The Christs alone have compassion and 
 they of their making, — the poets, the ar- 
 tists, the musicians, — and this because 
 their vision is of things beyond the com- 
 mon understanding. What shall trades- 
 people know of the Sun ! What shall the 
 weavers of cloth know of the Weavers of 
 Dreams! Shall the poet make apologies 
 to men ! The embodiment of his person- 
 ality in the poetry he bequeathes to the 
 
 19 
 
IMPEESSIONS 
 
 world, — is that not the explanation! 
 What need for apologies! 
 
 Oscar Wilde saw deep into the eyes of 
 life, and for this reason he held with all 
 philosophers that life must be lived as 
 one finds it. And shall any man take 
 credit unto himself for the blood that is 
 in his veins because he has no tendency 
 to certain lines of life! Let the race 
 blame the race, but let no man blame an- 
 other! In the great economy of nature, 
 morality is an episode. It is the rut into 
 which all average men fall. There is still 
 a greater vision — and that is of the soul. 
 Who has seen the soul, is he not the king 
 among his fellows, is he not the man 
 among men ! Whosoever has entered into 
 his own soul, like the sun enters a mass 
 of clouds, or like a lion enters the forest, 
 or like an elephant enters the intermin- 
 able jungle — let the world beware whether 
 it stigmatizes him either "good'' or "bad." 
 For what is goodness but a common deter- 
 
 20 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 mination to leave hands off certain cus- 
 toms that are not "respectable/' What 
 is "respectable'' in London-town may not 
 be "respectable" in Baloochistan ; or what 
 was "respectable" in the world of Pericles 
 or Plato may not be "respectable" in the 
 world of trade-chasing Manchester. But 
 it is not the fault of Baloochistan, al- 
 though in our conceit we may call Baloo- 
 chistan barbaric ; nor yet is it the fault of 
 Pericles or Plato, although in our pre- 
 sumptuous pride we claim we have tran- 
 scended these kings in thought. 
 
 "Respectability" is what one's fore- 
 fathers may have done ten centuries ago, 
 or it may be what average people call 
 "virtue." But shall any man be limited 
 down to the thought of his great, great 
 ancestors, or be pent up in the narrow 
 prison-house of the opinion of the crowd ! 
 In this mess of a world, there is only one 
 thing that is "respectable" — and everyone 
 is quite agreed to this-— and that is might, 
 
 21 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 It is might that makes "respectable" the 
 outrages of the Congo, because their per- 
 petrator lives in a king's palace and wears 
 a king's livery. It is might that excuses 
 the animality of multi-millionaires and 
 excuses their heinous crimes on the plea 
 of "eccentricities." In international af- 
 fairs the word "respectability" is second- 
 cousin to a cannon-ball. In private af- 
 fairs "respectability" covers a host of 
 secret sins, because a man has money. 
 
 Who is not "the sinner?" Said a great 
 man, "A man has his evil deeds quite in 
 common with the rest of mankind, but 
 his virtues stand out separately, and it 
 is by his virtues that he should be 
 judged." And it is by the glory of the 
 light it sheds that genius should be 
 judged. And of them that are dead in 
 the line of genius and sanctity what trag- 
 edies in sin might have been enacted. But 
 the centuries have clothed their sins in 
 deep forgottenness and only the light 
 
 22 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 stands forth. But that is as it should be. 
 For shall a man gloat constantly and for- 
 ever over the sins of his fellow ! It is the 
 sinner who sees the sin — and for that mat- 
 ter the whole world is a sinner. 
 
 Slow is the recognition of the world! 
 Before it praises, it must erstwhile have 
 blamed. It has always the nature of the 
 beggar who takes without thanks. In 
 fact, in most instances, it is like a thief 
 who comes in the night and robs genius 
 of its merit and then turns accuser on 
 genius because its capacity to give has 
 been exhausted. 
 
 Genius, alone, is possessed of vision, 
 but for that reason must genius suffer. 
 The genius is always of the temperament 
 of the redeemer. He makes the world see 
 its own shams. He makes it conscious of 
 its own behavior. He makes it aware of 
 its own limitations. And because of this 
 must genius be crucified by the sons of 
 men, even as Christ was nailed to the 
 
 23 
 
IMPEESSIONS 
 
 cross. Does a new world-ghost make it- 
 self present with mankind, like Wagner, 
 it is despised because of the greatness of 
 its message. And for the "eccentricities'' 
 of genius let the race blame the race, even 
 as it becomes morally blind in the ability 
 to find sin under a cloth of gold. 
 
 There were certain wise men who had 
 taken up their abode in the compound of 
 a temple, but seeing that men pursued 
 them, they retreated into a forest, where 
 they lived upon their thoughts, like the 
 mountains stand upon their base. But 
 the foolishness of men pursued them still. 
 There were those who came unto these 
 wise men, after they had discovered their 
 hermitage. But the wise men saw them 
 not because they had plunged into eternal 
 meditation. But these foolish men caught 
 hold of the sages and spoke unto them, 
 "Evil men, why have you deserted socie- 
 ty ?'' And then these same wise men 
 turned upon their questioners like a 
 
 24: 
 
IMPKESSIONS 
 
 mountain of fire and said, "Because so- 
 ciety sees in little ways and can only see 
 conventions." 
 
 But these foolisli men could not under- 
 stand and they called a multitude of such, 
 like unto themselves, and they cast the 
 wise men into a foul dungeon where they 
 perished, — but with them, likewise, per- 
 ished their wisdom, so far as this foolish 
 world goes. 
 
 So did the foolish men -of the world 
 come unto Oscar Wilde. They said, "Be- 
 hold, thou art a sinner ! And we, who are 
 not like God, condemn the sinner and not 
 the sin." Therefore and in that hour they 
 cast him into a prison-house and mur- 
 dered his soul. 
 
 "And every hitman heart that breaks, 
 In prison-cell or yard, 
 Is as that broken box that gave 
 Its treasure to the lord, 
 And filled the unclean leper's house 
 With the scent of costliest nard." 
 
 It is gone some years now— the soul of 
 25 
 
IMPRESSIONS 
 
 Oscar Wilde, escaping from the worn-out 
 body that suffered the tortures of seven 
 hells before it sunk down into death. Now 
 the world is kinder. It has allowed his 
 books to be published. It has allowed his 
 plays to be staged. It has seen wisdom in 
 his essays and learning in his art. Above 
 all, it has seen a soul in the garment of 
 his poetry. 
 
 8Q 
 
iReflections 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 Life is, after all, an experiment. Each 
 man has his methods, and they are his 
 own, and he alone understands them. He 
 cannot communicate unto any other the 
 subtle distinctions of his personality, 
 those subtle shades of his feeling, that 
 make him act in accordance with the in- 
 stinct of certain moods. From what 
 does a poem come? Is it a sub-conscious 
 sensing of finer shades of physical or 
 spiritual reality? Does all poetry arise 
 from the depths of the soul, just as the 
 Sistine Madonna appeared to Raphael 
 before he embodied its spiritual beauty 
 and spiritual appeal and the gentle lofti- 
 ness of the Christ-child to canvas? 
 
 In the poet, nature expresses herself 
 more fully. The poet is in closer spirit- 
 ual relationship to the divine sentiency 
 which is nature. The most heightened in- 
 
 29 
 
KEFLECTIONS 
 
 spiration, the most brilliant flashes of 
 insight, the most luminous penetration 
 into the heart of things — are of the soul 
 of the poet. His tread is light. His per- 
 sonality moves on swiftly in the direction 
 of ideal vision, just as the feet of the lover 
 are quickened with speed by the thought 
 OP the hope of meeting with the beloved. 
 
 The world speaks to the poet as an 
 oracle to its priest. It speaks monstrous 
 realities to him. It initiates him into 
 the very soul of itself. It leads him 
 through ethereal forms of consciousness, 
 into the splendid portico of its inner 
 temple. Nature is God, and the poet is 
 the priest of God. He has anointed of 
 the Lord, Who is nature. Upon his soul 
 is the ineffaceable mark of priesthood; 
 and nature has placed upon his lips the 
 seals of prophecy and eloquent insight. 
 
 The same power that causes the sun to 
 set, causes the inspiration, the vision of 
 the poet. Indissolubly associated with 
 
 30 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 the very spiritual essence of life is the 
 lieart-throbbings of the poet's career. He 
 is as much a glory as the glories he in- 
 terprets. His life affords as much of 
 jvision, as he himself is possessed. In 
 his life the spectator may read Apocal- 
 yptic realities. For this reason should 
 the world reflect for a long, long period 
 of time, before it consigns any priest of 
 poetry, any priest of nature to the silence 
 and the shame and the inquities of the 
 house of shame — a prison. 
 ! It is incalculable ingratitude to put be- 
 hind the prison bars a soul that has 
 dreamed larger realities into the life of 
 man. However he may sin, the sin of 
 torturing his soul is immeasurably great- 
 er. And poor indeed, is the recompense 
 of a tardy appreciation. Shall long-de- 
 ferred praise be given, when the ears of 
 him who has admittedly deserved praise 
 have gone to ashes! 
 
 Each man pays for his own fault ; and 
 31 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 the most awful penalty is the eonscious- 
 ness of fault. How deeply did this priest 
 of poetry, of whom this is written, be- 
 come conscious of his own w^oe; and yet, 
 underlying whatever sense of woe he 
 might have felt, was the triumphant con- 
 sciousness that he was divinely a poet. 
 He felt his own greatness. When the 
 whole world accursed him, he was stag- 
 gered. Yet, in the terrible confinement of 
 those prison-months when, as he says : 
 
 "We tore the tarry rope to shreds 
 With blunt and bleeding nails ; 
 We rubbed the doors and scrubbed the floors, 
 And cleaned the shining rails 
 And rank by rank, we soaped the plank 
 And clattered with the pails." 
 
 yet, in those terrible hours we have 
 glimpses of his resoluteness of soul. We 
 find him heart-broken indeed, but never- 
 theless conscious that his life had been a 
 mission and a message. As a person, he 
 had his confessions and his regrets, but 
 as a man with a message, he had no apolo- 
 
 32 
 
KEFLECTIONS 
 
 gies, nor confessions, nor regrets. He 
 was a man of his age and lie knew what 
 brooding his own soul had experienced, 
 so that man might have the glory of a 
 new vision from the very depth of his 
 thought. 
 
 Some, whose spiritual sight is blind, 
 have spoken of his personal testimony in 
 "De Profundis'^ as insincere. They dared 
 say, that even when in the despair of his 
 prison experience, "he was posing." Can a 
 man pose when in physical pain? Can he 
 smile when he is tortured? It may be; 
 but then he is like one of the Christian 
 martyrs, — who sees the glory of God 
 awaiting him and the gate-ways of Para- 
 dise open to receive him. Can a man be 
 glad in the house of shame, which is the 
 prison; can he be merry when his soul is 
 tortured? Can he be "artistic'^ when he 
 is mad with pain? Can he "pose" when 
 the whole world is watching his agony, 
 when he finds himself deserted by every 
 
 33 
 
EEFLECTIONS 
 
 man — standing entirely alone and in 
 shame? 
 
 Dastard is such an accustation of in- 
 sincerity against the soul of Oscar Wilde. 
 Unspeakably mean is such an analysis 
 of the soul of any man, but of the soul of 
 a sensitive poet, whose whole thought is 
 attuned to worlds of pain to which the 
 common man is a stranger no words can 
 describe the meanness from which such 
 calumny proceeds. Or else if it is not 
 meanness, it is most assuredly, to say the 
 least, criminal thoughtlessness. To turn 
 a happy phrase, to make a clever remark, 
 to be regarded as a "remarkable" ana- 
 lyzer of the soul of a poet need one go to 
 such criminal lengths? 
 
 Those who knew of Oscar Wilde in his 
 last days— and they were few indeed — 
 know how spiritual his nature had be- 
 come. His whole personality had be- 
 come transfigured. Out of the hell of his 
 misfortune he emerged, — dead and for- 
 
 34 
 
EEFLECTIONS 
 
 gotten to tlie world, but lie lived in God, 
 having for his earthly companions only 
 his own soul and his own thought. For 
 him it was Vita Nuova, the New Life. 
 He had left behind him all the traffic and 
 the accusation of the world, ill the calum- 
 ny, all the stupid commiseration, as well, 
 and stood on the foundation-ground of 
 his own soul. His poem "Vita Nuova'^ 
 is the key to worlds of understanding, so 
 applicable is it to his own cause : 
 
 "I stood by the unvlntageable sea 
 Till the wet waves drenched face and hair with 
 
 spray, 
 The long red fires of the dying day 
 Burned in the west; the wind piped drearily; 
 And to the land the clamorous gulls did flee : 
 *Alas !' I cried, *my life is full of pain, 
 And who can garner fruit or golden grain, 
 From these waste fields which travail ceaselessly!' 
 My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw 
 Nathless I threw them as my final cast 
 Into the sea, and waited for the end. 
 When lo ! a sudden glory ! and I saw 
 From the black waters of my tortured past 
 The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!" 
 
 Here is the self-revealed soul of Oscar 
 Wilde, weary with the pain of the world, 
 
 35 
 
EEFLECTIONS 
 
 disconsolate, grieved and in despair, — 
 and yet, witlial, a surprisingly joyous 
 consciousness that his life was not a fail- 
 ure, that he had fulfilled a task, that he 
 had carried out a mission, that he had 
 given of that of which he was possessed, 
 that he was "right'' with himself and with 
 God. 
 
 It became quite true of him at the end 
 — that he had come to know happiness 
 within himself. He once remarked, "Al 
 man who is master of himself can end a 
 sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleas- 
 ure." This was true of him. Sorrow had 
 made him ten times a thousand times 
 over the master of himself. Pain makes 
 everyone the master of himself, and the 
 pain that was so mercilessly heaped upon 
 Oscar Wilde made him conscious of many 
 spiritual facts. He became deep. For- 
 merly he had thought lightly of religion, 
 but in the end, when he stood alone, it 
 was with God that he sought peace. In 
 
 36 
 
KEFLECTIONS 
 
 the end, when the world had left him, 
 God alone was with him. In the end he 
 had overcome both the pleasure and the 
 pain of life. His last illness brought 
 agonies of suffering, but he had learned 
 the uses of pain. He had become deep; 
 and a strange sweetness of disposition, a 
 strange reconciliation with sorrow made 
 life possible for him. 
 
 In the end he was more the philosopher 
 than the artist. The joyous energy that 
 characterizes all his earlier writings, the 
 evident sense of pleasure and power that 
 mark his dramas, with their telling anal- 
 ysis of human nature, — all these left him 
 in the hour of pain, and he became the 
 student of the Real. The artist was trans- 
 figured into the philosopher. And after 
 all, perhaps the whole task of his bitter 
 experience was to teach himself that he 
 was more the philosopher than the artist, 
 although he himself disclaimed that he 
 was the serious observer that philoso- 
 
 37 
 
EEFLECTIONS 
 
 pliers are. It made liim realize that in- 
 sight is deeper than art, that the intensi- 
 fied artistic consciousness and vision were 
 far superior to any artistic expression. 
 
 His prison experience had taught him 
 many things, among other things that, 
 "Prison regulations may enforce *plain 
 living,' but cannot prevent ^high think- 
 ing,' nor in any way limit or contract the 
 freedom of a man's soul." This is the tri- 
 umph of the soul of Oscar Wilde couched 
 in as many words. The sorrow, the shame, 
 the deprivations, the hardships of prison 
 could not stifle his soul; they could not 
 kill in him the soaring of thought or the 
 vision of great ideals. He was hurt, 
 grievously hurt. The soul of him saw the 
 depths of pain; and yet his vision was 
 the steadier and the surer and the deeper 
 because of it. 
 
 "Pain is the Lord of this world, nor is 
 there any one who escapes from its net," 
 he said, and he spoke truthfully. But 
 
 38 
 
REFLECTIONS 
 
 tlie fires of pain, the fires of human agony 
 make the greatness of man. It made the 
 greatness of Oscar Wilde, and, withal, 
 a greatness far beyond that of his poetry, 
 far beyond that of his prose, far beyond 
 that of his art, — the greatness of the man 
 
 HIMSELF. 
 
 -39 
 
Keiielations 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 If Oscar Wilde liad a message, — ^tlien, 
 indeed, his very life is a revelation. He 
 walked as a god through the common- 
 placeness of our age. He scrutinized so- 
 ciety and the culture of the times as a 
 connoisseur. To him life was not com- 
 plex. It was simple, and he understood 
 it as an old man understands a child; it 
 was a childish affair to him. But behind 
 all his criticism and all his witticism was 
 an element of spiritual understanding 
 and a genuine, great compassion. His 
 views on the doctrines of socialism came 
 as the result of his study of the stifling 
 conditions to self-consciousness and self- 
 expression with which the poor are bur- 
 dened. Behind his gay expression was 
 the whole vision of this "world of pain.'' 
 In fact he declared himself to be the 
 prophet of pain. What more eloquent 
 
 43 
 
EEVELATIONS 
 
 testimony is there to the innate worthi- 
 ness of him than his «own statement, "I 
 shall be an enigma to the world of 
 Pleasure, but a mouthpiece for the world 
 of Pain." 
 
 How touching in its deep consciousness 
 of human life is that fine saying of his 
 which shows to us the tragedies of the 
 poor, "The real tragedy of the poor is 
 that they can afford nothing but self- 
 denial." Beneath the garment of his 
 penetrating witticisms are enormous so- 
 cial and spiritual realities, proving the 
 man to have been possessed of keen spir- 
 itual vision and of an illuminated under- 
 standing of the problems of human so- 
 ciety. And, best of all, as the foundation- 
 ground of all his delightful literature is 
 a heart-throbbing with the world's suf- 
 fering. 
 
 He was the teacher of great moral 
 truths under the covering of a seeming- 
 ly joyous indifference. He smiled at the 
 I 44 
 
KEVELATIONS 
 
 world's woe and the world's mistakes, 
 but in the background — though, it may 
 be, even he himself was not always 
 fully conscious of it — was his oneness 
 with pain and woe in all forms. It 
 was pain for him to find himself iso- 
 lated in his realization; it was pain 
 for him to find none conscious of the 
 same great realities in art of which he 
 was so magnificently conscious. It was 
 pain for him to find himself misunder- 
 stood at all angles of his message. And 
 he suffered pain because of the very big- 
 ness of his ideas for which he stood. The 
 most advanced social outlook was his; 
 and for this he walked through worlds 
 of pain, if only because to represent the 
 highest thought inevitably means to be 
 misunderstood and decried. It was only 
 that grand indifference to all things 
 which supported him in the hours of his 
 intellectual solitude. He stood in a class 
 by himself, and his greatest friend was 
 
 45 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 that ^^exquisiteness" within his own 
 nature which responded to the full stim- 
 ulus of the greatness of his 'Own person- 
 ality. 
 
 Oscar Wilde, if anything, was real, and 
 because he was so intensely real, was he 
 misunderstood. To be great is to stand 
 alone ; to have a glorious vision is to stand 
 alone and, as he himself said, "To be 
 great is to be misunderstood." Great- 
 ness inevitably brings misunderstanding, 
 for those who misunderstand greatness 
 are always in the majority. He never 
 sought the approval of the many. At one 
 time he remarked, "If my work pleases 
 the few I am gratified. If it does not, it 
 causes me no pain. As for the mob, I 
 have no desire to be a popular novelist. 
 It is far too easy.'' There is the fineness 
 of the man, the grandeur of the conscious- 
 ness that he is alone, and that if only the 
 few understand and accept him, well and 
 good. His consciousness was as perfect 
 
 46 
 
EEVELATIONS 
 
 as a perfect work of art ; and lie knew of 
 himself, just as few appreciate that which 
 is perfect would few come to know him. 
 And in this his self-pride was justified. 
 ^^Conceit is the privilege of the creative," 
 he writes. 
 
 Oscar Wilde uncovered the shame and 
 the sham of the ^^unselfishness" of which 
 the age prides itself. He saw human 
 nature as it is, or as it would be, and in 
 both cases he saw it as bad. But he took 
 human nature, so far as he himself was 
 concerned, and made spiritual realities of 
 its very limitations. He was selfish be- 
 cause he realized, as all men realize, 
 though all men are silent about it, that 
 the world is selfish. But he dignified, it 
 may be said, spiritualized the meaning. 
 He put it — that to live for one's self is to 
 live for others as well, and that if one can 
 be true to his own personal vision and 
 intensify his own personal insight he 
 helps others thereby in a more real and a 
 
 47 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 more earnest sense tlian if he were the 
 greatest philanthropist. 
 
 And for the matter of that he regarded 
 all philanthropy as so much meddling 
 with the affairs of others, and charity as 
 the instigator of numerous sins. He saw 
 in so-called unselfishness the enforced 
 necessity most men feel of doing the least 
 that one can and heralding to the skies 
 what little they have done, as if it were 
 whole-souled renunciation. 
 
 "Selfishness is not living as one wishes 
 to live ; it is asking 'Others to let one live as 
 one wishes to live. And unselfishness is 
 letting other people's lives alone, not inter- 
 fering with them.'' Here is the philo- 
 sophy of freedom embodied. He believed 
 that all lives should grow, just as flowers 
 ^ow, and that each life should take on 
 its own expression. With one other great 
 soul he held, "Hands off ; if you can help, 
 well and good; if you cannot help, be- 
 ware of interfering !" That was the sum 
 
 48 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 and substance of the selfishness of which 
 he has been accused. Why should one 
 live for others? Let one first learn how 
 to live for himself, and if one learns how 
 to live for himself, if he has learned how 
 to realize his own ideals and to stand 
 firmly on the individual basis of thought 
 and experience — the whole environment 
 in which he moves is made better, thous- 
 ands of times by it. 
 
 He held all life to be sacred. He re- 
 garded it with the veneration one ap- 
 proaches a great and solemn sacrament. 
 He denied that life could be placed into 
 the narrow enclosures of speculative 
 opinions or even of accepted moral stan- 
 dards. He realized, as do all philoso- 
 phers, that morality is a shifting quantity 
 and according to different times do differ- 
 ent standards arise. He saw that the 
 vices of the few are the price society pays 
 for the virtues of the many. He saw, 
 also, that there were elements in human 
 
 49 
 
EEVELATIONS 
 
 nature, if not for the actual admiration 
 of vice, then at least for the make-up of 
 that great body of experience which is 
 the history of human society as personi- 
 fied in the tragic characters of the opera 
 and the drama. In other words, he saw 
 the artistic, and the human and historic 
 realities of vice. The only fault that the 
 world finds with its own badness is, after 
 all, not the badness of badness, but the 
 weakness of badness, for vices committed 
 on a great scale are approved of by so- 
 ciety. He who stains his hands with the 
 blood of one single life is a murderer ; he 
 who slaughters millions, either by the 
 sword, or by the more foul means of 
 financial power, is the hero. 
 
 Oscar Wilde knew that the- world is 
 bad, very bad as it goes ; so he tore off the 
 mask and, admitting that there were bad 
 elements in human nature, made these 
 very things the corner-stone of a higher 
 order of life and a still greater standard 
 
 50 
 
EEVELATIONS 
 
 of art for society with its future. Ee- 
 ligion to him, became the natural living 
 of life ; and in this sense he went even so 
 far as to place the self-expression of the 
 poet Shelley on the same level of spiritu- 
 ality as he spoke of Father Damien, who 
 went out from home and comfort to the 
 abiding-place of the leperous outcasts. 
 It was the vulgarity in badness that Oscar 
 Wilde denounced; and of vulgarity and 
 of death he mentions that they are the 
 only inexplicable facts. 
 
 Gifted with that insight into the social 
 structure, he mercilessly assailed every 
 institution and every personality he 
 found on the side of that ponderous hy- 
 pocrisy which goes by the name of social 
 progress. For this reason he made ene- 
 mies, many enemies, and enemies who 
 hated him with the hatred which pursued 
 him until the end — the hatred that put 
 him into the prison-house and hounded 
 him even after his spirit had been broken, 
 
 51 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 The world has no time for those who 
 upset its sense of hypocritical righteous- 
 ness and complacent ease. It hounds 
 them out and gives them no peace. 
 
 Oscar Wilde was the prophet of the 
 World of Becoming ; and one never knows 
 with regard to the future what new moods 
 of social consciousness and conscience 
 may arise. His belief was that life 
 should be seen as the stream of fluctuat- 
 ing experience and that no portion of the 
 stream could be permanent or absolutely 
 true, that does not flow with the swift- 
 ness of the current towards the ocean of 
 future progress. No form of culture was 
 true, to him, except in so far as it bore 
 the stamp of the constant renewal of its 
 possibilities. To him life was long and 
 art was fleeting, and the more real wei 
 could make our visuali2;ation of the ideals 
 in art, and the more concrete we could 
 make our artistic images and artistic op- 
 portunities, the more would we shorten 
 
 52 
 
REVELATIONS 
 
 the monotony of life, the more would we 
 rid ourselves of the mortality of life and 
 enter the ranks and the files of the Im- 
 mortals. To him truth was never sta- 
 tionary. It was eternal, and it was true, 
 because it constantly assumes newer and 
 more revealing relations. Truth is made 
 up of the progress of luminous ideas, and 
 the more luminous the ideas become, the 
 more luminous do the personalities be- 
 come who understand them. The spir- 
 itual outlook he possessed was the facing 
 of reality, the tearing off of all masks, of 
 all appearances from society and from 
 thought and the entering into the domain 
 of real things even at the cost of a thor- 
 •ough self-confession, on the part of so- 
 ciety, of its own weaknesses. 
 
 The clever writer was the deep philoso- 
 pher. The brilliant epigrammatist had 
 within him the serious philosopher, the 
 enlightened sage. And the conscious man, 
 Oscar Wilde, was the compounding, into 
 
 53 
 
EEVELATIONS 
 
 one single eloquent utterance, of tlie sub- 
 conscious voices of numerous personal- 
 ities that slept in the depths of the thought 
 within him. He was not only the exquisite 
 moulder of exquisite sentences, but the 
 observer of all other observers. He was 
 the philosopher-poet, the poet-philoso- 
 pher. He was the destroyer of those 
 beautiful illusions society entertains, 
 which makes virtues of its vices and 
 truths of the most glaring falsenesses. 
 He showed the hollowness of the appar- 
 ently sound basis of the culture of our 
 times. He turned over the conventional 
 notion of what is ethical and of what is 
 proper ; and he was the "Arbiter Eleganti- 
 arum" in the domain of modern sociology 
 and of the culture that is-to-be. 
 
 The shams of religion, the shams of 
 politics, the shams of society and the 
 shams of morality, — all these Oscar Wilde 
 laid bare. He made a confession to so- 
 ciety of its own faults, and he laughed 
 
 54 
 
EEVELATIONS 
 
 at all its sins. He excused them as a god 
 might excuse them and he endeavoured to 
 show the ways of repentance in the fol- 
 lowing of a newer, more enlightened, more 
 truly human outlook where the vision is 
 fixed upon the realities in the World of 
 Constant Becoming. 
 
 But the sinner is wary of the confes- 
 sional ; and for this reason did the world 
 have little use for its father-confessor in 
 Oscar Wilde. 
 
 55 
 
Mttntiom 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 If one makes a thorough study of the 
 life of Oscar .Wilde, he is inevitably 
 brought face to face with the realistic 
 features of the whole life of the man. 
 He is brought face to face with the in- 
 tentions of Oscar Wilde. Whatever may 
 have been the final outcome of the career 
 of Oscar Wilde in so far as externals go 
 and in so far as the world approved or 
 disapproved, there is no doubt that within 
 the sphere of his own personal under* 
 standing of the values of life, his inten- 
 tions were real. That is, he was sincere. 
 Early in life he had come across the 
 knowledge of the message that lies behind 
 all art ; early in life he had come to realize 
 the urgent spirit of progress as the back- 
 ground of the expression any age gives 
 of itself in art. Therefore, from the ear- 
 liest beginning of his literary life he set 
 
 59 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 himself to that task of beeoming aware 
 of the essential elements of art, — which, 
 after all, are of the realities of life itself. 
 So when he speaks of himself as render- 
 ing the terms and the consciousness of 
 philosophy into the domain of art, one 
 finds that he is not splendidly insincere, 
 not anxious to be known as the clever and 
 unreal paradoxist, but eager to make art 
 the medium for the experience of life, to 
 make art the expression of life. Through 
 this form he succeeded, where most others 
 have failed, in putting realism into art, 
 of heightening the realities of art, of mak- 
 ing art more human, more real, more of 
 a messenger of the concrete, more of a 
 power in interpreting life as it is. 
 
 This was fundamentally the intention of 
 Oscar Wilde — to take art from its rather 
 metaphysical ground into the sound- 
 er realities, where its foundation would 
 be life. Imagination was to be subordi- 
 nated to the marvelous realism that 
 
 60 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 already exists. For these reasons his very 
 life was a revelation in art; it was the 
 expression of a free-living, free- thinking 
 S'onl whose personality was the outcome 
 of a rich soul, even as the glorious rose- 
 blosson is of the great richness of the soil. 
 He saw dreams not outside, but within 
 life. He saw the ideal with the real. Be- 
 fore him the real and ideal were separate ; 
 in the contents of his literary message 
 they were revealed as one. Life itself is 
 the standing-ground of the real and the 
 ideal. Life itself is the treasure-house of 
 all reality and of all beauty and, verily, 
 even of all divinity. Scrutinizing the 
 pages of his works one is constantly re- 
 minded of the richness and glory of life. 
 Even religion, for him, was in the natural 
 living of life, in the spontaneity of soul in 
 its response to the stimulus of the outside 
 world. The visible universe was, in his 
 mind, a temple, and each soul a priest 
 in waiting upon the JJniversal Soul, 
 
 61 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 the One Real. Therefore, art must not 
 deny life; it must simply reveal it. 
 And in the revelation, naturally, there 
 is frequently to be found a setting-at- 
 nought of our easy, time-made and small- 
 opinioned standards of ethics and seem- 
 ing propriety. Civilization is, in itself, 
 a movement from simplicity to com- 
 plexity, or, in other words a speeding 
 of the human soul from virtue to vice. 
 A moment arrives in the ensemble of the 
 ideals of culture when the climax has been 
 reached. And then the nations cry out, 
 ^^Alack the day! Have we come in our 
 search for truth, in our far-striding on 
 the paths of progress — to THIS !'' Such 
 is the complaint of the age ! And that is 
 why every poet is a messenger of the Re- 
 turn to Simplicity, which is the Mother- 
 hood of Virtue. That is why poets are the 
 prophets of the times, and why their mes- 
 sage is always spiritual. It is the seeing 
 of the ideal in the real, — and this is, or it 
 
 .62 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 should be, the message of art, the function 
 of all artistic intention; — and it was 
 this that fundamentally underlayed the 
 purposes of the life of Oscar Wilde. 
 
 Outside the ways of civilization is the 
 great freedom of life. Civilization is a 
 limitation w^hich the ignorance of society 
 places upon the naturalness of life. Oscar 
 Wilde having seen deeply into the appear- 
 ance of society, saw that behind the dis- 
 cipline-of-fear, which makes society, was 
 all the longing of the spirit of man ; and 
 progress is the bursting of limitations. 
 And ignorance dislikes moving — ^that is 
 why progress inevitably brings pain, and 
 why the luminous personalities who in- 
 augurate progress are always sacrificed 
 to the ignorance of man, being crucified 
 as was Jesus Christ of old. Oscar Wilde, 
 after having read the meaning of the dif- 
 ferent historic experiences, felt that in 
 the society of the Greeks, in the height of 
 their social prosperity, were realized the 
 
 63 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 ideal visions of life that was there lived 
 to its fullest, where it was flexible to the 
 stimulus of the natural desires of man; 
 and the desires of man, when natural, 
 are always artistic. He sensed the spirit 
 of his own epoch as born of the smallness 
 of men who barter; he saw his period as 
 that of trade and of the extension of em- 
 pire, — not through the romance of sacri- 
 fice and the heightened imagination of 
 nations, but through the pain of the poor 
 and the oppressed and the merciless 
 power of moneyed associations, when it is 
 all sordid and cruel without a morsel of 
 romance. The life of Oscar Wilde, and 
 his art as well, will testify to the romance 
 of things. It is the note of a rich sim- 
 plicity, the sound of an old ideal world 
 in the loud noise and strife of the present 
 age. It is the clarion-call to a newer 
 order founded upon venerably-old spir- 
 itual ideals. After all, life is an experi- 
 ment, as said in a previous chapter, and 
 
 64 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 every soul is making an effort at tlie in- 
 terpretation wliich, in ratio to the cliar- 
 acter of its desires, it deems the highest. 
 In this light, even mistakes balance to 
 the credit side. Even mistakes are the 
 landmarks of progressive movement. 
 Even mistakes are the signs and prophe- 
 cies of higher things. And the relation of 
 art to ethics is the taking-into-one-beauti- 
 ful-whole of the mistakes and the virtues. 
 Vice is never offensive under the gold 
 covering of art. Theology, not art, has 
 made vice. Vice dwells in vulgarity. Vul- 
 garity is vice. Apart from vulgarity, all 
 life is beautiful, is real, is good, is of the 
 soul. This was the message of Oscar 
 Wilde, and of this was the character of 
 his intention as wrought into his message. 
 When Oscar Wilde speaks of art it is 
 no limited sense. It is an all-embracive 
 definition that he gives. Art is the visual- 
 ization of the perfect things in life ; it re- 
 veals the perfection of life, and the reve- 
 
 65 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 lation may be in literature or in philoso- 
 phy, in music or in marble, on canvas or 
 in stone. Its meaning may be read in the 
 architecture of a cathedral or in a poem ; 
 it may be glimpsed in song or in eloquence 
 of any form. In this inclusive sense art 
 is philosophy or the concrete reflection of 
 man upon life; it is the vision of man as 
 to the glories and the powers of life, 
 whether it be the glories and the powers 
 of pain or of pleasure, or of so-called evil 
 or of so-called good. Art is life ; it is ever 
 at oneness -with life. It is the perfect 
 commingling of the soul of man with the 
 soul of nature. And the poet is the high- 
 priest of art. What mighty messages are 
 throbbing in his heart! What messages 
 and what revelatioirs ! In him nature is 
 struggling for the incarnation of itself; 
 in him nature seeks articulate expression 
 of itself. It has made the brain of the 
 artist for the purposes of revealing glory 
 even as it has created the oceans and the 
 
 66 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 rock-ribbed mountains. The artist is as 
 much a part of nature as are the sky and 
 the stars. Oscar Wilde perceived this as 
 one perceives any physical object and, 
 consequently, he made this perception of 
 the early years of manhood the conscious 
 intention of all his work. The intentions 
 of every poetic soul are the fashlights 
 nature throws out upon its own forms and 
 realities. Through the intentions of the 
 poet the vision of the world grows larger. 
 This is the spiritual feature of the lives 
 and of the intentions of the poet-artists 
 and of the artist-poets. Revelation! 
 Revelation ! Revelation ! Indeed, that is 
 the burden of all poets' songs. 
 
 The drift of the artistic tendencies has 
 always been into the direction of physical 
 idealism ; and it will be seen that physical 
 idealism is a mode of spiritual perception. 
 Through the glories of form the soul steps 
 into the region of the formlessness of its 
 own life, where the substance of life is 
 
 67 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 seen as freedom, and the form of life an 
 ideal form whose substance is beauty. 
 Behind everything Oscar Wilde intended 
 to see the soul. He insisted that behind 
 all expression must be the reality of the 
 flood of feeling, the truth of the soul, the 
 realization of the power of the soul. For 
 all art is the product of feeling; some- 
 times, indeed, of riotous, violent feeling; 
 sometimes, indeed, of the culminating 
 glory of feeling, — which is divinity. Art 
 is the complement of life ; it fulfills ; it is 
 the other half; without it life would be 
 purely physical. With it life is divine; 
 with it life is reality ; with it one has the 
 vision of the soul encased in the beauty 
 of form. The artist points to the soul 
 that is set as a precious, priceless jewel 
 within the setting of form. The soul, the 
 poet sees, in the subtle reality, forever 
 escaping definition, forever passing the 
 scrutiny of knowledge. That is why Oscar 
 Wilde repeatedly stated that neither life 
 
 68 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 nor art can be set down by hard and fast 
 rules. These are the free because they 
 are of the soul. And the soul is a reality 
 that cannot be bound, nor encompassed, 
 that cannot be limited nor circumscribed 
 in any way. The intentions of Oscar 
 Wilde were of the soul of him ; they em- 
 bodied the determination to set things 
 aright once more with the soul which per- 
 ceives them ; they embodied the principles 
 of true vision that are, of course, dia- 
 metrically opposed to life as he found it, 
 and as all artists must find it. For life, 
 as it is lived publicly, is in cheap ways 
 and in sordid intentions. With this in 
 mind Oscar Wilde, announcing a social 
 observation said, "There is this to be said 
 in favour of the despot, that he, being an 
 individual, may have culture, while the 
 mob, being a monster, has none." And 
 the mob is always made up of those in 
 position and in power who are the owners 
 of barbaric souls and to whom the spirit 
 
 69 
 
INTENTIONS 
 
 of ideals is a foreign goddess. With such 
 as these the materialism of the age is a 
 constant companion; and materialism is 
 always the death-blow to art. All artists 
 are the apostles of the soul ; they are the 
 preachers of the spiritual life, for they 
 have seen within the encasements of flesh 
 the divine light that shines wherever there 
 is beauty or glory, or majesty or power, 
 wherever there is truth or goodness, or 
 grandeur or greatness, — and Oscar Wilde, 
 being the poet-artist was, verily, such a 
 priest and preacher and apostle. 
 
 70 
 
a0pttatton$ 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 The findings of the poets are always 
 spiritual findings. Their vision is ex- 
 tended, above that of the ordinary, into 
 the perspective of nobler realities. Be- 
 cause of this they are always possessed 
 of glorious aspirations. Perhaps sB^- 
 times unconsciously; but it is always so. 
 The medium through which the poet ma- 
 terializes his aspiration is art. In this he 
 roams, the creature of the free impulse ; — 
 and the free impulse is always the im- 
 pulse of spirituality. For this reason, 
 unquestionably, Oscar Wilde had number- 
 less aspirations, whose ideal was the dis- 
 covery of the real and the true. He in- 
 tended that the personal vision he had of 
 the true and the real should be applic- 
 able to the society in which he found him- 
 self ; in the changes of society he saw the 
 spiritual forecast of humanity No matter 
 
 73 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 what the character of such changes might 
 be, they were changes, and for this reason, 
 they were needful and good. Monotony 
 in society necessarily implied to him, that 
 society was at a standstill so far as the 
 opportunities for progress were con- 
 cerned. He believed in revolutions, there- 
 fore, and also in rebellions. He was the 
 messenger of the Rightful Stirring Up so 
 that new eras be born out of the chaos of 
 old social forms. In his remorseless crit- 
 icism of society he was the herald of an 
 approaching social dawn, when better 
 things were to be, and a more real and na- 
 tural order of living was to transplant the 
 hypocrisies of the day. He had no time for 
 the mimicries of virtue and honour that 
 prevailed everywhere ; he was no respect- 
 er of institutions that were at bottom 
 corrupt. And he was the champion of the 
 depressed and of the downtrodden, all be- 
 cause he had aspirations. And these as- 
 pirations had nothing whatsoever to do 
 
 74 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 with himself as a personality; they had 
 everything to do with the society in which 
 he lived and in which he believed, — how- 
 ever cynical it might seem to say this. He 
 was a man of tempestuous aspirations. 
 In him one found the prophecies of the 
 future fulfillment of society's hopes. He 
 was the prophet of nobler institutions and 
 of an epoch of heightened sincerity. He 
 upheld, fundamentally, all those ingredi- 
 ents of culture, however the world might 
 laugh at them, which embodied the pos- 
 sibilities of the growing-forth and the 
 becoming-big of the spirit of romance. 
 His dramas are the denunciation of so- 
 ciety, at first glance ; on a studious survey 
 of their real characters they are found, 
 however, to be the hopes for a better or- 
 der. Genius and not birth was to deter- 
 mine aristocracy. The circle that was the 
 exclusive, by reason of its very inclusive- 
 ness, was to be the circle of the intellect- 
 ually and intuitively great. The burden 
 
 75 
 
ASPIEATIONS 
 
 of his message was, "Throw ofO all ap- 
 pearance! Let us stand in sincerity of 
 attitude before the oncoming of the future 
 generations !" 
 
 Oscar Wilde's aspirations were for the 
 poor. How his heart throbbed for the 
 poor of all ages ! The heart-rending fact, 
 he said, of the French revolution was not 
 the beheading of the queen of France, 
 but the voluntary sacrifice of the peas- 
 ants of the Vendee who, though starving, 
 went out to fight for the hideous cause of 
 feudalism. On all occasions his heart 
 suffered and struggled for the depressed 
 classes. In this he proved himself to be 
 capable and to be possessed of monu- 
 mental sincerity. He showed himself the 
 owner of multitudinous aspirations, and 
 to be a man of courage and a man of 
 strength. Coming from his lips one hears 
 that strong and exquisite saying of his, 
 "Those who reject the battle are more 
 deeply wounded than they who take part 
 
 76 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 in it." And therefore lie threw himself 
 boldly into the vortex of society; and he 
 accused and he accursed ; and he took the 
 whips of criticism and lashed heavily all 
 those that were guilty of hypocrisy and 
 tyranny. He spared none. And he him- 
 self was not spared. For he stood up be- 
 fore audiences that did not understand 
 him; and he was mocked and persecuted 
 for his vision. And still the welling-up 
 of his aspiration did not cease. He sang 
 all the more strongly. And he sang so 
 loud that even death has not engulfed his 
 song; but then he had said of all song 
 that it should be stronger than death. 
 
 Here and there one senses the spirit- 
 uality of his aspirations. How wonder- 
 ful and how spiritual is that remark of 
 his, "Art is the one thing death cannot 
 harm." This was the Faith of Oscar 
 Wilde that only that was real, that only 
 that was spiritual which went beyond the 
 conquests of death. And art he recog- 
 
 77 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 nized and spoke of on all occasions as im- 
 mortal. Because art is an inner, spiritual 
 existence ; it lias nothing whatsoever to do 
 with the concrete. The concrete may be 
 its medium, but never its own subject. 
 What is there in words or in stones save 
 that which the soul reads into them? 
 Oscar Wilde, together wdth all other 
 poets, reached beyond the borders of 
 purely physical things, and made serious 
 effort to perceive art in its own sphere, — 
 and that sphere is the sphere of eternity 
 and immutability where nothing perishes, 
 and where every single image is perfect. 
 The aspirations of Oscar Wilde were all- 
 inclusive of the modern requirements. 
 They embraced every sphere of sociology 
 and socialism, but socialism of that type 
 w^hich meant the introduction of all op- 
 portunities for artistic expression. In 
 certain portions of the literature of Oscar 
 Wilde one climbs with him the stairs of 
 gold that lead above the marts of men to 
 
 78 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 God. One ascends with him to regions 
 of pure feeling where the soul meets with 
 its own self and stands on the border- 
 lands of infinite things. 
 
 Wherever one finds Oscar Wilde it is 
 always on the safe side of progress. His 
 position concerning womanhood bears 
 this out in strong ways. He hoped for a 
 brighter future for womanhood, when it 
 should take part in the deliberations of 
 the nations and should take its seat in the 
 jurisdiction of the world. His aspiration 
 included for womanhood complete eman- 
 cipation in all forms. He was never mean. 
 Whatever he saw to be right, he an- 
 nounced that. He could not be insincere 
 with truth. He saw that conditions of so- 
 ciety, particularly in the realm of politics, 
 tended to hamper the natural and per- 
 sonal development of women; and that 
 unless they asserted themselves, all hope 
 would be lost. He regarded them not only 
 as women, but as equals and counterparts 
 
 79 
 
ASPIKATIONS 
 
 of men in the effort to enunciate the hu- 
 man realities. In fact, in the very highest 
 sense, he was the pleader of no law. In 
 that he was a spiritual communist and so- 
 cially an anarchist. He saw that laws 
 often held back the very progress they 
 were intended to accelerate ; and he knew, 
 also, that laws were as capable of grow- 
 ing infirm and old, even as the physical 
 form. Therefore he pleaded for no law, 
 except that of Common Consent in those 
 matters which demanded a combination 
 of effort for the revelation of higher 
 things and nobler ideals. 
 
 Outside the mere living of life there are 
 glories of which the poet alone is aware ; 
 and these glories are resident in another 
 and more luminous sphere, the sphere of 
 ideals in themselves. And the moment of 
 perception is as well the moment of 
 ecstasy. Thus the poet is the saint. He 
 is the seer of things as they are. Closely 
 does he touch the confines of ideal things. 
 
 80 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 He almost visualizes them. He almost 
 renders them concrete. And with that 
 splendid eloquence of his, Oscar Wilde 
 made the world possessed of many things 
 of which heretofore it had not dreamed. 
 Oscar Wilde dreamed, and the world is 
 richer for his dreaming. In that delight- 
 fully ^searching manner of his thought 
 one sees how he was naturally the mystic 
 in his treatment of the world common- 
 sense, in its plea for sole reality. He 
 looked upon the world of commonsense as 
 the world of tragedy and tears, of hollow 
 mockery and terrible laughter. Only in 
 the world of art was he free; only there 
 did he feel himself safe from the reproach 
 of them that dwell in small ways and 
 whose habitation is the very foulness they 
 condemn. He dwelt there where truth is 
 peace and where peace is illumination 
 and where illumination is proximity to 
 God. He was familiar with sights and 
 sounds of which the man of the commoa- 
 
 81 
 
ASPIPvATIONS 
 
 sense world has neither consciousness nor 
 capactity of faculty. The soul of Oscar 
 iWilde is the reality of him ; and all other 
 personal elements were as the straws that 
 are swept before the wind. For it is the 
 soul in every man that is reality ; and all 
 other and personal elements are verily as 
 straws carried on before the wind. And 
 it is the reality in a man which is desir- 
 able to see and observe. It is the aspira- 
 tion towards larger spheres of reality 
 which is worthy of witnessing. And this 
 should be what is spoken of with refer- 
 ence to every man — that wherein his soul 
 is large and divine, be it in the arts or in 
 the sciences or in religious life. The re- 
 ality in man is free from all personal 
 dross; it is the shining light of truth 
 which God sees, and in that reality God 
 verily makes Himself incarnate. The re- 
 ality in each and everyone is the reality 
 of the divine, and that is of the soul. Thus 
 it is the soul which is; thus it is thetsoul 
 
 S2 
 
ASPIRATIONS 
 
 which aspires. It was the soul which in 
 Oscar Wilde took on the championship of 
 truth wherever he saw truth and confined 
 itself to no bounds except the bounds of 
 the determination to see God. And in 
 this respect what visions were his as the 
 result of his aspirations! They were 
 numerous and enormous. 
 
 In the urgent impulse of the soul at 
 self-discovery and self-expression, we find 
 the facts and characters of aspiration. In 
 the effort of the personality of man to rise 
 to the soul's level, — in that, verily is as- 
 piration. In so far as a man rises above 
 the average conceptions of his day and 
 perceives newer ideas and newer ideals, 
 only in so far does he enter the \vorld of 
 aspiration. Aspiration was as the central 
 flame in the whole spiritual make-up of 
 the illumination of Oscar Wilde. He pos- 
 sessed, also, the innate strength without 
 which there can be no aspiration ; that is, 
 subconsciously he was aware that within 
 
 83 
 
ASPIEATIONS 
 
 himself were the powers and potential- 
 ities of making aspiration, — realization. 
 And the result of aspiration, again, de- 
 pend solely on the power of the aspirant 
 to touch higher zones of consciousness 
 and vision. The whole body of the liter- 
 ature of Oscar Wilde is that of aspira- 
 tion ; — and, also, of inspiration that comes 
 of aspiration. 
 
 And the aspiration of Oscar Wilde has 
 become realization not only to himself. 
 It bids fair to become realizations unto 
 millions. For now is the world wide 
 awake and on the alert for the revelation 
 of newer ideals. And in so far as Oscar 
 Wilde was the messenger of new things, 
 in so far has he achieved immortality in 
 the memory of men. And because he was 
 the revealer of greater ideas than have 
 been with the world before, verily for that 
 reason is he to grow higher and higher 
 in the estimation of men and to be en- 
 dowed with the powers to think and live 
 
 84 
 
ASPIKATIONS 
 
 in tlie hearts and thouglits of others who 
 €ome to understand him, and in this he 
 had already become Immortal ! And for 
 this he lived ! 
 
 85 
 
laeaU^attans 
 
EEALIZATIONS 
 
 Undoubtedly the realizations of the 
 soul of Oscar Wilde were many and 
 varied. He carried with him, as his con- 
 stant companions, those finer realities in 
 the way of feeling that are peculiarly 
 characteristic of one who has been made 
 aware of the potentialities of the spir- 
 itual impulse. He was gloriously con- 
 scious of the reality of the soul as domi- 
 nant in every form of experience. The 
 one thing that is, was to his mind, the 
 soul. So one finds him- preaching the 
 doctrines of the most ancient of the spir- 
 itual teachers, "Man, know thyself!'' In 
 fact he says, "The realization of oneself 
 is the prime aim of life, and to realize 
 oneself through pleasure is finer than to 
 do so through pain." ^he expression of 
 one's nature, the moulding into experi- 
 ence, of the potentialities within, the ma- 
 
 89 
 
EEALIZATIONS 
 
 terialization of the possibilities for per- 
 fection into self-conscious reality, — these 
 things to him were of the beginning and 
 the fulfillment of life. And the natural 
 medium for expression, he imagined, was 
 through pleasure; and it is not wonder- 
 ful that he imagined thus. For he had 
 been too long the disciple of the Prophet 
 of Pain not to know all the inner work- 
 ings of the elements of pain in the devel- 
 opments of one's nature. So he turned 
 to pleasure in the end ; not to riotous 
 pleasure, be it remembered, but to artis- 
 tic pleasure, wherein the soul basks free 
 of the stigma of "good" or "evil.'' Dwell- 
 ing within itself is the Live Fire of the 
 soul which is of the Flame of the Most 
 High. Let this fire burn as it will. In 
 the end it must always and inevitably re- 
 move the dross from the gold in experi- 
 ence. 
 
 Oscar Wilde's personality loved to bask 
 in the sunshine and in the play of life. To 
 
 90 
 
REALIZATIONS 
 
 Mm life was Greek. It was buoyant ; it 
 was full of divinity. It was spiritual; it 
 was of the gods. And immortality was 
 in art! Immortality was already, even 
 here on earth, in the adequate fulfillment 
 of the potentialities of personality. To 
 live was to rank already with the Im- 
 mortals, to be recognized as of the Olym- 
 pian Gods. And his fine saying was, 
 "Most people exist, that is all." Inher- 
 ently he had a passion for life. To him 
 it was spiritual; to him it was replete 
 with spiritual portents. It was big with 
 spiritual meaning. It was possessed of 
 spiritual powers. And the creative 
 faculty of the soul acting in response to 
 the highest stimulus of the soul's own 
 powers was in itself, utmost si)iritual. 
 "The senses, no less than the soul, have 
 their spiritual mysteries to reveal," he 
 once put it in this relation. 
 
 The body was of the soul. It was the 
 temple and the mind and the soul were 
 
 91 
 
EEALIZATIONS 
 
 Priest and High-Priest respectively. To 
 him each had its function and its sphere 
 of expression. To him, body, mind, soul 
 were the spiritual trinity of the micro- 
 cosmos; and Art was to dominate all. 
 And in Art, using that term in its highest 
 significance, were to be discovered the es- 
 sentials for the making of immortality 
 out of the elements of mortal life. The 
 god was the man; the man was the god 
 in-the-making. And the whole character 
 of the message of life he read, as written 
 in the sum and substance of the capaci- 
 ties for expression. He revered all things ; 
 he despised no single messenger in the 
 revelation of life. But all artists are of 
 this temperament. All artists have that 
 within which says, "All this, even all this 
 is good,'^ and they find fault with no 
 thing; and they find no fault with their 
 own lives and they hold that everyman 
 must live his own life. But artists and 
 poets are in the minority. But great are 
 
 92 
 
KEALIZATIONS 
 
 their ideas; nor is the sun as great as 
 they. Higher than all mortal traffic is 
 the perception of the assemblage of ideas 
 that draw out the Man in man. In this 
 the poet is the seer of potentialities and 
 powers. He is the angel whose sight has 
 been perfected. He is the man who has 
 seen Manhood that is of the type and 
 character of the Super-Man. O for the 
 revelation of the soul within the form ! O 
 for the divinity in the expression of the 
 senses! O for the seeing of God in the 
 beauty of form ! Need* one make myster- 
 ies of theology, when life itself is the 
 Greatest Mystery ! This is the version of 
 poetry in relation to life; this also, the 
 message of art in relation to life — In Life 
 Behold Religion! 
 
 Religion is in the culture of the eye 
 to the perception of spirituality in the 
 domain of physical form ; it is the training 
 of the faculty* for hearing to the attuning 
 of spiritual sound or silence, as the case 
 
 93 
 
KEALIZATIONS 
 
 may be, in this din and strife of life. It 
 is the education of the powers of motion 
 in the direction of freedom of personal 
 bearing and in freedom of thought. Even 
 so is it the education of the whole self 
 into the direction of Art. And art is 
 religion; and religion is art. And sym- 
 bolism consists in the transfiguration of 
 ideas into concrete realities that walk and 
 speak and live and act with the senses. 
 For now is religion perceived as being of 
 and with art. And art is the messenger of 
 spiritual facts amid their physical encase- 
 ments ! Who shall deny this ! And herein 
 is religion safe and secure against all the 
 pulverizing of science. Here is religion 
 inviolable, for herein it has come down 
 from the heights of mystery, where it is 
 dull and undefined, into the sunshine of 
 living surroundings where it speaks unto 
 all men the same concrete message, the 
 same tokens of reality, "Man! Behold 
 all the possibilities of Self within the 
 
 94 
 
EEALIZATIONS 
 
 powers of the Self at Self-analysis !'' For 
 what, after all, is art but the self-revela- 
 tion of man into the substances and ma- 
 terials of art? Is there any distinction, 
 therefore, between art and philosophy; 
 and is not the artist the philosopher as 
 well? 
 
 How wonderful was his delicate treat- 
 ment of the religions as he found them! 
 He saw in them great artistic opportuni- 
 ties ; and even in their superstitions did he 
 observe foreshadowings in the way of ro- 
 mance and beauty. They were "the colour 
 elements of thought and imagination.^' 
 Keligion offered all the necessary condi- 
 tions for Indefinite spiritual expansion, — 
 even unto that, where a man might em- 
 brace and become larger, even than the 
 sun and the moon, and all the hosts of 
 heaven. And for these reasons, was every 
 religion, to him, a form of actual redemp- 
 tion. But for this reason, also and inevi- 
 tably, was the founder of every religion 
 
 95 
 
EEALIZATIONS 
 
 crucified. Religion is romance; it is ro- 
 mance between the soul and its own king- 
 dom. It is the self-discovery of the soul ; 
 it is the self-witnessing of the soul's own 
 greatness. Because of this is religion 
 comprehensive in the great treatment of 
 life as art. There is no end to opportun- 
 ity in the spiritual realization; and all 
 forms of life, all modes of expression and 
 experience were, to him most certainly, 
 in and of the soul. The degree differs in 
 the ratio of intensity, but it is all of that 
 one and same spiritual longing. It is all 
 one and of the same spiritual impetus and 
 striving. Conquest of all obstacles to ex- 
 pression was, to Oscar Wilde, the tri- 
 umphing of soul. The unravelling of all 
 mysteries, so that the soul might stand 
 forth, claiming itself, — this for him was 
 elemental in the conception of religion. 
 He knew, and was glad in the knowing, 
 that spirituality is not "religiosity'' but 
 something quite separate and apart. It 
 
 96 
 
KEALIZATIONS 
 
 was super-provincial and all-inclusive. It 
 was not theologically territorial. It was 
 not dogamatism, as religion is. And spir- 
 ituality to him meant the consciousness of 
 the suppleness of life to all touches of 
 pure desire, all touches of natural aspira- 
 tion; and in this all distinction between 
 "good'' and "bad" were lost. Then, too, 
 it necessitated luminosity on all forms of 
 understanding. It implied readiness and 
 sprightliness of the intuitive perceptions. 
 It meant the singling-out of spiritual ele- 
 ments wherever there were any to be had. 
 It included the consciousness of divinity 
 within one's own nature ; and if that were 
 blasphemy, then let the world make the 
 most of it, and even God, if He is that 
 personal! For is it not that every atom 
 is spiritual per se; and is it not that the 
 worm is the God in-the-becoming? Who 
 shall set the confines to the expanses of 
 the divine nature, or who shall demarcate 
 that which is divinity and that which is 
 
 97 
 
EEALIZATIONS 
 
 not. The spirituality of Oscar Wilde was 
 Pantlieism, plus Super-Pantheism. 
 
 To be one's self a god ; to walk among 
 the common environment of life conscious 
 of a superiority within ; to take size and 
 measure of one's own stature and be con- 
 scious of it as being both larger and more 
 spiritual than the limitations that civili- 
 zation has set upon life, — this, in another 
 form, was also the spirituality of Oscar 
 Wilde. IN'eed we wonder, then, at his tem- 
 pestuous efforts at self-expression ! Need 
 we wonder at the revelations he gave of 
 himself ! His spirituality was flower-like. 
 It loved the Son of God and understood 
 Him and could set Him amidst the jewels 
 of poetry as much as he could speak of a 
 flaming sunset or an experience of the 
 uttermost in feeling. The spiritual im- 
 ages of Oscar Wilde's poetry were those 
 that constitute the proper elements of the 
 religious consciousness itself. For are 
 not the rivers and the flowers and the 
 
 98 
 
KEALIZATIONS 
 
 mountains- and the seas parts and ele- 
 ments of the Lord God Most High in His 
 Own Nature? At least to the poet it is 
 so ; and it was so, at least, to Oscar Wilde. 
 He found immortality and God in Na- 
 ture ; he found Nature in and as God. He 
 saw divinity in the budding of the rose 
 and divinity in the setting of suns. He 
 saw the universe as created, essentially, in 
 the image and in the likeness of God ; and 
 as to God himself, he found God dwelling 
 within the Abyss of the Soul. Can any- 
 one read his poetic stanzas written in 
 Italy and bearing upon the spiritual real- 
 ities Oif Roman Catholicism without feel- 
 ing closer to Christ as a Saviour indeed, 
 •because Christ, as Oscar Wilde himself 
 said, was undoubtedly a poet among poets, 
 for all his utterances are poetic utter- 
 ances ; and it was Oscar Wilde who loved 
 to think that, indeed, Christ spoke in 
 Greek, even as the Gospels were written 
 in that language. And languorous fan- 
 
 99 
 
REALIZATIONS 
 
 cies float upon the mind in the dreaming 
 of the poetic dreams of Oscar Wilde of 
 powers and potencies that he was made 
 aware of in the frequent and marvellous 
 unfoldings that were his, as it were, in 
 the very inner vision of spiritual worlds. 
 And his poems may be regarded, here and 
 there, as prophecies and prayers, and he, 
 himself, verily as priest and prophet. And 
 throughout one catches a glimpse of the 
 refinement of that which was his soul and 
 of the pain it knew, and of the longing it 
 knew, as well, to transcend the bonds of 
 physical limitations and soar aloft into 
 the pure empyrean of artistic reality, — - 
 and to him artistic and spiritual reality 
 were one. They were not one or two. 
 They were aspects of the Same; and, that 
 Same, — the Soul of Man, — ^verily, verily, 
 his own Soul ! 
 
 100 
 
3Uumination$ 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 Culminating as the climaxes in his lit- 
 erature and art and as the crown-piece of 
 the jeweled frame-work of his life were 
 the illuminations of Oscar Wilde. 
 Throughout one recognizes in him the 
 mind with insight. His art and his 
 poetry were the expression of his in- 
 sight, and the elements through which it 
 found beautiful form in the expression 
 were numerous and consummate illum- 
 inations. These pressing hard upon the 
 personal consciousness of him gave utter- 
 ance to poetic and philosophic song. 
 Beauty and truth, — these are the dual 
 expression of that inner order of stimulus 
 and response of soul whose outcome are 
 illuminations. The soul searching with- 
 in itself for reality discovers it, spirit- 
 ually, in the flow of concentration; then 
 follow, in the train of concentration, 
 
 103 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 science and philosophy and art and new 
 modes of life and renewed and more ex- 
 alted states of consciousness. This is 
 the ecstasy of the inner life; this is the 
 world of the intuitive self, the world of 
 the self within, greater than the cosmos 
 without. And in the grand distinctions 
 that exist between the inner world of one 
 and the inner world of another are there 
 the distinctions, likewise, between per- 
 sons who are ordinarily human and per- 
 sons who are both human and spiritual. 
 The incarnation of personality becomes 
 spiritual in the transmutations of con- 
 sciousness wherein the latter is shifted 
 from normal to super-normal relations 
 and wherein revelations take higher 
 and higher flight and higher and more 
 wondrous form. Within the depths of 
 personality are the tides of divine spir- 
 ituality, but the ebb and the flow of them, 
 so far as time and illumination are con- 
 cerned, depend on the efforts of person- 
 
 104 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 ality to transcend itself ; and this is done 
 in the seeking by the soul for the forms 
 of reality and of beauty and of truth. 
 And everyone, according to his own 
 fashion, approaches divinity; but the 
 method of the poet is unique ; and the il- 
 luminations which he receives are more 
 manifold and far more intense. The 
 whole surge of life is divine, but the poet 
 meets that divine reality through both 
 forms of perception, — those of the intel- 
 lect and of the heart. The search of the 
 scientist leads him along the arid desert 
 of facts, but the search of the poet is 
 along broad rivers of spirituality flanked 
 with wondrous gardens where grow the 
 marvellous and beautiful realities of soul 
 in the gardens of love and life and where 
 joy reigns and where the perception of 
 truth itself is joy. 
 
 The whole imagination of Oscar Wilde 
 was coloured with those richer elements 
 of life which are immediate to the treas- 
 
 105 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 ure-places of reality in its higher sense. 
 His soaring in soul, through the medium 
 of his poetic thought and fancy, led him 
 from out the tumult of life into the si- 
 lent retreats where the soul communes 
 with its own richness and its own ecstasy. 
 To the poet life is a grand spectacle and 
 he is the privileged witness ; and he sings 
 so perfectly because he is not of it. Or 
 if of it at all, then he sings because the 
 panorama of life is beautiful as a whole, 
 both in its sorrows and in its joys, in its 
 mistakes and its flaws, as well as in its 
 virtues and its heroic greatnesses. The 
 vision of the elect is the poetic vision, 
 and all saints are poets and all saints are 
 prophets. In them personality is dead 
 and the heart-throbbing of a world is 
 made personal. Their personalities have 
 become the Individuality of the race, the 
 sacred, aspiring Individuality of man as 
 Humanity. Their illuminations borde^* 
 upon every definition of life. That is 
 
 106 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 why one finds in Oscar Wilde the pro- 
 phet of the redemption of society as well 
 as the prophet of the redemption of art. 
 He yearns for higher ideals in education 
 as well as in art. One hears as though 
 it were but yesterday that eloquent and 
 rich saying of his which reads, "The best 
 way to make people good is to make them 
 happy.'' In this there is the penetrating 
 touch to all educational insight. If the 
 purpose of education be the training of 
 the moral faculties, then, indeed, happi- 
 ness, of itself, creates the conditions for 
 goodness. And, in truth, goodness and 
 blessedness are one. 
 
 Indeed, one w^ould always think of 
 classifying the moral observations of 
 Oscar Wilde as spiritual illuminations, 
 because they mark him out to have been 
 the witness of the wonderful opportun- 
 ities that follow in the wake of that in- 
 definably spiritual morality, dependent 
 on personal insight, which, of necessity, 
 
 107 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 insures a grand futurity in all personal 
 and spiritual progress. And his illum- 
 inations in this sense are always vibrant 
 and sonant with a remarkable under- 
 standing of the relation between freedom 
 and ethics. For example he says, "There 
 are moments when one has to choose be- 
 tween living one's own life, fully, en- 
 tirely, completely — or dragging out some 
 false, shallow, degrading existence that 
 the world in its hypocrisy demands !'' 
 Can the soul speak more clearly of the 
 demands which it realizes must be made 
 of ethics in the way of spiritual liberty. 
 Hard and fast rules cannot be put down 
 for that expansion of thought and life 
 which is the growth of the soul. And, 
 as a matter of fact, all the leaps and 
 bounds that have been made at any time 
 in the world's history, so far as both 
 morals and intelligence are regarded, 
 have always been the sequence of the vic- 
 torious demand made by the soul in the 
 
 108 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 direction of living its own life and of 
 following its own ideals. Because of this 
 insight he insisted that there are no codes 
 and standards for the artist. Verily his 
 own temperament is the standard and 
 test. By that he goes forward; by that 
 he launches forth and creates. Had the 
 great in soul who have made the world 
 stopped at its stupid gaping and, in fear, 
 failed to proceed onward and boldly in 
 the paths of vision and insight, to what 
 a sad pass of retrogression and benight- 
 edness should society have come! Cour- 
 ageous as lions are the makers of the 
 world and they stalk through the jungle 
 of confused social ideals and purposes 
 with that manner — the world must give 
 way. And this was of the spiritual il- 
 luminations of Oscar Wilde that one must 
 proceed boldly and valiantly, not heeding 
 the loud noise of criticism and always 
 mindful of the vision possessed. 
 Take him from his environment, or 
 109 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 rather from the environment of his age, 
 allow him to stand in the pure light of 
 the flame of his own life and one sees in 
 Oscar Wilde the thoughts and the ideals 
 of the spiritual genius. He believed defi- 
 nitely in God as the Highest Good; he 
 certainly believed more in God than he 
 did in man; and he had more reason to. 
 But then he also believed in man, but 
 in man as the Super-Man of the Future. 
 He believed in a mankind that was to be 
 whose vision should never be blunted, 
 which should be able to see truths and 
 ideals through the largest possible human 
 perspective. Then all narrowness will 
 have died out, all limitations that now 
 bind society will have been broken. Then 
 all superstitions which tend towards the 
 destruction of romantic culture and of 
 the romantic spirit shall have utterly 
 perished, and mankind stand on the very 
 pinnacle of consummate intelligence view- 
 ing the universe through the benevolence 
 
 110 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 which comes of deep wisdom, forgiving 
 all weakness and recognizing, everywhere 
 and at all times, the potentialities and the 
 goodness of man. Then should the vision 
 be concentrated on positive realities ; then 
 should the vision be turned from the ob- 
 servation of limitations to the glorious 
 consciousness of all human opportunities, 
 even though the marvellous working-out 
 of these opportunities be fraught with 
 fault and weakness. O for the vision that 
 sees men and things as they are, in the 
 ideal! O for the vision that soars be- 
 yond the deformities of physical life, that 
 takes in a larger scope of the ideal world ! 
 O for the vision that sees greatness and 
 forgives, — because of the perception of 
 greatness ! Great is the man with illumi- 
 nations, and few indeed are those who are 
 like unto him. He is on the high-road to 
 the realization of divine things. He is on 
 the approach to super-mundane glories 
 and super-mundane realities. And there 
 
 111 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 is no telling when or how he will think 
 out and spread the message of the re- 
 deeming vision. Oh ! the poet is both the 
 priest and the preacher of illuminations. 
 And illuminations are the greatest things 
 in this world ; for it is by the splendour 
 and by the light of illuminations that the 
 world is led out of the darkness and the 
 confusion of its relative perceptions into 
 the vision of nobler and more inclusive 
 realities. Therefore let the poet be un- 
 derstood. It is not necessary that he be 
 praised. For praise is often given be- 
 cause those who praise are benighted by 
 external show. And praise is cheap. But 
 rare, above all things, is understanding; 
 and it is understanding that the poet 
 craves. He cares not for sympathy, ex- 
 cept as sympathy is the Greek thing, 
 which is a "feeling with" Sympathy, 
 and taken in that definition is, indeed, the 
 highest understanding. Understanding to 
 the poet! But for understanding there 
 
 112 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 is required a passivity to the message of 
 tlie poet ; there is needed a suppression of 
 the egoistical instinct. One must live in 
 and breathe the atmosphere of that real- 
 istic ideal vi^orld from whence the poet 
 breathes his aspiration. One must have 
 learned to ascend through the com- 
 monplaceness of life to the great and 
 to the prodigious realms of inspiration 
 where all phenomena are appreciated in 
 the highest aesthetic relations, — and the 
 highest aesthetic relations are of divinity. 
 The poet leads those to whom his message 
 reveals itself through the heaven-worlds 
 of beauty to the radiant and higher 
 spheres of divinity where the soul wit- 
 nesses within itself the "Maker of Beau- 
 ty" for beauty is not without, but within. 
 And the more one penetrates inward, far, 
 far inward, verily, behind the net-work of 
 personality, into the inmost sanctuary of 
 the soul, the more does he become aware 
 of the source of the aspiration and in- 
 
 113 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 spiration of poets. The more does he en- 
 ter with the poet the ecstatic conscious- 
 ness where beauty is recognized as all- 
 pervading and truth as embodied in 
 beauty. The strength of the poet is in the 
 ratio of his capacity to apprehend illumi- 
 nations and to impart them, as well. 
 Through the medium of language the 
 poet steals his way into the inner pre- 
 cincts of the divine nature, rendering in- 
 carnate in the graphic beauty of poetry 
 and art the very presence of ideal things. 
 The world of illuminations comes closer, 
 so it seems, because of the power of the 
 poet-artist to render vision intense. And 
 Oscar Wilde — of him it may be truly said 
 that he put the illuminations of his vision 
 into the jewel-like beauty of the phrase- 
 ology of his poetry and prose. He placed 
 the whole setting of life into a phrase, 
 and he summed up the whole meaning of 
 life into a song, but the phrase and the 
 song, alike, were divine. And for this 
 
 114 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 should lie be remembered among the na- 
 tions and for this and for bis illumina- 
 tions should he be forgiven any faults 
 that he may have had as man ; but, other- 
 wise and apart, should the world seek 
 pardon of him inasmuch as the world in 
 its smallness in assaulting him vehem- 
 ently attacked the soul of which he was 
 possessed. And it not only decried the 
 man, but his illuminations; it not only 
 took dire vengance upon him for his 
 faults, but mercilessly assailed the poet 
 in him. But he, knowing that the world 
 is by its nature bigoted, sought peace 
 with God in his retiring days, uncon- 
 cerned as to the happenings of the world. 
 A grand indifference came over him ; and 
 he became concerned only with the under- 
 standing of his own soul; and he sought 
 communion, likewise, with his own spirit 
 as the great are wont to do. And it was 
 the irony of fate, proving the strangeness 
 of public vision, that he who in the height 
 
 115 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 of his prosperity, while residing in Paris, 
 should have been appropriately styled, 
 "The King of Life/^ should spend his 
 last days in a condition bordering nigh 
 on that of which Christ speaking said, 
 that the foxes had their holes and the 
 birds their nests, but the Son of Man 
 had nowhere to lay his head. And it was 
 in those dark hours of his fortune when, 
 verily, it seemed that he had nowhere to 
 lay his head and no place in which to 
 find retirement from the "terrible laugh- 
 ter'' of the world that Oscar Wilde had 
 those illuminations of the highest spir- 
 itual order that brought him close — very 
 close to Grod, freeing him eventually from 
 the pain of the body and the contempt of 
 the world and bringing him through the 
 valley of death into the glorious realm of 
 the ideal of which he, as the poet, in his 
 lifetime had such radiant visions and such 
 resplendent illuminations. And the veils 
 of the divine peace closed from his view 
 
 IIG 
 
ILLUMINATIONS 
 
 all the miseries and all the selfishness 
 and all the woes of life, taking him into 
 its own ineffable nature where he became 
 aware of it and its blessedness. For the 
 strength and the effulgence of illumina- 
 tion enter, in their fullness and in their 
 fulfillment, the veiled silence and the in- 
 communicable bliss of peace. 
 
 IIT 
 
CottcIu$ion0 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 And to what conclusions shall one 
 eventually come when the book of the 
 greatjiess of Oscar Wilde has been 
 perused to the closing lines? What are 
 the final realities? What are the last 
 words to be said of him? That he was 
 great; of that there is no doubt. Of the 
 fact that he had a message and a mission, 
 there is no doubt. That he remodelled 
 the opinions of the world as to the func- 
 tions and ideals of art is true. That he 
 gave a new tone to social aspirations, 
 rendering the aspirations of the multi- 
 tudes into spiritual forms, is true. More 
 true, however, in so far as he himself is 
 to be regarded, was the magnitude of his 
 personal consciousness, was the grandeur 
 of his personal insight, was the soaring 
 into everlasting realms of all the forms 
 of his thought, was the supreme mood of 
 
 121 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 his perceptions of all beauty and of all 
 true culture. He praised the worthiness 
 even of things which seem unworthy; he 
 saw the goodness and the greatness of 
 that which the commonplaceness of the 
 world stigmatizes as superstitious, — that 
 is the developments and the romance 
 of the spiritual consciousness. And in 
 conclusions it must also be said that he 
 laboured for the sake of labour, that he 
 loved beauty for its own sake and that he 
 was busied with reality because reality is 
 divine. At one time he remarked, "To 
 give form to one's dreams, to give shape 
 to one's fancy, to change one's ideas into 
 images, to express one's self through a 
 material that one makes lovely by mere 
 treatment, to realize in this material the 
 immaterial ideal of beauty — this is the 
 pleasure of the artist. It is the most 
 sensuous and most intellectual pleasure 
 in the whole world," and, indeed, he might 
 have added that it was, likewise, the most 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 spiritual pleasure in the wliole world. 
 For the expression of one's self through 
 the realization of the immaterial ideals 
 of beauty in material form, indeed, that 
 is the culminating purpose of the soul's 
 existence. The soul's own vision of itself 
 is the high ideal of aspiration ; aye, there 
 is none that is higher. To touch deli- 
 cately all the moods of life and express 
 them in new modes and to finger with 
 divine thoroughness all the ideals in their 
 true nature, verily, this is the task and 
 the joy of the rich in soul. The cardinal 
 purposes of life are to be found in the 
 soul's expression of its own potential- 
 ities ; and the reading of every single life 
 must be from this point of view. Thus 
 Oscar Wilde must be seen in the relations 
 that were true of him ; that is, he must be 
 recognized as one who determined to read 
 the meaning of life in the writing of his 
 own soul in the personal experience. For 
 this reason he could see neither good nor 
 
 123 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 bad; he was aware only of tlie forms ot 
 expression in tlie delicacy or tlie vulgarity 
 they might assume. And vulgarity he 
 thought of as the only vice. Everything 
 was to be forgiven by the gods save vul- 
 garity, — and vulgarity, he triumphantly 
 asserted, was the conduct of others in the 
 observation of the sins of the sinners. 
 Badness is not bad; only unsuccessful 
 badness is bad. Until his success Gari- 
 baldi was a brigand ; until its success the 
 revelation is the rebellion; until its sue-, 
 cess it is treason. And so, in the depart- 
 ment of ethics and aesthetics, failure in 
 the propaganda of a new ideal inevitably 
 means that the preacher is denounced and 
 decried; aye, he may be socially ostra- 
 cised, even persecuted. But let success 
 crown his motives and he is praised as 
 the deliverer in the hours of darkness, as 
 the redeemer in the chaos of confused 
 yisions. 
 
 Fast is the time approaching when 
 124 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 Oscar Wilde will be seen in liis true light, 
 and when the world will draw new con- 
 conclusions from the phenomena of his 
 literature and his career. Then he will 
 be seen in his own light and own lumin- 
 osity. Then the harping critics, who love 
 littleness wherever it is to be found and 
 are blind to greatness because they have 
 not the faculty of perception, will no 
 longer be heard, and he whose life was 
 one long sorrow, one uninterrupted ac- 
 quaintance with pain, and the ending of 
 whose life was in the pangs of deepest 
 pain shall be divested of the environment 
 of his personal sorrow and stand revealed 
 in the glory of his vision and his genius. 
 He will be seen as the sociologist among 
 them, as the artist among them, as the 
 prophet among them in his dramas, as 
 the seer among them in his poetic songs. 
 He will be recognized as the herald of 
 new social orders, as the spokesman of a 
 newer and far more inclusive social mes- 
 
 J2S 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 sage. He will be regarded as all artists 
 and poets should be regarded, — from 
 without the pale of ethics and within the 
 limitless circumference of aesthetics 
 which becomes incarnate within them. 
 Then will he be seen as the prophet of the 
 greater dawn of things when man shall 
 walk upon the face of the earth — a crea- 
 ture of art and the follower, pure and 
 simple, of the artistic impulse with vision 
 ever fixed upon the company of artistic 
 ideals. Personally he was an "Arbiter 
 Elegantiarum" in the social fashions ; not 
 alone that, however. He was, also and 
 especially, the "Arbiter Elegantiarum'^ 
 in intellectual and artistic fashions. 
 Wherever he walked in the greatness of 
 his days he was always the man of power 
 in the insight which was his, the man of 
 eloquence in the expression of the con- 
 tents of that insight. No matter when 
 or where he expressed himself, it was al- 
 ways as the enthusiast and as the dreamer 
 
 126 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 of dreams that are real, the dreams of the 
 ideals that are to be true in the more glor- 
 ious future of a greater to-morrow. His 
 motives were the unconscious aspirations 
 of multitudes; and since his day it has 
 been the custom, both in the world of art 
 and that of drama, to speak the truth 
 about the evils of the day. He shifted 
 drama from its purely historic bearings 
 into the light of the present, when the 
 drama forthshadows the life of the people 
 as it is lived in the passing of the days. 
 It was his initial effort that made the 
 drama the moral censor of society and 
 the merciless critic of the smallnesses of 
 the age. 
 
 And for this is he to be thanked ; since 
 his time the whole message of art has been 
 thoroughly renewed; indeed, it appears 
 to have entirely reshaped its functions 
 and the character of its intentions. It is 
 to society what religion and the church 
 are to the soul. More than that it is to 
 
 127 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 society as tlie sublime dictator of true 
 social ideals. The commanding element 
 in all the work of Oscar Wilde, however, 
 and which made his dramas so character- 
 istically and intensely real, was the force 
 of his personality. Throughout one finds 
 in Oscar Wilde the critic, the moralist, 
 the philosopher, the man of fashion and 
 the man of the world. One finds in Oscar 
 Wilde, also, the man of spiritual longing 
 and intellectual sincerity — a rare combi- 
 nation. It is much to be regretted that he 
 did not have the full scope of opportunity. 
 For had not misfortune overtaken him 
 and robbed him of his powers of joy and 
 sympathy with life it is certain that he 
 would have given utterance to worlds of 
 farther understanding in the lines of the 
 poetry and in the framework of the 
 dramas he would have composed. As it 
 is, his dramas bear out the demand 
 that he forced upon society of changing 
 its standards of social opinion. Aristo- 
 
 128 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 cratic himself, lie nevertheless assaulted 
 that assembly of so-called aristocrats who 
 live physically in sumptuousness, but 
 who are devoid, utterly, of any intellec- 
 tual or artistic outlook. He believed in 
 the aristocracy of artists and poets and 
 world-seers. He laboured for that end 
 whereby should be combined the great 
 forces of society and the greater forces of 
 art. Now society rules, and uninstructed 
 society, but when art is allowed to domi- 
 nate, then society will be perfect and 
 beautiful and all its faults shall have been 
 made virtues in the transition, and all its 
 limitations metamorphosed into splendid 
 advantages and its narrow preoccupa- 
 tions altered into gloriously large deal- 
 ings with the future. And visions of the 
 renewal instead of the ignorant preser- 
 vation of culture shall dawn upon the so- 
 cial sight. 
 
 The intentions of Oscar Wilde were al- 
 ways with the future; the same is to be 
 
 129 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 said of his aspirations for society, and in 
 one instance he remarks, "The past is of 
 no importance. The present is of no im- 
 portance. It is with the future that we 
 have to deal. For the past is what man 
 should not have been. The present is 
 what man ought not to be. The future is 
 what artists are." Already and in our 
 very midst is the world of the future, 
 prophesied of by the careers and the be- 
 quests of the poets and the artists. And 
 Oscar Wilde was an inhabitant of that 
 future world. That is why the present 
 world laid violent hands upon him, for 
 it could not understand him, and the 
 world always deals hard with that which 
 it fails to understand. How far his vision 
 extended into the future order of society ! 
 He anticipated in his ideas the very aims 
 of socialism, purified from politics and 
 standing in the light of spirituality. He 
 says, "When private property is abolished 
 there will be no necessity for crime, no 
 
 130 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 demand for it; it will cease to exist." 
 And again, "Starvation, and not sin, is 
 the parent of modern crime." And an- 
 other saying of liis might be -.added, be- 
 cause of the light it throws in this re- 
 lation, "So completely has man's person- 
 ality been absorbed by his possessions 
 that the English law has always treated 
 offences against a man's property with far 
 more severity than offences against his 
 person, and property is still the test of 
 complete citizenship." What a careful 
 summing-up of the status of the industrial 
 age! What eloquent foretelling, as it 
 were, is it also of what is to come, for 
 socialism is the social condition for the 
 future, a spiritual socialism wherein shall 
 shine, as great human beaeonlights, the 
 virtues of sacrifice and selfishness and all 
 the virtues and advantages of the great 
 human communal consciousness. Yes, it 
 was in the future that Oscar Wilde lived ; 
 and were it possible for him to be re- 
 
 131 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 born and to re-live certainly, whenever 
 the time of his birth and life, his message 
 would deal with the future, because the 
 vision of the future is always purer and 
 more refined, as compared with the sordid 
 realities with which the present is ever 
 filled. Oscar Wilde always lived beyond 
 the opinions and beyond the contents of 
 the world as he saw it. He had become 
 the avowed lover of a reality more spir- 
 itual than the reality with which life is 
 bound up in hopeless paradoxes and con- 
 tradictions. It seems as if he were speak- 
 ing much of himself, though perhaps un- 
 consciously so, when he said, ^^There are 
 two worlds. The one exists and is never 
 talked about; it is called the real world 
 because there is no neecj to talk about it 
 in order to see it. The other is the world 
 of art ; one must talk about that, because 
 otherwise it would not exist.'' 
 
 Ah! Indeed! Because he was an in- 
 habitant of that world which is not talked 
 
 132 
 
CONCLUSIONS 
 
 about and which is difficult to see was 
 Oscar Wilde so much misunderstood. But 
 the great are the residents of that world 
 and, "To be great is to be misunderstood.'' 
 But we seem to see the soul of Oscar 
 Wilde as caught up now into that world, 
 living altogether there, freed from all 
 the many bondages of this small world. 
 And when the anguish of pain became 
 most intense, death came to him, as it 
 were, like the fiery chariot came unto 
 the Prophet of old and he was carried 
 up by the pure flame of his own soul into 
 the region where immortality lives, be- 
 cause there is the world of art, the region 
 where joy reigns pure and boundless and 
 where the vision of beauty is unending 
 and ever intense, and ever — ever — and 
 forever divine — for there is God! 
 
 133 
 
aftettootD 
 
AFTERWOED 
 
 In the instance of the poetic tempera- 
 ment, greater than the personality of the 
 man is the larger personality of the poet ; 
 but, in the deepest sense, the man is the 
 poet; at least this was true in the case 
 of Oscar Wilde. To him the man and the 
 poet blended indistinguishably ; and the 
 beauty of the poet was that of the man, 
 and vice versa. It is in this light that 
 lone sees him ; and this is the true light in 
 which he is properly and genuinely re- 
 flected and in which his genius shines 
 forth in its fullness. 
 
 The room still stands in which he 
 passed away; it is but a stone's throw 
 from the Academie des Beaux Arts, but 
 he is no longer within the mournfulness 
 of that time when he dwelt in that room 
 with his dying days. He has gone to the 
 great Academie des Beaux Arts in the 
 
 137. 
 
AFTERWOED 
 
 real realm of art wliere death and ugli- 
 ness cannot go, where all is beauty and 
 truth and beautiful reality and where the 
 great gods walk and speak with those 
 who go to such Olympian heights. He is 
 beyond all pain, resting within the 
 shadow and the grandeur of his own 
 manifested genius; and there no harsh- 
 ness, and nothing unseemly, can touch 
 him. There he stands apart in his own 
 light above the censure and the blame of 
 this small world. He has been caught up 
 into the radiant world of art. 
 
 ^N'ow a monument is to be erected to 
 his name; but all these long days since 
 his passing away has he had a monument 
 which was and is the appreciation of 
 those who know and love and understand 
 him. And this is a monument which time 
 cannot' cause to decay ; it is an imperish- 
 able monument. And he dwells also in 
 the immortality of his personal illumina- 
 tion, tov it was personal illuminatiou and 
 
 138 
 
AFTERWORD 
 
 not public applause that lie sought. His 
 was an illuminated intellect and his was 
 a soul delicate in its sensitive response 
 to the stimulus of rich ideals. 
 
 And now he lives in the company of 
 those rich ideals. And he is now at 
 peace, — ^joyous, luminous, silent peace. 
 
 FINIS 
 
 X39 
 
PSYCHIC CONTROL 
 
 "A book of three hundred and forty pages of 
 living truths." — Universal Republic. 
 
 "A book that should interest a large class of 
 readers who like research into the subtler forces 
 of nature and the abtruse working mind and 
 spirit." — Banner, Nashville, Tenn. 
 
 "The author emphasises the need of a practical 
 creed that shall make the soul conscious of real- 
 ities which have heretofore been believed." — The 
 Bookman. 
 
 "The depths of the soul are touched by the 
 apostleship of a newer philosophy." — The Times, 
 Louisville, Ky. 
 
 "The knowledge of what constitutes the im- 
 mortal self of each animate and inanimate being 
 is set forth." — Press, Pittsburgh, Pa. 
 
 "Here we have a thoughtful elaboration of the 
 principles generally taught in what we recognize 
 as the new school of Philosophy." — The Public. 
 
 \ "In his descriptive writings the author has 
 struck the spiritual chord of the world's deepest 
 philosophies" — Richard G. Badger, Esq., in Poet 
 Lore. 
 
 "As water purifies the physical instrument of 
 the soul, so the mind is purified by adherence to 
 the tenets of the individual conscience." — The 
 
 Club Fellow. 
 
 "This is a study of the mental and spiritual 
 control through self-knowledge, and as such a con- 
 tribution to the literature of New Thought." 
 Democrat, Little Rock, Ark. 
 
 "The knowledge of what constitutes the im- 
 mortal soul of each animate and inanimate being 
 is set forth in a way that leaves an indelible im- 
 pression upon the mind.' — The Despatch, Phila- 
 delphia, Pa. 
 
 "Those who have a fancy for the occult will 
 be interested in 'Psychic Control Through Self 
 Kxiovi\tdgQ*J^unday States, Ne w_Orle ans, La. 
 
PSYCHIC CONTROL 
 
 * "An earnest attempt to present a system of 
 thought and a method for the development of the 
 spiritual iaculties."— Inter-Ocean, Chicago, 111. 
 
 "Mr. Kenilworth's work is fertile in thought- 
 'fulness of the subjects treated, and cannot fail 
 of being highly commended by the constantly- 
 increasing investigators of the psychic philosophy." 
 Courier, Boston, Mass. 
 
 "Walter Winston Kenilworth emphasises the 
 need of a practical creed and system of self- 
 knowledge."P/am-Z)^a/^r, Cleveland O. 
 
 One of the most important of recent contri- 
 butions to the metaphysical literature of the New 
 Thought, and emphasizes the need of a practical 
 creed founded on a better understanding of the 
 spiritual self." — Press, Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
 "It is doubtless a very fine thing; like a star, 
 the light of which has not yet reached the earth, 
 the multitude cannot appreciate it." — News and 
 Courier, Charleston, S. C. 
 
 "This book is a tribute to the spirit of the 
 age, a spirit of better values, higher sympathies, 
 a deeper recognition of death and a more ex- 
 tensive spiritual perspective." — American, Balti- 
 more. 
 
 "The great principal which has been emphasized 
 is that morality is the medium through which the 
 deepest psychic and spiritual consciousness is 
 obtained." — Age-Herald, Birmingham, Ala. 
 
 "The spiritual consciousness which corresponds 
 with spiritual knowledge is shown to be intimately 
 identified with a moral consciousness."— Tn^ww^, 
 Minneapolis, Minn. 
 
 "Psychic Control Through Self-Knowledge^ 
 emphasizes the need of a practical creed and 
 system of self-knowledge,"— P/am-D^a/(?r, Cleve- 
 land, Ohio. ' 
 
 "New religions, new systems of thought, new 
 systems of philosophy are turning the tide of 
 spiritual unrest from X\i^ orthoraoxy of past 
 ages* Th9 profound dissoveries of modern $ci« 
 
PSYCHIC CONTROl. 
 
 " ' ' ' 1— » 
 
 strikes the keynote of his work — Faith is giving 
 way to knowledge." — The Herald, New York. 
 
 "The author of this book writes the lines of 
 what is called *new philosophy.' He takes a broad 
 view of the problems of life and shows the in- 
 timate connection between the spiritual connection 
 which corresponds with spiritual knowledge and 
 a moral consciousness. The book is interesting 
 and instructive." — Metaphysical Magazine. 
 
 "The object is to show that realization of the 
 spirit within is the goal of spiritual effort, psychic 
 control is the direct method of approach and mor- 
 ality is the medium through which the deepest 
 psychic and a spiritual consciousness is evolved.'* 
 Chronicle^ San Francisco. 
 
 "How we can gain psychic control through self- 
 knowledge is the theme here exploited. Mr. Ken- 
 ilworth argues that self-knowledge must be estab- 
 lished in consciousness, Man has in himself a 
 reservoir of latent energy upon which he is at 
 liberty to draw, but which he puts to slight ac- 
 count. ^ Mr. Kenilworth would help man to it's 
 use." — Detroit Free Press. 
 
 "This is a psychological and philosophical study, 
 rrhe author departs from the orthodox conceptions 
 of religion and the soul's relation to God. I£ 
 you are orthodox and wish so to remain, let the 
 volume alone. If you believe faith is giving away 
 to knowledge, here's a book you want." — News, 
 Galveston, Texas. 
 
 "The author has taken Solon's dictum 'Know 
 Thyself, as his theme, but has handled it in a 
 manner which would have been impossible in the 
 days of the Greek philosophers. — It is a call to in- 
 dividualism as against the modern socialistic 
 spirit." — Book News Monthly. 
 
 "The book is one of an increasing number of 
 works showing the tendency to break away from 
 the old established forms of theology, to teach 
 mankind to become conscious of his soul and to 
 take issue with the old orthodox assertion 'be- 
 lieve and ye shall be sa,y^d,"^^America7t, New 
 lYork. 5 
 
PSYCHIC CONTROL 
 
 ^■■■l ■— ■■■■ M —. -. ■■■—I.. .1 ^1 - — -■'—' "■ ■■■ ^^■ .—■■ - ■■ 
 
 "The purpose of this excellent book is not to 
 teach control of others, but control of self; and 
 it deals with principles rather than methods. The 
 value of this book is far beyond that of mere 'psy- 
 chic' uses of the mind. 'The Birthright of the 
 Sour is a chapter that well represents the refresh- 
 ing energy of thought which constitutes the help- 
 ful philosophy of this book." — Bible Review. 
 
 "There is so much fakery and quackery beingj 
 laid before ignorant and unsuspecting readers 
 these days under the titles of 'psychic' this and 
 'psychic' that, that the very name of this book 
 gives rise to dark suspicions in the mind of the 
 reader. And yet there is no quackery evident in 
 this volume. It is apparently the work of an 
 earnest and sincere man." — Telegraph, Phila- 
 delphia, Pa. 
 
 "He has made an extremely readable book, in 
 which the influence both of theosophy and of 
 new thought is visible." — Globe, Boston Mass. 
 
 "This volume is the result of deep research, 
 much study, an indefinite amount of thought, 
 coupled with a primary understanding of the sub- 
 ject acquired through years of labor. It is above 
 else a book for the thinker, a volume that must 
 be studied and analyzed before it's true worth be- 
 comes manifest." — The Reporter, Waterloo, Iowa. 
 
 "A very lucid exposition of the theory of evo- 
 lution, of spiritual truths, and the attainment of 
 the higher self. The author sees clearly the 
 need of the individual for a practical creed and a 
 more definite knowledge of soul forces. It is a 
 plea for the consciousness of soul and a spiritual 
 understanding of self. It is a^well written and 
 clear analysis of a subject that is steadily gaining 
 in interest." — Miscellaneous. 
 
 "A philosophical work of great value, teaching 
 how to become conscious of one's soul, and by 
 cultivating morality and things spiritual, to de- 
 velope all the highest capablities of self. Gently 
 but firmly he leads the reader up the steps of 
 self-knowledge. To the mind who strives to 
 understand, there first comes inspiration, and then. 
 
PSYCHIC CONTROL ^ 
 
 an all pervading peace. No one should attempt 
 to study more than one chapter at a sitting, for 
 the pages are literally packed with meaning, which 
 is best assimilated by degrees. The word paint- 
 ing is rarely beautiful." — The Times-Union, KU 
 bany, N. Y. 
 
 *Table-turning, thought reading, crystal gazing, 
 clairvoyance, ghost-raising and such like diver- 
 sions are at present so much in favor with the 
 frivolous that it may be proper to offer a word 
 of warning about Mr. Walter Winston Kenil- 
 worth's book. Psychic Control Through Self- 
 Knowledge, and those who hope to find any in- 
 formation here about the transference of thoughts 
 or the shifting of furniture will be grievously dis- 
 appointed. By psychic control Mr. KenilwortK 
 means the control of desires with the amelioration 
 of conduct and the refinement of physical and 
 mental vibration." — The Evening Sun, New York. 
 
 ^ 'This is a very interesting, instructive and up- 
 lifting work, written in the author's well known 
 style. All will find some new truth in this book, 
 and there are none but whom will receive in- 
 struction and benefit." — Voice of the Magi. 
 
 "In the author's power to perceive relations, to 
 j?rasp the occult truth embodied in an object or a 
 phenomenon, to recognize truths pertaining to the 
 unseen realm and to the inner life, and to lay the 
 same before others with clearness, originality and 
 convincing power, one is continually reminded of 
 Emerson. One closes it marveling at the heights 
 which a soul has reached that can put forth a 
 work like this." — ^L. Frances Este§ v^ The OC' 
 cidenU 
 
Xi r>i 
 
SEP ■ 6 1912 
 
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