A picture of Dorian Wilde

Those who achieve literary fame earn virulent enemies as well. In the case of Oscar Wilde, it seems to us a century later that he achieved a degree of infamy he hardly deserved. His death on November 30, 1900 was a sad end to a life that had promised much; it also marked the beginning of a century of serious drama, which could have used some of his frivolity. VIJAY NAMBISAN remembers Wilde's literary virtues and vices, and what Bernard Shaw called his 'unconquerable gaiety of soul'.

ONE hundred years ago last Thursday, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde died of acute brain inflammation brought on by an ear infection. He had earlier injured the ear when he fainted in chapel in Wandsworth Prison. There was irony in this; for his father, Sir William Wilde, had been Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon. But in the last five years Oscar's ties to family, most friends, and country had been severed; and in his final moments he renounced his church as well and became a Roman Catholic.

Irony was not one of his weapons as writer or man. He could be sublimely witty, and his plays glitter to excess with epigrams; but they deal very superficially with such ironies as those of time or position. His wit was never cruel on stage, and in private life he was never sarcastic, rarely unkind. This can be said of few wits. One of his friends - he did not have many - who stayed a friend after his disgrace, the portraitist Sir William Rothenstein, has written that there was only one time he ever heard Wilde say an unkind thing. Even this does not sound particularly harsh. It was at a dinner given by Frank Harris (editor of The Saturday Review), and the host was boasting of the great houses where he had been a guest. At last, "Yes, dear Frank," Oscar exclaimed, "we believe you; you have dined in every house in London - once."

Another story (from Hesketh Pearson's 1946 biography) illustrates both his kindness and his unwillingness to let an opportunity pass to sparkle. A beggar in the Haymarket asked him for alms, saying he had no work to do and no bread to eat. "Work!" exclaimed Wilde. "Why should you want to work? And bread! Why should you eat bread?" He put his hand on the man's shoulder and continued in a friendly way, "Now if you had come to me and said that you had work to do, but you couldn't dream of working; and that you had bread to eat, but couldn't think of eating bread, I would have given you two shillings and sixpence." He paused. "As it is, I give you half-a-crown." (We inhabit a decimal present; the two sums are identical.)

For such a gentle soul - his friends all bear witness - to have had his name associated with such a degree of infamy is surprising. It was his personal life his enemies objected to, and they made his name a byword for vileness unspeakable. In our own, much more tolerant age, which pardons his passions, why is Oscar Wilde still a name to reckon with?

Wilde's work consists of seven finished plays, one novel, two collections of fairy tales, one of short stories and one of essays, practically all of it written or published between 1887 and 1895. Besides, there are the two products of his disgrace, "De Profundis" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", and two uncompleted verse dramas. Little of it is relevant reading now.

His society plays created an immense sensation in the early 1890s, as they introduced a new form of comedy to the English theatre. In fact they were not new in form: Wilde had merely adapted the conventional French "well-made play" to a setting where his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit could shine. His first two stage successes, "Lady Windermere's Fan" (first performed 1892) and "A Woman of No Importance" (1893) convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde's plays "must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama". These were also the years when another London-domiciled Irishman and Wilde's junior by two years, George Bernard Shaw, staged his first plays to almost universal condemnation. The contrast in their reception makes, again, for irony.

Shaw outlived Wilde by half a century, and produced a body of work which - though self-confessedly didactic, and intended to make converts - rivals Shakespeare's in its range and characterisation. I hardly think Wilde would have made as significant a contribution to literature had he lived. But on the evidence of his last play - "The Importance of Being Earnest" - he would probably have taken the well-made play to unexplored heights; even perhaps made a reputation to defy the modern drama.

The influential modern director Tyrone Guthrie has said, "It is possible to argue that the best work of Oscar Wilde never got written." I do not know; it would be hard to improve upon "The Importance". And it is on that play that Wilde's present reputation as a dramatist wholly rests. The others are shallow, sentimental tripe leavened by irrelevant wit, with all the conventions of Indian B-grade movie kitsch - the erring society woman, the dreadful secret, the horrifying revelation, the selfless sacrifice. Indeed it is hard to tell them apart.

It is also difficult to make a case that Wilde was condemning Victorian - or any other - hypocrisy in his plays. On the contrary, they are full of it. Neither did he, until his plays were successful, flaunt his vices in the public gaze. All his society plays involve "the secret sin" whose disclosure or concealment creates what dramatic tension exists; his was a case of life imitating art. It is only in "The Importance", which is amoral in the sense that it is not rooted in any system of morality, that Wilde soars - because he has jettisoned the ballast of orthodoxy. "The Importance" is a triumph of superficiality; it is not in any way bold or outspoken. It was acclaimed by London society, which is to say the very same superficial people it was spoofing. Again - ironically - Wilde was discovering the advantages of rising above the reality of social values at a time when Shaw was succeeding by sapping and mining their foundations.

Wilde and Shaw were both Irish Protestants, born in Dublin within two years of each other, who each went to London to make a career for himself. What made them so different? What created Oscar Wilde?

* * *

This essay is not a comparative study of Wilde and Shaw, but it is appropriate to remember the younger and greater writer, too, at this time. Wilde died a 100 years ago in November, Shaw 50 years ago in the same month. But Shaw's oeuvre is canonical, and much more difficult to treat in a magazine article. Wilde is not only frothier stuff but has all the fascination of sin.

Wilde and Shaw, by the way, knew each other pretty well. Though I cannot find any indication they were friends, neither were they rivals. Shaw was as much impressed by Wilde's wit as his other contemporaries were, but when his blood was cold he often rebelled against the older man's weapons. In his famous review of "The Importance", he admitted to being amused but added,

...unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it. If the public ever becomes intelligent enough to know when it is really enjoying itself and when it is not, there will be an end of farcical comedy.

Wilde once said of Shaw, "He hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him"; but this is quoted by Shaw himself (Sixteen Self Sketches). There is also a story of an evening when they were both present (told by one Sir Bernard Partridge in Pearson's Life):

Shaw was on the threshold of his career; Oscar had already "arrived". But for once he was content to listen, and Shaw, delighted to meet such a listener, let himself go. His subject was a magazine, the founding of which he had in mind, and he held forth at great length on its scope and outlook. When he came to a halt, Oscar said, "That has all been most interesting, Mr. Shaw; but there's one point you haven't mentioned, and an all-important one - you haven't told us the title of your magazine."

"Oh, as for that," said Shaw, "what I'd want to do would be to impress my own personality on the public - I'd call it Shaw's Magazine: Shaw - Shaw - SHAW!" and he banged his fist on the table. "Yes," said Oscar, "and how would you spell it?"

Shaw joined heartily in our laughter against him.

Oscar Wilde's father was a scientific man, but he also published books on archaeology, folklore and Dean Swift; his mother was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore. This may account for Wilde's purple patches and his occasional woolly-headedness. Yeats strove hard against an excess of sentiment, but Wilde made no such attempt. He often dragged the present back to the foggy realms of myth instead of making myth relevant to the present. This ruins such excellent beginnings as "The Canterville Ghost" has, and makes even "The Selfish Giant" less successful than it could have been.

Perhaps it was his bringing-up which determined Wilde's attitude to religion, which when it obtrudes into his writing at all does so in the most conventional way. There is a lovely story about his viva voce examination at Oxford (where Wilde not only took Honours but also won the Newdigate in 1878). He was required to translate from the Greek New Testament, and the passage chosen was from the story of the Passion (the concluding chapters of Jesus's life, beginning with the vigil in the Garden of Gethsemane). Wilde began to translate, easily and accurately. The examiners professed their satisfaction. He ignored them and continued. At last they stopped him and told him it was enough. "Oh, do let me go on," said Oscar, "I want to see how it ends."

Shaw's father was not a successful man, and the humiliations of genteel poverty stiffened the son's backbone. He had a religious upbringing, and held the Bible in such reverence that

when one day, as I was buying a pennyworth of sweets in a little shop in Dublin, the shopkeeper tore a leaf out of a dismembered Bible to wrap them in, I was horrified, and half expected to see him struck by lightning. All the same I took the sweets and ate them; for to my Protestant mind the shopkeeper, as a Roman Catholic, would go to hell as such...

His plays do not display any conventional religiousness in Shaw; however, what was his moral system but religion? The orthodox observances of the Church were replaced by fads (which were never trivial, though) - simplified spelling, vegetarianism, celibacy. Once the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell, irked by Shaw's continual correction during a rehearsal of "Pygmalion", told him, "You are a terrible man, Mr. Shaw. One day you'll eat a beefsteak and then God help all women." It is recorded that Shaw actually blushed.

It is impossible to imagine such a reprimand as ever having been necessary in Wilde's case. He was always ready to succumb to temptation, as he famously admitted. After the success of his first plays, his friends noticed that prosperity and fame had transformed his character. He became gross in appearance; he openly flaunted his homosexual proclivities, showing himself in public in the company of male prostitutes and other such riffraff.

Wilde had been famous before his plays were hits. He was indeed one of the first of the modern celebrities - people famous for being famous. (Much later, in exile, he said to Andre Gide, "Do you want to know the great drama of my life? It's that I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent.") His undergraduate reputation was the greatest asset he carried out of Oxford, and having sat at Walter Pater's feet, he established himself as a leader of the Aesthetic Movement, which believed in Art for Art's Sake. Though built like a giant, and with "formidable fists", he carried himself in a droopy fashion, struck "languid poses", and wore a green carnation.

Having achieved, published or staged absolutely nothing, he was invited to lecture in the United States. When he arrived at New York in January 1882, a swarm of reporters awaited him. He naturally expected them to ask about Art and Aestheticism; instead, with that sublime indifference to reality which is the hallmark of the American press, they asked him "how he liked his eggs fried, what he slept in, how he trimmed his fingernails, and what temperature he liked his bath to be" (this story is also from Pearson's Life).

Wilde did not answer with much enthusiasm, and the reporters asked his fellow-passengers for their impressions. They informed the press that Wilde had complained that "the trip was tame, 'deucedly stupid' in fact, that the roaring ocean did not roar...." The reporters reported that Wilde was "disappointed with the Atlantic Ocean", a comment which quickly became famous. Realising what was expected of him, Wilde then, at the New York Customs House, made the remark about his genius that set the Atlantic on fire. He also cultivated, in the US, a costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches and black silk stockings, and an effeminate carriage. All this won him the hostility of the press, but it did no harm to the size of his audiences. After a year he returned to Britain, to earn more fees by lecturing on America.

While in the US, Wilde began to write a verse play, "The Duchess of Padua"; in 1883 he returned to New York for the first performance of his play "Vera, or The Nihilists". These works proved utter failures; indeed, no one would touch them in London.

Reading them today, it is difficult to imagine that Wilde was almost thirty years of age, and that he had a reputation as a leading wit and aesthete. "The Duchess of Padua" and another, later Italian play, "A Florentine Tragedy", are such poor pastiche of Shakespeare that one wonders why the author wanted them staged at all. They are the kind of thing you write at 18, bury at the back of the bookshelf when you are 21 and wince at the recollection of when you are 25.

When Wilde attempted to anchor himself in a period - even, or especially, his own period - he got nowhere. ("Salome" may be cited as an exception, but Salome is no more anchored in the Biblical story than "The Importance" is in Victorian England. "Salome" is only an excuse for some wonderfully purple passages and hints at unspeakable decadence.) His greatest successes - his few successes - are timeless; and this is as true of "The Importance" and "Salome" as it is of "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant".

When Wilde was being hailed as being "on the very highest plane of modern English drama", Shaw was relentlessly and uncompromisingly anchoring his plays in the social realities of Victorian England - not in the drawing-rooms of Mayfair, but in the tenements of the East End and in suburban houses. When he set a scene in a drawing room or club (as in "The Philanderer") his men and women thought and spoke like living men and women, not like cardboard cut-outs. Wilde's stories dealing with "secret sins" are very different from Shaw's. "Mrs Warren's Profession" was first staged in 1902, but it had been written nine years earlier, when Wilde's first two society plays - also dealing with secret sins - had won immense success on the stage. Shaw's sinner displays no sentimentality, she does not droop or shudder or sacrifice herself. On the contrary, she is a successful businesswoman.

Shaw would have made a good businessman. That is necessary for an artist to succeed. It is all very well to make a career of wearing your hair long and striking romantic poses, but when a writer begins to believe the illusion which has made him famous it is the beginning of the end. Wilde wrote in the preface to his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey:

...there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

He also wrote in his preface, "all art is quite useless." Had he then begun to believe the fictions he created? It is arguable. At any rate he seemed to think he could throw off the conventions as easily in life as he did in his art. And Dorian Grey was presented as evidence against him at his trial.

It is unnecessary to this article to dwell on the ignominies Wilde suffered in the three court trials. His two years at Wandsworth Prison and Reading Gaol were full of humiliation and suffering, both of the mind and body. He was sustained both then and in the three years after his release by visits and letters from his few devoted friends, one of whom was Rothenstein, another Max Beerbohm; also by what Shaw called "an unconquerable gaiety of soul". After his release he went to France (where he settled as "Sebastian Melmoth") and never returned to Britain.

One last story, of his prison days, I must recount. It is told by Rothenstein, who met him in France in 1897.

He told how, although talking was strictly forbidden, one of his warders would exchange a remark with him now and then. He had a great respect for Oscar as a literary man...

"Excuse me, sir; but Charles Dickens, sir, would he be considered a great writer now, sir?" To which Oscar replied: "Oh yes; a great writer, indeed; you see he is no longer alive." "Yes, I understand, sir. Being dead he would be a great writer, sir."

Another time he asked about John Strange Winter [actually Mrs. Henrietta Stannard]. "Would you tell me what you think of him, sir?" "A charming person," says Oscar, "but a lady, you know, not a man. Not a great stylist, perhaps, but a good, simple storyteller." "Thank you, sir, I did not know he was a lady, sir."

And a third time: "Excuse me, sir, but Marie Corelli [who was Queen Victoria's favourite novelist and wrote unutterable pap], would she be considered a great writer, sir?"

"This was more than I could bear," continued Oscar, "and putting my hand on his shoulder I said: 'Now don't think I have anything against her moral character, but from the way she writes she ought to be here."'

Unconquerable gaiety of soul indeed!

* * *

I said that Wilde's few successes are timeless. It seems there are two ways in which a writer can produce timeless work. One is to be a fabulist like Hans Andersen, or Tolkien, or Wilde himself. The other is, like Shaw or Wells - or Shakespeare - to write relevantly and unforgettably of one's own period. Wilde never did succeed with the second alternative. His was an undergraduate wit, abetted by an undergraduate temperament and an undergraduate sensibility. He was naughty, and when no guardian appeared to bail him out of the consequences of his naughtiness he had a chance to grow up.

In "Reading Gaol" he exhibits some symptoms of maturity:

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
And later,
I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.

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