The Collected Oscar Wilde (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as comments contemporaneous with the work, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the worh’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter the writings in The Collected Oscar Wilde through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.

COMMENTS

Arthur Symons

Mr. Wilde is much too brilliant to be ever believed; he is much too witty to be ever taken seriously. A passion for caprice, a whimsical Irish temperament, a love of art for art’s sake—it is in qualities such as these that we find the origin of the beautiful farce of æstheticism, the exquisite echoes of the Poems, the subtle decadence of Dorian Gray, and the paradoxical truths, the perverted common sense, of the Intentions. Mr. Wilde, with a most reasonable hatred of the bourgeois seriousness of dull people, has always taken refuge from the commonplace in irony. Intentionally or not—scarcely without intention—he has gained a reputation for frivolity which does injustice to a writer who has at least always been serious in the reality of his devotion to art. The better part of his new book [Intentions] is simply a plea for the dignity, an argument for the supremacy, of imaginative art.

W. B. Yeats

Here now is Mr. Oscar Wilde, who does not care what strange opinions he defends or what time-honoured virtue he makes laughter of, provided he does it cleverly. Many were injured by the escapades of the rakes and duellists, but no man is likely to be the worse for Mr. Wilde’s shower of paradox. We are not likely to poison any one because he writes with appreciation of Wainwright—art critic and poisoner—nor have I heard that there has been any increased mortality among deans because the good young hero of his last book tries to blow up one with an infernal machine; but upon the other hand we are likely enough to gain something of brightness and refinement from the deft and witty pages in which he sets forth these matters.

“Beer, bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made England what she is,” wrote Mr. Wilde once; and a part of the Nemesis that has fallen upon her is a complete inability to understand anything he says. We should not find him so unintelligible—for much about him is Irish of the Irish. I see in his life and works an extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity. “I labour under a perpetual fear of not being misunderstood,” he wrote, a short time since, and from behind this barrier of misunderstanding he peppers John Bull with his pea-shooter of wit, content to know there are some few who laugh with him.

Max Beerbohm

Except Ruskin in his prime, no modern writer has achieved through prose the limpid and lyrical effects that were achieved by Oscar Wilde. One does not seem to be reading a written thing. The words sing. There is nothing of that formality, that hard and cunning precision, which marks so much of the prose that we admire, and rightly admire. The meaning is artificial, but the expression is always magically natural and beautiful. The simple words seem to grow together like wild flowers. In his use of rhyme and metre, Oscar Wilde was academic—never at all decadent, by the way, as one critic has suggested. But the prose of the Intentions, and of his plays, and of his fairy-stories, was perfect in its lively and unstudied grace.

G. K. Chesterton

Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the public. They professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois. The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes. He studied the Surbiton school-mistress with exquisite attention, and knew exactly how to shock and how to please her. Mr. Shaw often gets above her in seraphic indignation, and often below her in sterile and materialistic explanations. He disgusts her with new truths or he bores her with old truths; but they are always living truths to Bernard Shaw. Wilde knew how to say the precise thing which, whether true or false, is irresistible. As, for example, ‘I can resist anything but temptation.’

But he sometimes sank lower, sank into the lowest gorges and chasms of Surbiton. One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization. This is what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan—among other things. He descended below himself to be on top of others. He became purposely stupider than Oscar Wilde that he might seem cleverer than the nearest curate. He lowered himself to superiority; he stooped to conquer.

One might easily take examples of the phrase meant to lightly touch the truth and the phrase meant only to bluff the bourgeoisie. For instance, in A Woman of No Importance, he makes his chief philosopher say that all thought is immoral, being essentially destructive; ‘Nothing survives being thought of.’ That is nonsense, but nonsense of the nobler sort; there is an idea in it. It is, like most professedly modern ideas, a death-dealing idea not a life-giving one; but it is an idea. There is truly a sense in which all definition is deletion. Turn a few pages of the same play and you will find somebody asking, ‘What is an immoral woman?’ The philosopher answers, ‘The kind of woman a man never gets tired of.’ Now that is not nonsense, but rather rubbish. It is without value of any sort or kind. It is not symbolically true; it is not fantastically true; it is not true at all.

Anyone with the mildest knowledge of the world knows that nobody can be such a consuming bore as a certain kind of immoral woman. That vice never tires men, might be a tenable and entertaining lie; that the individual instrument of vice never tires them is not, even as a lie, tenable enough to be entertaining. Here the great wit was playing the cheap dandy to the incredibly innocent; as much as if he had put on paper cuffs and collars. He is simply shocking a tame curate; and he must be rather a specially tame curate even to be shocked. This irritating duplication of real brilliancy with snobbish bluff runs through all his three comedies. ‘Life is much too important to be taken seriously’; that is the true humorist. ‘Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable’; that is said by a fine philosopher. ‘Nothing is so fatal to a personality as the keeping of promises, unless it be telling the truth’; that is said by a tried quack. ‘A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her’; that is wild truth. ‘Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical’; that is tame trash.

James Joyce

And here is the pulse of Wilde’s art—sin. He deceived himself into believing that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people. His own characteristic qualities, the qualities, perhaps, of his race—wit, generosity, and a sexless intellect—he placed at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the Golden Age and the joy of the world’s youth. But if some truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms and not by syllogisms, to his assimilations of other natures, alien to his own, as the delinquent is to the humble, it is the inherent truth in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot arrive at the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.

Richard Le Galienne

Arthur Ransome

Wilde preserved, even in those of his writings that cost him most dearly, a feeling of recreation. His books are those of a wonderfully gifted and accomplished man who is an author only in his moments of leisure. Only one comparison is possible, and that is with Horace Walpole; but Wilde’s was infinitely the richer intellect. Walpole is weighted by his distinction. Wilde wears his like a flower. Walpole is without breadth, or depth, and equals only as a gossip Wilde’s enchanting freedom as a juggler with ideas. Wilde was indolent and knew it. Indolence was, perhaps, the only sin that stared him in the face as he lay dying, for it was the only one that he had committed with a bad conscience. It had lessened his achievement, and left its marks on what he had done. Even in his best work he is sometimes ready to secure an effect too easily. “Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning,” may be regarded as an example of such effects. Much of his work fails; much of it has faded, but Intentions, The Sphinx, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Salomé, The Importance of Being Earnest, one or two of the fairy tales, and De Profundis, are surely enough with which to challenge the attention of posterity.

These things were the toys of a critical spirit, of a critic as artist, of a critic who took up first one and then another form of art, and played with it almost idly, one and then another form of thought, and gave it wings for the pleasure of seeing it in the light; of a man of action with the eyes of a child; of a man of contemplation curious of all the secrets of life, not only of those that serve an end; of a virtuoso with a distaste for the obvious and a delight in disguising subtlety behind a mask of the very obvious that he disliked. His love for the delicate and the rare brought him into the power of things that are vulgar and coarse. His attempt to weave his life as a tapestry clothed him in a soiled and unbeautiful reality. Even this he was able to subdue. Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. He touched nothing that he did not decorate. He touched nothing that he did not turn into a decoration.

Edward Shanks

[Wilde] was not an originator, he was, much as he would have disliked the designation, a populariser. He summarised in his work what was then called fin de siècle art, and made it easy for the great public to understand. Almost every aspect of the movement was there. The sensualism of Baudelaire and his hinting at strange vices, Gautier’s disinterested immoral adoration of things, hard, bright, and sharp-edged, Verlaine’s religiosity—all these with dashes of Satanism and cruelty and just so much of the doctrines of Ruskin and Morris as could be made to fit in with the rest without too startling an incongruity. One might almost say that Wilde was not so much a writer as a museum.

QUESTIONS

1. Wilde established himself as an arbiter of style, and above all he reproached mediocrity—“the English public always feels perfectly at ease when a mediocrity is talking to it”—yet we might ask how a democratic society can rise above such mediocrity and still remain democratic. Was Wilde an elitist? Is art necessarily elitist, like professional sports?

2. The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats tells us that for Wilde there was a direct line between boredom—including boring behavior and lack of imagination—and “the seven deadly virtues.” Is it possible that Wilde wanted to reveal that virtue, as commonly understood, is only a hypocritical veil thrown over the dishonest or shameful things we humans actually do?

3. According to Beerbohm, Wilde mostly wrote his poems in an academic and conventional style. The Ballad of Reading Gaol adopts traditional ballad meter, somewhat like S. T. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Can one make the case that the terrifying story of an execution in Wilde’s Ballad required the poet to neutralize our fear by using ancient rhymes and rhythms?

4. While G. K. Chesterton praises much of Wilde’s epigrammatic wit, he also attacks him for playing down to audiences, thus demeaning his gift. But is it fair to ask an entertainer, who writes for a living, to deny the groundlings their unsophisticated pleasures? Is there a hypocritical vein in Wilde’s wit?

5. If we follow Richard le Galienne, we may think that a poet’s work is the direct mirror of his life. Is this a useful biographical approach for reading Wilde? How would this relate to Wilde’s Irish heritage?

6. “The Decay of Lying” is about the decay of truth-telling in Victorian times. If to be a hypocrite is a full-time job, is it possible that Wilde’s satire throughout his plays and criticism is intended less to expose personal errors of judgment than to expose the cynical exploitation of unchallenged political, economic, and religious power?