ENDNOTES

1 (p. 5) Macpherson, Ireland, and Chatterton: In the Pre-Romantic period James Macpherson (1736—1796), William Ireland (1777—1835), and Thomas Chatterton (1752—1770) created the “forged” poetical works of actual poets like Shakespeare (Ireland), imaginary figures like the Celtic bard Ossian (Macpherson), and the medieval song-writer Rowley (Chatterton). These pretended original works were all significant for Romantic poetry, not least because they cast doubt on the dubious belief that humans can “own ideas” which in turn become their intellectual property, and hence possible unwitting causes of their own forgery. The authors named all belong to, or pretend to belong to, a period when most poetry was oral and aural and traditional in its spirit and its production. Wilde notes them in order to raise subtle questions about authentication which arise when we speak of any author’s “original” works—that is, when we try to fix the sense in which an invented imaginary work is held to be “true” or “truthful” in its fictive dreams. Here, as elsewhere, Wilde inherits the romantic view of art.

2 (p.12) any publisher of the time: Throughout the ensuing passage Wilde suggests several historical barriers against learning or fixing the identity of persons known by mere initials, such as “Mr. W. H.,” chiefly because modern historians lack the social details of an early period. By mentioning actual persons like Lord Buckhurst, Fitton, Vernon, Hathaway, Willobie, Drayton, Davies, and others, the “Portrait” changes the direction of its narrative—away from the notorious literary puzzle of “Mr. W. H.,” a famous bibliographic publishing riddle, toward another mystery, one that really interests Wilde. This central enigma is the Platonic question of inspiration, since Wilde’s imagined Willie Hewes, whose portrait may or not be authentic, becomes a magically inspiring presence both for Shakespeare and for its discoverer, Cyril Graham. Finally all parties to the narrative begin to share in a metaphysical question, raised often by Shakespeare himself, whether we humans are not in fact living a dream existence. If so, then history itself is a fiction. The known poets Michael Drayton and Sir John Davies then become “unreal,” though we can “verify” their existence in the Dictionary of National Biography.

3 (p.46) Robin Armin: As he does throughout the “portrait,” Wilde here builds a composite picture gallery of linked names in which the aim is not so much to show particular cases as to convey the general probability that there were numerous young and beautiful boy-actors who might just as well be called “Willie Hewes.” He uses particular names to create the merest illusion of proof, to be sure, but the names of the plays and court-masques of playwrights like Ben Jonson (1472—1637) and Philip Massinger (1583—1640) conspire to suggest why connoisseurs of theater believed that women could not perform women’s roles with the same grace and power as could these adolescent male actors. Fearful Puritan attitudes rebelled against the gender-changing illusion, and Wilde in turn, like other artists, felt free to attack Puritan “uncouth morals and ignoble minds.” Sir Philip Sidney wrote his great Defence of Poesie (1579—1580) precisely to show that Puritan attacks—like those of Stephen Gosson, William Prynne, and Francis Lenton, mentioned below, when they fulminated against poetry and the stage—were expressions of aesthetic fear. Among them, Prynne suffered a cruel penalty, for in the 1630s he was pilloried and had both ears cut off. Let no one say that literature is mere verbiage.

4 (p.273) The English Renaissance: Wilde was accustomed to improvising his public lectures, which he had already practiced while lecturing in Britain, but when he arrived in New York, famously declaring his genius, he nevertheless seems to have hesitated over what to include in his first public appearance. Finally, during his first week on American shores, he wrote out a lecture on the English Renaissance and its modern significance, had the lecture typed, and delivered it to a capacity crowd in Chickering Hall on January 9, 1882. Over the course of his lecturing marathon he was to use this text many times, often shortening it to fit the occasion. Eventually he decided to add two other speeches to his repertory—“The House Beautiful” and “The Decorative Arts.” Despite massive press coverage and much obsessive public fascination with Wilde’s dandified costume and his authority in matters of fashion, the Renaissance oration remained central to his tour. According to Robert Ross, his close friend and his 1908 editor, the talk exists in at least four versions, of which the one reprinted in this edition is not the longest. Nevertheless, our reprint gives the full flavor of Wilde’s Renaissance enthusiasms and his noble, at times ironic, casually amusing, and always entertaining way of introducing and amplifying an important historical subject.

5 (p. 491) Socialism: Wilde initially presents his case for “socialism” as an antidote for the Victorian pretense of “charitable deeds,” which flatter the donor’s conscience while doing nothing substantial to remedy the causes of jobless poverty. Like certain Marxists of a later date, he suggests that such philanthropy is not only a travesty of Christian generosity but also is politically flawed by its fundamental contradictions. The essay makes a political plea for a method of truly shared wealth, for a true “common wealth.” But Wilde, as always, must be read in the terms of his theory of Art, in which we find him calling poets, philosophers, and scientists “the real men,” owing to their basic independence, their “individualism.” The reader should therefore take this essay as a brief treatise on the individual as creative being, since those real men are real because they “have realized themselves,” and in them “all Humanity gains a partial realization.” Such utopian words and thought will be seen to carry Wilde beyond political theory, as enunciated by Herbert Spencer’s “social Darwinism” or by any other extended versions of Darwinian principles. These ideas had long fascinated the poet—he had noted in his college notebooks that Darwin was a chief modern philosophical truth-bearer, to whom all serious thinkers must now pay heed. Making this philosophical case, Wilde’s Soul of Man adduces the Socratic maxim “Know Thyself,” which leads Wilde to the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, to the great English Romantic poets, and finally to the spiritual teachings of Jesus. He imagines the socialist view of a just world much as if he were what is called a “primitive” Christian, a Christian acting before St. Paul’s organization of the faith, and certainly before the later ecclesiastical ordering of Christianity as a “religion.” Critical to all such “political” discussions is their spirit, and in this vein the essay focuses on the common public fear of novelty, specifically as represented by artists, since “Art is Individualism,” while “Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.” To overcome this fear is the task of Wildean socialism, and success in this attempt will minister to the soul of man. The poet seems to be punning on one of his given names, even as he reminds his reader of real working and living conditions. The reader will therefore need to recall that Wilde had always recognized and spoken of the vicious reality and causes of poverty, especially in the Victorian city, be it Dublin or London. He recognized and knew facts of the tragic fury of Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Riots, and of riots and retributions equally evil in Britain. As a man of the world and a journalist, he had always studied the wide-ranging conditions of culture, from the bottom levels up to the top. Hence his essay may be taken as an interpretive gloss on more purely literary and artistic essays, such as “The Decay of Lying.” By linking a political theory, however loosely defined, to the spiritual life of mankind, the essay carries pragmatic thought to the highest level, reminding us that to read Wilde is to read utopian hope into the most distressing ironies of honest social perceptions. Like other utopian thinkers, Wilde expresses his hope that artistic imagination will lead us all to imagine better future conditions, equally shared by all. One senses that Wilde, at this stage of his career, is attempting to weave the aesthetic pursuit of beauty and balance into the cloth Darwin wove as the main principle of his Origin of Species: “Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.” We are to imagine that whatever Art is, it must rise to the philosophic status of a paradigm as grand as Darwinian theory itself. At the same time, this essay signals to the reader that Wilde is a strange combination of spiritual thinker and pragmatic observer. One comes away from the essay thinking that he wants himself, and us, to do good deeds in the world. If Bertrand Russell the agnostic could later argue the case for “a free man’s worship,” so Wilde in this essay argues the case for the individual artist’s worship—or, as Franz Kafka would say, he argues for writing as a form of prayer.