A sense of direction
COLIN WILSON
On 5 January 1895 Henry James's play Guy Domville opened in London. The author, too nervous to sit through it, went instead to see Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. It was, he wrote to his brother William, `so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, feeble and vulgar' that he was suddenly struck by a presen- timent that his own play was bound to flop. And it did. It ran for less than a month, and was replaced by The Importance of Being Earnest by 'the triumphant Oscar'.
Three-quarters of a century later, Wilde can still provoke growls of contempt. I recall that when St John Ervine wrote a book about him a few years back, one reviewer remarked that it was so much more brilliant than anything Wilde ever wrote that Wilde's works could now be allowed to go out of print. The judgment was bad-tempered but understandable. Wilde set out to irritate, as a way of getting himself noticed, and any good book about him makes him as irrita-1 ting as ever.
This 'Critical Heritage' volume* on Wildel--one of a series—suddenly makes it all much more understandable. It is a selec- tion of original reviews and articles about him, running from 1881 (when Wilde was twenty-seven) to twenty years after his death. It makes it clear why he was so widely disliked, and why the crowds outside the court cheered at the news of his con- viction.
Wilde's contemporaries called him a poseur, but what they really meant was a' publicity-seeker. Swinburne made people in- dignant; Whistler made people angry; the Pre-Raphaelites made people sneer. But they were all regarded as sincere in their own way. Wilde gave the impression that his chief desire was to become famous and successful on any terms. His method of attracting attention involved an element of calculated risk, like poking a tiger with a pointed stick: When his success proved that the technique worked, everybody felt that it was unfair that he should get away with it. Hence the chorus of 'serve him rights' when he went too far and landed in jail.
Nowadays, we can afford to be more tolerant. Not only because Wilde's downfall was 'tragic', but because we are boringly familiar with people who achieve fame and success by courting controversy. After Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Aleister Crowley and Salvador Dali used the same methods. And since television anybody can do it. It is true that there are plenty of people who can't stand Malcolm Muggeridge, and who feel that David Frost is the non-event of the cen- tury; but they don't feel that there is much anybody can do about it. What makes the present book so interesting is the realisation that Wilde's contemporaries saw him as a kind of David Frost figure; a man of no *Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage edited by Karl Beckson (Routledge £5) particular talent but a highly developed pushiness. Ambrose Bierce heard Wilde lec- ture in San Francisco, and rose to magnificent heights of articulate loathing : `That sovereign of insufferables, Oscar Wilde, has ensued with his opulence of twad- dle and penury of sense. He has mounted his hind legs and blown crass vapidities through the bowel of his neck ... His lecture is mere verbal ditch-water . . . It lacks even the nastiness that exalts and refines his verse ...' and so on for five hundred Words. It becomes possible to sympathise with Henry James's somewhat uncharitable estimate of what is, after all, by no means a bad play. Wilde has most un-taking manners.
The real mistake about this view of Wilde as a poseur—quite apart from his real gifts as a writer and a wit—is that it ignores what he saw as his most serious quality: the 'aesthetic idealism' that endowed him with a kind of asceticism. Wilde grew up at the tail end of the romantic era, progressing from imitating Byron to imitating Swinburne, Gautier and Pater. All these late romantics had in common a credo of world-rejection; Axel's 'As for living, our servants can do that for us .. : Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Yeats, John Gray, James Thomson, had almost nothing in common except that credo. The wrong of unsightly things is a wrong too great to be told', wrote Yeats. Wilde left Oxford prepared to do bat- tle for this Swinburnian credo. If he had possessed a private income, he might have spent his life trying to live up to Marius the Epicurean. But he was poor, brilliant, energetic and lacking in self-pity. This meant that his credo had to be turned to account as a means of gaining attention—a paradox, perhaps, but not a contradiction or a sell-out. Success came slowly (he was thirty-eight when Lady Windermere's Fan made his fortune). And he never ceased to feel rather guilty at the way he had made aestheticism pay. He was perfectly serious when he told Gide: 'One must always seek out what is most tragic'. At Oxford, he had thought of the poet as the Christ-like redeemer of civilisation, and here he was, making five hundred a week. It worried him; he had to keep on finding new ways of assuring himself he wasn't 'one of them', the philistines. I suspect this explains why he became a homosexual relatively late in life: the masochistic desire to join a minority group and risk everything. So long as the philistines hated him, it wasn't too bad; but in this book, one can see a gradual warming of the tone. The British can come to terms with anything so long as they can put a label on it. And a man who makes people laugh must be a decent, solid sort of chap un- derneath . . . Wilde became overwrought; everything he did turned out right. The tragic receded. Does this explain why he ignored the excellent advice of Shaw and Frank Harris about suing the Marquis of Queensberry, and later about escaping to the continent?
Perhaps the real tragedy of Wilde is that the catastrophe, instead' of purging him and restoring his sense of integrity, only broke his spirit. He was in his mid-forties when he died, and prison had not destroyed his health. Only the sense of direction had gone. And for Wilde, that was the real meaning of damnation.
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