Compton Mackenzie
0 N a Saturday afternoon in March, 1895, I came away from a matinee of Hengler's Circus to catch one of the red Hammersmith buses in Piccadilly, and on the black and orange-buff contents placard of the Pall Mall Gazette I read ' Sporting Peer and Dramatist i Result.' This must have been the second of the police-court hearings of the charge against Lord Queensberry of criminally libelling Oscar Wilde. In April I stopped on my way to school to watch a couple of bill-posters pasting strips of paper over the name of the author of The Importance of Being Earnest On six small playbills of the St. James's Theatre upon a hoarding just beyond some flats only a few years old called Glynn Mansions in Hammersmith Road. I am glad to remember that I was able to feel shocked by what I felt was an ignominious gesture, for in April, 1895, educated opinion had surrendered to the emotion of the mob. That a schoolboy Of twelve could feel degraded by the behaviour of his elders was of good omen for the future, for I do not believe that any schoolboy of twelve today could be placed in a position to be shocked by the spectacle of one man being hounded by the public and the Press as Oscar Wilde was hounded. Yet even as I write these words 1 recall the unhappy Maud Allan abandoned by Mr. Justice Darling to the filthy cross- examination of Pemberton Billing in a court of law to the accompaniment of applause from a mob which the Judge lacked the strength of character to suppress. That was in 1918. I recall more anxiously those injudicious but perfectly harmless broadcasts of Mr. P. G. Wodchouse in 1941 and the zest with which so many of his fellow-authors hurried to kick him when he was down. It may be wiser not to be too confident that any man is safe against the ' common cry of curs,' should he fall by the way. The ruthlessness of which human nature is capable may be learnt from reading a recently published book* written by the survivor of the two sons of Oscar Wilde, who at the time of his father's downfall was a boy of nine. It is a dignified book completely devoid of self-pity, but the poignancy of it is acute, and anybody who had read, it and was standing among the five hundred spectators gathered to see the unveiling of the plaque affixed by the London County Council to 34 Tite Street, Chelsea, in commemoration of the fact that ' Oscar Wilde, Wit and Dramatist' once lived there must have felt a profound sense of relief that Mr. Vyvyan Holland could bring his little son to see his grandfather's position as a writer formally recognised. It was thanks in the first place to the devoted Persuasiveness of Mrs. Irene Barton, the honorary secretary of the Wilde Centenary Committee, that the London County Council decided to honour the memory of an Irishman of genius who had written the best English comedy since another Irishman wrote The School for Scandal. That intelligent civic gesture was rewarded by a representative gathering of distinguished men and women under the ashen and sombre sky of that October morning.
Hayward, was indeed heartening to see Mr. T. S. Eliot and Mr. John klayward, Mr. Augustus John, Mr. Sacheverell Sitwell. Dame Edith Evans, the Irish Ambassador, the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, the Vice-President of Magdalen College, Oxford, and many other outstanding figures of literature, paint- ing. drama, scholarship and diplomacy, but it was perhaps even nlore heartening to listen to the admirable speech of Mr. Guy Edmiston, the Mayor of Chelsea, and to realise that the achieve- Ment of Oscar Wilde was at last a recognised fact outside the world of art. I looked at Merlin, the grandson of the man Whose centenary we were celebrating, himself on the edge of nine, the age when his father had been hurried away to Switzerland, leaving behind in what was then 16 Tite Street his toys and his rabbit hutch to be sold for a song at that auction of everything in the house after the bailiffs had been put into it by Wilde's creditors. This house would have for him a happier memory than for his father.
It had been hoped that Sir Max Beerbohm would unveil the plaque, but he was unable to make the journey from Italy, and sent instead this tribute : I suppose there are now few survivors among the people who had the delight of hearing Oscar Wilde talk. Of these I am one. I have had the privilege of listening also to many other masters of tabletalk—Meredith and Swinburne, Edmund Gosse and Henry James, Augustine Birrell and Arthur Balfour, Gilbert Chesterton and Desmond MacCarthy and Hilaire Belloc—all of them splendid in their own way. But assuredly Oscar in his own way was the greatest of them all--the most spontaneous and yet the most polished, the most soothing and yet the most surprising. That his talk was mostly a monologue was not his own fault. His manners were very good: he was careful to give his guests or his fellow-guests many a conversational opening: but seldom did anyone respond with more than a very few words. Nobody was willing to interrupt the music of so magnificent a virtuoso. To have heard him consoled me for not having heard Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke, Lord Brougham or Sydney Smith.'
Another tribute was sent by Mr. Laurence Housman, which it was my privilege to read to the gathering on October 16, and those words from a man in his ninetieth year had a profoundly moving effect upon their audience.
I am very glad that this memorial meeting is being held for so good a purpose. Oscar Wilde was incomparably the best talker I have ever met. But he was not only the best talker, he was also the most courteous and the most charming. His unhappy fate has done the world a signal service in defeating the blind obscurantists : it has made people think. Far more people of intelligence think differently today because of him. And when he wrote his Ballad of Reading Gaol he not only gave the world a beautiful poem but a much-needed lesson in goodwill, pity, pardon, and understanding for the "down and out."' The Ballad of Reading Gaol, besides starting people to reflect on the hysteria responsible for inflicting upon Oscar Wilde a much more savage punishment than was inflicted upon him even by the savage sentence of Mr. Justice Wills, helped the public conscience to realise the brutality of prison life still enduring at the close of the nineteenth century.
For a long time there was an inclination to suppose that Wilde's literary renown was the result of his tragic downfall, and consequently his work was depreciated by austere critics. A survey now of that work, most of which was produced in' seven years, when the man who wrote those fairy tales, poems, essays, plays and stories has been dead for fifty-four years, leaves one sharply aware of vitality.
On the night that Henry James's play Guy Domville was produced at the St. James's Theatre he went to the Haymarket as a means of being coerced into quietness '; and this is what he wrote about An Ideal Husband: ' The thing seemed to me so helpless, so crude, so bad, so clumsy, feeble and vulgar, that as I walked away ... to learn my own fate, the prosperity of what I had seen seemed to me to constitute a dreadful presumption of the shipwreck of Guy Domville.' James's premonition was right; his play was howled down by the gallery and whisked away to make room for the triumphant Oscar.'
James did not see that successor to his own play which sixty years later still holds the stage in many countries: he would have despised it. It is ironical that Guy Doraville and The Importance of Being Earnest were succeeded by Henry Arthur Jones's play The Triumph of the Philistines.
Previous page
