Aristocrats of the Intellect
IF it was not Oscar Wilde who first observed that one should choose one's parents with care, it certainly ought to have been. On the whole it may be said that he followed this advice, for neither of his parents was a nonentity, and his fither's reputation in particular has clearly been neither augmented nor decreased by the greater notoriety of the son.
It was remarked soon after the Union of 1800 that medical men occupied a more eminent place in Dublin society than they did in that of London, and that in consequence they were gayer and more conversible. It is certain that William Wilde, ophthalmic surgeon, archaeologist and topographer, was able to cut a grander figure in the Dublin of the eighteen-forties and fifties than he could have done in London. He had something of his son's talent for show- manship, and, like his son, could apply himself to solid and exacting work while appearing never to miss a social occasion of consequence. In its way, William Wilde's catalogue of the Royal Irish Academy's collection of gold objects, completed in a few weeks, is an achieve- ment comparable to the equally rapid production of The Importance of Being Earnest. Two of William Wilde's books are in print at present; two of the journals he founded still flourish; his great catalogue has never been superseded, and he left his mark on medicine.
His wife has hardly fared so well. Her poetry (as Mr. Byrne admits) is unreadable; her patriotic politics were of the familiar hysterico-dramatic brand which either dies young (as in her case) or survives to become a bore. Only the legend of her salons, at No. 1 Merrion Square and later in Park Street and Oakley Street, Chelsea, survives in reminiscences by Yeats and Bernard Shaw. Yet it is less by what they did than by what they were that the Wildes claim our attention. They were aristocrats of the intellect and the personality. They were courageous—a quality which they handed on to Oscar—and, in the best sense of the phrase, they lived by their wits.
Dramatic things were always happening to them—Gavan Duffy being prosecuted for treason because of a leader written by "Speranza" (Lady Wilde); Wilde lecturing on archaeology in the Metropolitan Hall while milling crowds outside in Abbey Street were devouring a scurrilous pamphlet by one of his discarded mistresses, who, years later, as he was dying, sat by his bedside in black, saying never a word, for day after day in the house in Merrion Square; two of his illegitimate daughters burned to death at a Christmas party in Co. Monaghan; Lady Wilde, having (as Mr. Byrne believes) forced Oscar to stand his trial, dying forlorn in Chelsea, deprived by bureaucrats of a last interview with the son she loved so much. Even Willie Wilde, Oscar's brother, married a rich American widow_ and ultimately died of drink. Only Oscar's wife Constance, a gentle creature not of dramatic mould, seems cast as a foil to the rest.
The Wildes of Merrion Square is agreeably written and on the whole well-informed, though more attention might have been given to the correct spelling of proper names such as Steevens and Mitchel. It is- not true, as implied on page 41, that Lady Wilde's was the first salon in Dublin; there was Lady Morgan's, to mention only one. It is not clear how the three million people who died in the Famine on page 21 could also have emigrated on page 54, leaving five million people behind in each case. And surely (page 76) it was from Macpherson's Ossian that Lady Wilde drew the name Fingall to go with the name Oscar from the same source. Finally, it is disconcer- ting that "Dr. Wilson" in the index turns out to be two people in the text—one a natural son of Sir William, the other his living biographer. There are no portraits, which is a pity.
MAURICE CRAM
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