Two Oscars
IT is surely time that Oscar Wilde ceased to be treated either as a pathological specimen or as a noble (if heretical) martyr, a kind of modern Albigensian. What is really needed, at this date, is a severely critical approach to Wilde as a literary artist. Has he any claim to greatness, or was he merely a minor writer whose reputa- tion has been inflated by his personal legend ?
Neither of the two books under review supplies a satisfactory answer to these questions. The Gide volume consists merely of
short pieces reprinted from the Mercure de France, together with relevant extracts from Si le Grain ne Meurt and the Journals. Since the two latter works were already available in English translations, their reappearance in this form seems superfluous - but Gide him- self, it seems, expressed a. desire that they should be included with the earlier fragments. To Gide, for more reasons than one, Wilde was chiefly of interest as a human being, and in the Mercure de France essay (written in 1901) he firmly states his conviction that the friend to whom, personally, he owed so much was " not a great writer." At the time of Wilde's trials various attempts were made, says Gide, to " exonerate the man " by " praising the writer "- attempts doomed to failure, for it was the man, Gide here main- tains (and continued throughout his life to maintain), who was admirable: a great vivetir in the widest sense, who put his genius —as he hintself said—into his life.
Can one, then, after all, separate the man from the artist ? One had hoped that Mr. Ervine, himself a successful playwright, would at least attempt a final assessment of Wilde's work in the form at which he chiefly excelled—a hope which was encouraged by the publisher's blurb, in which it is announced that Mi. Ervine " sets out to judge Wilde, not as a subject for pity of reproach, but as a writer and especially as a dramatist." This statement is, in fact, flatly untrue ; far from being an objective study of Wilde the dramatist, Mr. Ervine's book. is the most sustained and belligerent diatribe against Wilde, the man, that I have yet read, rivalling, in some of its more bombastic passages, the epistolary frenzies of the " Scarlet Marquess " himself. It seems extraordinary that poor Wilde, half a century after his death, should still be capable of provoking such hysterical fury. Mr. Esvine misses no opportunity for a cheap gibe, not only against Oscar himself, but- against his friends and even against his parents. All the old clichés of vilification abound- " nauseating twaddle," " criminally culpable," &c., &c.—and Wilde is presented not only as a monster of unbelievable degeneracy, but as ungenerous, boorish and mean-spirited into the bargain.
Now, whatever one may think of Wilde, there is abundant evidence to show that he was never Tacking in generosity ; and even his worst detractors have commented upon his kindness and his personal charm. , Such an attitude in a biographet can only, I think, argue some deep, perhaps personal, grudge on the writer's part; and it is surely rather late in the day to give vent to such uncontrolled ran- cour. According lo Mr. Ervine, Robert Ross was the villain of the piece (he refers to him throughout, with a rather cheap malice, as " Mr. Robert Baldwin Ross ") ; but here again his attitude is suspect, for it is surely a matter of history that Ross remained a loyal friend to. Wilde up to the day of his death—and indeed after it. Often, too, Mr. Ervine is misinformed in detail. It is incorrect, for instance, to say that ,tke disease which Wilde is supposec(to have contracted at Oxford Mistitutes any sort of " proof ' that he was not, at that time, homosexual ; any doctor could adduce evidence to the contrary.
As for Wilde the writer, Mr. Ervine allows a certain merit to a few of the essays and short stories. Of the plays he considers The Importance of Being Earnest the only one of lasting merit—and few will disagree with him on this point. His praise, however, is tempered by so obvious a hatred of Wilde himself, and is expressed in so grudging and ponderous a manner, that one is reminded of some Evangelical Bishop who has been persuaded into saying a good word or two for the less exceptionable passages of Petronius Arbiter. These critical sections, moreover, are constantly interrupted by a series of irrelevant divagations. Thus, Mr. Ervine will break off from his account of Wilde's masterpiece to trounce Henry James, whose work, we are told, is admired " by young men with lank hair and damp hands, and young women with lanker hair and damper hands "—a statement which inspires little faith in Mr. Ervine's critical judgement. Finally, Mr. Ervine goes to considerable lengths to show that Wilde, as a playwright, was not so good as Congreve or Sheridan, and that his verse was infepior to that of Milton and Wordsworth—facts which are surely self-evident, and which, con- sidered as critical weapons, suggest the assault upon some harmless butterfly of a bulldozer or a Churchill tank.
The book lacks both index and bibliography. JOCELYN BROOKE.
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