W. B. Yeats: ‘[a] man talking with perfect
sentences, as if he had written them overnight with labour, and yet all
spontaneous’, cited in Richard Ellmann, ed., Oscar Wilde: A Collection
of Critical Essays, NY: Prentice-Hall 1969, p.9); also, ‘I have
known two or three men of philosophical intellect like Wilde and Beardsley
who spent their lives in a fantastic protest against a society they could
not remake.’ (John B. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose, 257);
also memoir of Wilde in London, in Autobiographies (Macmillan 1955,
& edns.), chiefly pp.130-36: ‘He had just renounced his velveteen
...’; Wilde said to him, ‘We Irish are too poetical to be poets;
we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers
since the Greeks’ [also cited in Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.55];
‘[He] perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite
of all that he had known in childhood and youth. He never put off completely
his wonder at opening his eyes every morning on his own beautiful house
and in remember that he had dined yesterday with a Duchess’ [q.p.];
‘I remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there,
with his beautiful wife and his two children, suggested some deliberate
artistic composition’ (p.135); ‘ the dinner-table was Wilde’s
event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays and
dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation, now
a record, of his talk’ (p.139); Also, ‘[Wilde’s personality]
was deliberately adopted and therefore a mask - it was the only escape
from the hot-faced bargainers and the money-changers.’ (Autobiographies,
p.311). Further, ‘I never before heard a man talking with perfect
sentences, as if he had written them overnight with labour and yet all
spontaneous’; ‘perpetually performed a play which was in all
things the opposite of all he had known in childhood and early youth’;
Yeats on Wilde, to Katharine Tynan, ‘The interesting thing about
him is that he is a dandy as well as a philosopher. He is naturally insignificant
in looks, but by din of elaborate training in gesture has turned himself
into quite a striking looking person’; [on being asked if Wilde was
a snob:] ‘No, I would not say that. England is a strange country
to the Irish. To Wilde the aristocrats of England were like the nobles
of Baghdad.’ (All cited in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, pp.53-56).
Note further, Walter Starkie remarked that Wilde's ‘snobbery sprang
from his Anglo-Irish characteristics and it can be explained by a remark
made by Yeats when he was asked whether Oscar Wilde was a snob. "No,
I would not say that; England is a strange country to the Irish. To Wilde
the aristocrats of England were like the nobles of Baghdad."’
(Quoted in Terence de Vere White, The Anglo-Irish, 1971, p.194;
see also Tuohy, infra.).
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Franz Blei, in Recollections of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge 1906) [co-ed. with André Gide, ‘Ernest La Jeunesse’, and Arthur Symons], remarks: ‘Wilde’s literary residue would be important enough to secure his name to posterity. But his life encountered a fate that took precedence, with its grotesque tragedy, and overshadowed it scurrilously with a blackness that, in England, was as a night of pestilence ... one must needs explain this cruelty as a mob outbreak of Saddism [sic] not to be found altogether extraordinary there, where flagellation marks the highest place of erotic culture.’ (q.p.)
Robert H. Sherrard (Oscar Wilde: The Story of An Unhappy Friendship, 1908 Edn.): ‘The story of Baudelaire’s life enthralled us even as his poetry enchanted. I owe it altogether to Oscar Wilde that I became familiar with the most wonderful verse which was written in France in the nineteenth century. And though, with ill-masked insincerity, he professed to prefer in Les Fleurs de Mal, the horrrid realisms of the Carcase, and The Murderer’s Wine, he taught me to admire, with some degree of his own enthusiasm, the organ swell of La Musique, the stately sweep of the unknown woman in deep mourning; to love also Diana in gallant equipage. The maladive interest which he showed in Baudelaire’s slow self-destruction, on which an end waited far more appaling than Gerard de Nerval's short struggle in the strangling rope, may have proceeded from his inwit of tendencies with him which might lead him to the same end. (pp.45-46; quoted in Walter A. Nelson, Oscar Wilde’s Allusions and References to Baudelaire: An Essay (Bloms I Lund Tryckeri AB 2003, p.6.)
James Joyce, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Poet of Salome’: ‘Here we touch on the pulse of Wilde’s art - sin. He deceived himself into thinking that he was the bearer of good news of neo-paganism to an enslaved people. His own distinctive qualities, the qualities, perhaps, of his race - keenness, generosity, and a sexless intellect - he placed at the service of a theory of beauty which, according to him, was to bring back the golden age and the joy of the world’s youth. But is some truth adheres to his subjective interpretations of Aristotle, to his restless thought that proceeds by sophisms rather than syllogisms, to his assimilations of nature as foreign to his [proud nature] as the delinquent is to the humble, at its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.’ (Ellmann, Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Essays, NY: Prentice Hall, 1969, p.60; Ellworth Mason and Ellmann, eds., The Critical Writings, 1964, pp.204-05; cited in part Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea, Derry: Field Day 1984, p.10, and at more length in Deane, ‘Joyce the Irishman’, Derek Attridge, ed., The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Cambridge UP 1990, p.35.) Note: since Joyce associates ‘sexual apathy’ as a defining characteristic of the English in his account of Daniel Defoe, it is likely that he means here that Wilde was English (or Anglo-Irish) rather than Irish - a stubborn resistance to the national identification with ieland that Wilde, like his mother, so much enjoyed. [BS]
James Joyce: ‘Wilde seems to have had some good intentions in writing it - some wish to put himself before the world - but the book is rather crowded with lies and epigrams. If he had had the courage to develop the allusions in the book, it might have been better. I suspect he has done this in some privately-printed books.’ (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959; 1965 Edn., p.241; Ellmann comments, ‘Wilde, like most of the authors he now read, was not tough-minded enough.’) Note also, Stephen Dedalus responds inwardly to Haines’s comment upon his own paradoxes with ‘Tame essence of Wilde’ (“Telemachus”, Chap. of Ulysses.)
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G. B. Shaw [on Wilde]: remarks that Wilde ultimately ‘drank himself into impotence as a writer’; ‘the best English-speaking talker of whom we have record in his time; and all witnesses now agree that he performed with all his old brilliancy and pleasantness to the end’; described Lady Wilde and Oscar as examples of ‘pituitary giantism’ (Pref., p.xi, xxxiii, and xlvi; Also, Shaw wrote of Wilde in his preface to John Bull’s Other Island, ‘Ireland is of all countries the most foreign to England [...] to the Irishman (and Mr. Wilde is almost as acutely Irish an Irishman as the Iron Duke of Wellington) there is nothing in the world quite so exquisitely comic as an Englishman’s seriousness.’ (Cited in Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, Kegan Paul 1970, p.177.) Also, ‘Ireland is of all countries the most foreign to England and to an Irishman (and Mr Wilde is almost as acutely an Irishman as the Iron Duke of Wellington) there is nothing in the world as exquisitely comic as an Englishman’s seriousness.’ (Shaw, 1895; cited in Thomas Kilroy, ‘Anglo-Irish Playwrights and Comic Tradition’, in The Crane Bag, 3 (1979), pp.19-27; rep. in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies, 1982, pp.439-47, p.439.)
G. B. Shaw blamed Bosie [Lord Alfred Douglas] for encouraging Wilde to defend himself in court on the second occasion; further, ‘Society praised him for being idle and then persecuted him savagely for an aberration it would have been better to have left unadvertised, thereby making a hero of him, for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly. If the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per cent of its devotees.’ (Harris, [1931], p.341; quoted in Eibhear Walshe, ‘Wilde’s Salome and Shaw’s Saint Joan’, in Irish University Review, Summer 1997, p.27.) Note: Yeats entertained a like idea for a story about Jesus, communicated in a letter to Katharine Tynan; and that George Moore made it the subject of his novel The Brook Kerith. Further, when Wilde sent Shaw a copy of De Profundis, the latter wrote, ‘We all dreaded to read it. However, Wilde, like Richard III and Shakespeare, found in himself no pity for himself.’ [Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde, [NY 1930] Dorset 1989, p.342; quoted in Walshe, op. cit., 1997, p.26.). Also, Shaw wrote: ‘Though by culture Wilde was a citizen of all civilised capitals, he was at root a very Irish Irishman, and as such a foreigner everywhere but in Ireland’. (Cited in H. M. Hyde, Oscar Wilde, p.37; cited by Selina Mooney, UUC MA Diss., 1999.)
G. B. Shaw [on The Importance of Being Oscar]: ‘I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me of course; but unless a comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening.’ (See K. Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1970, p.195; cited in Raymond Mullen, UG Essay, UUC 2004.) Further, Shaw characterisedEarnest as ‘his [Oscar Wilde’s] first really heartless play’. (‘Memories of Oscar Wilde by George Bernard Shaw’ in Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, NY 1920.)
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Travers Humphreys [Sir], A Book of Trials (London: Heinemann 1953), 243pp., incl. ‘Oscar Wilde’, pp.33-43: the author’s first trial was the Queensberry trial; ‘plea for justification’; homosexual section was No. XI in the Act; on Wilde’s caricature by W. S. Gilbert:‘he was so constituted that he would rather be made to look ridiculous than be ignored’ (p.36); St. John Ervine wrote of Queensberry:‘A more unholy scoundrel never defiled the earth by his presence on it. The Marquis of Queensberry was either the embodiment of evil who should have been destroyed, or an incurable lunatic who should have been certified and secluded’ (here p.36); Wilde’s riposte to Carson about the former newspaper boy - ‘That is the first I have heard of his connection with literature’ - drew no laughter; Sir Edward Clarke represented Wilde in the Queensberry trial; Charles Gill prosecuted in the first Wilde trial, where Wilde offered ‘a fine outburst in defence of male affection’, resulting in a split jury; sentences 25th May 1895].
Travers Humphreys, Famous and Infamous Trials ( Heinemann 1950): ‘The Trial of Oscar Wilde’, pp.236-44. ‘Wilde had no one to blame but himself; that vanity and exhibitionism which are said to be the peculiarity of those whose moral code is the same as his had led him to adopt a course which could only end in his utter [240] degradation.’ Humphreys adverts to the fatal exchange with Carson that ‘sent Wilde crashing from his pedestal’: Carson: ‘Did you kiss that boy?’ Wilde: ‘Oh no. He was a peculiarly ugly boy’ Carson: ‘[...] is that the reason why you did not kiss him?’ (p.243). Humphreys quotes Wilde: ‘If the charges were true they would be filthy and loathesome’ and remarks that men who live ‘a life of filthy beastliness are not fit to be accepted as a friend’ [... &c.].
St John Ervine, Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal (London: Allen & Unwin 1951), ‘... despite his brief abasement in De Profundis, [Wilde] seems never to have known that he was, directly in his argument about art for art’s sake, and indirectly in his downfall [...] and any hope he might have had of spreading his belief was destroyed when after his release from Reading, he reverted to his sewer life in Paris.’ (p.333.). See remarks on Marquis of Queensberry, under Travers Humphreys, supra.
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Willie Wilde, letter to Bram Stoker written at the time of Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency: ‘Bram, my friend, poor Oscar is not as bad a people thought him. He was led astray by his Vanity - &c. conceit, & he was so “got at” that he was weak enough to be guilty - of indiscretions and follies - that is all [...] I believe this thing will help to purify him body and soul. Am sure you & Florence must have felt the disgrace of one who cared for you both sincerely.’ (Quoted in Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1996, p.245-46).
Allardyce Nicoll, 19th c. Drama [ q.d., &c.]: ‘Wilde takes a delight in choosing a theme which may be likely to interest contemporary audiences, but in the moral implications of the theme has simply no interest [...] the value of [the play] does not rests in its story but in its dialogue [...] finely polished, his prose has a metallic ring lacking in the less refined accents of Jones and Pinero [...] Wilde carries us into the realm once dominated by Etherege when gentlemen conversed in epigram and gaily tossed similes to one another in some spiritual battledore and shuttlecock. This style reaches its finest expression in Earnest. No inharmonious thoughts of life and morality intrude here, for the plot is given the same filigree grace as the language itself. Shot through with the best flowers of Wildian epigram, it maintains easily its settled plan and style. [...] This is perhaps the only comedy written by Wilde wherein he achieves complete harmony in aim and achievement.’ (p.190ff.)
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H. G. Wells, reviewing Earnest on the first night, wrote: ‘It is all very funny, and Mr Oscar Wilde has [decorated] a humour that is Gilbertian with its innumerable spangles of wit that is all his own. We must congratulate him unreservedly on a delightful revival of theatrical satire.’ (See Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson, 1970.)
Lionel Trilling: ‘Wilde saw [that] Victorian men demand that their women epitomise those virtues of softness, domesticity and fidelity which a harsh business ethic had led them to suppress in themselves. In The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde showed that such an antithesis quite simply does not work. As often as not, it is the women in the play who are businesslike in making cynical economic calculations about a proposal of marriage, while the men remains steadfastly impractical.’ (Sincerity and Authenticity, [q.d.] p.118-22; cited in Selina Mooney, UUC MA Diss., 1999).
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Rupert Croft Crooke, quoting letter from Douglas to his mother: ‘Unless you understand that Oscar was an Irishman through and through, you will never get an idea of what his real nature is.’ (Bosie: The Story of Lord Alfred Douglas, 1963, p.93; cited in Selina Mooney, UUC MA Diss., 1999.)
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Harmondsworth: Penguin Edn. 1988): ‘Wilde now allowed for a “higher ethics” in which artistic freedom and full expression of personality were possible, along with a curious brand of individualistic sympathy or narcissistic socialism [...] To these he added another feature of aestheticism, the invasion of forbidden areas of thought and behaviour.’ (p.288.) [On the fin de siècle:] ‘The various labels that have been applied to the age - Aestheticism, Decadence, the Beardsley Period - ought not to conceal the fact that our first association with it is Wilde, refulgent, majestic, ready to fall.’ (ed., Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1969, p.1.) ‘The Importance of Being Earnest constructs its wonderful parapet over the abyss of the author's disquietude and apprehension. By a desperate stratagem Wilde keeps the melancholy of the world at a distance. Deception is everywhere, cancelled by spontaneity and humour. Erotic passions compete with family ambition, innocence longs for experience, and experience longs for innocence. Tears are taboo. Wilde masked his cares with the play’s insouciance, by a miracle of control. A friend said it should be like a piece of mosaic, “No”, Wilde said, “it must go like a pistol shot.”’ (All quoted by Raymond Mullen, UG Essay, UUC 2003.)
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Ian Scott-Kilvert, ed., British Writers [for British Council], Vol. V (NY: Scribners 1982), Lady Windermere’s Fan, a blackmailing divorcee driven to self-sacrifice by maternal love; The Ideal Husband, the most strongly plotted of her earlier works, deals with political corruption, public and private honour, blackmail, repentance, and forgiveness; The Importance of Being Earnest, slender but deftly worked plot concerns two fashionable young gentlemen, John Worthing (Jack) and Algernon Moncrieff, and their eventually successful courtship of Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew, with Gwendolen’s mother Lady Bracknell, Miss Prism, and Canon Chasuble.
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W. B. Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984): quotes: ‘“I got my love for the Greek ideal and my knowledge of the language at Trinity from Mahaffy and [R. Y.] Tyrrell”; Wilde helped Mahaffy with his Social Life in Greece from Homer to Meander (1874) and was thanked in the introduction for “having made improvements and corrections all through the book”; Mahaffy corrected his aesthetic divagation towards Catholicism, catching up with Wilde on a journey to Rome, apparently funded by Jesuits, and deflecting him to Greece. Stanford discusses the struggle of Christian and Hellenic sentiment in Wilde’s poetry. His neo-Hellenism is vividly presented in longer poems such as The Garden of Eros, The New Helen [here it is a Trojan dame instead of the Blessed Virgin who is ‘not born as common women are’, in a poem deliberately placed at the end of his Rosa Mystica to emphasise his rejection of Christian mysticism], The Burden of Itys, Carmides, Panthea, and The Sphinx. Others, include Humanitad. In The Decay of the Art of Lying (1891), he paradoxically argues that the reality which underlay the Greek ideal was just as ordinary as contemporaries, ‘Do you believe that the Athenian women were like the stately figures of the Parthenon frieze, or like the marvellous goddess who sat in the triangular pediments of the same building [....] You will find that the Athenian ladies laced tightly, wore high-heeled shoes, dyed their hair yellow, painted and rouged their faces, and were exactly like any silly fashionable or fallen creature of their own day.’ Wilde scathingly reviewed Mahaffy’s Greek Life and Thought (1877), charging the author with ‘bias, provincialism, and lack of ‘reasonableness, moderation, style and charm.’ (Stanford, pp.238-39). Bibl., V[yvyan] Holland (London 1954); H. Pearson (London 1946), and Brazol (NY 1938); also A. Ojala, ‘Aestheticism and Oscar Wilde’, Annales Academiae Scientiae Fennicae (Helsinki), B 90, 2 and 93, 2 (1954 and 1955); B. Fehr, Studien zu Oscar Wilde’s Gedichten (Berlin 1918); for classical references, see Richard Ellmann, The Artist as Critic (NY 1968) [notes, 245].
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Seamus Deane, Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea [Field Day Pamphlet, No. 4] (Derry: Field Day 1984), ‘Shaw and Wilde denied the subversive force of their proto-socialism by expressing it as cosmopolitan wit, the recourse of the social or intellectual dandy who makes [8] such a fetish of taking nothing seriously that he ceases to be taken seriously himself.’ (p.8-9.)
Declan Kiberd, Anglo-Irish Attitudes [Field Day Pamphlets, No. 6] (Derry: Field Day 1984), ‘Wilde’s is an art of inversion where each side exemplifies qualities which we would normally expect in its opposite, as every dichotomy dichotomises. …The inversion of expectations of the audience may also be found in the play’s [Importance] depiction of sexuality. So it is the women who read heavy works of German philosophy and attend university courses, while the men lounge elegantly on sofas. The men are filled with romantic impetuosity and breathless surges of emotion, but it is the women who cynically discuss the finer points of male physique [...] In all these scenes Wilde is applying this doctrine of the androgyny of the healthy personality. […]/Antithesis was the master key of the entire Victorian cast of mind … Wilde saw that by this mechanism the English male could attribute to the Irish all those traits of poetry, emotion and soft charms which a stern Victorian code [7] had forced him to deny to himself[,] but he knew from experience that the two peoples are a lot more alike than they care to admit - that the Irish can as often be cold, polite, and calculating as the English can be sentimental, emotional and violent. [...] Wilde is interested in the moment of modernism when the ancient antithesis dissolves to reveal an underlying unity. Like Yeats, he could see that talent perceives differences, but only genius perceives unity. / This same inversion of conventional expectations would explain the pose adopted by Wilde in England. All the norms of his childhood were now to be reversed. (pp.7-8.) […] Wilde is one of the first modernist writers to take for subject not the knowledge of good and evil, but what Lionel Trilling was later to call the knowledge of good-and-evil. he insists that men and women know themselves in all their aspects and that they cease to suppress those attributes which they may find painful or unflattering.’ (p.9.)
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Declan Kiberd, ‘Irish Literature and Irish History’, in Roy Foster, ed. Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (1989), incls. remarks: ‘the career of Oscar Wilde in late Victorian London was, in every respect, an inversion and critique of all these [stage-Irish] stereotypes. According to the bemused Yeats, Wilde there ‘perpetually performed a play which was the opposite of all that he had known in childhood and youth.’ [...] the father had been an unkempt Irishman, so the son became a fastidious, urbane Englishman. From his mother Oscar Wilde had inherited a gigantic and ungainly body, which recalled all too painfully the gorilla-like form of the Irish peasant in cartoons by Tenniel and others. To disarm such racist critics, the young dandy concealed his massive frame with costly clothes and studied the art of elegant deportment. The ease with which he effected this transition from stage Irishman to stage Englishman was his ultimate comment on the hollowness of the antithesis, on the emptiness of both notions. For Wilde sensed that antithesis was the master-key to the Victorian mind, which delighted in absolute distinctions between men and women, good and evil, English and Irish, and so on. By this mechanism, the English male could attribute to the Irish all those traits of emotion, poetry, and soft charm which a stern industrial code had forced him to deny in himself. In rejecting this manic urge to antithesis, Wilde was satirising the determinism of figures such as Marx and Carlyle, who contend that social conditioning or parental upbringing determined consciousness. The belief that the Irishman was a prisoner of heredity diet, and climate, like the conviction that woman is by nature docile, subservient, deferential, were twin attributes of Victorian determinism. This determinism is taken to its reductio ad absurdum in the account of the two girls, each of whom accepts that it is her ineluctable destiny to love a name named Earnest. The very plot of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is an example of a determinism so extreme as to render the concept idiotic and banal. [...] The flaunted effeminacy of Wilde, no less than his espous[al] of the inner world of the child in his stories, may well be a sly comment on those hidden fears [i.e., the Englishman’s unease with the child and woman in himself]. Wilde’s “few” writings on Ireland question the assumption that just because the British are industrious and rational the Irish must be lazy and illogical [...] Wilde could see that every sensitive Irishman must have a kind of secret Englishman within himself - and vice versa. He realised that the image of the stage Irishman tells us far more about English fears than Irish realities, just as the still vibrant Irish joke tells us far less about the Irishman’s foolishness than about the Englishman’s persistent and poignant desire to say something funny. In his case, Wilde opted to say that funny something for the English, in a lifelong performance of Englishness which constituted a parody of the very notion. By becoming more English than the English themselves, Wilde was able to invert, and ultimately to challenge, all the time-honoured clichés about Ireland.’ (pp.310-13.)
Declan Kiberd introduces Wilde with similar remarks in Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991, Vol. II): ‘Wilde satirised the determinism Victorians as diverse as Marx and Carlyle, who believed that upbringing and social conditional determined consciousness [...] This determinism is taken to its reductio ad absurdum in Wilde’s account of the two girls, each of whom accepts that it is her ineluctable destiny to love a man named Earnest. The very plot of of the play is an example of a determinism so extreme as to render the concept idiotic and banal.’ (FDA, vol. II, p.374.)
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Declan Kiberd, ‘Oscar Wilde: The Artist as Irishman’, in Inventing Ireland (London: Cape 1995), pp.33-50; Kiberd regards Wilde’s jilting by Florence Balcombe as a massive disappointment, whereon he vowed to leave Ireland ‘probably for good’ (Letters, Hart-Davies, 20-21.) ‘Wilde was, however, the first intellectual from Ireland who proceeded to London with the aim of dismantling its imperial mythology from within its own structures. He saw that those who wanted to invent Ireland might first have to reinvent England.’ (p.32.) ‘His famous parents were probably too busy to offer the one commodity that is signally lacking in all his pals, that continuous tenderness and intimacy which might have given him a sense of himself.’ (p.34.) ‘The ease with which Wilde effected the transition from stage Irishman to stage Englishman was his ultimate comment on the shallowness of such categories.’ (p.36.)
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Seamus Heaney, ‘Speranza in Reading: On “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”’, The Redress of Poetry [Oxford Poetry Lectures] (London: Faber & Faber 1995), pp.83-102: ‘I want[ed] to draw attention to these parallels and foreshadowings and coincidences of style and behaviour between mother and son. It’s not that there is anything new in noticing the resemblance; it’s just that, by recalling it, the provenance of the ballad is illuminated even if its stylistic faults are not extenuated. [...] Its effects are probably deemed too broad, its popularity too [102] misplaced, its status within Wilde’s oeuvre too insecure to warrant serious consideration. And yet, for all that, the poem does give credence to the idea of poetry as a mode of redress. […] The master of the light touch came to submit to the heaviness of being and came, as a result, to leave his fingerprints on a great subject.’ (p.101-02.) [Heaney explicitly acknowledges in this essay the merits and influence of Declan Kiberd’s post-colonial reading of Wilde, along with those of Terry Eagleton.] Heaney remarks that W. B. Yeats, in compiling his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, edited The Ballad of Reading Gaol down from 109 stanzas to 38, writing in his Introduction: ‘Now that I have plucked from The Ballad of Reading Gaol its foreign feathers it shows a stark realism akin to that of Thomas Hardy, the contrary to all its author deliberately sought. I plucked out even famous lines because, effective in themselves, put into the Ballad they become artificial, trivial, arbitrary; a work of art can but have one subject.’ Further, Yeats wrote, ‘I have stood in judgement upon the Ballad, bringing to light a great, or almost great poem, as he himself had done had be lived; my work gave me that privilege.’ (Heaney, op. cit., p.88.) Among the lines he culled acc. to Heaney were ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves,/By each let this be heard, / Some do it with a bitter look, / Some with a flattering word. / The coward does it with a kiss, / The brave man with a sword!’ Heaney comments that the power of this stanza ‘derives from Wilde’s sense that the condemned man is his double’ thus ‘fastening upon a figure through whom he could indulge in a vicarious exercise in self-castigation and self-pity, but Yeats was not prepared to allow this self-gratifying aspect of Wilde’s writing to absorb attention.’ (p.89); Heaney cites verses on the binding of the man for hanging (‘hangman comes with gardener’s gloves ... and binds one with three leathern thongs’), remarking that ‘for the purposes of his ballad, less would have been more.’ (p.91).
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Neil Sammells, ‘Oscar Wilde, Quite Another Thing’, in Paul Hyland & Sammells, eds., Irish Writing, Exile and Subversion (London: Macmillan 1991), pp.116-25, writes that Wilde insists on the fertile interrelation of art and nationalism in a crushing dismissal of his old friend and tutor J. P. Mahaffy whose Greek Life and Thought: From the Age of Alexander to the Roman Conquest he review in Pall Mall Gazette in 1887; Wilde admits that there is ‘no reason why Mr. Mahaffy should be called upon to express any sympathy with the aspirations of the old Greek cities for freedom and autonomy’ but is appalled by his attempts to treat the Hellenic world as ‘Tipperary writ large’, and to ‘finish the battle of Chaeronea on the plains of Mitchelstown’; condemns him for ‘an amount of political bias and literary blindness that is quite extraordinary’. Quotes further [Wilde:] ‘A careful study of the cartoons published in United Ireland has convinced him “that a ruler may be the soberest, the most conscientious, the most considerate, and yet have terrible things said of him by mere political malcontents”. In fact, since Mr. Balfour has been caricatured Greek history must be entirely rewritten! [...] With all his passion for imperialism, there is something about Mr. Mahaffy that is, if not parochial, at least provincial, and we cannot say that this book of his will add anything to his reputation either as a historian, a critic, or a man of taste.’ (Critical Writings, ed. R. Ellmann, pp.80-84).
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Terry Eagleton, Introduction to Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems, Dent, 1991), remarks: ‘Aestheticism at its most challenging is concerned not to isolate art from life but to "aestheticise" life itself - to imbue it with the rich intricate expressiveness of a work of art. To live well, in Wilde’s view, was to turn oneself into an artefact - to savour each of one’s moments with the unique intensity of a poem. Art was thus not a substitute for living, but the very model for it. In his dress, speech, deportment, in the minutiae of his daily conduct, Wilde [strove] to live with the elegance and self-completion of a great painting or a symphony - to allow each of his varied inclinations free realisation, and to shape them in provisional harmony. Such supreme freedom of self-expression was for him the very essence of morality.’ (p.xxi.)‘The Importance of Being Earnest is an intoxicatingly comic play, almost giddy with its own effervescent wit yet beautifully controlled. What prevents us from finding it too oppressively mannered is its geniality and high spirits, the deep good humour which sounds through its precious wit. Its fast-moving farcical plot presses the whole dramatic action into a kind of surrealist dimension where it is sustained by nothing but its own exhilarating momentum. The play stacks illusion upon illusion, but reveals high society to be quite as unreal as itself; it deconstructs the distinction between fact and fiction.’ (p.xxiv.) ‘If Wilde mocks, he does so with a certain genial affection, as a licensed jester rather than a sardonic scourge [...]. Their [his plays’] wit shows up the English nobility as blockheads and parasites, but belongs to the very social world it criticises.’ (p.xxv.) ‘Dorian Gray does indeed represent in Freud’s terms, the “return of the repressed” - a ghastly, uncannily powerful exposure of the dangers of the hedonistic creed, which in the heartless Dorian now takes the form of driving a young girl to suicide. [...] But Dorian Gray, guilt-ridden and tormented though it may be, is in no simple sense Wilde’s “recantation”. For one thing, its sumptuous, hothouse style colludes with the very aestheticism the book officially questions.’ (p.xviii.) ‘Dorian’s callow ideology of pleasure is something of a travesty of his creator’s own philosophy. For Wilde, self-cultivation is the absolute goal of human life, but it involves an all-round “Hellenistic” development of the personality, not just the pursuit of perverse sensations.’ (pp.xviii-ix.)
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Terry Eagleton, ‘The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde’, in The Wildean, 19 (July 2001), pp.2-9: ‘Like many an Irish emigré washed up on the shores of England, Wilde set about the business of becoming more English than the English, a project he shared with Joseph Conrad, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, V. S. Naipaul and a good many other luminaries of modern English literature. Most of which, of course, was written by Americans, Irishmen, Indians and the like. The Irish didn’t only have to supply Britain with its cattle and grain; they also had to write much of its literature for it. From Goldsmith and Sheridan to Wilde and Shaw, the London stage is dominated by these literary blow-ins and carpet-baggers, who landed on their uppers in the English metropolis with little to hawk but their wits. All of these men practised that most native of all Irish customs, getting out of the place. At once in and out of English society, they could master is conventions while at the same time turning a subversive satirical eye upon them. They could appreciate at once how farcically arbitrary such conventions were to those within them - and this tension between nature and artifice is the very stuff of comedy. Wilde [shows] the natives that he could handle their conventions even more dexterous than they could themselves, like the circus clown who cheekily nips off with the suitcase the strong man has been struggling to lift. But whether this was flattery or mockery, parody or conformity, was never easy to say, least of all perhaps for Oscar himself. Or perhaps, as he himself would say, imitation is the sincerest form of mockery. Even so, there’s always the danger that one’s imitations will be too perfect - that one will be too meticulously, too fastidiously the real thing, and so betray the fact that one actually isn’t. So thogh the Irish wit in England is allowed to play the clown, from Oliver Goldsmith to Brendan Behan, this licensed jester must ultimately know his place. He mustn’t get his hands, however well-manicured, on sons of the aristocracy, whose destiny is to marry and reproduce their line, and, if he does, as Bernard Shaw knew very well, the English have long experience in how to take care of such rotters, cads and bounders. / Wilde’s ambivalences weren’t just his own. He was born into that most schizoid of social classes, the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, and like Yeats, tended to feel English in Ireland and Irish in English. The Anglo-Irish endured a kind of internal exile, at once natives and aliens, rules and victims, both central and marginal to Irish life. If they were formidably self-assured, they could also feel fearfully defensvie and besieged, and Wilde, the patrician who himself [3] became persecuted, reflects something of this ambiguity. […/] A similar duality haunts the career of Wilde’s great compatriot and contemporary, Charles Stewart Parnell, another Anglo-Irishman brought low by a combination of sexual misdemeanours and a spiteful British Establishment.’ Quotes Wilde: ‘[The Happy Princes and Other Tales] are studies in prose, put for Romance’s sake into a fanciful form: meant partly for children, and partly for those who have kept the child-like faculty of wonder and joy, and who find in simplicity a subtle strangeness.’ (‘Letter to G. H. Kersely, 15 June, 1888; Hart-Davies, p.219.) The critic contests the suggestion that there was any hint of paedophilia in Wilde’s sexuality.
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Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998), writes: ‘One alternative to standard decolonising practices is associated with the “decadence” of Wilde and the aestheticist movement of contempoary Europe which finds its fullest anglophone formation in his work.’ (p.79.) ‘The very situation which allowed Wilde to adopt and develop this attitude - his Irish “otherness” located at the heart of the metropolitan power - also denied him full access to a nomenclature dominated by cultural nationalism. And with his [80] exclusion an alternative critical politics, based upon an alternative version of the relationship between culture and politics, was lost.’ (p.81.)
Mary C. King, ‘Oscar Wilde: Naming, Re-cognising and Re-Collecting and The Picture of Dorian Gray’ (typescript paper on Wilde, 1998): ‘Wilde’s text [Dorian Gray] rigorously constructs, complicates and deconstructs these master pieces [sic]. It does so through the treacherous deployment of texts and of names as complicitous corrupt paratexts. As we tease out history’s charmed nightmare of nominally compressed sentences, we are curiously encouraged to engage in our own disruptive-subversive readings of canonical versions of scriptures and literatures. Wilde’s revolutionary style requires and rewards ‘not just the identification of referents, but the elucidation and advancement of relationships between the various levels of allusion. That traumatised hermetic art which leads to a door or a picture-frame beyond which there is nothing but life is historicised and positioned as an Anglo-Irish nineteenth century manifestation of the European bourgeois quest for the immortelle of pure origins, solipsistically desired, eternally sought and endlessly receding. As in Joyce’s critical modernism, so in Dorian Gray technique becomes the problem of history: style and form lead us into and beyond the world of the picture and the book, soliciting and negotiating subversive relationships between text and world and requiring us an insomniac reading against the grain.
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Merlin Holland, The Wilde Album (1997): ‘He may, as he says, have lost his Dublin accent soon after arriving at Oxford as an undergraduate, since it would have separated him linguistically from his contemporaries, perhaps even caused him embarrassment, but later his Irishness would set him apart from what he regarded as the commonplace in English life and letters and was more a matter in which to take pride. […]. To be Irish was to be subversive but above all it was to be imaginative, qualities rooted deep in his nation’s culture and history and which, at the same time as they marked both the author and the man as an individiual in an age of conformity, also wrote his name clearly [8] into the lists of public undesireables.’ (pp.8-9; for biographical details from this text, see Wilde1, supra.)
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J. B. Lyons, ‘Oscar Wilde’s Final Illness’, Irish Studies Review (Summer 1995), pp.24-27, holds that the theory that syphilis caused Wilde's death ‘does not stand up to scrutiny’. It was first propounded by Arthur Ransome: ‘his death was directly due to meningitis the legacy of an attack on tertiary syphilis’ (Oscar Wilde, a Critical Study, London: Martin Secker 1912). It was endorsed by R. H. Sherard: ‘the ear trouble was only shortly before his death recognised as a tertiary symptom of an infection he had contracted when he was 20 (Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, 1934) and then taken up by Richard Ellmann in his biography of Wilde where he attributes death to ‘neurosyphilis’ (Oscar Wilde, 1987, p.545). The theory is hotly disputed by Vyvyan Holland among others in columns of the Times Literary Supplement [q.d.]. Note that Joyce referred without foundation to Wilde's possession of an ‘epileptic tendency’ (Critical Writings, 1959, p.203).
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Simon J. James,
review-notice on Philip Hoare, Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence,
Conspiracy and the First World War (London: Duckworth 1997), 250pp.;
deals with lawsuit of 1918, initiated by Maud Allen, the dancer in Salomé
who was the implied object of charges of homosexuality under the caption
‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ in Noel Pemberton Billing’s
paper The Imperialist, contain charges that a black list of 47,000
British homosexuals being blackmailed by the German Government included
the subscribers to the play (an idea suggested to Billing by Marie Corelli).
Trevor Fisher, letter to Times Literary Supplement (2 March 2001), speaks of forthcoming book on the Wilde-Douglas relationship suggesting that ‘Wilde’s self-image as a benign individual suffering from the actions of others is now due for revision.’ Further, ‘Wilde was a highly intelligent man who both acted as he wanted to and then manipulated the consequences to present a favourable image’; speaks earlier of his believing that he could talk his way out of anything and hence walking into a ‘booby trap’ as Queensberry described the legal action.
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Thomas Wright, [review] in Times Literary Supplement ( 9 Feb. 2001), p.3-5, quotes Wilde in a letter of 1898 to Robbie Ross: ‘I shall live as the infamous Saint Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr’. Further, quotes Wilde to Frank Harris: ‘Fifty years … or a hundred years hence … my comedies and my stories … will be known and read by millions, and even my unhappy fate will call forth worldwide sympathy’, and rRemarks: ‘Wilde has emerged in the last few years as a serious (or at least a seriously trivial) intellectual, and as a dazzingly protean figure.’ Notes that the following is misattributed by Barbara Belford to Wilde himself rather than a character: ‘It is sad to think of, but there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than Beauty.’ (Sir Henry Wotton, Picture of Dorian Gray); also cites Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983).
Simon Callow, ‘The Importance of Remembering Oscar’, The Times [London] (Friday, 24 Nov. 2000), writes: ‘[…] the backlash has begun. Goaded by extravagant caims tht he was a social, moral, artistic and intellectual revolutionary, the detractors have hit out: Wilde was a minor writer, they say: he was vain, snobbish and pompous; he was intellectually thin and morally suspect; his self-induced trial and subsequent imprisonment have swollen his significance out of all proportion to his achievements. / Those of us who love him must wryly admit that there is perhaps a modicum of truth in these accusations, but all this is besides the point. The single most consistent theme in Wilde’s writing is his assertion of the primacy of personality, and it is as a personality that he triumphantly survives the erosion of time.’ Callow recounts that Merlin Wilde showed him the lock of Wilde’s sister’s hair which he always kept, and likewise a lock of Wilde’s hair which Robbie Ross cut on his deathbed, ‘untouched by any trace of grey’. (p.18.)
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Colm Tóibín,
‘Darkness of the heart’, Introduction to Hesperus Edn. of
The Return by Joseph Conrad (2004): ‘In the last years of the 19th century,
a number of writers who were in exile in England began, as outsiders,
to consider the drama surrounding the brittleness of English manners and
morals and the pressures on English stability. This offered them an alluring,
mysterious and, at times, evasive subject. / Henry James, for example,
remained fascinated by the English system of inheritance in which, on
the death of her husband, the widow was cast aside while her son inherited
the property. James sought to dramatise this in The Spoils of Poynton
(1896). / It was this world, too, which Oscar Wilde described in
his comedies of manners written in the early 1890s, work in which no Irish
characters appeared, in which members of the English drawing-room class
are mimicked and mocked, masked and unmasked. So, too, the hero, whoever
he is, of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll
and Mr Hyde (1886) wallowed in the great unstable openness of London.
The vast and various city, in all its ineffable mystery and otherness,
offered these three writers an escape from their own narrow heritage,
and a richly layered world to chart in its duplicity, and perhaps even
its decline. / This close attention to English manners did not last long.
James, once the new century had begun, returned to writing about Americans
in Europe. Stevenson escaped to a more exotic landscape where he died
in 1894. Wilde was destroyed by the very forces he mocked. The house of
England, in all its glory, was not their property; they stayed as guests,
watchful and untrusting.’ (Extract in The Guardian, Saturday,
3 April 2004.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco): 2002