there had been such critics and such criticism. The abstract usually
follows the concrete, and the practice dictates the precept. Wilde had
in his mind as he wrote such fine flaming things as Swinburne's study of
Blake, and such slow-moving magnificent pageants as "Marius the
Epicurean," in which Pater had criticized a century of manners and
ideas. And, perhaps, he did not forget his own 'Pen, Pencil, and
Poison,' that was "a study in green," as well as a summary of the life
and talents of Janus Weathercock of The London Magazine.
Beautiful criticism had been made as long ago as when Sidney wrote of
the "blind crowder," whose song moved his heart like the sound of a
trumpet. But men had not known what they were doing, and made lovely
things with quite another purpose. Coleridge set the key for many men's
playing when he said that "the ultimate end of criticism is much more to
establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pass
judgments on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible
that the two could be separated." And Mr. Arthur Symons, who has in our
own day made fine critical things, yet says, quite humbly, that "the aim
of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a
writer," and again, that "criticism is a valuation of forces." Hazlitt
was no further from the truth when he wrote, in a pleasant, rather
malicious article on the critics of his time, that "a genuine criticism
should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul
and body of a work." Criticism, as Wilde saw it, was free to do all
these things, but had a further duty to itself. Hazlitt, and those who
read him in his own day, thought that he was giving opinions, talking,
reflecting "the soul and body of a work"; but it is for himself that we
read him now, and his subjects and opinions matter little beside the
gusto and the fresh wind of the chalk downs that make his essays things
in themselves and fit for such criticism as he liked. Wainewright too,
who learnt from Hazlitt, "deals," as Wilde saw, "with his impressions of
the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate these impressions
into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for his
imaginative and mental effect." But he did not say so, and perhaps
Walter Pater's essays were the first to make it impossible not to
recognize that criticism was more than a series of judgments, opinions
and ideas, necessarily subordinate to the thing criticized.
Wilde, at any rate, recognized this, and carried passive recognition
into active proclamation of a new creed for critics. He gave them a new
creed and a new charter, and, if he had done nothing else, would have
earned a place in the history of our literature. He showed that they
were free to do all they had ever attempted, to track the secret stream
of inspiration to its source, to work out alike the melody and
counterpoint of art, to discover its principles, to enjoy its examples,
to paint portraits, to talk with their sitters, to enounce ideas, to
catch the fleeting sunlight and shadow of impression. They were free to
do all this, and for a creed he taught them that criticism is itself a
creative art, perhaps the most creative of the arts, certainly an art to
be practised with no less delicate care than that of the maker of poems,
the teller of stories, the painter of pictures, the man who captures a
melody, or the man who shapes a dream in stone.
My private predilections may have led me to lay too much emphasis on the
main contention of 'The Critic as Artist.' I hope not, but must take
this opportunity of remembering that, like 'The Decay of Lying,' this
dialogue is rich in other matter than theory. Wilde never, unless in the
essay on Wainewright, deliberately set himself to estimate an artist or
to paint a portrait. But throughout the two dialogues are scattered
fragments of vivid criticism, sometimes a little swift and careless,
always subordinated as notes of colour to the prevailing scheme of the
whole, but never impersonal or dull. It is impossible to read a page of
_Intentions_ without experiencing a delightful stimulus. It is, in my
opinion, that one of Wilde's books that most nearly represents him. In
nothing else that he wrote did he come so near to pouring into
literature the elixir of intellectual vitality that he royally spilled
over his conversation.
The fourth essay in the book is not on the high level of the others. It
is more practical and less beautiful, was written earlier than the rest,
and published in the year after Wilde's marriage. It is interesting, but
less as a thing in itself than as an indication of the character of
Wilde's knowledge of the theatre. I have therefore passed it over to the
next chapter.
VII
THE THEATRE
There is a public glory in the art of the theatre, a direct and
immediate applause that is nearer to the face-to-face praise and visible
worship that is won by conversation than the discreet approval of
readers of books. Of all the arts that of the drama is most likely to
attract the talker for talk's sake. By its means he can set his fancies
moving on the boards, fling his metaphors dressed and coloured on a
monstrous screen, and entertain a thousand listeners at once. Hazlitt
never wrote a play; but his was talk with a purpose. He talked to learn,
to teach, to think aloud. But Lamb, who talked for the delight of
himself and his friends, tried to amuse a larger audience with "Mr. H.,"
and, when that play was damned, joined heartily in the hisses, for fear
of being mistaken for the author. Those who conspired at the Mermaid
Tavern to send brave argosies of wit trafficking on a bluer sea than
ever sailed Drake's galleons were playwrights to a man. Particularly the
theatre attracts those dandies among authors and talkers, for whom
social means as much as artistic success--Steele, Congreve, Wilde.
Congreve, like Wilde, went to Trinity College, Dublin (though he was not
an Irishman), came to London with but little money, was a public
character before he was twenty-five, cared as much for society as for
art, grew fat with success, and became a gentleman of the world. The
differences between his comedies and Wilde's are not due to different
aims in writing, but only to differences in their personalities, and to
the change in public taste during the two centuries that passed between
"Love for Love" and _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Not until
Congreve had had three plays successfully acted did he write one of
which "but little ... was prepared for that general taste which seems
now to be predominant in the palates of our audience."
It is important in considering Wilde's early comedies to remember the
character of the audience with which he had to contend. His was a public
that asked to feel as well as to smile, a public that had grown
accustomed to smile with tears in its eyes, a public that was best
pleased to laugh loudly and to sob into handkerchiefs, and judged a play
by the loudness of the laughs and the number of the handkerchiefs that
it made necessary. He had not a Restoration audience of men and women
with sharpened wits and a delight in their exercise, ready to smile and
quite unready to take anything seriously except amusement. It is for
that reason that he called _Lady Windermere's Fan_ "A Play about a Good
Woman," instead of making Mrs. Erlynne a Sylvia and punishing Lord
Darlington with a marriage.
The spectacular effects of the theatre, the possibilities of delightful
dialogue, the public glory, of which he was always rather greedy, drew
Wilde to the writing of plays. But beside these less intimate motives he
had a genuine dramatic instinct that kept him from his early youth
intermittently preparing himself as a playwright. The first thing he
wrote after the publication of _Poems_ was a play. He took it with him
to America, and on his return wrote another. With the charming
braggadocio of one who was quite determined that there should be an Op.
XXX. he printed Op. II. on the title-page of the private issue of _The
Duchess of Padua_. His public recognition as a playwright was deferred
till 1892, but after the writing of _Vera_, which, I suppose, was Op.
I., he seldom ceased to observe and to plan for the stage.
The character of Wilde's study of the theatre was shown in 'The Truth of
Masks,' and in the dramatic criticism that he wrote in the years
immediately following his marriage. It was a study of methods and
concerned no less with stage-management than with the drama. Nearly
thirty years ago he made a plea for beautiful scenery, and asked for
that harmony between costumier and scene-painter that has been achieved
in our day by Charles Ricketts and Cayley Robinson under the management
of Mr. Herbert Trench. He remarked that painted doors were superior to
real ones, and pointed out that properties which need light from more
than one side destroy the illumination suggested by the scene-painter's
shadings. From the first his dramatic criticism was written in the
wings, not from the point of view of an audience careless of means,
observant only of effects. _Vera_ may have been dull, and _The Duchess
of Padua_ unplayable, but actors, at least, shall have no fault to find
in the technique of _Lady Windermere's Fan_. That play seems to me to be
no more than a conscious experiment in the use of the knowledge that
Wilde had sedulously worked to obtain.
There was a continuity in Wilde's interest in the theatre wholly lacking
in his passing fancies for narrative or essay-writing. This, with the
fact that his plays brought him his first financial success, has made it
usual to consider him as a dramatist whose recreations are represented
by his books. Even Mr. Symons, in his article on Wilde as "An Artist in
Attitudes," finds that his plays, "the wittiest that have been seen upon
the modern stage," expressed, "as it happened by accident, precisely
what he himself was best able to express." I cannot help feeling that
this is a little unjust to him. His most perfectly successful works,
those which most exactly accomplish what they attempt, without
sacrificing any part of themselves, are, perhaps, _The Importance of
Being Earnest_ and _Salome_. Both these are plays. But neither of them
seems to me so characteristic, so inclusive of Wilde as _Intentions_,
_De Profundis_, _The Portrait of Mr. W. H._, or even _The Picture of
Dorian Gray_. His plays are wilfully limited, subordinated to an aim
outside themselves, and, except in the two I have just mentioned, these
limitations are not such as to justify themselves by giving freedom to
the artist. Some limitations set an artist free for an achievement
otherwise impossible. But the limitations of which I complain only made
Wilde a little contemptuous of his work. They did not save his talent
from preoccupations, but compelled it to a labour in whose success alone
he could take an interest.
It is impossible not to feel that Wilde was impatient of the methods and
the meanings of his first three successful plays, like a juggler,
conscious of being able to toss up six balls, who is admired for tossing
three. These good women, these unselfish, pseudonymous mothers, these
men of wit and fashion discomfited to make a British holiday; their
temptations, their sacrifices, their defeats, are not taken from any
drama played in Wilde's own mind. He saw them and their adventures quite
impersonally; and no good art is impersonal. Salome kissing the pale
lips of Iokanaan may once have moved him when he saw her behind the
ghostly footlights of that secret theatre in which each man is his own
dramatist, his own stage-manager, and his own audience. But Lady
Windermere did not return to her husband for Wilde's sake, and he did
not feel that Sir Robert Chiltern's future mattered either way. He cared
only that an audience he despised should be relieved at her return, and
that to them the career of a politician should seem to be important. Not
until the production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ did he share
the pleasure of the pit. I know a travelling showman who makes "enjoy"
an active verb, and speaks of "enjoying the poor folk" when, for
coppers, he lets them ride on merry-go-rounds, and agitate themselves in
swing-boats, which offer him no manner of amusement. In just this way
Wilde "enjoyed" the London audiences with his early plays. He did not
enjoy them himself.
Hazlitt said of Congreve that "the workmanship overlays the materials;
in Wycherley the casting of the parts and the fable are alone sufficient
to ensure success." Wilde may not have read Hazlitt on "The English
Comic Writers," but his earlier plays suggest a determination to "ensure
success" after the manner of Wycherley, and to overlay the base material
necessary for that purpose with wit's fine workmanship after the manner
of Congreve. The fables, the characters, the settings, were chosen on
account of their experience; all were veterans with reputations
untarnished by any failure in popularity. Some were taken from the
English stage, some from the French; all served as the machinery to keep
an audience interested and carry Wilde's voice across the footlights. In
the theatre, as in storytelling, he was not unready to work to
_bouts-rimes_.
I say, to carry Wilde's voice across the footlights: that is exactly
what his plays do. Those neat, polished sentences, snapping like
snuffboxes, are often taken from the books that hold what he chose to
preserve of his conversation. An aphorism that has served the author of
_The Soul of Man_ and shone for a moment in _Dorian Gray_ is given a new
vitality by Lord Illingworth, and what is good enough for Lady
Narborough is a little better in the mouth of Dumby. Wilde was never
without the power, shared by all amateurs of genius, of using up the
odds and ends from one pastime to fill out the detail of another. Doing
things, like Merimee, for wagers with himself, he would make plays that
should be powerful in their effect on other people, but he would reserve
the right to show, even while making them, that he could do something
else. He learnt from Musset, and believed, with Fortunio, that "a pun is
a consolation for many ills, and a play upon words as good a way as
another of playing with thoughts, actions, and people." He consoled
himself for his plots by taking extraordinary liberties with them, and
amused himself with quips, bons-mots, epigrams and repartee that had
really nothing to do with the business in hand. Most of his witty
sayings would bear transplanting from one play to another, and it is
necessary to consult the book if we would remember in whose mouth they
were placed. This is a very different thing from the dialogue of
Congreve on the one hand or of J. M. Synge on the other. The whole
arrangement in conversation, as he might appropriately have called
either _Lady Windermere's Fan_, _An Ideal Husband_, or _A Woman of No
Importance_, was very much lighter than the story that served as its
excuse and sometimes rudely interrupted it. It was so sparkling,
good-humoured and novel that even the audience for whom he had
constructed the story forgave him for putting a brake upon its speed
with this quite separate verbal entertainment.
I suppose that this forgiveness encouraged him to believe that the
situations and emotional appeals he borrowed from melodrama were not
necessary to his success. In _The Importance of Being Earnest_ he threw
them bravely overboard, and wrote a play whose very foundation was a
pun. Nothing could be a better proof of the inessential nature of those
tricks with which he had been making sure of his audience than the
immense superiority of this play to the others. Free from the necessity
of living up to any drama more serious than its conversation, it
preserves a unity of feeling and of tone that sets it upon a higher
level. Wit is a little heartless, a little jarring, when flashed over a
crisis of conscience, even when we know that the agitated politician is
only a figure cut from an illustrated paper and mounted on cardboard.
And passion, whether of repentance or of indignation, is a little
_outre_ in a picture-gallery where Lord Illingworth has said that a
well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. In those first three
plays, even when Wilde makes a serious effort to get dramatic value out
of, for example, the Lord Illingworth's worldly wisdom, he is quite
unable to disguise the fact that it is an effort and serious. Those
plays are interesting, amusing, clever, what you will, but their
contradictions have cost them beauty. It is not in the least surprising
that _The Importance of Being Earnest_, the most trivial of the social
plays, should be the only one of them that gives that peculiar
exhilaration of spirit by which we recognise the beautiful. It is
precisely because it is consistently trivial that it is not ugly. If
only once it marred its triviality with a bruise of passion, its beauty
would vanish with the blow. But it never contradicts itself, and it is
worth noticing that its unity, its dovetailing of dialogue and plot, so
that the one helps the other, is not achieved at the expense of the
conversation, but at that of the mechanical contrivances for filling a
theatre that Wilde had not at first felt sure of being able to do
without. The dialogue has not been weighted to trudge with the plot; the
plot has been lightened till it can fly with the wings of the dialogue.
The two are become one, and the lambent laughter of this comedy is due
to the radioactivity of the thing itself, and not to glow-worms
incongruously stuck over its surface.
It is not easy to define the quality of that laughter. It is not
uproarious enough to provide the sore throat of farce. It is not
thoughtful enough to pass Meredith's test of comedy. It is not due to a
sense of superior intellect, like much of Mr. Shaw's. It is the laughter
of complicity. We do not laugh at but with the persons of the play. We
would, if we could, abet the duplicity of Mr. Worthing, and be
accessories after the fact to the Bunburying of Algernon. We would even
encourage Lady Bracknell's determined statement, for we are in the
secret, and we know--
She only does it to amuse,
Because she knows it pleases.
The simultaneous speech of Cecily and Gwendolen is no insult to our
intelligence, nor do we boggle for a moment over the delightful
impossibility of Lane. We are caught from the beginning by a spirit of
delicate fun. We busy ourselves in the intrigues, and would on no
account draw back. _The Importance of Being Earnest_ is to solid comedy
what filigree is to a silver bowl. We are relieved of our corporeal
envelopes, and share with Wilde the pleasure of sporting in the fourth
dimension.
* * * * *
Nothing better illustrates Wilde's extraordinary versatility than his
almost simultaneous business as two entirely different dramatists. The
one wrote the plays we have been discussing, the other, plays so
different from these in character that it is hard to believe that they
are the work of the same man. These other plays have been called
"romantic," a word that hardly distinguishes them from the "romantic"
comedy of _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Still, Gautier and Flaubert
have made it possible to attribute to that word a flavour of the South
and the East, and these plays have Southern and Eastern settings that
are harmonious with their contents. There is no laughter in these plays.
They are nearer to _The Duchess of Padua_ than to comedy. Wilde
delighted in laughter, but also in a quality in emotion almost hostile
to laughter, a quality that I can best describe as magnificence. In his
prose books both are expressed; if his dramatic writing had been limited
to the four plays that brought him success, it would have seemed that
the Wilde who wrote _The Sphinx_ had not been represented on the stage.
But, when he was writing _Lady Windermere's Fan_, or a little earlier,
he wrote down, swiftly, as if to relieve himself, a play whose mood was
at the opposite end of his range. And, while _The Importance of Being
Earnest_ was filling the St. James's Theatre, he was trying to finish
_La Sainte Courtisane_, and had submitted to a manager the latter part
of _A Florentine Tragedy_, which he had never been able to begin. When
he was released from prison, he left the manuscript of the first in a
cab, and did not complete the second. He had imagined, while in Reading
Gaol, two other such plays as _Salome--Ahab and Isabel_, and _Pharaoh_.
These, unfortunately, like _The Cardinal of Arragon_, portions of which
Wilde was accustomed to recite, were never written. The non-existence
and the incompleteness of these plays are explicable on other grounds
than those of inclination. I think that if _Salome_ had been produced
with success as soon as it was written, Wilde would very likely not have
written his plays about good women and conscience-stricken men of State,
or, having written one, would have written no more. It is possible that
we owe _The Importance of Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor
prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing _Salome_ at the Palace Theatre.
For though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he preferred to
think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams. He would rather
have been a magician than a jester. The well-dressed modern plays
starved too many of his intimate desires. He was unable to clothe
magnificent emotions in evening dress. But applause was necessary to
him. He made sure of it by the modern plays, and had not a chance of
securing it by anything else. And so there are four social comedies, and
only one _Salome_.
Of the unfinished plays, as they are printed in his works, there is
little to be said. _La Sainte Courtisane_ is a beautiful fragment,
suggesting a story rather intellectual than emotional, but an admirable
framework on which to drape a cloak of imagery. The motive is the same
as that of _The Portrait of Mr. W. H._ The woman covered with jewels is
converted by the hermit to the love of God, and he by her to the love of
the flesh. They lose their own beliefs in imparting them, and the hermit
goes to Alexandria, while the woman remains in the desert. The dialogue
is of the same character as that of _Salome_, which we shall presently
discuss. We cannot tell how fine a play it might have been. _The
Florentine Tragedy_ is less fragmentary. As Wilde left it, it was the
latter part of a play in one act in blank verse, beginning with the
surprisal of the lovers by the husband. The whole of the conversation
between the three had been written. To fit the play for presentation on
the stage, Mr. Sturge Moore wrote a preparation for it that cannot be
far different from Wilde's design, and is now printed with the rest. It
is not the business of this book to consider the brilliant and vigorous
poetry of Mr. Sturge Moore, though it is impossible not to remember with
delight passages from many of his books, always rich in ore, and again
and again melting into purest gold. His induction to Wilde's play is
perfectly calculated. He catches the spirit of Wilde's verse, and
subdues his own to agreement. His is the difficult task of so drawing
Bianca's character that she shall be able without incongruity to beg the
young lord to kill her husband, and, when the young lord is himself
killed, to come dazed towards the merchant she has despised, with the
question--
"Why
Did you not tell me you were so strong?"
and receive the answer--
"Why
Did you not tell me you were beautiful?"
Wilde's is a piece of cumulative drama that keeps up an increasing
tension in the audience from the moment that the husband enters till the
moment when the lover dies and those two sentences are spoken. The play
resembles _The Duchess of Padua_ in being unable to disguise an aloof
intention, an extraneous will-power, that is perfectly hidden in the
earlier _Salome_.