The Amenities of Book-Collecting and Kindred Affections

by A. Edward Newton

It is with a feeling of relief that one turns from “Dorian Gray”—which, let us agree, is a book which a young girl would hesitate to put in the hands of her mother—to Wilde’s other prose work, so different in character. Of his shorter stories, his fairy tales and the rest, it would be a delight to speak: many of them are exquisite, and all as pure and delicate as a flower, with as sweet a perfume. They do not know Oscar Wilde who have not read “The Young King and the Star Child,” and the “Happy Prince.” That they are the work of the same brain that produced “Dorian Gray” is almost beyond belief.

What a baffling personality was Wilde’s! Here is a man who has really done more than William Morris to make our homes artistic, and who is at one with Ruskin in his effort that our lives should be beautiful; he had a message to deliver, yet, by reason of his flippancy and his love of paradox, he is not yet rated at his real worth. It is difficult for one who is first of all a wit to make a serious impression on his listeners. I think it is Gilbert who says, “Let a professed wit say, ‘pass the mustard,’ and the table roars.”

Wilde was a careful and painstaking workman, serious as an artist, whatever he may have been as a man; and in the end he became a great master of English prose, working in words as an artist does in color, trying first one and then another until he had secured the desired effect, the effect of silk which Seccombe speaks of. But he affected idleness. A story is told of his spending a week-end at a country house. Pleading the necessity of working while the humor was on, he begged to be excused from joining the other guests. In the evening at dinner his hostess asked him what he had accomplished, and his reply is famous. “This morning,” he said, “I put a comma in one of my poems.” Surprised and amused, the lady inquired whether the afternoon’s work had been equally exhausting. “Yes,” said Wilde, passing his hand wearily over his brow, “this afternoon I took it out again.”

Just about the time that London had made up its mind that Wilde was nothing but a clever man about town, welcome as a guest because of the amusement he afforded, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” appeared in the “Fortnightly Magazine” for February, 1891. London was at once challenged and amazed. This essay opens with a characteristic statement, one of those peculiarly inverted paradoxes for which Wilde was shortly to become famous. “Socialism,” he says, “would relieve us from the sordid necessity of living for others”; and what follows is Wilde at his very best.

What is it all about? I am not sure that I know: it seems to be a plea for the individual, perhaps it is a defense of the poor; it is said to have been translated into the languages of the downtrodden, the Jew, the Pole, the Russian, and to be a comfort to them; I hope it is. Do such outpourings do any good, do they change conditions, is the millennium brought nearer thereby? I hope so. But if it is comforting for the downtrodden, whose wants are ill supplied, it is a sheer delight for the downtreader who, free from anxiety, sits in his easy-chair and enjoys its technical excellence.

I know nothing like it: it is as fresh as paint, and like fresh paint it sticks to one; in its brilliant, serious, and unexpected array of fancies and theories, in truths inverted and distorted, in witticisms which are in turn tender and hard as flint, one is delighted and bewildered. Wilde has only himself to blame if this, a serious and beautiful essay, was not taken seriously. “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is the work of a consummate artist who, taking his ideas, disguises and distorts them, polishing them the while until they shine like jewels in a rare and unusual setting. Naturally, almost every other line in such a work is quotable: it seems to be a mass of quotations which one is surprised not to have heard before.

Interesting as Wilde’s other essays are, I will not speak of them; with the exception of “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” a study of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the poisoner, they will inevitably be forgotten.

Of Wilde’s poems I am not competent to speak: they are full of Arcady and Eros; nor am I of those who believe that “every poet is the spokesman of God.” A book-agent once called on Abraham Lincoln and sought to sell him a book for which the President had no use. Failing, he asked Lincoln if he would not write an indorsement of the work which would enable him to sell it to others. Whereupon the President, always anxious to oblige, with a humor entirely his own, wrote, “Any one who likes this kind of book will find it just the kind of book they like.” So it is with Wilde’s poetry: by many it is highly esteemed, but I am inclined to regard it as a part of his “literary wild oats.”

After several attempts in the field of serious drama, in which he was unsuccessful, by a fortunate chance he turned his attention to the lighter forms of comedy, in which he was destined to count only the greatest as his rivals. Pater says these comedies have been unexcelled since Sheridan; this is high praise, though not too high; but it is rather to contrast than to compare such a grand old comedy as the “School for Scandal” with, say, “The Importance of Being Earnest.” They are both brilliant, both artificial; they both reflect in some manner the life and the atmosphere of their time; but the mirror which Sheridan holds up to nature is of steel and the picture is hard and cold; Wilde, on the other hand, uses an exaggerating glass, which seems specially designed to reflect warmth and fluffiness.

Wilde was the first to produce a play which depends almost entirely for its success on brilliant talk. In this field Shaw is now conspicuous: he can grow the flower now because he has the seed. It was Wilde who taught him how, Wilde who, in four light comedies, gave the English stage something it had been without for a century. His comedies are irresistibly clever, sparkle with wit, with a flippant and insolent levity, and withal have a theatrical dexterity which Shaw’s are almost entirely without. While greatly inferior in construction to Pinero’s, they are as brilliantly written; the plots amount to almost nothing: talk, not the play, is the thing; and but for their author’s eclipse they would be as constantly on the boards to-day in this country and in England as they are at present on the Continent.