The first comedy, “Lady Windermere’s Fan,” was produced at the St. James’s, February 22, 1892. Its success, despite the critics, was instant: full of saucy repartee, overwrought with epigrams of the peculiar kind conspicuous in the “Soul of Man,” it delighted the audience. “Punch” made a feeble pun about Wilde’s play being tame, forgetting the famous dictum that the great end of a comedy is to make the audience merry; and this end Wilde had attained, and he kept his audiences in the same humor for several years—until the end. Of his plays this is, perhaps, the best known in this country. It was successfully given in New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere, only a year or two ago. It might, I think, be called his “pleasant play”: for a time it looks as if a pure wife were going astray, but the audience is not kept long in suspense: the plot can be neglected and the lines enjoyed, with the satisfactory feeling that it will all come out right in the end.
“A Woman of No Importance” is in my judgment the least excellent of his four comedies; it might be called his “unpleasant” play: it is two acts of sheer talk, in Wilde’s usual vein, and two acts of acting. The plot is, as usual, insignificant. A certain lazy villain in high official position meets a young fellow and offers him a post as his secretary. The boy, much pleased, introduces his mother, and the villain discovers that the boy is his own son. The son insists that the father should marry his mother, but she declines. The father offers to make what amends he can, loses his temper, and refers to the lady as a woman of no importance; for which he gets his face well smacked. The son marries a rich American Puritan. This enables Wilde to be very witty at the expense of American fathers, mothers, and daughters. Tree played the villain very well, it is said.
Never having seen Wilde’s next play acted, I once innocently framed this statement for the domestic circle: “I have never seen ‘An Ideal Husband’”; and when my wife sententiously replied that she had never seen one either, I became careful to be more explicit in future statements. No less clever than the others, it has plot and action, and is interesting to the end. Of all his plays it is the most dramatic. On its first production it was provided with a splendid cast, including Lewis Waller, Charles Hawtrey, Julia Neilson, Maude Millett, and Fanny Brough. In the earlier plays all the characters talked Oscar Wilde; in this Wilde took the trouble, for it must have been to him a trouble, to conceal himself and let his people speak for themselves: they stay in their own characters in what they do as well as in what they say. “An Ideal Husband” was produced at the Haymarket early in 1895, and a few weeks later, at the St. James’s, “The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Wilde called this a trivial comedy for serious people. It is clever beyond criticism; but, as one critic says, one might as well sit down and gravely discuss the true inwardness of a soufflé. In it Wilde fairly lets himself loose; such talk there never was before; it fairly bristles with epigram; the plot is a farce; it is a mental and verbal extravaganza. Wilde was at his best, scintillating as he had never done before, and doing it for the last time. He is reported to have said that the first act is ingenious, the second beautiful, and the third abominably clever. Ingenious it is, but its beauty and cleverness are beyond praise. To have seen the lovely Miss Millard as Cecily, the country girl, to have heard her tell Gwendolen, the London society queen (Irene Vanbrugh), that “flowers are as common in the country as people are in London,” is a delight never to be forgotten.
Wilde was now at the height of his fame. That the licenser of the stage had forbidden the performance of “Salome” was a disappointment; but Sarah Bernhardt had promised to produce it in Paris, and, not thinking that when his troubles came upon him she would break her word, he was able to overcome his chagrin.
Only a year or two before, he had been in need, if not in abject poverty. He was now in receipt of large royalties. No form of literary effort makes money faster than a successful play. Wilde had two, running at the best theatres. His name was on every lip in London; even the cabbies knew him by sight; he had arrived at last, but his stay was only for a moment. Against the advice and wishes of his friends, with “fatal insolence,” he adopted a course which, had he been capable of thought, he must have seen would inevitably lead to his destruction.
To those mental scavengers, the psychologists, I leave the determination of the exact nature of the disease which was the cause of Wilde’s downfall: it is enough for me to know that whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
The next two years Wilde spent in solitary and degrading seclusion; his sufferings, mental and physical, can be imagined. Many have fallen from heights greater than his, but none to depths more humiliating. Many noble men and dainty women have been subjected to greater indignities than he, but they have been supported by their belief in the justice or honor of the cause for which they suffered.
Wilde was not, however, sustained by the consciousness of innocence, nor was he so mentally dwarfed as to be unable to realize the awfulness of his fate. The literary result was “De Profundis.” Written while in prison, in the form of a letter to his friend Robert Ross, it was not published until five years after his death: indeed, only about one third of the whole has as yet appeared in English.
“De Profundis” may be in parts offensive, but as a specimen of English prose it is magnificent; it is by way of becoming a classic: no student of literature can neglect this cry of a soul lost to this world, intent upon proving—I know not what—that art is greater than life, perhaps. Much has been written in regard to it: by some it is said to show that even at the time of his deepest degradation he did not appreciate how low he had fallen; that to the last he was only a poseur—a phrase-maker; that, genuine as his sorrow was, he nevertheless was playing with it, and was simply indulging himself in rhetoric when he said, “I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame.”