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 outré 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 Salomé—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 Salomé 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 Salomé 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 Salomé.
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 Salomé, 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—