The notoriety naturally following on this masquerade had its advantages in the way of dinner invitations, lecture engagements, and, to some extent, the smiles of publishers. But Wilde earned little and had to spend a good deal in maintaining his position; and, despite a lecturing venture in America, it was not until his marriage with Miss Constance Lloyd in 1884 that he settled down to anything like satisfactory employment. For such a man the post of editor of the Woman’s World could hardly be amusing, and Wilde retained the bitterest recollections of his connection with journalism. “In centuries before ours,” he once wrote, “the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the key-hole. That is much worse.” It was not, in fact, until the Nineties had well opened that Wilde began to make good and to relieve the strain on his wife’s little fortune which his extravagant habits caused. Dorian Gray, published in 1891, was a doubtful artistic success and a quite undoubtful commercial failure. But at the beginning of the next year Lady Windermere’s Fan at once took the fancy of London. Wilde had made several attempts to conquer the stage, but partly inexperience and partly obstinacy had so far stood in his way. “I hold,” he said, “that the stage is to a play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting.” But a frame can generally be had to accommodate any picture, and no stage could properly accommodate some plays. Wilde once argued for the performance of plays by puppets. “They have many advantages. They never argue. They have no crude views about art. They have no private lives. We are never bored by accounts of their virtues, or bored by recitals of their vices; and when they are out of an engagement they never do good in public or save people from drowning.... They recognise the presiding intellect of the dramatist, and have never been known to ask for their parts to be written up.” A man holding such views—which are really only a mad extension of a sane position—was likely to remain for long unacted. But when he left behind him the intricacies of five-act tragedy, and found his true métier in comedy, his success was instantaneous.

And it was well deserved. The Wilde comedies “date” a good deal. They are rather monotonous in their brilliancy. There is too much of a particular trick; one is always expecting the unexpected. The characters sit round to exchange epigrams rather too much like the Moore and Burgess Minstrels used to sit round to exchange conundrums, with a “Mr. Johnson” at one corner and a Mr. Somebody-else at the other. The epigrams themselves are often forced and sometimes merely foolish. There is little characterisation; all Wilde’s men are wits or the butts of wits, and his women, broadly speaking, are unimportant. But when all deductions are made his comedies are among the best in the language. Lady Windermere’s Fan was followed a year later by A Woman of No Importance, and in 1895 by An Ideal Husband and—the best of the series—The Importance of Being Earnest. From circumstances of considerable embarrassment Wilde suddenly mounted to high prosperity. But the change was all for the worse. With his tendencies to physical self-indulgence, a plentiful supply of ready money tempted him to fatal excess in eating and drinking, and he was a man to whom exercise of any kind was repellent. On his unsound mental constitution the brilliance of his position and prospects had an equally unfortunate effect. He grew fat and bloated in person and absurdly inflated in conceit. His features, once handsome with the comeliness of some image on a classic coin, were now puffed and of impure outline, and the richness of dress which he affected degenerated into a greasy luxuriousness. He had only three years of prosperity, but those were enough to show that he had neither the mind nor the physical constitution to bear success. Even before the tragedy which cut short his working life his friends had begun to fall away, and it was pretty clear that his career as a creative artist was likely to be limited.

Of the last chapters of his unhappy history nothing can usefully be said. The expiation was no less horrible than the sin; his last piteous work may suggest that there was final penitence and rest. But there was so much of the artificial in Wilde that it was never quite safe to infer when he was genuine and when histrionic. Almost his whole life had been spent in posing. Yet his mind was naturally precise and logical; with proper discipline it would have been of quite masculine strength. “There is something tragic,” he once said, “about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.” He would have been better with a useful profession. To adapt his own words, there is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at any given moment who start life with some Greek and Latin, a knack of good form and social dexterity, a more than competent physique, enough money to enable them to spend a few of their best years in rather laborious idleness, and no notion of giving the world a full equivalent of what they propose to take out of it. The number of young women in much the same case is scarcely less disquieting. The real moral of Wilde’s tragedy is not the obvious one. It is rather that even highly gifted people should have some honest trade to begin with, and leave “art” and “literature” (apart from such branches as are really trades and handicrafts) until, mayhap, they find themselves positively impelled thereto. If that were the rule the world would be poorer by some millions of bad pictures and unpleasant novels, but indefinitely richer in human cleanliness and honesty.

CHAPTER XIV
SIR WILLIAM HARCOURT

Those who seek the legislative monument of Sir William Harcourt must examine the Finance Act of 1894, which put real estate on the same footing as personal in the matter of death duties. A facetious writer once observed that the principle of graduation so beautifully exemplified in this measure must have been suggested to Sir William by a study of his own name, which is an excellent example of ascending values. William and George are but degrees in the ordinary, but with Venables we definitely reach the higher level; Vernon is still better, and Harcourt fitly crowns the whole. The full name, William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, is the perfection of a crescendo; it at once soothes and stirs like the grand vibrations of organ music; it has the majestic swell and rhythm of the peaceful ocean.

It is no discredit to Sir William Harcourt that he failed to live fully up to the more stately standards of this pageant of nomenclature. Sometimes he was little more than William or George; more often he got as far as Granville and Venables; it was only occasionally that he matched the full kingliness of all twelve syllables. His career, like his name, was a mixture of the great, the almost great, and the almost ordinary. But while in the name these elements were perfectly blended, the career somehow lacked balance and unity. Sir William arrived early at eminence; he was during many years a nearly first-class figure in English politics; he had gifts, sedulously cultivated, of a quite splendid type; he was acute, clear-headed, wary, indefatigable; he liked the game of politics and knew every move in it; his judgment of men and things was shrewd; he was witty as a Sheridan comedy; he commanded a capital debating style and a manner of platform speaking which, while not of the highest, was in its way exceedingly effective. Moreover, he had no inconvenient moral impedimenta. Mr. Labouchere described him (approvingly) as a “squeezable Christian,” and therefore fitter for a Party leader than a “conscientious atheist” like Mr. John Morley. So well endowed and so little handicapped, he should have been sure of the best that politics could give. Yet the latter part of his life was embittered by the sense of failure, and failure of a kind which has no compensations. For Sir William Harcourt was not one of those happily constituted people who can enjoy the sunshine as well as another, and yet get a quiet pleasure out of a rainy day. He attached excessive importance to the very things that just eluded him, and was complicatedly cross because they did elude him—cross with circumstances, cross with people who played him false at the critical moment, and cross with himself for not being superior to being cross with them. For though he did not lack magnanimity, and though in the long run he brought himself to act generously towards more than one who had helped to frustrate his natural ambition, he could not avoid being hurt and showing that he was hurt.

“You have a Chancellor in your family, and a Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,” said John Morley to him, in the year 1894, “and you’d like to have a Prime Minister in your family, and no earthly blame to you.” True, it was no great thing to be Liberal Prime Minister just then. The estate was terribly encumbered, and the brokers’ men were already at the door. That Sir William knew as well as any. But still, if one must be a “transient and embarrassed phantom,” it was just a little better to be a phantom in a shooting jacket than a phantom in livery. To don the Primrose livery, especially, was gall to the proud Plantagenet. He was of very ancient English and French family, while Lord Rosebery sprang (many years ago, it is true) from a mere Presbyterian minister; he had been in Liberal politics when Lord Rosebery was in the nursery; he had loyally supported Mr. Gladstone through thick and thin; he had never spared himself in the House of Commons or on the platform; he was conscious of qualifications with which the Scottish nobleman, with all his graces, could not vie; and he had every reason to calculate on the support of the Radical wing of the party, which he had served faithfully, if not always with conviction. Small wonder that Sir William Harcourt was bitter when with one accord the men in the inner councils of Liberalism, the new men as well as the old, the Asquiths and Aclands, as well as the Morleys and Spencers, turned against him, and towards Lord Rosebery.

We know now that the choice, if the best possible, was still unfortunate. But in politics the things which seem most obviously unreasonable are precisely the things which are done for the most serious reasons, and there were grave reasons indeed against a Harcourt Premiership. Sir William was endowed with a temperament which sometimes made it hard for men to work with him, and might well have made it impossible for men to work under him. He was at once too difficult and too easy. He had a fatal knack of rousing antagonism, and lacked the force or inclination to crush antagonism when it arose. He sometimes used language of the kind that stirs up rebellion in men of the most temperate blood, and, while sensitive himself, took little thought of the feeling of others. But, though he thoughtlessly made enemies, he was far too kindly and warmhearted a man to convert them into victims. Thus he had to meet a most perilous combination—strong hostility and no serious fear. It would have been well with him if he could have invoked the argument of terror; it would have been better if he could have led men in silken bonds. But he could not dominate, and he could not manage. The lack of tact and the lack of resolution were both well illustrated over the matter of the Rosebery Premiership. Sir William Harcourt stood out just enough to make the position for Lord Rosebery difficult, and gave way just enough to make his own position impossible. Then he fumed in private over the arrangements in which he had publicly concurred, and, apart from his manful work in his own department, played the part of a sulking Achilles. There were, of course, many excuses. He was getting old. He had no great enthusiasm for Home Rule, or, indeed, for anything. He was, like the rest of the Liberal leaders, bitterly disappointed by the size of the majority of 1892, and incensed by the futility of the task it had in hand; “he missed,” says Lord Morley, “old stable companions, and did not take to all the new”; and altogether he might well be oppressed by a sense of anachronism. For he was a politician of the old school, and the Nineties were perpetually reminding him that the old school was going, and almost gone. More an eighteenth-century man than even a nineteenth, with a taste for elegant scholarship and rotund phrase, he could not feel entirely at home in a House of Commons which included Mr. Keir Hardie, and jibbed at Horace. Indeed, whether quite consciously or not, John Morley had, in the sentence quoted above, put his finger on the trouble. The whole secret of Sir William Harcourt’s political life was that he was a belated Whiggish aristocrat trying to realise himself in unfavourable circumstances. The whole tragedy of Sir William Harcourt’s political death was that the circumstances were too strong for the ambition. A whist-player of the gentlemanly old school, he could have borne with philosophy a rubber lost to a conspicuously better player, or one with a conspicuously better hand. But it was bitterness indeed to have the card-room turned into a Bedlam at the exact moment when the last trick looked like being his.