Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

(First produced at the Haymarket Theatre by Mr Beerbohm Tree on 19th April 1903)

Perhaps of all Oscar Wilde's plays "The Woman Of No Importance" provoked the most discussion at the time of its production. It was his second venture in the histrionic field, and people expected much. They felt that he should now be finding his feet, that whatever shortcomings, from the point of view of stagecraft, there may have been in "Lady Windermere's Fan," should now be made good. His first comedy was a well-constructed play of plot and incidents. But now, expectation rose high, and required of the author something better, something greater, something more considerable than what he had achieved before. How far were these expectations realised? How did the first-night audience of public, and critics, receive the new play? It must be confessed it was with a feeling akin to disappointment. People at first were undeniably disconcerted. They had come prepared to witness drama, possibly of stirring interest, and what they heard was dialogue of brilliant quality, indeed, but which, up to a certain point, had little to do in forwarding the action of the piece. It was a surprise, and, to most of them, a not altogether grateful one. And it came in the first act. Here the author had actually been bold enough to defy popular traditions, and to place his characters seated in a semicircle uttering epigram after epigram, and paradox upon paradox, without any regard to whatever plot there might be; for it is not until the curtain is about to fall that we get an indication, for the first time, that something is going to happen in the next act. Here was an upset indeed! A subversion of all preconceived ideas as to how a play should begin! "Words! words!" they muttered captiously, although the words were as the pearls and diamonds that fell from the mouth of the maiden in the fairy tale. And so on, through scene after scene, until we come to the unexpected meeting of Lord Illingworth with the woman he had, long ago, betrayed and abandoned. Then quickly follows the pathetic interview between mother and son, culminating in Mrs Arbuthnot's confession that the man who would befriend her son is no other than his own father, to whom he should owe nothing, save the disgrace of his birth, leading up to the scene-à-faire in the final act, where Lord Illingworth's offer to make reparation to the woman he has wronged is acknowledged by a blow across the face. Here at last was drama, treated in the right spirit, and of an emotional value that cannot be too highly recognised. But the shock of the earlier acts had been a severe one, and it took all the intense human interest of the last two acts to atone for the outraged conventions of the two first. It speaks volumes of praise for the playwright's powers that he was enabled to carry his work to a successful issue, and secure for it a long run. And not only that, but to stand the critical test of revival. For, at the moment of writing these words, Mr Tree has reproduced "The Woman Of No Importance" at His Majesty's Theatre, which is crowded, night after night, with audiences eager to bring a posthumous tribute to the genius of the author.

Apropos of the first act where all the dramatis personæ are seated in a semicircle engaged only in conversation, and which was likened, on the occasion of the first production of the play, by an eminent critic to "Christy Minstrelism Crystallised," it may not be uninteresting to note, en passant, a similar arrangement of characters in a play of Mr Bernard Shaw's recently performed at the Court Theatre. This is called "Don Juan in Hell"—the dream from "Man and Superman"—mercifully omitted when that play was produced. It had nothing whatever to do with the comedy in which it was included, but is a Niagara of ideas, clumsily put together, and is more or less an exposition of the Shawian philosophy.

"Hear the result"—I quote from the critique in one of our leading journals—"The curtain rose at half-past two on a darkened stage draped in black. Enter, in turn, Don Juan, Dona Ana de Ulloa, the statue of her father, and the devil. They sat down, and for an hour and a half delivered those opinions of Mr Shaw with which we are all so terribly familiar. Every now and then there was a laugh, as, for example, when Don Juan said: 'Wherever ladies are is hell,' or, again, when he said: 'Have you ever had servants who were not devils?' It was all supposed to be very funny and very naughty, of course, especially when the statue said to Don Juan: 'If you dwelt in heaven, as I do, you would realise your advantages.' And so on, and so on, ad nauseum."

See now, how the parallel scene of "only talk" as written by Oscar Wilde was noticed upon its revival the other day. I quote from another journal. "Let all that can be urged against this play be granted. None the less is it worth watching the dramatis personæ do nothing, so long as the mind may be tickled by this unscrupulous, fastidious wit. And, even if all the characters speak in the same accents of paradox, their moods, the essentials of them, are differentiated with a brilliancy of expression which condones the lack of dramatic movement. These things, alone, evoke my gratitude to Mr Tree for reviving so interesting and individual a comedy.... For even those utterances which seem to be mere phraseological inversions are fraught with much wisdom, and the major part of the dialogue reflects the mind of a subtle and daring social observer." And it was this "mind," keen of observation, and equipped with no ordinary wit, that dominates an audience and compels them to sit, as it were, spellbound before the demonstration of the power of its unique personality. I am informed that, to-day, in Germany, the only two modern English dramatists who are listened to are Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw—the poet and the proser. Truly may it be remarked: "Les extrêmes se touchent."

The story of "The Woman Of No Importance" is quickly told.

Lord Illingworth, a cynical roué, has, in his youth, betrayed a too trusting young lady, who, in consequence, gave birth to a son, by her named Gerald. When the play begins this young fellow is nineteen years old, and has, most hopelessly it would seem, fallen in love with an American heiress whose name is Hester Worsley. He is living with his mother, called Mrs Arbuthnot, at a quiet country village, where also resides Lady Hunstanton, who acts as hostess to all the smart Society folk who appear upon the scene, and among whom Lord Illingworth is the most prominent. His lordship, ignorant of their real relationship, has taken a fancy to Gerald, and offers him a private secretaryship. Whereupon his future prospects brighten up considerably. But when Mrs Arbuthnot discovers that Lord Illingworth is no other than the man who had wronged her, she does all in her power to persuade her (and his) son to refuse the offer, and, driven to extremity in her distress, tells Gerald her own history, as that of another woman. Her efforts are futile. The boy only says that the woman must have been as bad as the man, and that, as far as he can see, Lord Illingworth is now a very good fellow, and so he means to stick to him. Consequently, when his lordship insists upon Gerald keeping to the bargain, and reminds his mother that the boy will be her "judge as well as her son," should the truth of her past be brought to light, Mrs Arbuthnot is induced to hold it still secret. Unfortunately for this secret, Mrs Allonby, one of Lady Hunstanton's guests, has goaded Lord Illingworth into promising to kiss Miss Hester Worsley. This he does, much to the disgust of the fair Puritan, who loudly announces that she has been insulted. Gerald's eyes are suddenly opened to Lord Illingworth's turpitude, and with the unbridled passion of the headstrong lover cries out that he will kill him! Which, apparently, he would have done, had not Mrs Arbuthnot stepped forward, and to everybody's surprise intervened with the dramatic: "No—he is your father!"

Tableau. In the final act Hester Worsley, now that she knows Mrs Arbuthnot, and is determined in spite of all to marry Gerald, solves every difficulty by carrying off the mother and son to her home in the New World, where we may presume the young couple marry, and live happily ever afterwards. Before her departure from England, however, Mrs Arbuthnot, maddened by the cynical offer of tardy reparation by marriage on the part of Lord Illingworth, strikes him across the face with a glove, and at the end of the play alludes to him as "a man of no importance"; which balances his earlier description of her as "a woman of no importance."

As I have pointed out elsewhere, many of the epigrams in this play were lifted bodily from "The Picture of Dorian Gray," but after these are eliminated there remain enough to establish the reputation of any dramatist as a wit and epigrammatist of the very first rank. Much would be forgiven for one definition alone, that of the foxhunter—"the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable." And Sheridan himself might envy the pronouncement that "the youth of America is its oldest tradition."

But apart from brilliant repartee and amusing paradox, the piece is full of passages of rare beauty and moments of touching pathos. Hester Worsley's speech anent Society, which she describes as being "like a leper in purple," "a dead thing smeared with gold," is as finely written a piece of declamation as any actress could desire, apart from its high literary qualities; and Mrs Arbuthnot's confession to her boy and her appeal to him for mercy are conceived in a spirit of delicacy and reticence that only the highest art can attain. Her pathetic peroration: "Child of my shame, be still the child of my shame," touches the deepest chords of human sorrow and anguish. With a masterly knowledge of what the theatre requires, he gives us Hester at the beginning of the play inveighing against any departure from the moral code and quoting the Old Testament anent the sins of the father being visited on the children. "It is God's law," she ends up—"it is God's terrible law." Later, when she begs Mrs Arbuthnot to come away to other climes, "where there are green valleys and fresh waters" and the poor woman for whom the world is shrivelled to a palm's breadth confronts her with her own pronouncement, how beautifully introduced is her recantation: "Don't say that, God's law is only love." It has been objected to Hester that she is a prig, but no girl could be a prig who could utter a sentiment like that. She is a fine specimen of the girlhood of the late nineteenth century, travelled, cultured, frank, and fearless, and above all pure. In the artificial atmosphere of Hunstanton, where the guests are all mere worldlings, her purity and goodness stand out in high relief. If there is a prig it is Gerald who, whether he be listening to Lord Illingworth's worldly teaching as to "a well-tied tie being the first serious step in life," or hearing the story of his mother's sin, is a singularly uninteresting and commonplace young man. As to the other characters they are all admirable sketches of Society folk. Lady Caroline Pontefract tyrannising over her husband and making that gay old gentleman put on his goloshes and muffler is a delightful type of those old-fashioned grandes dames who have the peerage at their fingers' ends. Nothing could be more delightfully characteristic than her opining, when Hester tells her that some of the States of America are as big as France and England put together, that they must find it very draughty. Lady Hunstanton too, who prattles away about everybody and everything and gets mixed up in all her statements, as for instance, when referring to somebody as a clergyman who wanted to be a lunatic, she is uncertain if it was not a lunatic who wanted to be a clergyman, but who at anyrate wore straws in his hair or something equally odd, is drawn with a fidelity to nature that shows what a really great student of character Oscar Wilde was. No less admirable a portrayal is that of the worldly archdeacon whose wife is almost blind, quite deaf and a confirmed invalid, yet, nevertheless, is quite happy, for though she can no longer hear his sermons she reads them at home. He it is whom Lord Illingworth shocks so profoundly, first by his assertion that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future, and finally by the flippant remark that the secret of life is to be always on the lookout for temptations, which are becoming so exceedingly scarce that he sometimes passes a whole day without coming across one. As literature alone, the play deserves to live, and will live, as a piece de théâtre. It has met with more success than any play of the first class within the last twenty years. The reason for that is not far to seek—it is essentially human, and the woman's interest—the keynote of the story—appeals to man and woman equally. I have seen rough Lancashire audiences, bucolic boors in small country towns, and dour hard-headed Scotsmen, sit spellbound as the story of the woman's sin and her repentance was unfolded before them. A play that can do that is imperishable, and it is no disparagement to the other brilliant dramatic works of the author that, as a popular play which will ever find favour with audiences of every class and kind, on account of its human interest and its pathos, "A Woman Of No Importance" is certain of immortality.