PART VI
THE FICTION WRITER
FICTION
That the gift of composing beautiful verse and the ability to write gracefully and wittily in prose does not of necessity enable an author to produce good fiction, is a truism that requires no elaboration. That the novelist should possess style is a sine quâ non—that is, if his novels are to take their place as works of art and not merely achieve an ephemeral success amongst the patrons of circulating libraries—but to achieve distinction in the field of romance many other qualities are requisite. To begin with, the story must be of sufficient interest to hold the attention of the reader, the dialogue must be brisk and to the point, and the delineation of character—a gift in itself—lifelike and convincing.
Whether Oscar Wilde would, had his life been prolonged, have ever achieved success in this branch of literature is one of those vexed questions which may well be left to those speculative persons who love to discuss "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" and other unfinished works of fiction. That he was endowed with an extraordinarily vivid imagination and that his versatility was marvellous are factors that no one should neglect to take into account when considering the matter. His own contributions to fiction are so few that they afford very little data to go upon. They consist of "The Picture of Dorian Gray," published in 1890; "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime"; "The Incomparable and Ingenious History of Mr W. H., being the true secret of Shakespeare's Sonnets, now for the first time here fully set forth," the manuscript of which, after passing through the hands of Messrs Elkin Mathews and John Lane, publishers, who had announced the work as being in preparation, has been unaccountably lost, although it is known that it was returned to the author's house on the very day of his arrest. An article in Blackwood's Magazine alone enables us to gather some idea of the last work. Then we have three short stories—"The Sphinx without a Secret," "The Canterville Ghost," "The Model Millionaire," which complete the list of Wilde's fiction in the limited sense of the word.
A careful study of these remains must lead to the inevitable conclusion that, so far as we can judge by these more or less fragmentary specimens, Wilde's forte was not fiction. He can in no sense be regarded as a novelist, certainly not as an exponent of modern fiction. The pieces are brilliantly clever, gemmed with paradoxes and quaint turns of thought, but they are not fiction in the accepted sense of the word. Works of imagination, yes, but "fiction," no. That he was a graceful allegorist nobody can deny, but that his work in this other field of letters was great is never for a moment to be even suggested. He used fiction as a means of introducing his curiously topsy-turvy views of life, but his characters are mere puppets, strange creatures with unreal names, without any particular personality or especially characteristic features, who enunciate the author's views and opinions.
In a preface to "Dorian Gray," when it was published in book form, Oscar Wilde himself confirms this view—"The highest and the lowest form of criticism," he tells us, "is a mode of autobiography." That he himself believed in the artistic value of his story is evident from the series of brilliant aphorisms which constitute the preface.
When in July, 1890, there appeared in an American magazine the fantastic story of "Dorian Gray" an astonished public rubbed its eyes and wondered whether all its previous theories as to this class of work had been absolutely false and should henceforth be discarded like a garment that has gone out of fashion.