Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

The dialogue throughout the tale sparkles with brilliant epigrams, and this is all the more notable when we remember that the story was written in a hurry, when the author was hard pressed for money, is more or less a piece of hack work, and that whole pages were written in at the behest of the publisher, who, like a customer at the baker's demanding the make-weight which the law allows him, was clamouring for more "copy."

Nothing could be more felicitous than "young people imagine that money is everything ... and when they grow older they know it"; and, "to be good is to be in harmony with oneself." And characteristic of that Epicurean pose that the author delighted in is the paradoxical dictum that "a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied." Likewise essentially characteristic of the man and his extraordinary, topsy-turvy views of life is, "There is a fatality about good resolutions—that they are always made too late," or "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account."

Some of the epigrams are as biting as a Saturday Review article, in the old days, as for instance, this description of a certain frail dame—"She is still decolletée, and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an edition de luxe of a bad French novel." Could anything be more pithy or more brilliantly sarcastic? It is of this same lady that the remark is made, "When her third husband died, her hair turned quite golden from grief."

But one could go on for ever, and I have quoted enough to illustrate the wittiness of the dialogue, and, as the author himself lays down, "Enough is as good as a meal." And there, by the way, we have an illustration of how cleverly Wilde could transform the commonest saws by the alteration or the transposition of a word, even sometimes by the inversion of a sentence into what, at the first flush, appeared to be highly original and brilliant sayings. By the substitution of the word "meal" for "feast" we fail to recognise the old homely saying, and are ready, until we consider it more closely, to receive it as a new and witty idea neatly embodied. It is a truc de métier, but one that requires a clever workman to use properly, as anyone can make sure of by glancing through the bungling work of the majority of his imitators.

In "Dorian Gray," Wilde gives free play to his ever-present longing to utter the dernier cri, to avoid all that was vieux jeu, and to fill with horror and amazement the souls of the stodgy bourgeoisie. That he succeeded in doing so merely proves that the bourgeoisie are stodgy, not that the author has erred from the canons of art and good taste.

His short stories are all written in a lighter vein—we peruse them as we eat a plover's egg, and with the same relish and appreciation. They are things of gossamer, but gossamer will oft survive more solid material, and has the supreme quality of delicacy.

"Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" deals with that nobleman's anxiety to commit the murder a cheiromantist has predicted he will perpetrate, and to get the matter over before he marries the girl to whom he is engaged. His two successive failures and his final drowning of the hand-reading fortune-teller is conceived in the best spirit of comedy, and provokes a gentle continuous ripple of amusement as we read it. The same may be said of "The Sphinx without a Secret," and "The Canterville Ghost," whereas the "Model Millionaire" is simply a pretty story wittily told. The whole plot is summed up in its concluding lines "Millionaire models are rare enough ... but model millionaires are rarer still."

But, incomparably, Wilde's best work in fiction is the "Portrait of Mr W. H." as the Blackwood article is headed. After reading it our regret becomes all the more poignant that the complete MS. of the book should have so unaccountably disappeared. Correctly speaking, the story is hardly a work of fiction, or, at anyrate, the fiction is so slight as to be hardly deserving of criticism, and is a mere medium for the exposition of a theory. The teller of the story is in a friend's rooms, and the talk drifts on to literary forgeries. The friend (Erskine) shows him a portrait-panel of a young man in late sixteenth-century costume, and proceeds to tell him his story. A young friend of his had discovered what he considered a clue to the identity of the Mr W. H. of Shakespeare's Sonnets, the only hitch being the difficulty of proving that the young actor to whom he asserted his poems were written, ever existed. He shortly afterwards produced a panel-portrait of the young man which he had, as he alleged, discovered clamped to the inside of an old chest picked up by him at a Warwickshire farmhouse. This final proof quite convinced Erskine of the genuineness of the discovery, and it was not till an accidental visit to a friend's studio that the fact of the panel being a forgery was revealed to him. He taxes the discoverer of the clue with it and the latter commits suicide. The writer of the story is so impressed with the various proofs that Erskine has laid before him that, in spite of that latter's utter scepticism as to the existence of any such person as the dead man evolved from the Sonnets themselves, he completes the researches on his own account. But the moment he has sent off a detailed account of the result of his investigations to Erskine, he himself is filled with an utter disbelief in the accuracy of the conclusions derived from them. Erskine, on the other hand, is once more converted by his letter to his dead friend's theory.

Two years later the writer receives a letter from Erskine written from Cannes stating that, like the discoverer of the clue, he has committed suicide for the sake of a theory which he leaves to his friend as a sacred legacy stained with the blood of two lives. The writer rushes off to the Riviera only to find his friend dead, and to receive from his mother the ill-starred panel.

The story ends with a true Wilde touch, for in a conversation with the doctor who had attended him, he learns that Erskine had died of consumption and had never committed suicide at all.