This hitherto unpublished essay was written by Max Beerbohm for the first number of The Yellow Book, but it was held over to make way for his famous Defence of Cosmetics, which duly appeared in April, 1894. Whether this change was made because of the impending Wilde scandal it is, of course impossible to say with certainty, but the probabilities favour this explanation. The Wilde case did not come to the ears of the general public until the spring of 1895, just one year after the founding of The Yellow Book, but literary London was aware of what was happening long before that date, and already in 1894 Wilde’s friends were very anxious about the recklessness of his behaviour. It is significant that Oscar Wilde, the archetype of the Decadent Nineties, did not contribute either to The Yellow Book or The Savoy, which were the literary organs of that whole movement. It is difficult not to see some connection between the remarkable absence of Wilde’s name from these periodicals and the fact that this brilliant essay on him was never published.
The essay itself is one of the deftest and cleverest pieces of writing which Max Beerbohm has ever achieved. In it one can see how from the very beginning of his career Beerbohm was destined to be the satirist of the period with which he is associated, although he never displayed any of the qualities—or defects—of the Decadents. No cartoon of his is more devastating and illuminating than this solemn buffoonery of Wilde in terms of a domesticity as preposterous as Wilde’s own pose of diabolism. At the same time Wilde had no more devoted admirer or faithful friend. It is characteristic of the good nature of Max’s satire that it does not necessarily imply disapproval. It is just his fun.
A PEEP INTO THE PAST
Oscar Wilde! I wonder to how many of my readers the jingle of this name suggests anything at all? Yet, at one time, it was familiar to many and if we search back among the old volumes of Punch, we shall find many a quip and crank out at its owner’s expense. But time is a quick mover and many of us are fated to outlive our reputations and thus, though at one time Mr. Wilde, the old gentleman, of whom we are going to give our readers a brief account, was in his way quite a celebrity; today his star is set, his name obscured in this busy, changeful city.
Once a welcome guest in many of our Bohemian haunts, he lives now a life of quiet retirement in his little house in Tite Street with his wife and his two sons, his prop and mainstay, solacing himself with many a reminiscence of the friends of his youth, whilst he leaves his better-known brother, William, to perpetuate the social name of the family. Always noted for his tenacious memory, it is one of the old gentleman’s keenest pleasures to regale a visitor from the outer world with stories of the late Mr. Frank Niles, Mr. Godwin, the architect, Mr. Robert Browning or the Earl of Lytton, who was not the only member of the upper ten thousand to honour Mr. Wilde with his personal friendship. “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces” and with the quiet resignation of one who knows that he is the survivor of a bygone day, Mr. Wilde tends more and more to exist in its memory or to solace himself with the old classics of which he was ever so earnest a student, with his Keats and his Shakespeare, his Joseph Miller and the literal translations of the Greek Dramatists. Not that he is a mere laudator temporis acti, a bibliophile and nothing more. He still keeps up his writing, is still the glutton for work that he always was. He has not yet abandoned his old intention of dramatising Salome and the amount of journalistic matter that he quietly produces and contributes anonymously to various periodicals is surprising. Only last year an undergraduate journal called the Spirit Lamp accepted a poem of his in which there were evidences that he has lost little of his old talent for versification.