Oscar Wilde

Karl Beckson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134722853
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

COLLECTED WORKS

1908

101.
St John Hankin on Wilde’s collected plays
1908

Signed article, titled ‘The Collected Plays of Oscar Wilde’, Fortnightly Review (1 May 1908), lxxxiii, n.s., 791–802.

St John Hankin (1869–1909), critic and playwright, who was an admirer of Ibsen, here offers several startling observations, the first being that The Importance of Being Earnest is Wilde’s ‘most serious’ and ‘most sincere’ play—‘the very greatest of English comedies’–a departure from previous critical estimates, but Hankin’s remark that it was a movement toward ‘more naturalistic methods of the newer schools’ is equally startling—and certainly untrue—for the ‘curtains’ that he discusses are less significant than the dandiacal element that dominates the play. The climax of startling moments occurs towards the close of Hankin’s article, where Salomé is declared Wilde’s ‘greatest play’. (In the penultimate paragraph of his article, Hankin asks whether the original four-act script of Wilde’s Importance still exists. A quarter of the manuscript is in the British Museum; the remainder, including the deleted act, is in. the Arents Collection, The New York Public Library. The four-act version was reconstructed and edited by Vyvyan Holland for publication in 1957.)

The complete edition of the works of Oscar Wilde, which Messrs. Methuen are now issuing under the editorship of Mr. Robert Ross, has a special interest for the student of the English drama of the latter part of the nineteenth century. For the first six volumes of it are devoted tothe plays, and by their appearance one is now enabled for the first time to consider their author’s dramatic work as a whole. Hitherto this has been impossible, since the early plays, Vera, or The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, and also the fragment of A Florentine Tragedy—which belongs in style to the early period though it was actually written comparatively late in his career—have never hitherto been either published or publicly performed in this country. The Duchess of Padua was originally produced in the United States, and has also been played, in a prose translation, in Germany, and both it and Vera have been printed in pirated editions in America and elsewhere. But seeing that the pirated edition of Vera was a careless and inaccurate reprint from a prompt copy, and that of The Duchess of Padua a prose translation of the German version—Wilde’s play is in blank verse—it will be understood that not much help could be got from them by anyone who desired to form a critical estimate of the plays, even if he were prepared to go to the trouble and expense of smuggling them.

This unsatisfactory state of things is now at an end. All the plays are now published in an authorised and unmutilated form, and though one cannot pretend that any of the three now printed for the first time are on a level with their author’s best work, they have their importance for anyone who wishes to understand Wilde as a dramatist and to estimate his powers and his limitations. On the whole, they certainly illustrate the limitations rather than the powers. Mr. Ross, in a characteristic dedicatory letter prefixed to The Duchess of Padua, acknowledges with engaging frankness that the play is artistically of small account, and that its author at the end of his life recognised the fact. In doing so, I think Mr. Ross has acted wisely. Honesty is the first essential in an editor, and nothing is to be gained by pretending that bad work is good—especially as in this case the pretence could take nobody in.

There will be some people, perhaps, who will urge that if a play is poor it is hardly worth exhuming after so many years, and that Wilde’s reputation can only suffer by its publication. But this, I think, is a mistaken view. Writers of real distinction stand or fall by the best they produced, not by the worst. Byron and Wordsworth wrote plenty of inferior verse, which is duly entombed in the collected editions of their works. But no sane person pretends to think the less of their genius on that account. If Vera and The Duchess of Padua were far worse plays than they are—Vera could hardly be that, by the way—it would still be desirable that they should be published. Wilde is a writer of quite sufficient power and accomplishment to deserve the compliment of acomplete edition. Moreover, the early work of great writers has an interest for intelligent people out of all proportion to its intrinsic merit. Ibsen’s early plays are frankly bad for the most part and no one can pretend that the actual artistic loss to the world would have been great if they had vanished as completely as the lost plays of Aeschylus. But they are interesting for the indications they contain of certain tendencies in his genius, and of the lines on which that genius was to develop, and for this reason the critic would regret their disappearance, though he cannot pretend that there is any particular aesthetic pleasure to be derived from their perusal.

From this point of view, it must be confessed, the early plays of Wilde are less illuminating, for there is far less of Wilde in the early Wilde plays than there is of Ibsen in the early Ibsens. Lady Inger of Osträt is a poor play with an elaborate intrigue constructed on absurd Scribe lines—and not very well constructed. For, whereas Scribe’s construction is always clear and workmanlike, Lady Inger’s is involved and tenebrous. Mysterious strangers pop in and out of dimly-lighted chambers, and nobody, either on the stage or in the auditorium, is allowed to know who they are or what they are about. When the Stage Society performed the play a season or two ago in London only a small fraction of the audience succeeded in disentangling the plot. This is quite remarkable in a play by the man who was to evolve the superb technique of the Social dramas.’ But though Lady Inger is a preposterous play, the eye of faith can see in it something of the Ibsen that was to come. There is an austerity and simplicity in the dialogue, an absence of mere rhetoric for its own sake, and a relative naturalness in the character drawing and the incidents which differentiate it from the work of his predecessors, and herald, faintly but surely, the rising of a new school of drama. Wilde’s early work is less prophetic. There are moments in Vera and The Duchess of Padua when the dialogue or the characterisation gives a foretaste of the later comedies. The talk between the Russian Cabinet Councillors in Vera reads rather like a parody of the talk between the men in Lord Darlington’s rooms in Lady Windermere’s Fan, while Padua’s Duke is a sort of blank-verse Lord Illingworth. And there is the same faculty for working up an exciting theatrical scene, the same fatal tendency to rely upon rhetoric instead of simplicity in emotional scenes, which made—and marred—the author’s plays almost to the end. But except for this, the early drama give no hint of the later work. The reason, of course, is simple enough. Wilde as a playwright was always an imitator rather than an original artist. In him, in fact, the faculty of imitation was carried to a point that was almost genius. He had an extraordinarily keen sense of literary style. If he had had ambitions in that direction he might have become a literary forger of the first distinction worthy to rank with Chatterton or Simonides. And, as was natural, this imitative faculty of his had the fullest play in his earliest work. Every artist begins by imitating someone. Even the greatest genius does not spring full-born from the head of Zeus. After a time he ‘finds himself,’ and ceases to be an echo, but in the beginning he models himself on others.

The difficulty about Wilde as a playwright was that he never quite got through the imitative phase. The Importance of Being Earnest is the nearest approach to absolute originality that he attained. In that play, for the first time, he seemed to be tearing himself away from tradition and to be evolving a dramatic form of his own. Unhappily it was the last play he was to write, and so the promise in it was never fulfilled. Had his career not been cut short at this moment, it is possible that this might have proved the starting-point of a whole series of ‘Trivial Comedies for Serious People,’ and that thenceforward Wilde would have definitely discarded the machine-made construction of the Scribe-Sardou theatre which had held him too long and begun to use the drama as an artist should, for the expression of his own personality, not the manufacture of clever pastiches. It would then have become possible to take him seriously as a dramatist. For, paradoxical as it may sound in the case of so merry and light-hearted a play, The Importance of Being Earnest is artistically the most serious work that Wilde produced for the theatre. Not only is it by far the most brilliant of his plays considered as literature. It is also the most sincere. With all its absurdity, its psychology is truer, its criticism of life subtler and more profound, than that of the other plays. And even in its technique it shows, in certain details, a breaking away from the conventional well-made play of the ‘seventies and ‘eighties in favour of the looser construction and more naturalistic methods of the newer school.

Consider its ‘curtains’ for a moment and compare them with those of the conventional farce or comedy of their day or of Wilde’s other plays. In the other plays Wilde clung tenaciously to the old-fashioned ‘strong’ curtain, and I am bound to say he used it with great cleverness, though the cleverness seems to me deplorably wasted. The curtain of the third act of Lady Windermere’s Fan, when Mrs. Erlynne suddenly emerges from Lord Darlington’s inner room, and Lady Windermere, taking advantage of the confusion, glides from her hiding-place in thewindow and makes her escape unseen, is theatrically extremely effective. So is that of the third act of An Ideal Husband, when Mrs. Chieveley triumphantly carries off Lady Chiltern’s letter under the very eyes of Lord Goring, who cannot forcibly stop her because his servant enters at that moment in answer to her ring. It is a purely theatrical device only worthy of a popular melodrama. But it produces the requisite thrill in the theatre. On the analogy of these plays one would expect to find in The Importance of Being Earnest the traditional ‘curtains’ of well-made farce, each act ending in what used to be called a ‘tableau’ of comic bewilderment or terror or indignation. Instead of this we have really no ‘curtains’ at all. Acts I. and II. end in the casual, go-as-you-please fashion of the ultra-naturalistic school. They might be the work of Mr. Granville Barker. Of course, there is nothing really go-as-you-please about them save in form. They are as carefully thought out, as ingenious in the best sense, as the strong ‘curtain’ could possibly be. But this will not appear to the superficial observer, who will probably believe that these acts ‘end anyhow’. Here is the end of Act I.:—

ALGERNON Oh, I’m a little anxious about poor Bunbury, that is all.

JACK If you don’t take care, your friend Bunbury will get you into a serious scrape some day.

ALGERNON I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.

JACK Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense.

ALGERNON Nobody ever does.

(Curtain)

This may seem an easy, slap-dash method of ending an act, and one which anybody can accomplish, but it is very far from being so easy as it looks. To make it effective in the theatre—and in The Importance of Being Earnest it is enormously effective—requires at least as much art as the more elaborate devices of the earlier comedies. Only in this case it is the art which conceals art which is required, not the art which obtrudes it.

In The Importance of Being Earnest, in fact, Wilde really invented a new type of play, and that type was the only quite original thing he contributed to the English stage. In form it is farce, but in spirit and in treatment it is comedy. Yet it is not farcical comedy. Farcical comedy is a perfectly well recognised class of drama and a fundamentally different one. There are only two other plays which I can think of which belong to the same type—Arms and the Man and The Philanderer. Arms and the Man, like The Importance of Being Earnest, is psychological farce, the farce of ideas. In it Mr. Shaw, like Wilde, has taken the traditionalfarcical form—the last acts of both plays are quite on traditional lines in their mechanism—and breathed into it a new spirit. Similarly, The Philanderer is psychological farce, though here there is less farce and more psychology. Unluckily, the Court performances of this play were marked by a dismal slowness and a portentous solemnity by which its freakish humour and irresponsibility were hidden away out of sight, and its true character completely obscured. Properly played, it would prove, I believe, one of the most amusing and delightful things in Mr. Shaw’s theatre.

Having spoken of the most original of Wilde’s plays, let me turn now to the least original, to the one in which his imitative faculty finds its fullest expression, The Duchess of Padua. The Duchess of Padua is a really remarkable example of this faculty. I may add that it is also an extremely amusing one, though the humour is, I suspect, wholly unconscious. It is a tragedy planned on the most ambitious Elizabethan lines, though a certain concession to Mid-Victorian theatrical conventions is made in the way of ‘strong’ curtains. In all other ways it follows its models with touching fidelity. Here you have the swelling rhetoric, the gorgeous imagery, the piling up of the agony, of Webster himself. There is the magniloquent verse for the nobles and the homely prose for the populace to which Shakespeare has accustomed us. First and Second Citizen speak with all the traditional imbecility. The croaking raven bellows for revenge. His name in this case is Moranzone. There is a Court scene in the manner of The Merchant of Venice. In fact, there is everything which one might count on finding in the play of a genuine Elizabethan—except originality. That, unluckily, is absent. The Duchess of Padua, in fact, is an exercise, a study in style, not an authentic work of art. Indeed, there are moments when it is not merely a study but something dangerously like a parody. Here is an example. It comes from the opening scene of the fourth act:—

MORANZONE Is the Duke dead?

SECOND CITIZEN He has a knife in his heart, which they say is not healthy for any man.

MORANZONE Who is accused of having killed him?

SECOND CITIZEN Why, the prisoner, sir.

MORANZONE But who is the prisoner?

SECOND CITIZEN Why, he that is accused of the Duke’s murder.

MORANZONE I mean, what is his name?

SECOND CITIZEN Faith, the same which his godfathers gave him: what else should it be!

This kind of thing is quite amusing as a skit, but it is a little out of place in a serious tragedy.

And some of the blank verse passages are equally funny with their elaborate reproduction of the best Elizabethan manner, though here the humour is subtler:—

GUIDO Let me find mercy when I go at night
And do foul murder.

DUCHESS Murder did you say?
Murder is hungry, and still cries for more,
And Death, his brother, is not satisfied,
But walks the house, and will not go away,
Unless he has a comrade! Tarry, Death,
For I will give thee a most faithful lackey
To travel with thee! Murder, call no more,
For thou shalt eat thy fill. There is a storm
Will break upon this house before the morning
So horrible, that the white moon already
Turns grey and sick with terror, the low wind
Goes moaning round the house, and the high stars
Run madly through the vaulted firmament,
As though the night wept tears of liquid fire
For what the day shall look upon. O weep
Thou lamentable heaven! Weep thy fill!
Though sorrow like a cataract drench the fields,
And make the earth one bitter lake of tears,
It would not be enough. (A peal of thunder)
Do you not hear?
There is artillery in the Heavens to-night.
Vengeance is wakened up, and has unloosed
His dogs upon the world, and in this matter
Which lies between us two let him who draws
The thunder on his head beware the ruin
Which the forked flame brings after.

GUIDO Away! Away!

Would Webster or Cyril Tourneur do it differently? Or any better for that matter? I think not. The Duchess of Padua is a school exercise, a set of Latin verses, as it were, constructed after the best Ovidian models, but it is the exercise of a very exceptional schoolboy. And though all of it is imitative and some of it is absurd, it has from the theatrical standpoint very real merits. It is not great drama in any sense, but it would bevery effective on the stage—which, after all, is what plays are meant to be. It has a good harrowing plot, plenty of ‘thrills,’ plenty of declamation, and plenty of impassioned love-making, everything, in fact, which makes for success with the romantic playgoer. The principal characters, too, except the Duke, who is frankly ridiculous, are well drawn after their kind. Not subtly drawn, of course—subtlety would be thrown away in work of this kind—but drawn clearly and boldly. Some of the verse is really fine, and none of it sinks below a respectable level. Altogether, as the work of quite a young man it is creditable enough. If all the blank verse dramas which have graced the English stage during the past ten years had been half as good, the discerning critic would have had less to complain of.

The Duchess of Padua, in fact, is quite good second-rate work. But as soon as you compare it with firstrate work the poverty of its texture at once becomes obvious. Browning, in A Soul’s Tragedy—I think his best, because his most characteristic and individual, play—took a subject belonging to much the same period as The Duchess of Padua. His scene also is mediaeval Italy where cities groan under the tyranny of their rulers and worldly ecclesiastics pull the strings of government. But where Wilde could only turn out a clever copy of other men’s work, Browning produced an entirely original type of drama, which bears in every line the impress of his own personality, which nobody else could have written. It is a real reconstruction of the life of its period as Browning saw it, not as he believed Shakespeare or Webster would have seen it. It has its alternation of blank verse and homely prose, but here too Browning is no mere imitator. He does not simply borrow a trick from the Elizabethans. His first, second and third citizens talk their prose and make their simple jokes in it, but their speeches never for a moment read like a parody of the gravediggers in Hamlet. And it is not only the citizens who talk prose. The Papal Legate talks prose too— because he thinks prose. So do the romantic characters, Chiappino and the rest, when they have come down from the romantic heights and have to face a commonplace, practical issue. Browning himself, it will be remembered, divides the play into two parts, ‘Act I., being what was called the poetry of Chiappino’s life, and Act II., its prose,’ and he writes the first act in verse and the second in prose to carry out the idea. This is to give a fresh significance to the traditional blending of verse and prose in tragedy, and put fresh life into what had become an obsolete convention. If The Duchess of Padua had been written with the artistic sincerity of A Soul’s Tragedy—Wilde, by the way, admired that play very highly—Mr. Ross would not have had to write so deprecatingly of it in his dedicatory letter.

The same imitative quality which prevents one from taking The Duchess of Padua seriously as a work of art mars the comedies also. As far a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• POEMS: June 1881
• VERA; OR THE NIHILISTS: First produced: 20 August 1883
• THE HAPPY PRINCE AND OTHER TALES: May 1888
• THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: First published version: 20 June 1890
• THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: Second published version: April 1891
• THE DUCHESS OF PADUA: First produced: 26 January 1891
• INTENTIONS: 2 May 1891
• LORD ARTHUR SAVILE’S CRIME AND OTHER STORIES: July 1891
• A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES: November 1891
• LADY WINDERMERE’S FAN: First produced: 20 February 1892
• SALOMÉ: 22 February 1893
• A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE: First produced: 19 April 1893
• THE SPHINX: 11 June 1894
• AN IDEAL HUSBAND: First produced: 3 January 1895
• THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST: First produced: 14 February 1895
• THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL: 13 February 1898
• ON THE OCCASION OF WILDE’S DEATH: 30 November 1900
• DE PROFUNDIS: 23 February 1905
• COLLECTED WORKS: 1908
• Bibliography