Truth and Wit: The Many Faces of Oscar Wilde
New York: more than a century ago, an eccentrically dressed young Irishman on a lecture tour cast his image across the United States. The United States, being an obliging young nation in such matters, threw his image back to him in a form even larger and more colourful than the original.
Newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic made note, made fun and lionized, reporting every change of clothing and every quotable quote, whether he actually said it or not. and so was born the international legend known as Oscar Wilde, who, up till now, was merely a London poetaster of some social notoriety.
Wilde’s actual accomplishments, disregarding a brilliant undergraduate career at oxford, were scant at that point. “what has he done, this young man, that one meets him everywhere?” a polish actress had asked in London in 1882. in fairness, by 1882, the year Wilde made his American tour, he had published a volume of highly perfumed poems and completed a rather embarrassing melodrama. But the reason he had been contracted to lecture had little to do with anything he had written.
It was that he was a personality… indeed, it was Richard D’Oyly Carte who engaged Wilde, thinking it might give the box office a boost. Besides, as an English journalist observed at the time, the
Americans are far more curious than we are to gaze at all those whose names, from one cause or another, have become household words.
Long before Americans, Oscar Wilde: who died 100 years ago this month: was expertly practicing the modern art of making celebrity the first step in a career rather than its culmination. This is, after all, a man who observed in his twenties that “ success is a science”. Looking back on the press coverage of Wilde’s American tour, it is astonishing to see how completely the image with which he is now identified was in place. Before… and “ The Importance of Being Earnest”, before his disastrous romance with Lord Alfred Douglas and the following scandal of his trials and imprisonment, before what really guaranteed his place in literature and history, the figure that comes to mind when one hears “Oscar Wilde” already existed. Also firmly established during the tour was the idea of Wilde as the champion of art for art’s sake. This wasn’t, by the way, precisely his philosophy, but in those days the philosophy was not yet quite in shape. The subject of his American lectures was basically the pursuit of beauty and its powers to ennoble. But he was still inventing his theories more or less as he went along. What mattered at that time was less what he said than how he said it, which was of course in epigrams, rendered with both flourishes and simplicity. Then there
were the costumes: the knee breeches, the cavalier capes, and the much-commented-upon legwear. The overall impression was ---and is---arch, amusing, divinely decadent.
This was the image in the popular imagination. Therefore it is amazing how so many different images have come from this single, certain, and fixed image since his time.
The crudest versions have much to do with changes in society. For the first few decades of the 20th century, he was largely seen as a symbol of corruption and self-destruction. The Wilde of the century’s last decades is, in contrast, a gay martyr.
Much more intriguing are the other Oscar Who keep showing up in everything from mainstream movies to academic papers…
How fitting that the collected works of Wilds offer a source of inspiration for all sorts of intellectual viewpoints. Care to find an attractive little phrase to spice up a speech promoting elitism? How about a defense of the idea that art shapes history or that history shapes art, or even that each exists entirely independent of the other? Some of these seeming contradictions are the natural reversals of opinion brought about by a dramatically eventful life… this multisided sensibility was what made Wilde seem so dangerous in twilight of the Victorian era, an age that had been built on sturdy certainties. Paradox, Wilde insisted, is the very root of all existence;
truth, he wrote, is simply “one’s last mood”. All one can really do in life is to exalt and cater to the organ of these shifting impressions. Words would always be Wilde’s most powerful defense, and made an art form of the single sentence and the perfectly poised, contradictory phrase. For that very reason, too much Wilde at once can cloy, like a diet of chocolates.
There is, however, one work of art in which the style of Wilde becomes its own end, without one inappropriate detail to mar its perfection: “the Importance Of Being Earnest”, which created a sealed world in which everyone speaks the same shapely language of paradox and practices the same religious worship of things trivial. Wilde once said that one should avoid the “I” in art, and in “Earnest”He produced his one major work in which he is invisible, though no one else could have written it. “Earnest” is Wilde at his best, turning style into substance and vice versa. Unlike most satires, it never steps outside itself to point a finger. It may be the most perfect comedy ever written.。
