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    File: \DP\0227\02274.TXT         Sun Jun 06 10:49:12 1993
Database: Monarch Notes By Author


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Title:       Plays of Oscar Wilde
Book:        Introduction to Oscar Wilde
Author:      Wilde, Oscar
Critic:      Schwartz, Grace Horowitz
Affiliation: Department Of English, Hunter College

Queen Victoria's England:

     Every writer is marked by the age in which he lives and writes. Oscar
Wilde (1854-1900) passed the whole of his short life in the reign of Queen
Victoria. In his own unique way, he was as much affected by this fact as was
Alfred Lord Tennyson, who is usually thought of as the supremely
representative poet of Victoria's world, or Rudyard Kipling, who is known as
the spokesman for Victoria's worldwide Empire, so farflung that the sun never
set on it.

     When Victoria became queen in 1837, the royal family was neither popular
nor respected. George III, her grandfather, had suffered recurrent spells of
insanity during his lengthy reign (1760-1820) and at last, in 1811, he became
hopelessly incompetent; the Prince of Wales, the oldest of his ten sons,
became Prince Regent. When his father died, he came to the throne as King
George IV.

     The new king had a history that did not inspire loyal affection. He was
married to a Mrs. Fitzherbert in 1785, but the marriage, though blessed with
many children, was not recognized officially because the lady was a Roman
Catholic instead of a member of the Church of England. George's endless
extravagances landed him in hopeless debt. In 1795, he deserted Mrs.
Fitzherbert to marry Princess Caroline of Brunswick on condition that his
debts should be paid off.

  t  He made no pretense of caring for the Princess; he first neglected, and
then abandoned her. A furor was created when, in 1820, Caroline indicated that
she expected to be crowned Queen alongside her husband. George tried to
divorce her on the charge that she had committed adultery; the obvious
opportunism of his behavior made him thoroughly unpopular. The scandalous
situation was climaxed by a scene at the coronation when the Queen tried to
enter Westminster Abbey for the ceremony and had the doors shut in her face.

     George died without legitimate heirs in 1830. His brother, the Duke of
Clarence, succeeded him as William IV. William's outstanding characteristic
was his boorishness. His uncouth behavior during his short reign did nothing
to win back the respect lost by his father and his brother. It was not
expected that young Victoria, who became Queen in 1837, would be able to
retrieve the love of the English people which her grandfather and uncles had
managed to alienate. In fact, many thinking people assumed that the time of
the monarchy was running out. It was expected that Britain would get rid of
her royal family, by revolution or by other means, and at last become a
republic. It was a strange beginning for what ironically turned out to be the
longest reign in English history, more than sixty-three years.

     Victoria's father was the Duke of Kent, fourth son of George III. He was
the oldest surviving son after King William IV, so that it was understood that
his little daughter would eventually become Queen. The Duke died while she was
a baby. Her German mother supervised her education with great strictness. This
consisted of constant drilling in manners and duties, rather than intellectual
training. Thus, though Victoria had considerable intelligence, she did not
have the asset of a thorough education. This was to lead, later in life, to a
narrow outlook, a serious lack of mental flexibility; even today, we think of
this cast of mind as "Victorian."

     But in 1837, no misgivings about the Queen's limitations troubled
England. The people only knew that after a succession of elderly, unappealing
kings, they now had a queen who was eighteen years of age, attractive,
vivacious, and conscientious. A great wave of affection rose from her
subjects, and with this there was mingled a protective instinct. The Queen was
hardly more than a child. She had been chaperoned and protected; diligently,
those in charge of her had shielded her innocence from contact with anything
distressing or improper. Now her subjects began to shield her too. Statesmen,
artists, and writers shared an impulse to avoid those subjects that might be
unsuitable for the sheltered young queen.

     Thus, the accident that the English crown was inherited by a girl colored
the culture of an entire age. The effect was striking - and not entirely
desirable. What may be proper intellectual nourishment for a strictly raised
eighteen-year-old girl is not necessarily appropriate for all the people in a
country. Also, the result was the encouragement of respectability, not the
rebirth of virtue. These are quite different things. If, inspired by the
Queen, the British people had shown an impulse toward higher standards of
conduct, the result would surely have been impressive. But as a whole they did
not do this. Rather, they showed a greater interest in appearing respectable.
The opinion of one's neighbors became all-important. As a result, hypocrisy
became the most important virtue. The standard of conduct in Victoria's time
was extremely strict and the penalty for breaking the moral code was to be
cast out from society - but this meant in practice only that one was expected
to avoid getting caught.

     Thus, the Victorian era fostered a highly repressive atmosphere. What one
could or could not do was carefully prescribed by society. And with this went
an insincerity which came to be accepted as entirely natural, especially by
the middle class.

     Victoria's later history did nothing to alter this. Married to her German
cousin Albert, whom she adored, she became the mother of nine children. In
1861, Albert died suddenly, leaving the Queen an inconsolable widow. For the
remaining forty years of her life, she wore mourning for him. Naturally, the
domestic virtues were those most prized by the Queen. As she got older she
became even surer that her own limited ideas were the only correct ones. As an
example, for many years she refused to receive at court any woman who had been
widowed and had later remarried. She expected all women to abide by her idea
of how a widow should behave. She demanded that all women who hoped to take
part in the life of the royal court live according to standards that were in
excess of what any western religion required.

     To summarize, the atmosphere of Victorian England was stuffy and
hypocritical. It insisted on conformity. As a result, it produced a large
number of people obedient to its standards-but it also produced a crop of
colorful eccentrics and rebels. Oscar Wilde was one of these.

Science And Religion:

     In 1859, Charles Darwin published his book, On the Origin of Species by
Means of Natural Selection, which presented the theory of evolution and
touched off a violent controversy which has not subsided completely even
today. However, we must not make the mistake of assuming that Darwin was the
first person ever to have such ideas. Even in ancient Greece, certain
philosophers had suggested that the forms of living things tended to change
and develop as time passed. In the early nineteenth century, a French
scientist, Baron Cuvier, observed in fossils simple forms of life which had
once existed on the earth but were no longer to be found. Sir Charles Lyell
explained the enormous extent of geological time in Principles of Geology
(1833).

     Darwin incorporated a lot of earlier material with his own observations
to produce his theory. To put it simply, Darwin observed that most species of
plants and animals produced far more young than ever grew into maturity. In
the case of some of the simpler organisms, only a minute percentage of those
produced could survive. He pointed out that if all the oysters produced in one
year were to reach maturity and reproduce, great mountains of oysters would
tower up out of the oceans.

     What was it that determined which organisms out of the multitudes would
be the survivors? Darwin answered that the huge numbers of organisms produced
by a given species had a great variety of hereditary characteristics. Those
who happened to have characteristics that helped them catch their food and
avoid their enemies were the ones that lived. The others died, victims of
their enemies, starvation, or other kinds of destruction. Among
characteristics that might be helpful to survival were speed, strength, and
protective coloration that helped the organism to blend with its surroundings
and avoid being seen.

     Darwin reasoned further that those creatures that survived were the ones
that reproduced themselves; they passed their characteristics on to at least
some of their offspring, who then could also survive and reproduce. Those
creatures who did not last till maturity died out before they could reproduce
themselves. In this way, those characteristics useful in the environment were
perpetuated. Thus, the various species developed and changed their
characteristics.

     Darwin was convinced that this process had been in effect countless
millions of years; he believed it had begun with a primitive unicellular sea
creature that had been the first life on the earth. As a result of the
constant operation of this process, different kinds of life had developed.
Some kinds had died out and could now be seen only as fossils. Others became
more and more differentiated and complex, until the various forms of plant
and animal life known in the modern world came into being.

     Naturally, not many people actually read through Darwin's complex and
technical explanations. But his ideas became known through newspapers,
magazines and sermons. For the implications were clear. If life really had
begun in a very simple form and slowly developed over vast stretches of time,
then the account of creation in the Bible was seemingly contradicted-for this
was different from a world made with all its varied creatures within seven
days by the hand of God. A famous Biblical scholar, Bishop Ussher, had, after
careful study, dated the year of creation as 4004 B.C. He was even able to
supply the very day and hour of the event. Now the concept of geological time
made this absurd.

     Thus it seemed to many that the very foundations of religious faith were
being attacked. Yet, eventually, the various sects were able to assimilate
Darwin's ideas. Almost all religious groups have faced the contradictions
between science and traditional interpretation of the Bible. Evolution is
today taught in many religious seminaries. Darwin himself is buried in
Westminister Abbey.

     Yet Darwin's thought did give a terrible shock to the time. Before him,
most people lived in a cozy, understandable world. Man was the center of this
world-of course, for was he not made in God's image? All of creation had been
for the purpose of providing a home for him. The universe, the Earth, other
living creatures, only mattered because they were necessary to man.

     But with the new science, how cold and terrifying the universe became!
How frightening it was to think of the earth as an insignificant speck in time
and space, where a series of evolutionary accidents had produced the human
race.

     And worst of all were the methods by which evolution took place. The
main instrument of it seemed to be death! Huge quantities of living creatures
were produced, apparently with no other function but to die. They were linked
with one another in a relationship of repeated cruelty and suffering. A
creature might be a destroyer of many species, only to fall a victim at last
to others more quick or powerful than itself.

     How different is this world governed by waste, accident, and cruelty from
that secure one where the benevolent Creator observed each sparrow's fall!
Many men who could face the idea that the account of creation in the Bible
might not be strictly accurate were stricken to the heart by the senselessness
and horror of this picture. Alfred Lord Tennyson, a very typical Victorian
writer, speaks of Nature, "red in tooth and claw." "How careful of the type
she seems,/ How careless of the single life." Nothing could better sum up the
despair of the thoughtful man than these excerpets from Tennyson's In
Memoriam.

     To summarize, the conflict between science and religion in the Victorian
period produced an atmosphere of despair. Thoughtful men found the new world
of science, so huge and indifferent to man, a bleak place to live. Some, like
Tennyson, faced the problem and struggled to find some basis for faith and
hope.

     But others, equally aware of the new atmosphere, fought it by ignoring
it. They also were troubled by the lonely new world in which they had to live.
But they protected themselves by trying to escape. They tried to find a scale
of values which would not be affected by these developments. Such men, no
longer able to have confidence in the moral world, turned to the world of
beauty. The worship of beauty became an end in itself. Beauty was safe,
unaffected by outside events. In beauty one could place one's faith and hope;
it was changeless. Among those who turned to the worship of beauty were the
poet Algernon Swinburne, the critic Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

The Industrial Revolution:

     Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, the face of England
was drastically changed by a huge series of events, which we usually call "The
Industrial Revolution." In the early eighteenth century, all Englishmen made
their living from the land.

     The term "Industrial Revolution" refers to the period in English history,
approximately 1750-1850, in which major social and economic changes took
place. With the invention of the spinning frame and power loom, England moved
from an agricultural and commercial society to a modern industrial society.
England became a world textile center. By the mid-1840s over half a million
people were employed, 340,000 of them tending power-driven machines in
factories.

     Economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo rejected contemporary
doctrines. They developed the thesis that division of labor and free trade
would necessarily benefit the bulk of the populace. But these new doctrines
inherited the squalor of the past centuries and developed some new
difficulties.

     In 1764 a machine for spinning thread (known as the "spinning jenny") was
invented. A series of other inventions followed rapidly, including the steam
locomotive in 1825. It became possible to produce cotton, wool, and iron at
far lower cost than ever before. This was done by building power-driven
machines and assembling them in factories, where large numbers of workers came
together to operate them. Most often, these factories were built in the north
of England, near the coal mines which provided the fuel that would make steam
to drive the machines. It was because of this that the industrial cities of
England were built mainly in the north.

     England's cities grew monstrously in the years between 1800 and 1830.
Thousands who could no longer live from the land came to the cities, where
they had a better chance of survival. An entirely new class of people
developed-people who were, dependent on factory employment rather than on the
whims of nature. As thousands poured into the urban settlements, tremendous
new difficulties had to be overcome.

     Not enough wealth had yet been produced to adequately provide for the
newcomers. No housing had been planned to accommodate the hordes of workers.
At first, they lived in abandoned houses in old sections of the cities.
Eventually inexpensive housing was put up, built by the barest minimum of
speculative capital. Among other things, sanitary conditions were woefully
substandard (in relation to our present-day standards) and this led to a
severe epidemic of cholera during the 1830s.

     The multitudes had come from abject poverty to conditions barely better.
It was a brand-new mode of living, but the system was yet too young to
alleviate the horrors. English cities were hideous in a way that we of the
twentieth century can scarcely imagine. In huddled groups of tumble-down
houses, mobs of people lived, sometimes several families in one room. Filth
and horrible smells were everywhere. People were dressed in rags. Children
were undernourished and deformed. In the mines, five-year-olds pulled carts of
coal for twelve to fourteen hours a day and never saw the sunlight-or the
inside of a school.

     Some writers tried to make the people of England conscious of the horrors
all around them. For example, Elizabeth Barrett wrote "The Cry of the
Children," which described the conditions of child labor. But for others, the
ugliness of industrial England made physical beauty seem more important than
ever before. In reaction to what they saw, they regarded beauty as a supreme
good. Oscar Wilde is one example of this. His writings show no trace of what
we call "social consciousness." He never indicates any concern for the evils
of his time. Slums, child labor, disease, and poverty might not have existed
for all the notice Wilde takes of them. Reading his plays, one gets the
impression that England is made up entirely of Lords, Ladies, and a few others
who do not have titles but are at least independently wealthy.

     Nevertheless, in spite of the narrow focus and limited sympathy displayed
in his work, one gets a strong impression that Wilde turns to elegance and
beauty to some extent because the whole of reality is unacceptable to him. He
escapes ugliness and doubt, and while he does so, he enables his audience to
escape with him.

The Aesthetic Movement:

     Reaction against the conformity, hideousness, and doubt of
nineteenth-century England came to a spectacular climax in the 1890s. This
rebellion featured a group of eccentric, self-conscious young men, of whom
Oscar Wilde was the most famous. But a stream of rebellion can be traced far
back to the 1850s. In 1853, in The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin presented
the theory that England's lack of beauty was simply a visual sign that English
life lacked moral good and inner joy; beauty and goodness were part of each
other. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was convinced that the Middle Ages were far
superior to nineteenth-century England. He was a gifted painter and a fine
poet; in both forms he celebrated the beauty and sincerity of medieval life.

     William Morris (1834-1896) carried his dissatisfaction with
industrialism and mass production even further. He found factory-made
objects ugly and worthless; he felt that the only way for the individual
to create beauty was to devote himself to craftsmanship and painstaking
handwork. In 1861, he formed a company to produce wallpaper, tiles, draperies,
carpets, and furniture by old hand methods. The results showed beauty and
artistic integrity. Indeed, by this work, Morris created a small revolution
and founded the modern art of interior decoration. Morris was also a fine
poet.

     In Ruskin, Rossetti, and Morris, we find a deep concern with morality
and virtue, as well as with beauty. In different ways, each of these men
found a close connection between ugliness and evil, and between virtue and
beauty. Their love of beauty was part of their devotion to what was good.

     But as time went on, the idea of beauty no longer was firmly connected
to the idea of goodness. The poet Algernon Swinburne was a violent hater of
all authority, political and religious. He praised the joys of passion and
the beauty of the pagan way of life. This brought down the wrath of
conventional Victorians on his head; he was condemned for being indecent
and irreligious. Poor Swinburne was an unstable person at best, and after
years of alcoholism and other excesses, he broke down completely in 1879,
at the age of forty-two, while his respectable enemies enjoyed the
opportunity to cry: "I told you so!" For the remaining thirty years of his
life, he lived under the careful control of his friend, Theodore Watts
Dunton. Eventually, he became able to write again though his great work was
all done in the 1860s and 1870s.

     Many ideas which can be seen in Swinburne's passionate poetry were given
formal expression by the influential essayist Walter Pater (1839-1894). As a
student at Oxford, he had intended to become a clergyman, but he became
skeptical toward religion. He became a fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford,
where he influenced students for many years. Pater wrote extensively about
the art of Italy and Greece. His essays showed much sympathy with pagan
thought. Beauty was his great ideal. He praised "art for art's sake." That
is, beauty was not for creating moral goodness; it was sufficient in itself.
The perfect and complete enjoyment of something beautiful was the greatest
happiness a man could know, Pater stated. He wrote that to each man only a
limited number of moments is given; the best use a man can make of them is
to fill each one with an exquisite sensation.

     Pater was himself a mild little man; but he was worshiped by Oxford
students who abandoned conventional behavior and tried to follow his
instructions. They tried to live each moment to the fullest-to "burn with a
hard, gemlike flame," as Pater recommended. Wilde was among the students who
were influenced by him.

     Thus, the serious moral rebellion against ugly Victorian materialism
which we find in the 1850s and 1860s eventually alters until it loses its
ethical side completely and becomes a delight in pleasurable sensations.
By the 1880s, the "aesthetic movement" was in existence; Wilde was its best
known disciple. Others were Arthur Symons and John Addington Symonds.
"Aestheticism" may be defined as a philosophy which makes appreciation of
beauty through man's senses the chief aim of life. Ridiculing the Victorian
conventions with his sophisticated wit, Wilde praised the free enjoyment
of pleasure as an ideal of life.

     He claimed that the pagan Greeks had lived in this way. However, in fact
Wilde's ideas were also much influenced by the French literature of his time.
Among these influences were Emile Zola, who permitted himself, in his
realistic novels, to discuss what had been impossible to mention before. The
poet Baudelaire, author of Flowers of Evil, also was an important influence;
he delighted in evil, which had a weird beauty for him. Also Flaubert, the
author of Madame Bovary, showed the English aesthetes how one could polish
and perfect one's language as though it were sculpture.

     To summarize, the aesthetes of the 1880s and 1890s formed a very
sophisticated little group, scornful of conventions, proud of their moral
daring, and most anxious to develop extraordinary skill in the use of words.
They were obviously the result of a long rebellion against Victorian
hypocrisy, scientific materialism, and ugly industrialism; however, they were
the indirect product of these things.

The Life Of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Early Life:

     Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland, on October 16, 1854. At his
christening, he was burdened with the lengthy name of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie
Wills Wilde. His parents were both distinguished, though a little peculiar.

     His father, Sir William Wilde, was an eye and ear surgeon of world-wide
fame. He wrote a textbook on the surgery of the ear that was one of the
authorities in its field. Medical students came from all over to study with
him. Among his many other interests were medical statistics, literature, and
ancient civilizations.

     Physically, Sir William Wilde was not very impressive; he was small,
homely, and none too careful about cleanliness. All the same, he was
constantly involved in love affairs, until one of them turned into a great
scandal and injured his career.

     Wilde's mother, Jane Elgee, was a bookish woman; under the pen name
"Speranza" she wrote many fiery articles in favor of Irish independence
from England.

     In their Dublin mansion, the famous doctor and his stately literary
wife gave many parties and receptions, entertaining most of the famous
people of their day. The conversation at these parties was stimulating
and the household offered warm hospitality. Mrs. Wilde was apparently
more interested in Irish independence than in housekeeping, however.
Many stories have been told of her eccentric behavior. It is reported that
she once scolded a servant for putting the plates in the coal scuttle; she
ordered them to be put on a chair, where they belonged.

     Wilde's mother was devoted to him, though she had originally regretted
that he was not a girl (for a time she even made the bad psychological
mistake of dressing him in girl's clothes). She stood by him in the difficult
years of his later life.

     As a boy, Oscar was sent first to Portora Royal School and then to
Trinity College in Dublin. At both, he was unpopular because he absolutely
loathed sports. However, he was large and powerful though clumsy; when it
was necessary, he could more than hold his own in a fight. Oscar was a lazy
student. He would not make any effort to learn subjects that did not
interest him, such as mathematics and science. But he loved Greek literature.
Since he had a powerful memory, he was able to remember what he read. And as
he already was showing writing ability, he was able to write with skill in
the Greek language. His performance in classical studies was good enough to
win him scholarships, as well as a gold medal. In 1876, he entered Magdalen
College of Oxford University.

     Teaching at Oxford were the great writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater
(see previous section). Wilde was impressed by Ruskin's great sincerity as he
preached about the horrors of factories and the beauty of honest labor.
He was even more impressed by Pater's elegant, musical prose and daring ideas.
The thought of tasting life fully, of filling each moment with an experience
of the senses, dazzled him. He was not troubled by the fact that this
philosophy had no place for moral responsibility or service to one's fellow
men. Pater's essays on the Renaissance inspired Wilde, but he never liked
Pater himself. Nor did Pater, who was shy and somewhat cold, care for his
eccentric student.

     Wilde retained his hatred of sports at Oxford, but he was popular because
of his good nature, his excellent parties, and his growing conversational
ability. He could speak easily on any subject; his conversation was gay,
sometimes preposterous, sometimes beautiful, but always entertaining.

     Already, he showed a tendency to behave artificially in order to be the
center of attention. It is said that once he pointed to a blue china vase in
his room and said: "Would that I could live up to my blue china!" This remark
had in it a germ of sincerity; it demonstrated Wilde's growing conviction that
the beauty of a physical object was a positive good in itself; this was part
of the aesthetic creed. (See previous section.) But there is no doubt that he
was purposely exaggerating; he was genuinely surprised to learn that some
people were foolish enough to take him seriously.

     During this Oxford period, Wilde took several important trips abroad. In
1875 and again in 1876 he went to Rome. There he was so moved by the majestic
beauty of the Vatican and by an audience with the Pope, that he considered
becoming a Catholic. He did not do so, however.

     With an old professor of his from Trinity College, J. P. Mahaffy, Wilde
visited Greece in 1877. To see the things he had studied and dreamed about for
so long was an intoxicating experience. The beauty of Greece influenced him
for the rest of his life.

     Again at Oxford, Wilde did splendidly in his classical studies. He added
another triumph to his academic career when he won the famous Newdigate Prize
for poetry with his poem "Ravenna." At the end of his university career he had
a great reputation, but no definite plans for his future.

London And America:

     After Oxford, Wilde came to London in 1880. There he set out to make
himself well known as quickly as possible. He took the pose of a highly
aesthetic young man who devoted himself entirely to beautiful costumes. In the
daytime he dressed like a fashionable dandy. But in the evening he blossomed
in a costume of his own invention, which consisted of knee breeches, black
silk stockings, a velvet coat, a silk shirt, and a large bow tie. In his
buttonhole he wore a lily or a sunflower.

     Because he was the friend of many aristocratic Oxford graduates, Oscar
was made welcome by the great families of London. His eccentric pose, added to
the real wit of his conversation, made him a colorful visitor. Soon his
exploits and his amusing remarks were the talk of London. It was reported that
he claimed to have sat up all night to care for a sick primrose. One story was
that he had arrived at a certain house, gorgeously dressed, at dinner time,
and said to the owner: "I have come to dine. I thought you would like to have
me." Not only had he not been invited, but the man had never set eyes on him
before.

     Soon the comic magazine Punch took up Wilde as a subject. He was
caricatured with his knee breeches and his lilies. His eccentricities were
reported and exaggerated, and when Punch ran out of real life absurdities, it
invented more.

     More important than this was his contact with Gilbert and Sullivan. In
1875, William S. Gilbert, the lyricist, and Arthur Sullivan, the composer, had
begun to collaborate on comic operas. They had several successes, including
Trial by Jury, H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Pirates of Penzance. Now Gilbert was
looking around for a new subject, and he got the idea of writing a comic
satire of the modern aesthetic poets. In 1881, Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride,
was ready. Bunthorne, the leading character, combined the most conspicuous
traits Gilbert could find among the new poets. Probably he was meant to be
more like Swinburne (see previous section) than anyone else. Bunthorne was
known as "the fleshly poet," which describes some of Swinburne's poetry
accurately. Also Gilbert's drawings of Bunthorne (which can be found in most
of Gilbert's librettos) show a tiny man with a skinny neck and a great mop of
hair. The resemblance to Swinburne, who was so little that he was almost a
dwarf, and who had a conspicuous head of red hair, is marked. But the love of
lilies and the aesthetic talk are taken from Wilde. Tactfully, the resemblance
to Wilde was stressed in the production, for by then Swinburne was living
under the care of his friend, ruined by his unbalanced excesses, and to make
fun of him publicly would have been unthinkable.

     Rupert D'Oyly Carte, the producer of Patience, wanted to be certain
American audiences would understand the joke, so he formed the plan of sending
Wilde to America to lecture on aesthetic ideas. It was surely a cruel thing to
do, for Carte obviously hoped Wilde would be a laughing stock and thus insure
the success of Patience.

     Most likely, Wilde understood what Carte had in mind. But he had little
money and could not sustain his life of elegant aesthetic idleness. He had
published a book of poems in 1881, but it had not made much money. Carte's
offer was good, so Wilde accepted it in 1882.

     In America, Wilde was a sensation. People were surprised at first that he
did not wear his funny costumes in the street, and they were disappointed when
they found that his lectures were not meant as jokes. But from the moment he
left the ocean liner he delighted them each time he spoke. "Have you anything
to declare?" the customs inspector asked. "I have nothing to declare except my
genius," Wilde replied. Reporters followed him everywhere and eagerly took
down everything he said. Ladies appeared in strangely draped costumes which
they fondly hoped were aesthetic. And Wilde was swept into a never-ending
cycle of balls, dinners, teas, and receptions.

     The lectures were well attended. Americans found that Wilde, when he was
not making highly affected remarks about flowers and wallpaper, was a most
likeable man. He also had the fortunate ability to turn jokes on the jokers.
For example, when he lectured at Boston, sixty Harvard students dressed in
knee breeches and carrying lilies and sunflowers marched into the lecture hall
and sat in the front rows. Wilde somehow found out about the joke ahead of
time. He came out on the stage wearing beautiful evening clothes, a picture of
conservative elegance in his black suit and white dress shirt. The Harvard men
sat foolishly before him, as Wilde skillfully captured the sympathy of the
audience.

     Several attempts were made to embarrass Wilde by giving him too much to
drink, but at Oxford he had developed the ability to out-drink almost anybody.
He was able to drink and eat until his hosts lay helpless under the table, a
talent which earned him respect from miners and cattlemen when he toured the
west.

     Altogether, Wilde delivered over eighty lectures. He returned home
successful and with a substantial sum of money.

The Creative Years:

     In 1884, he married. His bride was Constance Lloyd, a very pretty girl
with whom he was deeply in love. She in turn was devoted to him. His wife had
a moderate income of her own, but the Wildes lived in an elaborate manner, and
money continued to be a problem. The profits of the American tour had been
spent long before. Wilde tried various ways of earning more. From 1887 to 1889
he was the editor of a woman's magazine. Between 1885 and 1890 he had the less
unlikely task of reviewing books for the Pall Mall Gazette. He published short
stories, essays, and poems in various magazines. A collection of beautiful
fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, appeared in 1888. A collection
of short stories and another book of fairy tales followed.

[See Happy Prince: The Happy Prince.]

     The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) was Wilde's only novel. It was the
story of a beautiful young man who remains untouched by his life of sin, while
his portrait exhibits the ravaging of his soul. The morbid atmosphere which
fills the book was a terrible shock to the critics, who condemned it
violently.

[See Dorian Gray: The Picture of Dorian Gray.]

     Two melodramas by Oscar Wilde had been produced in New York - Vera and
The Duchess of Padua. They had little success; today's readers do not find
this surprising, since both plays are little better than third rate. But their
author understood that a really popular play might earn a lot of money. He
went to work seriously and within a few weeks had turned out Lady Windermere's
Fan (1892).

[See Lady Windermere's Fan: Lady Windermere's Fan.]

[See Revived Cards: I'm so glad Lady windermere has revived cards.]

     Both critics and public were delighted by this play. Wilde wrote two more
plays that followed the same formula as Lady Windermere's Fan; these were A
Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1895). His method was
simply to take a commonplace plot full of melodrama and sentimentality, and
decorate it with his own brand of wit, which he usually put into the mouths of
a few minor characters. Each of the plays, like most of this writer's work,
was dashed off in a spurt of spontaneous creation within a few weeks.

[See Ideal Husband: When I was your age, sir, I had been an inconsolable
widower for three months.]

[See Woman Of No Importance: She was far too good-looking to be in any
respectable household.]

     This series of successful plays was ended with The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895), Wilde's masterpiece and one of the delights of English
literature. Within a few short weeks after it opened to the cheers of a
fashionable London audience, Wilde's life lay about him in ruins. From 1895 to
1900, the year of his death, his story is one of disaster.

[See Being Earnest: The Importance of Being Earnest.]

The Disastrous Years:

     One of Oscar Wilde's closest companions was Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas'
father, the Marquis of Queensberry (the same man who invented the Queensberry
Rules for boxing), loudly expressed his disapproval of this friendship. At
last, Queensberry became publicly insulting; Wilde felt that there was nothing
for him to do except to sue Queensberry for libel. He was encouraged by
Douglas, who had been on bad terms with his eccentric father since childhood.
The fashionable world settled back happily; it expected a particularly juicy
scandal at the libel trial, and it was not disappointed.

     Wilde's libel suit against Queensberry was suicidal. He was suing
Queensberry for soiling his reputation with untrue accusations of homosexual
behavior. But in fact these accusations were true; Queensberry's lawyers
were able to find evidence and witnesses easily. Wilde took the witness stand
to testify. He was then cross-examined by Queensberry's lawyer, Sir Edward
Carson. By the end of this extensive cross-examination (which is a classic
that is still studied in law schools), it was clear that Wilde was guilty of
the charges Queensberry had made. Wilde's lawyers withdrew the suit.

     Wilde's friends were sure that he would shortly be arrested; they begged
him to flee the country. This he refused to do. Perhaps there is some truth to
the explanation that he so loved being the center of attention that he could
not bear to flee the spotlight. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two
years in prison.

     The treatment Wilde received from Victorian England fills the
twentieth-century reader with dismay. Not only was he imprisoned for what
today is regarded as a sick condition, his destruction was received with glee
by London society. The very people who had looked up to him, who had enjoyed
his stories, jokes, and witty remarks, who had been proud to have him as a
guest, now turned on him viciously. His friends deserted him in crowds. While
he was free on bail, he was hounded from public places. He could not find any
place to sleep at night. There was neither financial aid nor pity for his
unhappy wife and little two boys. One actor who had appeared in his plays (and
to whom Wilde had never done any harm that we know of) gave a dinner party to
celebrate his conviction.

     Two years of brutal imprisonment nearly killed Wilde. He was never the
same afterward. One of the most pitiful effects was that he could never again
sleep uninterruptedly through the night. In prison, he had to undergo
inspection every morning, and if a single thing was not in its proper place,
he would be harshly punished. He formed the habit of waking several times a
night and feeling about him in the dark to make sure that all his possessions
were in their proper place. Even after his release, he still did this.

     From 1897 to 1900, Wilde lived outside of England, mostly in France,
aided by a few faithful friends such as Robert Ross and Robert Sherard. He
died, in great agony, of meningitis on November 30, 1900. Two days earlier he
had finally become a convert to the Roman Catholic faith.

     Almost entirely drained of creative energy, Wilde was sure he could never
write again after he left prison. But he did produce The Ballad of Reading
Gaol (1898), a moving poem about what happened in prison while a condemned man
was hanged. It showed a depth and strength which were new in Wilde's work.
Prison almost destroyed him, but there seems no doubt that in some ways it
also made him grow.

     Oscar Wilde's wife and career testify that Victorian England had little
room for individuality. With a heavy hand it either forced the uncommon person
into conformity or drove him into violent rebellion or unprofitable
eccentricity. In a society which was often narrow, ugly, and cruel, Oscar
Wilde did not have the wisdom and genius of a William Morris, who could lead a
moral crusade against that society's faults. His protest was less powerful,
conscious, and direct. It was frittered away in foolishness and weakness. But
it was not entirely unproductive.

