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THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY |
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Joseph
Loewenstein |
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‘Oscar Wilde and
the Evasion of Principle’ was first published in the South Atlantic
Quarterly, Vol. 84 No. 4, Autumn 1985,
pp.392-400, and reprinted in Jonathan Freedman (ed.): Oscar Wilde, A
Collection of Critical Essays. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall 1996. It is here republished by kind permission. |
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Oscar Wilde, to the
actor-manager George Alexander, after the first performance of The Importance of
Being Earnest: ‘Charming, quite charming. And, do you know, from
time to time it reminded me of a play I once wrote called The Importance of Being Earnest.’ |
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There is more than a little risk in this enterprise. Though
Wilde was himself a famous, if not to say notorious, critic, he was also
unkind enough to remark on the inevitable folly of public
pronouncement. ‘How appalling,’ he writes, ‘is that ignorance which is
the inevitable result of imparting opinions.’ I will not be the first
critic to go on about The Importance of Being Earnest, while appearing steadily to
descend the evolutionary chain in the course of doing so. The first
person to feel this way was William Archer – one of the few drama critics
whom Wilde seems to have respected: when Archer reviewed the play, he too
began from the vantage of self-pity: ‘What can a poor critic do with a play
which raises no principle, whether of art or morals . . . and is nothing but
an absolutely wilful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality?’
Shaw had taken just such a tack in a review of Wilde's previous play, a
review written for the Saturday Review a few weeks before Earnest opened, in which he observed
that Wilde had the peculiar ‘property of making his critics dull.’ |
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Whether or not one sympathizes with my predicament or with Shaw's, one
should, I think, sympathize with Archer's. He was the champion of serious Victorian drama, which meant,
for him, being a champion of Ibsen's plays, and of those early plays by Shaw
which looked like Ibsen's plays
only without the snow. He liked Wilde's plays, though; he couldn't help
liking them – this is no doubt why Wilde liked his reviews – but his own
principles kept him from knowing what to say about them. The temptation not to say anything about
such a play as Earnest is strong;
and the temptation not to say anything serious
about such a play is exceptionally strong. Yet one resists the
temptation on Wilde's own orders, for oddly enough his own lectures, plays,
novels, and conversation are full of insistences that criticism shares the
mission of art, that art must be critical and criticism creative. I
could sum up what my own thinly creative contribution will be this here, but
that would be inartistic. Even to hint darkly that I think the play to
have been very aptly named or to reveal that this essay ought properly be
entitled, ‘Wilde as Moralist’ is to give too much of the game away.
Wilde once wrote that the primary function of criticism was ‘to deepen a
book's mystery.’ Mystery is more difficult to generate than many
readers think, but in his own critical writing Wilde overcomes this
particular difficulty by avoiding straightforward pronouncement: he
characteristically argues a delicate point by telling a story. Let me
follow his lead. |
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Picture Wilde on the 14th of February in 1895, backstage at the St.
James Theatre in London. The habitual elegance of his appearance is
considerably muted in the dim lights of the wings. Indeed, his
appearance had sobered of late: at just about that time when his plays began
to succeed he gave up the velvet knee breeches which had been his sartorial
signature during early adulthood. (Ada Leverson speaks of his having
been dressed that evening with ‘a sort of florid sobriety.’) But more than
darkness and a slight swerve
towards more conservative tailoring restrain the air of carefree ease that makes
him seem, in his photographs, like so much human drapery. I hope I
shall not be betraying probability by making the irreverent suggestion that
Wilde is concentrating backstage at
the St. James. Franklin Dyall, who played Merriman in the first production,
provides the evidence here. His role had rather few lines, but one of
them won him the loudest and most sustained laugh of his career. The
line in question was, ‘Mr Ernest Worthing has just driven over from the
station. He has brought his luggage with
him.’ And it is Wilde's response to the laugh that proves how closely
he was attending to the performance: Dyall reports, ‘As I came off
Wilde said to me: `I'm so glad you got that laugh. It shows they have followed the plot.'‘ Let me explain why I think the
anecdote is important. I shall try to obey Wilde's alter-ego, Algernon
Moncrieff, who tells his friend Jack, ‘Now produce your explanation, and pray
make it improbable.’ The plot.
Let me tell you a plot. It begins, if you will excuse the formulation,
years after it begins. What I mean to say is that the events of this
play involve a complicated investigation of how things got into the state of
confusion in which we find the characters at the beginning of the play
itself. Years earlier an infant had been separated from its parents, an
unfortunate fact of biography that has hardly inhibited the baby from growing
up to be a hero and from getting a play named after him. Through a
complex chain of events he discovers his true identity and is reunited with
his family. It all leads up to a spectacular final scene, perhaps the
most famous scene in the history of Western drama. Indeed it is
probably the most famous play in the history of Western drama. It is
called Oedipus Rex. |
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I trust that it will be granted that the comparison of Wilde's play to
Sophocles's is sufficiently improbable. Certainly the plots are not absolutely identical. Wilde has
taken considerable care about this. In the Greek story, for example,
the hero has a terrifying encounter with a she-dragon famous for asking
difficult questions and I want to insist that it would be entirely
inappropriate to compare the sphinx to Lady Bracknell, who is, as Jack puts
it, ‘a monster without being a myth.’ But there's no denying that Wilde
flirts brilliantly with Oedipus Rex, elements of which drop casually
and hilariously into The Importance of Being Earnest. Sophocles's story is essentially about
mistaking one's relatives, of confusing mother and wife, and Wilde toys with
such confusion in a wonderfully side-long manner during the first act when he
has Algernon muse, in mock perplexity, over ‘why an aunt should call her own
nephew her uncle.’ Certainly the central irony of Sophocles's play is
that the bed of conception and birth should be transformed into a bier, a
site of death. Ancient as this paradox
is, it is news to the monstrous Lady Bracknell, who insists that ‘Until
yesterday I had no idea that there were any families or persons whose origins
was a Terminus.’ |
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Lady B is punning, of course, and that is just the point: Wilde is
steadily converting the tragic into the comic, ironic paradox into shrewd
witticism. That is an old strategy, of course: Roman New Comedy took
just this sort of tragic or romance plot – of foundlings, confusions of
identity, and scrambled erotic attachment – and made it its own, asserting
equal rights to such confusions. If it weren't for its dalliance with
the plot of Oedipus Rex, it might be enough to speak of
Wilde's play simply as another New Comedy. Perhaps it would be truer to
say that The Importance of Being Earnest recovers the originary moment of New Comedy, renews it.
My improbable explanation has a number of implications which I want to tease
out a bit. The first is that it might help to focus our attention on
the play more appropriately. It has become the custom for inattentive
directors to concentrate, in casting, on Algernon and Lady Bracknell, and
then to let the rest of the roles get sorted out as best they can. But
if The Importance of Being Earnest is indeed a comic imitation of Oedipus Rex, then it is
clearly Jack, or Earnest, as he in fact discovers himself to be, who is at
the dramatic center. It is he, after all, who turns out to possess the
crucial name – you will notice that at the end of the play Wilde finesses the
problem that Algernon can’t take
the name of Earnest, for his long-lost brother has title to that title, which
leaves Algy stuck as Algy (and, as Cecily has said before, she might not be
able to give a person so named her ‘undivided attention’). At any rate,
it is more important to be Jack than Algernon, since Jack is Earnest, and
thus is the elder brother, the true heir to the Moncrieff fortune, and above
all, the possessor of the magic name. But he is important for other
reasons as well. |
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It is often objected that Wilde's characters all talk more or less
alike, that the characters are all more or less the same. But Jack
Worthing does not talk like Algernon Moncrieff. He aspires to talk like
Algernon, aspires to the masterful urbanity of an Algernon, but he is a
dreadful failure at it. He loses his cigarette case, gets stuck with
the bill for dinner, fails to get more than a muffin or two of his own to eat
in the third act and a few portions of bread and butter in the first, while
Algernon gorges on the cucumber sandwiches and gets almost all of the
muffins. The fact is that Jack is too much in earnest. His
deceptions are in service of the most formal and pedestrian courtship,
whereas Algernon deceives in order to flirt wildly. |
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Before the trip to Jack's place in Hertfordshire, Algernon's
deceptions had always been in service of nothing but deception itself. Both deception and the flirtation have the
same name for Algy; both are called ‘Bunburying.’ This is Important.
For Algy, artifice and eros have the same name, whereas for Earnest, they are
opposed. As with Buster Keaton, the elegance of Jack's facade is
constantly being betrayed by the earnestness within. In Wilde, as in
Keaton's best films, concentration is a kind of distraction. The huge
difference between Algernon and Jack is nowhere more obvious than at their
entrances in Act II. When Jack appears, he looks like an undertaker;
when Algernon enters, he looks like an ad for Christian Dior. |
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And of course that is why
the play's curtain line is so very good.
When Jack says, ‘I've now realized for the first time in my life the
vital Importance of Being Earnest’ he is punning, like Lady Bracknell talking
about origins and terminuses. What he means is that it's important to
have the name, Earnest, and that that's the only ‘Earnest-ness’ that's good
for anything at all. Seriousness hasn't done him any good in the course
of the play; worst of all, seriousness has sapped all of his deceptions of
fluency, of artistry. The last line is a sign that Jack has finally
learned his lesson, which is that he must stop caring so much about things,
stop trying to keep up appearances for Cecily's sake. Appearances must
be kept up, says Wilde, for their own
sake, because appearances are so very nice to look at. |
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So that is the first implication of the link between this play and Oedipus Rex: both plays, like most good plays, dramatize the hero's
coming-to-knowledge, in this case a coming-to-knowledge about the use and abuse
of seriousness that frees the characters to get down to some genuine
artificiality. The next implication has to do with the very fact that
comparing the two plays seems so improbable. In Sophocles's play, plot
is nearly everything, whereas in Wilde's play, the plot has a tendency to
disappear under the wonderful surface of aphorism. I could again quote
the play to illustrate my point about the value of plotting: take the little
exchange between Algernon and Jack at the End of Act I, where Jack objects to
Algernon's delightfully complicated techniques for pitching woo. ‘If
you don't take care,’ he says, ‘your friend Bunbury will get you into a
serious scrape one of these days,’ to which Algernon replies, ‘I love
scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.’
Scrapes is a handy term, since it trivializes those contortions of stratagem
and coincidence which are at the center of Sophoclean plotting. When
Algernon says that such plotting, such scrapes, are never serious, he is speaking
as Wilde the literary critic. And here a bit of dramatic history will
be useful. |
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William Archer, the critic to whom I referred earlier, was not only a
fan of Wilde's, he was the chief spokesman for a movement in English dramatic
writing that was advocating a new attention to social issues and which would
find an idiom which would lend philosophical and tragic dignity to matters of
political and topical concern. What Archer was in fact reacting to was
the pervasive influence of the dramatic techniques of the French playwright,
Eugene Scribe, the master of the so-called ‘Well-Made Play.’ The
well-made play is characterized by precisely that calculation of scheme and
coincidence, that trick of falling into place, which is the signal feature of
Oedipus Rex. Now Wilde's attitude to both the old school of Scribe
and the new school of Archer is subtle and hilarious. In effect he
accepts Archer's position that the well-made play is a kind of dramatic
Bunburying, nothing but a sequence of ‘scrapes,’ but then he fails to join
Archer in a full-scale assault on such plotting. What Wilde is doing,
if you will permit a slight anachronism, is to make the well-made play into a
kind of ‘Camp.’ No wonder Archer felt perplexed by Wilde. Wilde
was lavishing a mock literary nostalgia on Scribe, but without identifying
himself with the forces of what Archer regarded as ‘progressive’
playwriting. Archer is the theatrical spokesman for a particular kind
of Victorian value, what Matthew Arnold called ‘high seriousness,’ compounded
with a degree of reformist fervor; Wilde called it ‘earnestness’ and punned
it out of existence. |
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It's an extremely powerful effect. First of all, Wilde manages
to absorb Scribe's techniques by imitating Scribe's great Sophoclean model,
but – as I said before – he inundates this plot with a tide of wonderfully
musical wit, so that you hardly notice the plot which provides the technical
underpinnings of the drama. Scribe and Sophocles endure an homage that
leaves them looking rather frail and silly. And when we get to that
very stagey last line, which is right out of Scribe, and miles beneath the
literary standards of Archer's favorite playwrights, we hardly notice that
the line really is summing up the play, really is showing us how irrelevant
Arnoldian or Archerian seriousness is to the world of Wilde's plays.
All of Wilde's influences come out looking sheepish at best. Archer against
Scribe, Scribe against Archer. Nowhere does the trick of getting one's
predecessors to beat each other into jelly show up so powerfully as it does
during the final scene of the play. As we are discovering the secret of
Jack's mysteriously terminal origins, a fine sequence of exchanges take
place. Jack announces his identity to Miss Prism and Wilde signals the
particularly conventional quality of the scene by telling us that the lines
are delivered ‘in a pathetic voice.’ Here is the exchange: |
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JACK. Miss Prism,
more is restored to you than this handbag. I was the baby you placed in
it. MISS PRISM. [amazed.] You? JACK. [embracing her.] Yes . . .
mother! |
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This out-Scribes Scribe. More is falling into place than
actually needs to fall into place, for Miss Prism is not Jack's mother. But it takes several more lines in order
to straighten the misunderstanding out. Miss Prism responds, ‘recoiling
in indignant astonishment’ according to the stage direction: |
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Mr. Worthing! I am
unmarried! Jack. Unmarried! I do not
deny that is a serious blow. But after all, who has the right to cast a stone
against one who has suffered? Why
should there be one law for men, and another for women? Mother, I forgive
you! |
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Since the fate of the Fallen Woman is one of the great staples of late
Victorian social drama in the Archer tradition, what we have here is a
perfect example of out-Archering Archer. The breadth of spirit, the
exquisite liberality of young Earnest Worthing is utterly unnecessary here,
so that Scribe's plotting has disabled Archer's principles. It is a
cunning scene, and a cunning piece of dramatic criticism. |
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Wilde's other plays are not really very good, but noticing the way in
which they fail may help us to understand the peculiar character of Wilde's
success in Earnest. Of all
Wilde's other plays, the one that comes closest to working is his serious
attempt to write an Archerian Fallen Woman play, Lady Windermere’s Fan. (Archerian in conception,
but also neatly Scribal: the
crucial fan – like the Handbag at Victoria Station – is an object invested
with remarkable power over plot; such potent props were a staple of Scribe's
Well-Made Play.) It fails because Wilde can't get his tone to settle down
enough to accommodate the plot. Instead, the dialogue frequently
rallies itself up to a sparkle that gets in the way of the slow workings of
suspicion and self-defense that knit the play together. Wilde was
shrewd enough to recognize finally that he didn't really like plots, so when
he sat down to write Earnest he
took a few bits of the most famous plot in existence, crumpled them up, and
then smothered them with mannerism: in effect, he adapts form to content by
papering over the content. That he chooses what must be called the
master-plot of Western drama is both characteristically sophomoric and
characteristically self-aware: if one is uncomfortable with plotting,
why not sabotage the model of plotting, so that plotting itself will look
like a game not worth playing? |
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The gesture is less cavalier than perhaps I have made it seem.
If Wilde sacrifices plot to the surface sparkle of aphorism it's because he
is one of the great English philosophers of the surface. It is also
because he is, in his own way, a moralist
of the surface. |
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The best way to explain what I mean by this is to change the
subject. Consider a passage by another
great poetic moralist, a passage from The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which Blake gives his own very special definitions for
the two partners, Heaven and Hell, whose marriage he is announcing: |
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Without Contraries
is no progression. Attraction and
Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human
existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good &
Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active
springing from Energy. In what seems a moment of rhetorical condensation,
Blake finishes his definitions thus: Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell. |
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Now this is very shrewd. The definitions stack up in such a way
that one begins to suspect that Good is not so good, and that Evil, if it's
allied to energy and activity, can't be all bad. So when we get to the
final line it's hard to know how to take it. Yet it has the outward
form of a perfectly comprehensible, perfectly orthodox assertion: Heaven is
the good place, hell the bad place. Not only do we not know how to take
it when Blake says this, not only do we not know what he means by Heaven, if
it's good and good is passive and cut off from energy, but we also begin to
doubt the very form of such pronouncements. What Blake manages to do is
to take the form of the aphorism and make us wonder why we usually have such
an unquestioning and docile attitude to ideas when they're cut up for us so
neatly. The very simplicity of the proverb form is on display, and
under attack. |
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Wilde may well owe as much to Blake as did his young friend
Yeats. Certainly Wilde is no more
devoted to witty iconoclasm than is Blake; certainly Wilde is no less devoted
a practitioner of the anti- authoritarian proverb than is Blake.
Blake's defense of the imaginary over the merely factual, as in the line,
‘What is now proved was once merely imagined,’ could be a snatch from Wilde's
conversation, while Wilde's ‘Even things that are true can be proved’ sounds
just like Blake. (Only such an embittered remark as Wilde's ‘A thing
isn't necessarily true because a man dies for it’ reveals something –
specifically a bitter hostility to romantic idealism – that could
legitimately be claimed as beyond Blake's reach.) Both men are
primarily interested in the Witticism as a form, because it manages to
disguise the rebellious in the very garb of the prescriptive. |
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Consider the opening witticism from Wilde's famous ‘Phrases and
Philosophies for the Young’: The first duty in life is to be as artificial as
possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered. |
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Part of what makes this brilliant is that it seems to promise that you
could make a list, in descending order of importance, of what a person ought
to do. It then quite splendidly fails to deliver on the promise. At the same moment that it lays down a law,
it makes a monkey of lawyers, who can't remember all the commandments but are
sure that there are ten of them. The lawyers knew that they were being
made monkeys of, though, for when Wilde was on trial for his relations with
Douglas, the lawyers interrogated him very closely on ‘Phrases and
Philosophies for the Young,’ recognizing that the form of the witty phrase
itself was under attack, that the notion that morality can be summarized,
that its complexities can be distilled into Rules was crumbling under Wilde's
gloved hand. Besides its crucial function of obscuring the plot, how does the
form of the witticism operate in The
Importance of Being Earnest? Again, Wilde gives the
characters something very telling to say on the matter. Here, again, is
Algernon: |
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All women become
like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his. JACK. Is that
clever? ALGERNON. It is perfectly phrased! and quite as true as any observation in civilized life should be. |
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Algernon is telling us exactly how to take the play. We are to
approve the elegance of its phrasing, and to take its claims to truth with
strictly measured amounts of salt. The Witticism does not pretend to
truth with a capital T. What it pretends to is accuracy, by which I mean to say something like occasional
appropriateness to the sweet and petty business of getting along in polite
society, an observation pertinent, not to reality, but to civilized life. |
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It should be clear now why I intended to entitle this piece ‘Wilde as
Moralist.’ Like Blake, Wilde hated Truths. They hated them
because Truths put blinders on us, tell us what to do before we know who we
are or where we are, in whose company, in what room. The primary
function of Wilde's witticisms, so neatly packaged and so perfectly balanced,
is to erode our confidence in neat packaging and perfect balance as a vehicle
for inculcating ethical values. Wilde's description of a cigarette
might as well be a description of the witticism as a form, or of Earnest as a piece of dramatic construction;
‘A cigarette,’ he says, ‘is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It
is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.’ The witticism excites our
delight in matters of moral concern and steadily denies us the satisfaction
of easy or universally adequate reflections on those matters. |
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This, I take it, is a moral position. To bury plot under clever
talk is to insist that what happens to people is never as important as what
people make of what happens to them. Each time an event sinks beneath a
wave of wit we are being shown how much more valuable sense is than
sensation. And when a second witticism shoulders aside a first, and a
third displaces the second, we are being shown that any act of making sense
of sensation is merely provisional. Wilde shows us that there are no
satisfactory rules to lay down about life save that no matter what happens,
it is always pleasant to lay down a rule about it; or to translate this in
such a way that it reveals the moral passion that animated so much of Wilde's
work – There are no Moral Laws; there is only moral labor. Hence the
justice of what Borges has to say about the man: ‘Like Gibbon, like Johnson,
like Voltaire, he was an ingenious man who was also right.’ |
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·
Joseph Loewenstein is Professor
of English and Director of the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities at
Washington University in St Louis. |
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