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Arthur Walkley: Sincerity and Style - Introduction to Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance 1923. |
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[In 1923, Doubleday, Page and Company of Garden City, New York, published a multi-volume ‘Patron’s de luxe edition’ of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume VII contained Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance, with an introduction by the English theatre critic A.B. Walkley (1855-1926). The text of this (pp.ix-xiv) is retyped below, its designation as ‘Sincerity and Style’ being my own. Page breaks are indicated by // followed by the number of the new page. Punctuation has been faithfully copied. There are a number of references to other writers in the text, and for those unfamiliar with them I have ventured to list them at the end, hyperlinked to their Wikipedia entries (as I have done with Walkley himself), adding the customary warning for students that Wikipedia entries should be checked rather than cited. DCR] |
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“In matters of grave importance,” says a young lady in the blithest and most brilliant of Oscar Wilde’s comedies, “style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” She must have been thinking of her author’s plays. Superficially, these are all style and no sincerity. But we must distinguish. Without sincerity there can be no style; only flatulence, stereotypes, empty verbiage, what in Paris they call le poncif. Without, that is to say, the artist’s sincerity of presentation, the true expression of his intuitions. You cannot have perfect form without genuine feeling. Wilde was a dramatic artist who had a keen feeling on the dramatic virtues of insincerity – the sudden surprise of its paradoxes, its inverted commonplaces, its pouring of old wine into old bottles – and he sincerely presented it in a delightful style, terse, tense, witty, urbane. And so, when all his personages are insincere, as are all in The Importance //x of Being Earnest, he is most sincere, his style is at his best, and the result is a comedy worthy of the same shelf as Mariage à la Mode or The Way of the World. Nor am I “dragging in” Dryden and Congreve. For not only in the happy, easy elegance of his form is Wilde in the direct line of these masters of style; he is of their lineage, too, in his triumphantly sincere expression of insincerity. |
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Conversely, there is such a thing as the insincere presentation of sincerity. Wilde, it is clear enough, was much under the influence of two great Frenchmen, Augier and the younger Dumas, whose authority on the theatre, though on the wane, was even then scarcely to be ignored. From Augier he took his “natural” sons who unwittingly raise an arm against their father, and his “adventuresses” vainly attempting to force the portals of “society”; from Dumas fils he took what no English dramatist can afford even to touch, the tirade. Both these men were serious at heart, which Wilde never was; both did sincerely present sincerity, which Wild never could. Both, in short, were romantic, with the perfervid emotionalism of the romantic tradition; and it was with an eye on its tendency to degenerate into //xi the mere simulation of emotion that Sainte-Beuve said l’éceuil particulier du genre romantique, c’est le faux. You will find le faux in Wilde so soon as you turn to any of his presentations of the sincere. The husband and wife in Lady Windermere’s Fan are mere mechanical dolls, who are none the more human for behaving like lunatics. The mother and son and the Puritan maidens [sic –DCR] in A Woman of No Importance discredit virtue and seriousness by their hopeless inferiority to the vicious and frivolousness of the company. The Puritan maiden delivers a Dumasian tirade against English society, with variations by Wilde (“It lives like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold”) which is not only rhetoric, but “twopence coloured” rhetoric. For mark the peculiar penalty of insincerity; it not merely makes a nonentity of the author’s personage, but ruins his style! |
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Take those other insincere presentations of sincerity, Sir Robert and Lady Chiltern in An Ideal Husband. Wilde was never tired of railing at the newspapers. By a kind of Nemesis, Sir Robert always talks the most pompous journalism. Thirty years ago, at any rate, this was not the lingo of an English cabinet minister. //xii As for Lady Chiltern, she is not, at a domestic crisis, above borrowing the favourite literary cliché of the kitchen. “Don’t touch me!” Such were the misadventures of Wile’s fine culture, and fastidious taste, when sincerity failed him! |
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Style with sincerity, then “is the vital thing,” and, when all is said, Wilde had enough of it to keep his work alive. His conversations of the frivolous are inimitable. They out-Chamfort Chamfort. Many of his epigrams have become legendary. “The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden; it ends with Revelations.” Women are “Sphinxes without secrets.” “I can resist everything, except temptation.” “To be intelligible is to be found out.” “The English country gentleman galloping after a fox – the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.” These are sheer wit. But others are wisdom, too. As, ‘In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” And: “All thought is immoral. Its very essence is destruction. Nothing survives being thought of. Evidently the author of obiter dicta such as these could do something more than manufacture epigrams by the mechanical process of turning commonplaces //xiii upside down or inside out. But he was sometimes reduced to that extremity, because, at all costs, epigrams he must have. He believed, you see, like a true artist, in unity of tone; but unity of tone, when artificially prolonged, is called monotony. |
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His plots are as artificial as his weaker epigrams; almost as artificial, indeed, as the plots of Congreve. His stage situations are striking rather than inevitable, or even plausible. There is no real reason for Lord Windermere’s persistence in bringing Mrs. Erlynne into his wife’s drawing room. General [sic-DCR] Arbuthnot’s desire to inflict the death-penalty, on the spot, on Lord Illingworth is somewhat excessive – and is really created by the author’s sore need for a situation wherein the relationship of the two men shall be strikingly divulged. The story of An Ideal Husband is a mere list of articles of stolen property – letters, Cabinet secrets, bracelets, more letters. In plot, as in characterisation, when Wilde tried to be serious he succeeded only in being artificial. |
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In the single comedy without a blemish of seriousness, The Importance of being Earnest, the situations are not only striking in themselves, //xiv but naturally contrived. I would almost go so far as to say that the situation on Worthing’s entrance in Act II is the most visually comic thing in the English drama. Worthing has come to announce the death of his (wholly fictitious) brother, and is ignorant of the fact that his mischievous friend Moncrieff, personating that brother, has preceded him. Worthing is in deep mourning, and, before a word is spoken, the whole situation is revealed to the eye. This is a supreme example of that rare thing, wit in action. On the first night at the St James’s the house shook with laughter and, as often as Worthing stalks in solemn black upon the stage, the world will laugh again. The story of Miss Prism and the travelling bag is natural, too – natural, that is, is the make-up atmosphere, the “high fantastical” plane of the play. If the three earlier comedies are less comedies than tissues of epigrams stretched, and stretched something too thin, over a framework of conventional romance, we must cry at any rate over The Importance of being Earnest what they cried over les Précieuses Ridicules to Molière, Voila enfin de la vraie comédie ! |
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Posted April 2008 |
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Wikipedia hyperlinks: Augier – Chamfort – Congreve – Dryden – Dumas – Molière – Sainte-Beuve. |
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