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The Soul of Man: Oscar Wilde and Socialism
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An ‘OSCHOLARS’ Special Issue |
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Spring 2010 |
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The Roots of Wilde's Socialist Soul: Ibsen and Shaw, or Morris and Crane |
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Kristian
Williams |
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George Bernard Shaw, with his
characteristic blend of egotistical modesty, once claimed the credit for
inspiring Oscar Wilde's most famous essay.
As he wrote to Frank Harris: |
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At a meeting somewhere in
Westminster. . . I delivered an address on Socialism, and. . . Oscar turned
up and spoke. Robert Ross surprised me
greatly by telling me, long after Oscar's death, that it was this address of
mine that moved Oscar to try his hand at a similar feat by writing 'The Soul
of Man Under Socialism'.[1] |
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This claim has been repeated by
many a critic and biographer, most prominently Richard Ellmann.[2] J. D. Thomas has added the suggestion that
the lecture of Shaw's was ‘The Quintessence of Ibsenism,’ which he delivered
before the Fabian Society at St. James's Restaurant on July 18, 1890.[3] |
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Shaw's talk, part of a series on
‘Socialism in Contemporary Literature,’ was in the estimation of Fabian
Society Secretary Edward Pease, ‘perhaps . . . the high-water mark in Fabian
Lectures.’ Shaw spoke for almost two
hours, delivering a paper that was later to become ‘the bulk of the volume
“The Quintessence of Ibsenism”.’[4]
Shaw summed up Henrik Ibsen's plays (excepting Emperor and Galilean, and the not-yet-written Hedda Gabler), and presented, almost
in their entirety, his own chapters on ‘Ideals and Idealists’ and ‘The
Womanly Woman.’ The talk also featured
a substantial amount of material narrowly relating to the socialist politics
of 1890, which was then excised from the printed edition.[5] |
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Five months later, before
beginning his revisions, Shaw summarized his thesis: ‘[Ibsen's plays] are simply dramatic
illustrations of the terrible mischief and misery made every day, not by
scoundrels, but by moral people and idealists in their inexorable devotion to
what they all their 'duty'.’[6] This key point could, of course, be called
a Wildean (or a Nietzschean), as well as an Ibsenian or Shavian,
observation. As Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism: ‘As
one reads history, . . . one is
absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by
the punishments that the good have inflicted.’[7] |
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Undoubtedly there are other
similarities between Shaw's essay and Wilde's. Among the most striking are
the tension between the artist and the press, the critique of the family, the
de-bunking of democracy, and the repudiation of all moral idealism (what Shaw
calls ‘the tyranny of duty’[8]).
Shaw expresses disdain for ‘the Versaillese’ who out of ‘duty . . . to the French Republic’ put down the Paris
Commune and ‘shot their Parisian fellow workers’;[9]
Wilde likewise lamented the ‘tragic fact’ of ‘the starved peasant of the
Vendée’ who fought against the French Revolution and ‘voluntarily went out to
die for the hideous cause of feudalism.’[10] |
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Perhaps more than anything else,
the tone of the two essays is similar – forceful and sardonic. Shaw praises the young (‘unscrupulous,
undutiful, unbecomingly free in their manners, disrespectful, and bumptiously
self assertive’[11])
in much the same sense as Wilde praises the poor (‘ungrateful, unthrifty,
discontented, and rebellious’).[12] |
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It is even possible to read
certain of Wilde's proverbs as restatements of Shaw's: ‘Disobedience . . . is man's original
virtue. It is through disobedience
that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion’;[13]
and ‘There is nothing new in the defiance of duty by the individual: every
step of progress means a duty trampled out, and a scripture repudiated’[14]
– for an example. |
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Ibsen was, certainly, an inspiration. ‘[Y]our little book on
Ibsenism and Ibsen is such a delight to me,’ Wilde later wrote to Shaw, ‘that
I constantly take it up, and always find it stimulating and refreshing. England is the land of intellectual fogs
but you have done much to clear the air.’[15] |
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However, where The Quintessence is occupied with
discerning the political implications of drama, The Soul of Man is concerned to explain what politics means for
art. So in its theme, Wilde's essay
followed more closely an earlier Fabian lecture, this one by Walter Crane, on
‘The Prospects for Art Under Socialism.’
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Crane's lecture, and later
pamphlet, were part of a Fabian series on the ‘Basis and Prospects of
Socialism.’[16] In his memoirs, Crane recalled the lecture,
though he seems to have mis-remembered certain details: |
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‘I joined the [Fabian]
Society, and lectured for them on several occasions – once, I remember, in
Westminster Town Hall, to a large audience, when Mr. G. Bernard Shaw took the
chair, and Oscar Wilde was among the speakers in the discussion which
followed.[17] |
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Wilde's attendance is confirmed
by Shaw's diary,[18]
and by a note in Annie Besant's Our
Corner, though the latter places the meeting ‘at Willis's Rooms’ and with
‘H.W. Carr in the chair.’[19] The
Star, likewise, offered this description: |
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Mr. Crane believed that art
would revive under these new socialistic conditions. Mr. Oscar Wilde, whose fashionable coat
differed widely from the picturesque bottle-green garb in which he appeared in
earlier days, thought that the art of the future would clothe itself not in
works of form and color but in literature. . . . Mr. Herbert Burrows contended that the
masses loved good art, a fact which Mr. George Bernard Shaw deplored, as he
said it proved that the lower classes were following the insincere cant of
the middle classes. Mr. Shaw agreed
with Mr. Wilde that literature was the form which art would take. . . .[20] |
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Was this the lecture that
prompted Wilde's essay? Shaw's
editor/biographer, Stanley Weintraub, thought that it was, stating it as fact
in a clarifying footnote: ‘The meeting
which apparently led to Wilde's writing The
Soul of Man under Socialism (1891) was a Fabian lecture by artist Walter
Crane on 'The Prospects for Art under Socialism,' at Willis's Rooms on July
6, 1888.’[21] The claim is asserted just as plainly by
Karl Beckson in his Oscar Wilde
Encyclopedia.[22] |
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Oscar Wilde's presence that
night, though much remarked on, is not particularly surprising. Walter Crane had illustrated Wilde's book
of fairy stories, The Happy Prince and
Other Tales, published just a few weeks before, in May.[23] Still, it would be too much to call the men
friends. Wilde was closer, however,
with the man who inspired Crane to socialism, William Morris. There was even a story – though it may be a
product of Shaw's imagination – that ‘Morris, when he was dying slowly,
enjoyed a visit from Wilde more than anybody else.’[24] |
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For Crane, though, it would be
hard to exaggerate Morris's importance, especially in terms of his political
development. He recalled: |
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A little pamphlet entitled Art and Socialism. . . – really a
reprint of one of Morris's addresses, – had a great effect upon my mind, and
led me into a correspondence with Morris on the subject, in which I stated
all the objections or difficulties which occurred to me against Socialism, as
I then understood it, and he very kindly wrote fully in reply. The result was that the difficulties
disappeared, and from the verge of pessimism as regards human progress, I
accepted the Socialist position, which became a universal solvent in my
mind. It was the question which
swallowed all other questions. . . .[25] |
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Here, then, is another possible
line of development: Morris, Crane,
Wilde; Art and Socialism, The Prospects for Art Under Socialism,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism. |
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All three essays concern,
broadly speaking, the relationship of art to politics, or more specifically,
to economics – what Morris describes as ‘the evils that exist in the relation
between Art and Commerce.’[26] In each case, the author came to socialism
largely through his concern for art, and all three essays argue that
capitalism is bad for both the artist and his work, and that socialism would
be better. They each establish this
point by relating art to labor, showing that where labor is degraded, art
suffers; in contrast, where labor is respected, it and art are as one. It is in this attitude toward labor that
the three essays enjoy the greatest unity.
Morris writes: ‘Nothing should
be made by man's labour which is not worth making, or which must be made by
labour degrading to the makers.’[27] Later he elaborates: ‘It is right and necessary that all men
should have work to do: First, Work worth doing; Second, Work of itself
pleasant to do; Third, Work done under such conditions as would make it
neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.’[28] |
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Furthermore, the three writers
worry that workers are becoming slaves to the machines that ought to aid
them. Morris: ‘The wonderful machines which in the hands
of just and foreseeing men would have been used to minimize repulsive labour
and to give pleasure . . . have, instead of lightening the labour of the
workmen, intensified it, and thereby added more weariness yet to the burden
which the poor have to carry.’[29] Crane: ‘As to machinery, it is but a
question of adaptation of means to ends, since machinery simply gives extra
hands and feet to humanity; useful enough to do heavy and useful drudgery, .
. . to be the servant and labour-saver of man, in short, but never his master
and profit-grinder, as it has become. . . .’[30] Wilde:
‘Up to present man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of
machinery. . . . Were that machine the
property of all, everybody would benefit by it. . . . All unintellectual labour, all monotonous,
dull labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant
conditions, must be done by machinery.’[31]
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All three men lament the
division of art from labour, and artists from workers. Under socialism, they insist, every worker
would be an artist and all work would be artwork. These categories in fact – ‘artist’ or
‘worker’; ‘art’ and ‘labour’ – blend and blur and dissolve into one
another. Crane suggests that under
socialism the artists would be like ‘master craftsmen,’ each beginning his
career as ‘a smith or a carpenter,’ eventually becoming ‘capable of design in
all kinds of materials, [and able to] design a building, make the pattern of
a jewel or a gown, draw a title-page or paint a portrait,’ but spending, in
any case ‘a portion of time . . . in
some form of manual labour.’[32] |
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With the disappearance of
classes, there would be only humanity.
With the abolition of commerce, both ‘work’ and ‘art’ would lose their
specialized meanings. Both would
continue, though no longer distinguishable from, simply, life. Morris repeatedly defines art as ‘the
Pleasure of Life.’[33] And Wilde defines, or refuses to define,
work as ‘activity of any kind.’ He
reasons, with echoes of Morris: ‘Every
man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised
over him. If there is, his work will
not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for
others.’[34] |
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Wilde, however, presses this
line of thinking even further, and gives central place to Individualism: If, under socialism, work were to become as
art, that could only be because it would become an expression of the
individuality of the worker. Art,
here, is the model not only for labour but for life. The artist, which we are told the worker
will become, is the type for the true Individualist. (‘Art is the most intense mode of
Individualism that the world has known.’[35]) This is a very special kind of
Individualism: it relies for its
further development on the advent of Socialism, and it expresses itself most
fully through a broad sociability:
‘When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy
and exercise it freely and spontaneously.’[36] |
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Wilde thus anchors his
Individualism in Socialism, though the relationship between them is one of
ends and means: ‘Socialism itself will
be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.’[37] Socialism exists for Individualism, and this suggests a very special type of
socialism as well: one that is anti-authoritarian, even to the point of
anarchism: ‘Of course authority and
compulsion are out of the question.
All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that
man is fine. . . . [T]he State must
give up all idea of government. . . .
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no
government at all.’[38] |
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This brings us back, if not to
Shaw, then to Ibsen. ‘The state must be abolished!’ Ibsen declared. ‘Abolish the conception of the state,
establish the principle of free will and all that is spiritually akin to it
as the one prerequisite for a universal brotherhood – there is the beginning of a Freedom that is worth something!’[39] |
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So here we have, not one account
of the Soul's origin, but two –
neither very definite: Shaw said that
Ross said that Wilde said that he had been moved to write The Soul of Man Under Socialism after
hearing one of Shaw's lectures. The
inspiring oratory may, perhaps, have been Shaw's lecture on Ibsen. But perhaps Shaw, or Ross, or Wilde
mis-remembered, and it was actually a different Fabian lecture, one for which
Shaw was present, but not presenting; it may have been, for instance, Walter
Crane's. Either story offers a kind of
genealogy for Wilde's essay: Ibsen and Shaw on the one side; Morris and Crane
on the other. Each account represents
an approach to the essay, foregrounding certain features, highlighting
particular concerns, shifting the emphasis. That is why these stories are
valuable – not for whatever truth they may impart, but for the opportunities
they offer to see Wilde's essay in some new way. We should look to influences, not to narrow
our interpretation, but to broaden our understanding. |
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Of course we do not want to make
too much of these creation myths, any more than we want to involve ourselves
too scrupulously in the search for Mr. W.H..
Whatever evidence – textual and historical – may be amassed in their
favor, these stories remain highly speculative. There is no basis, really, for choosing
between them. But, also, there is no
need. Perhaps Crane supplied the
subject for Wilde's essay, and Shaw provided the motivational spark for him
to write it. Ideas aren't things to be passed along from one
person to the next in strict order, like the baton in a relay, or a regal
crown. A good essay is like a strong
plant, with roots spread in all directions.
‘The true artist is known by what he annexes,’ Wilde said, ‘and he
annexes everything.’[40]
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