Oscar Wilde

by Richard Ellmann

  But the audience was not composed only of accomplices. The New York Times acknowledged that it was ‘the most brilliant audience that had gathered for years.’ Frank Harris was there and brought with him a writer for the Times, Arthur Walter, in the hope that this paper would praise the play. Unfortunately Walter disliked it. So did Henry James, to whom it was ‘infantine … both in subject and form.’4 Harris came down to the foyer at the interval and discovered that most of the critics were against it.* A big man named Joseph Knight, whose life of Rossetti Wilde had disparaged in the Pall Mall Gazette, was getting his own back. ‘The humour is mechanical, unreal,’ he said to Harris, who said nothing. ‘What do you think of it?’ ‘That is for you critics to answer,’ said Harris. ‘I might say in Oscar’s way, “Little promise and less performance,” ’ said Knight, laughing uproariously, ‘That’s the exact opposite of Oscar’s way,’ said Harris; ‘it is the listeners who laugh at his humour.’ ‘Come now, really,’ said Knight, ‘you cannot think much of the play?’ Harris at last allowed himself to be drawn: ‘I have not seen the whole play. I was not at any of the rehearsals. But so far it is surely the best comedy in English, the most brilliant, is it not?’ And, ignoring hoots of derision, he added, ‘I can only compare it to the best of Congreve, and I think it’s better.’ Bernard Shaw also admired it, and on sending Wilde his own first play, Widowers’ Houses, which was produced later the same year, hoped he would find it ‘tolerably amusing, considering that it is a farcical comedy. Unfortunately,’ he added with some deference, ‘I have no power of producing beauty; my genius is the genius of intellect.’6

  Most of the audience agreed with Harris and Shaw. By the second interval, Wilde was already feeling jubilant. He was standing drinks for his friends in the bar when he caught sight of Le Gallienne and his ‘poem’ (otherwise woman friend), to whom he had sent tickets with the words ‘Come, and bring your poem to sit beside you.’ ‘My dear Richard, where have you been?’ he asked. ‘It seems as if we hadn’t met for years. Now tell me what you have been doing? Ah I remember.… Yes … You have pained me deeply, Richard.’ ‘I pained you! How?’ ‘You have brought out a new book since I saw you last.’ ‘Well, what of it?’ ‘You have treated me very badly in your book, Richard.’ ‘I treated you badly? You must be confusing my book with somebody else’s. My last book was The Religion of a Literary Man. You must be dreaming, man. Why, I never so much as mentioned you in it.’ ‘Ah, Richard! that was just it!’ In soberer mood he went on to ask what else Le Gallienne had been writing. ‘On loving one’s enemies,’ said Le Gallienne. ‘That’s a great theme,’ said Wilde. ‘I should like to write on that, too. For do you know, all my life I have been looking for twelve men who didn’t believe in me … and so far I have only found eleven.’7

  After the final curtain the applause was long and hearty, and Wilde came forward from the wings in response to cries of ‘Author!’ He knew how he wished to look, and what he wanted to say. In his mauve-gloved hand was a cigarette (‘out of nervousness,’ according to Mrs Jopling), and in his buttonhole a green carnation.8 The ‘delightful and immortal speech’ (as he himself described it in a letter to the St James’s Gazette) was accentuated, according to Alexander, in this way: ‘Ladies and gentlemen: I have enjoyed this evening immensely. The actors have given us a charming rendering of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.’†

  The conservative critics, his old friend Clement Scott for one, found the cigarette even more outrageous than the egotism. Henry James wrote to Henrietta Reubell, his friend and Wilde’s, that ‘the unspeakable one had responded to curtain calls by appearing with a metallic blue carnation in his buttonhole and a cigarette in his fingers.’ (The color was green-blue, verdigris.) Wilde’s speech he considered inadequate. ‘Ce monsieur gives at last on one’s nerves,’ James confided. Robert Ross, in an interview with Wilde in the St James’s Gazette of 18 January 1895, asked whether Wilde recognized that people found fault with his curtain speeches. Wilde replied, ‘Yes, the old-fashioned idea was that the dramatist should appear and merely thank his kind friends for their patronage and presence. I am glad to say I have altered all that. The artist cannot be degraded into the servant of the public. While I have always recognised the cultural appreciation that actors and audience have shown for my work, I have equally recognised that humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent. Assertion is at once the duty and privilege of the artist.’

  The crowds came. The Prince of Wales approved. And Alexander noticed that the pit and galleries were as full as the stalls and boxes. ‘My dear Alexander,’ said Wilde, ‘the answer is easy. Servants listen to conversations in drawing rooms and dining rooms. They hear people discussing my play, their curiosity is aroused, and so they fill your theatre. I can see they are servants by their perfect manners.’ Lady Wilde wrote to her son on 24 February, ‘You have had a brilliant success! and I am so happy.’ The play ran from February until 29 July, toured the provinces, and was back on the boards on 31 October. It has held the stage since, just as Dorian Gray has kept its public, because it is better than it seems to be. A kind of poetical glamour pervades it, as Shaw noticed. The audience cannot bear to be inattentive. The characters and plot may be implausible, but the tension of conflicting impulses is expertly sustained, the wit pungent, and the central transvaluation of values, by which the bad woman appears in a good light, the good woman in a bad one, and society in the worst light of all, is cunning.

  After the performances Wilde sometimes went to the Crown, a public house off Charing Cross Road, where Symons, Dowson, Beardsley, Beerbohm, Johnson, and their friends used to congregate, meeting in a little room away from the bar, drinking hot port until half past twelve and till later outside. There was much talk about his play. On 26 May, Wilde spoke at a meeting of the Royal General Theatrical Fund, with his friend George Alexander in the chair. An alderman named Routledge had praised Wilde for calling a spade a spade and for lashing vice in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Wilde disavowed both intentions. ‘I would like to protest against the statement that I have ever called a spade a spade. The man who did so should be condemned to use one. I have also been accused of lashing vice, but I can assure you that nothing was further from my intentions. Those who have seen Lady Windermere’s Fan will see that if there is one particular doctrine contained in it, it is that of sheer individualism. It is not for anyone to censure what anyone else does, and everyone should go his own way, to whatever place he chooses, in exactly the way that he chooses. It is said that literature should be considered an adjunct to the drama, but I am entirely at variance with every intelligent man to whom I have spoken on the subject. Whatever form of literature is created, the stage will be ready to embody it, and to give it a wonderful visible colour and presentation of life. But if we are to have a real drama in England, I feel quite sure it will only be on condition that we wean ourselves from the trammelling conventions which have always been a peril to the theatre. I do not think it makes the smallest difference what a play is if an actor has genius and power. Nor do I consider the British public to be of the slightest importance.’10

  Discerning reviewers recognized Wilde’s borrowings. One derived the play from The School for Scandal—a distant cousinship at best. A. B. Walkley, who wrote the best review, in The Speaker (Cassell’s publication tended to be kind to a former Cassell’s editor), traced Lady Windermere to Dumas fils’s Francillon, where the heroine also believes in a single law of fidelity for husband and wife; the scene in which Mrs Erlynne braves a hostile drawing room echoes Act I of Dumas fils’s L’Etrangère; Mrs Erlynne’s fear that her daughter will repeat her mistake recalls Jules Lemaître’s Révoltée; the fan is like the bracelet in Scribe’s Adrienne Lecouvreur. Others said it was from Sardou. Wilde’s reply was in an interview with Gelett Burgess in the Sketch (9 January 1895). ‘It does not
occur in any of Sardou’s plays, and it was not in my play until ten days before production. Nobody else’s work gives me any suggestion.’ Walkley allowed that Wilde improved as he borrowed. One unexpectedly captious review, in the Daily Telegraph on 22 February 1892, was attributed to Willie Wilde. It said in part, ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has spoken. He has publicly announced his complete satisfaction with his new and original play.… The author peoples his play with male and female editions of himself.… The play is a bad one, but it will succeed.’ Willie Wilde, if he was indeed the author, grudged his brother’s success. Soon after writing the review, he cajoled his wife into taking him back to New York.

  Revolt of the Puppets

  There are many advantages in puppets. They never argue. They have no crude views about art. They have no private lives.

  Wilde’s belittlement of the audience in his curtain speech offended many, and an article in the Daily Telegraph ten days earlier showed distaste for the actors too. It quoted him as saying, ‘The long-accepted truth that the test of a play lies in the actable nature thereof is a ridiculous fallacy. The stage is only a frame furnished with a set of puppets. It is to the play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting, which frame has no bearing on the intrinsic merit of the art within.’ Wilde wrote a reply, which the newspaper headed, ‘The Poet and the Puppets,’ to say that he had been misquoted: while he liked puppet theatres (even when the leading actress failed to acknowledge his bouquet), they did not suit the desire of the modern theatre for actuality. It was true that puppets did not impose their own personalities, as actors sometimes did. ‘For anybody can act. Most people in England do nothing else. To be conventional is to be a comedian. To act a particular part, however, is a very different thing, and a very difficult thing as well.’ On his honeymoon he had said that the actor was as important as the playwright. Now that he was a playwright, he no longer thought so.

  The title given to Wilde’s reply took the eye of Charles Brookfield, an actor and a writer of burlesques, who was to play the role of a minor devil in Wilde’s life. (The fact that Brookfield may have been Thackeray’s illegitimate son made him particularly sensitive to immorality.) He proposed to Charles Hawtrey a travesty of Wilde’s play, and Hawtrey assisted him with its composition, while Wilde’s fellow Dubliner Jimmy Glover wrote the music. They discovered from some biographical dictionary that Wilde’s middle name was O’Flahertie, and began their piece, The Poet and the Puppets, with a song to the tune of ‘St Patrick’s Day,’ which ran in part,

  They may bubble with jest at the way that I’m dressed,

  They may scoff at the length of my hair.

  They may say that I’m vain, overbearing, inane,

  And object to the flowers that I wear.

  They may laugh till they’re ill, but the fact remains still,

  A fact I’ve proclaimed since a child,

  That it’s taken, my dears, nearly two thousand years

  To make Oscar O’Flaherty—Wilde.

  Someone leaked the song to Wilde. Having had to suffer parodies in the past, by Gilbert and others, he was furious at the prospect of fresh vulgarization. He appealed to E. F. S. Pigott, the licenser of plays, and it was specified that the authors must read the script to Wilde. He refused to allow them the use either of ‘Oscar’ or of ‘Wilde,’ but did not object to O’Flaherty, so the last line was altered to

  To make Neighbour O’Flaherty’s child.

  Having gained this point, he listened amiably to the rest, praising each page: ‘Charming, my old friends!’ ‘Delightful!’ ‘It’s exquisite!’ Only as they reached the door did he add acid to his syrup: ‘I felt, however, that I have been—well—Brookfield, what is the word?—what is the thing you call it in your delightfully epigrammatic Stage English? eh? Oh yes! delightfully spoofed.’11

  ‘The Poet of the Lily’ is seen at the beginning of the play to be devising a new triumph and summons a fairy. Having invented flowers, music, and fairies, he proposes to imagine a play and players. The fairy helpfully calls up Shakespeare, Ibsen, Sheridan, and others to furnish him with stage devices. They produce the play, and the poet drills his puppets in mimicry of various actors: Hawtrey, made up as Wilde, also played the actor Rutland Barrington; Brookfield took on the mannerisms of Beerbohm Tree in Hamlet; and Lottie Venne those of Mrs Tree as Ophelia. Wilde’s epigrams were replaced by Joe Miller jokes. The discovery scene revealed not one but half a dozen Lady Teazles. The travesty, battening on Lady Windermere’s Fan and its author, ran from 19 May to the end of July. Hawtrey lost a little money on the production, but did not begrudge it, because of Brookfield’s ‘brilliance.’

  Overtures to Salome

  The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous.

  The success of Lady Windermere’s Fan made Wilde the most sought-after man in London. He had an entourage that included Ross, Robertson, Gray, the novelist Reggie Turner, and others, such as Edward Shelley. They were what he termed ‘exquisite Aeolian harps that play in the breeze of my matchless talk.’12 Among those regarding him with new eyes was Sarah Bernhardt, ‘that serpent of old Nile’ (as Wilde called her), who had taken a London theatre for a none-too-successful season in 1892. At a party at Henry Irving’s she remarked to Wilde that he should write a play for her one day. ‘I have already done so.’ As soon as she read Salome she decided to play the title role, though, as she told an interviewer, Wilde had said the leading part was that of the moon. A copy of the fifth edition of his poems, published in May, was accordingly inscribed,

  A Sarah Bernhardt, ‘Comme la Princesse Salomé est belle ce soir.’

  Londres ’92.13

  Her comments were as gratifying as he could wish. According to Charles Ricketts, she said, ‘Mais c’est héraldique; on dirait une fresque,’ and ‘Le mot doit tomber comme une perle sur un disque de cristal, pas de mouvements rapides, des gestes stylisés.’‡ The play seemed like a rendering of the line in Poems (1881):

  The joy of passion, that dread mystery

  Which not to know, is not to live at all,

  And yet to know is to be held in death’s most deadly thrall.

  Its one defect for Sarah was that Herod, not Salome, was the central figure.14

  Wilde persuaded Ricketts to do the stage design. Ricketts proposed ‘a black floor—upon which Salome’s white feet would show.’ The idea was meant to captivate Wilde. ‘The sky was to be a rich turquoise green cut by the perpendicular fall of strips of Japanese matting, forming an aerial tent above the terraces.’15 Wilde suggested that the Jews should be in yellow, the Romans in purple, and John in white. They discussed Salome’s costume endlessly. ‘Should she be black like the night? silver, like the moon?’ Wilde’s suggestion was ‘green like a curious and poisonous lizard.’ Ricketts wanted the moonlight to fall on the ground, the source not being seen; Wilde insisted upon a ‘strange dim pattern in the sky.’ Graham Robertson was also called in, and suggested a violet sky. ‘A violet sky,’ said Wilde. ‘Yes, I never thought of that. Certainly a violet sky and then, in place of an orchestra, braziers of perfume. Think—the scented clouds rising and partly veiling the stage from time to time—a new perfume for each emotion.’ Robertson pointed out that the theatre could not be aired between each two emotions. Sarah Bernhardt, who was paying, decided to borrow a set from Irving.

  She also borrowed some Cleopatra costumes. Robertson designed ‘a golden robe with long fringes of gold, sustained on the shoulders by bands of gilt and painted leather which also held in place a golden breastplate set with jewels. On her head was a triple crown of gold and jewels and the cloud of hair flowing from beneath it was powdered blue.’ Wilde objected that it was Herodias whose hair was powdered blue, but the actress insisted, ‘I will have blue hair.’ Robertson asked if she would have a standin to do the dance. ‘I’m going to dance myself,’ she replied. ‘How will you do the dance of the seven veils?’ ‘Never you mind,’ said Sarah, smiling
enigmatically.16

  The rehearsals began in the second week of June and had been going on for about two weeks when it became clear that Pigott, the licenser of plays, was considering whether the play should be banned. There was an old law that forbade the depiction on the stage of Biblical characters, and since Pigott was straitlaced, prospects were bleak. As Wilde pointed out, Saint-Saëns’s Samson and Delilah and Massenet’s Hérodias were also prohibited. ‘Racine’s superb tragedy of Athalie cannot be performed on an English stage.’ When Robert Ross interviewed Wilde for the Pall Mall Budget, Wilde threatened, ‘If the Censor refuses Salome, I shall leave England to settle in France where I shall take out letters of naturalization. I will not consent to call myself a citizen of a country that shows such narrowness in artistic judgement. I am not English. I am Irish which is quite another thing.’ He was indignant that the Lord Chamberlain ‘allows the personality of an artist to be presented in a caricature on the stage, and will not allow the work of that artist to be shown under very rare and beautiful conditions.’