On this occasion too, he explained why he wrote the play in French. ‘I have one instrument that I know I can command,’ he said to Ross in the interview, ‘and that is the English language. There was another instrument I had listened to all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it.… Of course there are modes of expression that a French man of letters would not have used, but they give a certain relief or colour to the play. A great deal of the curious effect that Maeterlinck produces comes from the fact that he, a Flamand by race, writes in an alien language. The same is true of Rossetti who, though he wrote in English, was essentially Latin in temperament.’ To a representative of Le Gaulois Wilde declared, ‘To me there are only two languages in the world: French and Greek. Here people are essentially anti-artistic and narrow-minded. Though I have English friends, I do not like the English in general. There is a great deal of hypocrisy in England, which you in France very justly find fault with. The typical Briton is Tartuffe, seated in his shop behind the counter. There are numerous exceptions, but they only prove the rule.’17
Pigott stopped the play, to Wilde’s great disappointment. Friends and enemies were not sympathetic. Max Beerbohm, who had not read the play, wrote to Reggie Turner,
Isn’t it killing also about Oscar’s Salome being interdicted by the Lord Chamberlain. I have designed a great picture in which King Bull makes a great feast and when they have feasted the daughter of Mrs Grundy dances before them and pleases the King—insomuch that he promises her whatsoever she shall desire. After consultation with her mother she demands that ‘they bring unto her by and by the head of Oscar the Poetast on a charger.’ The picture—which will be called The Modern Salome—represents Lord Lathom [the Lord Chamberlain] holding the charger.
There was general merriment at the fact that Wilde, if he became a French citizen, would be subject to military service, and Partridge of Punch surpassed himself with a caricature of Wilde uniformed as a poilu. The New York Times, never friendly to Wilde, summarized on 3 July, ‘All London is laughing at Oscar Wilde’s threat to become a Frenchman.’ And Whistler, not one to let off a downed opponent, said tersely, ‘Oscar has scored another brilliant—exposure.’18
But Wilde’s grievance was real, and he argued it well. It was absurd that painter and sculptor might depict what they liked, and only the poet be subject to censorship. Not that the musician escaped: ‘What can be said of a body that forbids Massenet’s Hérodiade, Gounod’s La Reine de Saba, Rubinstein’s Judas Maccabaeus, and allows [Sardou’s] Divorçons to be played on any stage?’19 Among established critics of the day, only William Archer and Bernard Shaw took Wilde’s part, and the rest of them, along with actors like Henry Irving, endorsed the censorship in testimony before a commission of inquiry.
Wilde went ahead with plans to publish his play whether or not it could be staged. The title page was to name the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant in Paris along with Elkin Mathews and John Lane in London as joint publishers, though the printing was in Paris and Mathews and Lane simply bought copies from Wilde. Correspondence with the printer indicates that Wilde made many corrections, chiefly excisions, in the first proofs. Stuart Merrill says that Wilde wished to be sure that his French was free of solecisms, but had no great confidence in the various young men whose advice he solicited. Merrill persuaded him that the tirades of the personages must not all begin with ‘Enfin,’ as they originally did, and all the ‘enfin’s’ were deleted. But when Wilde was reluctant to accept other suggestions, Merrill put him on to Adolphe Retté. Retté corrected some Anglicisms, and made Wilde give up a few sentences in the excessively long list of precious stones spoken by Herod. Gradually Wilde lost confidence in Retté as well, and consulted Pierre Louÿs, who had seen the play at an earlier stage. Louÿs, who acted as middleman with the printer, proposed further emendations, most of which Wilde ignored, allowing only grammatical changes. Two final touches, of a minor kind, were put in by Marcel Schwob. Schwob’s help and friendship were acknowledged by Wilde in the dedication to ‘The Sphinx,’ which was published in book form with Ricketts’s illustrations in 1894. But nothing could compensate for Wilde’s disappointment at not having his name linked with Bernhardt’s.
If Salome could not be staged, it was defiantly published in February 1893. Wilde said he had had it bound in ‘Tyrian purple’ wrappers to go with Alfred Douglas’s gilt hair. He liked to speak of the lettering as in ‘fading’ or ‘tired’ silver. ‘That tragic daughter of passion,’ Wilde wrote to a friend, ‘appeared on Thursday last, and is now dancing for the head of the British public.’20 He was generous with his copies. Presenting one to Charles Ricketts, he said, ‘You do not know that since we last met I have become a famous French author.’ A copy went to Shaw, whom Wilde playfully regarded as a fellow member of the Celtic school for which in Intentions he had predicted a great future. Florence Stoker got a copy, and among literary men, Le Gallienne, Swinburne, Pater, and two critics who had written sympathetically of Wilde, Edmund Gosse and William Archer. (The unsympathetic Henry James bought a copy.) Wilde was particularly interested in the response of his French compeers, who took his book as seriously as he could wish, and perhaps, as Robert Ross suggested, more seriously than he had expected. The best was the letter from Mallarmé of March 1893:
Mon cher Poète
J’admire que tout étant exprimé par de perpétuels traits éblouissants, en votre Salomé, il se dégage, aussi, à chaque page, de l’indicible et le Songe.
Ainsi les gemmes innombrables et exactes ne peuvent servir que d’accompagnement sur sa robe au geste surnaturel de cette jeune princesse, que définitivement vous évoquâtes
Amitiés de
STÉPHANE MALLARMɧ21
Another laudatory letter came from Pierre Loti:
Merci, monsieur, de m’avoir fait connaître votre Salomé—c’est beau et sombre comme un chapitre de L’Apocalypse—Je l’admire profondément.‖
And one from Maurice Maeterlinck:
Je vous prie de m’excuser, Monsieur, si les circonstances ne m’ont pas permis de vous remercier plus tôt au don de votre mystérieux, étrange et admirable Salome. Je vous ai dit merci aujourd’hui en sortant, pour la troisième fois, de ce rêve dont je ne me suis pas encore expliqué la puissance. Croyez, Monsieur, à mon admiration très grande.a
M. MAETERLINCK
Charles Morice and Henri Barbusse praised it. Will Rothenstein could not help saying that the play reminded him of Flaubert’s story ‘Hérodias.’ Wilde took the comment cheerfully: ‘Remember, dans la littérature il faut tuer son père [in literature you must always kill your father].’ When Mrs Bancroft, the actress, once said that a scene in one of his plays reminded her of a great scene in a play by Scribe, Wilde replied unblushingly, ‘Taken bodily from it, dear lady. Why not? Nobody reads nowadays.’ He took a similar tack with Max Beerbohm: ‘Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St Antoine without signing my name at the end of it. Que voulez-vous? All the best Hundred Books bear my signature in this manner.’22
Wilde next decided to have John Lane, who was publishing Lady Windermere’s Fan, bring out Salome in English. The question of who would illustrate it was important. There was Ricketts, whom he had commissioned to do the design for John Gray’s Silverpoints as well as for the deluxe edition of The Sphinx. But in the Studio for April 1893 a drawing showing Salome holding the head of John the Baptist had caught Wilde’s eye, as perhaps the artist, Beardsley, intended it should. Wilde engaged Beardsley to illustrate the book. The young man was strange, cruel, disobedient. He was making his way from a Japanese style towards an eighteenth-century English one. Wilde had expected a Byzantine style like Gustave Moreau’s. Instead Beardsley combined jocular impressions of Wilde’s face, as in the moon or in the face of Herod, with sinister, sensual overtones. He saw the play as hieratic absurdity. One drawing, of Herodias, had to be canceled as indece
nt. The artist’s reaction went into a quatrain:
Because one figure was undressed
This little drawing was suppressed.
It was unkind. But never mind,
Perhaps it was all for the best.
To Wilde’s credit, he saw that the drawings were ‘quite wonderful,’ and recognized the homicidal energy of Beardsley’s work. But he lamented to Ricketts, ‘My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau, wrapped in his jewels and sorrows. My Salome is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô, a Sainte Thérèse who worships the moon.’ Her dance was more metaphysical than physical. He deprecated Beardsley’s naughtiness, and when Ricketts tried to defend the drawings, he silenced him by saying: ‘No, no, my dear Ricketts, it is impossible that you should like them. You say you do to seem impartial. The true artist is incapable of impartiality; the men of the Renaissance destroyed Gothic buildings, just as the Gothic craftsmen had destroyed the masonry of the Normans.’ Wilde did not, however, let Beardsley’s sophistication escape unscathed. ‘Yes, dear Aubrey is almost too Parisian,’ he said, ‘he cannot forget that he has been to Dieppe—once.’23
Importance of Mrs Arbuthnot
Love can canonise people. The saints are those who have been most loved.
Wilde’s illness had disappeared after Lady Windermere’s Fan, but the fiasco of Salome revived it. He had enjoyed hearing Sarah Bernhardt speak his words, had looked forward to their public association, and had been so cast down by the censorship that he thought he must take a rest cure. On 3 July 1892 he went with Alfred Douglas to Bad Homburg. There the doctors put him on a diet, forbade him to smoke, and generally made him miserable. He met Douglas’s grandparents, the Montgomerys, but Alfred Montgomery did not care for him at all.24 On his return, however, Wilde rallied and started work on a new play. This one he had promised to an old friend, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who was manager of the Haymarket Theatre as well as its chief actor. For the moment Wilde called it Mrs Arbuthnot to conceal the true title, A Woman of No Importance. To get on with it, during August and September he took a farmhouse at a village called Felbrigg near Cromer in Norfolk—a place where Alexander had been earlier in August—while Constance and his children stayed at Babbacombe Cliff, near Torquay in Devon, a house belonging to her kinswoman, Lady Mount-Temple. Edward Shelley was invited to Felbrigg but declined.25 Wilde invited Alfred Douglas, who came and was ill, and Wilde may have used this as the pretext for not rejoining his wife at Babbacombe. A letter from her dated 18 September begins,
Dearest Oscar, I am so sorry about Lord Alfred Douglas, and wish I was at Cromer to look after him. If you think I could do any good, do telegraph for me, because I can easily get over to you.
She was not sent for.
Douglas’s presence did not prevent Wilde from finishing his play, which Tree accepted on 14 October 1892. Wilde read an act of it at the house of Lady (Walter) Palmer. His audience was moved to tears. Pre-empting the usual accusations of influence, Wilde then informed them, ‘in his most impressive manner, “I took that situation from The Family Herald.” ’26 This play also reconstituted certain elements in Lady Windermere’s Fan. Again there is a dreadful secret, but, as Wilde had written to Alexander, it could be discovered much sooner than in the original version of Lady Windermere’s Fan. The secret, that Gerald Arbuthnot is Lord Illingworth’s illegitimate son, is made known early in the second act. Mirroring Mrs Erlynne’s visit to her long-lost daughter, here a father discovers his long-lost son. The theme of the foundling in Wilde’s plays can be best thought of as a secret that stands for all secrets. For Wilde, errant husband and brother to three illegitimate siblings of uncertain maternity, it had a subconscious meaning. We are not what we think we are or what other people think us, and our ties to them may be greater or less than we imagine.
Lord Illingworth is one of Wilde’s verbal dandies, not the most attractive. Unlike Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Illingworth has no deep feeling for anyone.b
A Woman of No Importance is the weakest of the plays Wilde wrote in the nineties, but it does more than offer the stale theme of the Victorian fallen woman and her defiance of her seducer. Lord Illingworth is a Lovelace, a dandy and aesthete whose skepticism is not always misguided. He utters some of Wilde’s most critical epigrams, like ‘The English country gentleman galloping after the fox—the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable.’ The play is essentially a woman’s play (a point that Lytton Strachey understandably ignores), and the women’s voices are sharply critical of male presuppositions. The women range from puritans to profligates. Some are unconsciously funny, such as Lady Hunstanton, unable to choose between alternatives: ‘Lady Belton eloped with Lord Fethersall.… Poor Lord Belton died three days afterwards of joy, or gout. I forget which.’ Mrs Allonby is a conscious wit and a match for Lord Illingworth; when he remarks, ‘The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden,’ she retorts, ‘It ends with Revelations.’ She explains ingeniously why women have a better time than men: ‘There are far more things forbidden to us than are forbidden to them.’ Through these women, and others such as the American Hester Worsley, Wilde presents society scathingly, as it radiates into innocence and guilt, conventionality and unconventionally, steadfastness and whim. Though Mrs Arbuthnot (like Sibyl Vane) is too single-minded for wit, she is the vehicle through which morality loses out, as it must in Wilde, to the ‘Higher Ethics.’
Wilde’s sense that the world wore a mask but took it off at intervals found many demonstrations. There was his affectionate brother Willie, for example, who managed to betray him far off in New York. After returning there with his wife in a partial reconciliation, Willie had soon reverted to the Lotos Club. When his wife declined to finance him, he took to sponging drinks. His favorite act was to parody Oscar’s poems, no doubt hitting the mark with fraternal insight. He could strike aesthetic attitudes and speak in a ‘potato-choked’ voice near enough to Oscar’s to amuse his cronies. From time to time he said, ‘I’m going to buy a second-hand copy of Rochefoucauld’s Maxims, and then I’ll set up a play foundry in opposition to my brother Oscar.’ After his wife divorced him on 10 June 1893, he lingered on at the Lotos Club, more and more of a nuisance. On 17 September 1893 his fellow members expelled him, nominally for nonpayment of a $14 debt. They filled in a reporter for The New York Times on Willie’s antics, and an article in that newspaper, on the day following his expulsion, gave a detailed account of his mockery of Oscar. The article reached London in October. Willie, back with his mother, insisted that it was all lies, but Oscar did not believe him.28 He could now recall the negative review of Lady Windermere’s Fan Willie had probably written in the Daily Telegraph. Willie was one more example of the treacherous friend and disciple, a staple character in Wilde’s fable-spinning. They stopped speaking to each other.
Success Compounded
The originality I mean, which we ask from the artist, is originality of treatment, not of subject. It is only the unimaginative who ever invent. The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything.
At the end of March 1893, A Woman of No Importance was put into rehearsal by Tree. He had been impressed by the quality and the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan, and had immediately asked Wilde to do a play for the Haymarket. At first Wilde refused. According to Hesketh Pearson, who knew Tree well, Wilde said, ‘As Herod in my Salome you would be admirable. As a peer of the realm in my latest dramatic device, pray forgive me if I do not see you.’ Tree pointed out that his portrayal of a duke in Henry Arthur Jones’s The Dancing Girl had been widely praised. ‘Ah! that’s just it,’ said Wilde. ‘Before you can successfully impersonate the character I have in mind, you must forget that you ever played Hamlet; you must forget that you ever played Falstaff; above all, you must forget that you ever played a duke in a melodrama by Henry Arthur Jones.’ ‘I’ll do my best.’ ‘I think you had better forget that you ever acted at all.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because this witty aristocrat whom you wi
sh to assume in my play is quite unlike anyone who has been seen on the stage before. He is like no one who has existed before.’ The baffled Tree exclaimed, ‘My God! He must be supernatural.’ To which Wilde responded, ‘He is certainly not natural. He is a figure of art. Indeed, if you can bear the truth, he is MYSELF.’29
But he gradually came round and accepted Tree’s offer. When he read the play to Tree, Tree complimented him on the development of the plot. Such praise was unacceptable: ‘Plots are tedious. Anyone can invent them. Life is full of them. Indeed one has to elbow one’s way through them as they crowd across one’s path.’ And he said again, ‘I took the plot of this play from The Family Herald, which took it—wisely, I feel—from my novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. People love a wicked aristocrat who seduces a virtuous maid, and they love a virtuous maiden for being seduced by a wicked aristocrat. I have given them what they like, so that they may learn to appreciate what I like to give them.’
At the rehearsals Wilde kept trying to make Tree less theatrical, probably because Lord Illingworth was already theatrical enough. Tree liked the part so well he began to play it outside the theatre. ‘Ah,’ said Wilde, ‘every day Herbert becomes de plus en plus oscarisé. It is a wonderful case of nature imitating art.’30 Another problem was that Fred Terry, who was to play the ingenuous Gerald Arbuthnot, was determined to make Gerald a man of the world. When Wilde objected, Terry replied, ‘Oh well, you know, Mr Wilde, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ ‘No, Terry. But you have a circus. In that circus is a ring. A horse enters the ring and approaches a trough of water. The ringmaster cracks his whip and says, “Drink!” and the horse drinks. That horse, Terry, is the actor.’ ‘So, Mr Wilde, you compare the stage to a circus.’ ‘Ah,’ said Wilde, ‘yours was the metaphor.’ Terry remaining truculent, Wilde went to his fiat to lunch with him. By chance Terry happened to say he loved Dickens, and Wilde talked with great enthusiasm about Dickens’s characters. (He did not say what he thought, that Dickens failed with all his characters who were not caricatures.) Terry’s hostility vanished, and he said, ‘Well, Mr Wilde, it’s been a very great pleasure for me to find another person who is fond of Dickens.’ ‘Oh, my dear boy, I’ve never read a word of his in my life,’ said Wilde, belittling their newly formed bond.31
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