by Oscar Wilde
‘But what evidence have you?’ I exclaimed, laying my hand on his. ‘You have no evidence at all. It is mere hypothesis. And which of Shakespeare’s actors do you think that Willie Hughes was? The “pretty fellow” Ben Jonson tells us of, who was so fond of dressing up in girls’ clothes?’
‘I don’t know,’ he answered rather irritably. ‘I have not had time to investigate the point yet. But I feel quite sure that my theory is the true one. Of course it is a hypothesis, but then it is a hypothesis that explains everything, and if you had been sent to Cambridge to study science, instead of to Oxford to dawdle over literature, you would know that a hypothesis that explains everything is a certainty.’
‘Yes, I am aware that Cambridge is a sort of educational institute,’ I murmured. ‘I am glad I was not there.’
‘My dear fellow,’ said Erskine, suddenly turning his keen grey eyes on me, ‘you believe in Cyril Graham’s theory, you believe in Willie Hughes, you know that the Sonnets are addressed to an actor, but for some reason or other you won’t acknowledge it.’
‘I wish I could believe it,’ I rejoined. ‘I would give anything to be able to do so. But I can’t. It is a sort of moonbeam theory, very lovely, very fascinating, but intangible. When one thinks that one has got hold of it, it escapes one. No: Shakespeare’s heart is still to us “a closet never pierc’d with crystal eyes, ‘ as he calls it in one of the sonnets. We shall never know the true secret of the passion of his life.’
Erskine sprang from the sofa, and paced up and down the room. ‘We know it already,’ he cried, ‘and the world shall know it some day.’
I had never seen him so excited. He would not hear of my leaving him, and insisted on my stopping for the rest of the day.
We argued the matter over for hours, but nothing that I could say could make him surrender his faith in Cyril Graham’s interpretation. He told me that he intended to devote his life to proving the theory, and that he was determined to do justice to Cyril Graham’s memory. I entreated him, laughed at him, begged of him, but it was to no use. Finally we parted, not exactly in anger, but certainly with a shadow between us. He thought me shallow, I thought him foolish. When I called on him again, his servant told me that he had gone to Germany. The letters that I wrote to him remained unanswered.
Two years afterwards, as I was going into my club, the hall porter handed me a letter with a foreign postmark. It was from Erskine, and written at the Hotel d’Angleterre, Cannes. When I had read it, I was filled with horror, though I did not quite believe that he would be so mad as to carry his resolve into execution. The gist of the letter was that he had tried in every way to verify the Willie Hughes theory, and had failed, and that as Cyril Graham had given his life for this theory, he himself had determined to give his own life also to the same cause. The concluding words of the letter were these: ‘I still believe in Willie Hughes; and by the time you receive this I shall have died by my own hand for Willie Hughes’ sake: for his sake, and for the sake of Cyril Graham, whom I drove to his death by my shallow scepticism and ignorant lack of faith. The truth was once revealed to you, and you rejected it. It comes to you now, stained with the blood of two lives – do not turn away from it.’
It was a horrible moment. I felt sick with misery, and yet I could not believe that he would carry out his intention. To die for one’s theological opinions is the worst use a man can make of his life; but to die for a literary theory! It seemed impossible.
I looked at the date. The letter was a week old. Some unfortunate chance had prevented my going to the club for several days, or I might have got it in time to save him. Perhaps it was not too late. I drove off to my rooms, packed up my things, and started by the night mail from Charing Cross. The journey was intolerable. I thought I would never arrive.
As soon as I did, I drove to the Hotel d’Angleterre. It was quite true. Erskine was dead. They told me that he had been buried two days before in the English cemetery. There was something horribly grotesque about the whole tragedy. I said all kinds of wild things, and the people in the hall looked curiously at me.
Suddenly Lady Erskine, in deep mourning, passed across the vestibule. When she saw me she came up to me, murmured something about her poor son, and burst into tears. I led her into the sitting room. An elderly gentleman was there, reading a newspaper. It was the English doctor.
We talked a great deal about Erskine, but I said nothing about his motive for committing suicide. It was evident that he had not told his mother anything about the reason that had driven him to so fatal, so mad an act. Finally Lady Erskine rose and said, ‘George left you something as a memento. It was a thing that he prized very much. I will get it for you.’
As soon as she had left the room I turned to the doctor and said, ‘What a dreadful shock it must have been for Lady Erskine! I wonder that she bears it as well as she does.’
‘Oh, she knew for months past that it was coming,’ he answered.
‘Knew it for months past!’ I cried. ‘But why didn’t she stop him? Why didn’t she have him watched? He must have been out of his mind.’
The doctor stared at me. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
‘Weli,’ I cried, ‘if a mother knows that her son is going to commit suicide –’
‘Suicide!’ he answered. ‘Poor Erskine did not commit suicide. He died of consumption. He came here to die. The moment I saw him I knew that there was no chance. One lung was almost gone, and the other was very much affected. Three days before he died he asked me was there any hope. I told him frankly that there was none, and that he had only a few days to live. He wrote some letters, and was quite resigned, retaining his senses to the last.’
I got up from my seat, and going over to the open window I looked out on the crowded promenade. I remember that the brightly-coloured umbrellas and gay parasols seemed to me like huge fantastic butterflies fluttering by the shore of a blue-metal sea, and that the heavy odour of violets that came across the garden made me think of that wonderful sonnet in which Shakespeare tells us that the scent of these flowers always reminded him of his friend. What did it all mean? Why had Erskine written me that extraordinary letter? Why when standing at the very gate of death had he turned back to tell me what was not true? Was Hugo right? Is affectation the only thing that accompanies a man up the steps of the scaffold? Did Erskine merely want to produce a dramatic effect? That was not like him. It was more like something I might have done myself. No: he was simply actuated by a desire to reconvert me to Cyril Graham’s theory, and he thought that if I could be made to believe that he too had given his life for it, I would be deceived by the pathetic fallacy of martyrdom. Poor Erskine! I had grown wiser since I had seen him. Martyrdom was to me merely a tragic form of scepticism, an attempt to realise by fire what one had failed to do by faith. No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true. The very uselessness of Erskine’s letter made me doubly sorry for him. I watched the people strolling in and out of the cafes, and wondered if any of them had known him. The white dust blew down the scorched sunlit road, and the feathery palms moved restlessly in the shaken air.
At that moment Lady Erskine returned to the room carrying the fatal portrait of Willie Hughes. ‘When George was dying, he begged me to give you this,’ she said. As I took it from her, her tears fell on my hand.
This curious work of art hangs now in my library, where it is very much admired by my artistic friends, one of whom has etched it for me. They have decided that it is not a Clouet, but an Ouvry. I have never cared to tell them its true history, but sometimes, when I look at it, I think there is really a great deal to be said for the Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
THE PLAYS
Introduction by
TERENCE BROWN
W. B. Yeats, who as an impecunious young man in London, had the opportunity to observe his fellow Irishman and artist at the height of his conversatio
nal powers and at his most socially successful, astutely realised that the world Wilde explored so skilfully in his plays was one essentially alien to him. The upper classes and ruling elites of England, Yeats reckoned, to Wilde ‘were as the nobles of Baghdad’. Coming as he did from the Dublin which combined professional, academic and bohemian ways of life in a rackety, even disreputable brilliance, the subtle gradations of the English class system offered him much to reflect upon in his inimitable, iconoclastic manner. The pyramidic solidity of its social structures, with a glittering apex in the gentleman’s club, the Grosvenor Place town house and the country estate, was accordingly observed by Wilde with an eye that never took anything for granted, an eye acutely sensitive to the fact that a world which so manifestly took itself for granted had its foundations in the insecure, shifting sands of human need, ambition, power and passion. So plays that can seem simply clever, opportunistic exploitations of current theatrical fashions – for melodrama, for farce, for French boulevard comedy, for society plays that made everything of reversals, confusions, revelations, kleptodramatics – or simply vehicles for Wilde’s epigrammatic wit, are amongst the most devastating of studies of the bases of English society at the moment when its masters ruled the world, when the sun which lightens the summery garden scenes of The Importance of Being Earnest never set upon a far-flung empire.
For Wilde does not flinch in the matter of money. Wealth is a given in the lavish interiors through which Wilde’s elegant creations live, move and have their being. The opening passages of An Ideal Husband, for example, set in the octagon room of Sir Robert Chiltern’s magnificent house can be seen as a tableau to be entitled ‘The Ideal Home’ with its chandelier, staircase, 18th century French tapestry, its music room to one side from which emerges the faint sound of a string quartet. We are in the apotheosis of the house beautiful into which guests are received as objets d’art in their own right. Yet it is clear from this play, as from the other social comedies, that such wealth depends on British imperial power, on the aggressive control of world trade which has opened a canal to the east at Suez and is now assessing similar, corrupt plans for the Argentine. Indeed, there is in the Faustian temptation to which Sir Robert has given way in this play, something of the eastern luxury and sumptuousness that makes Sir Robert a brother of Herod in Salomé in a shared knowledge of luxury as the proper, privileged background for power. For each the exoticism of strange beauty is the sign of a power over men which ‘is the one pleasure worth knowing’, though both learn to their cost that there are forces over which it cannot exercise mastery.
This then is a world of a ruling caste which has had its servants fly to India for gold and has ransacked the ocean for the orient pearl. Furthermore it quite unembarrassedly accepts that it needs to sustain its life by regular injections of energy and capital from the colonies. Its languid, exquisite mannerism is not so unworldly that it does not welcome a brash Australian to its midst, like Hopper in Lady Windermere’s Fan because of, rather than despite the fact that, ‘his father made a great fortune by selling some kind of food in circular tins’. He may take a daughter off one’s hands and provide what the commercial and colonial classes are obliged to – the economic wherewithal for the ruling classes to continue their delightful lives. Indeed one senses that the impatience felt for the young American woman, Hester Worsley, in A Woman Of No Importance by the society grandes dames she offends by her puritanical outbursts is her disinclination to play a predestined part as the orphan of ‘an American millionaire or philanthropist, or both’ who will adapt to the conventions of that complex but adamantine artifice, the English class system. ‘She is painfully natural, is she not?’ says Lady Stutfield, sniffily.
It is of course Lady Bracknell who without sentimental compunction of any kind lets us see how money is the key to survival in the upper reaches of English society. In her famous interrogation of Jack Worthing, when she discovers the misfortunes that attended his birth, it is his fortune that she investigates with the surest touch. This is a woman who knows what’s what in her world: ‘What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one a position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.’ Lady Bracknell’s hard-nosed financial acumen is so integral a part of her character that even when Wilde dramatises it in terms of farce in the final act (‘A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady now that I look at her’) he seems merely to be high-lighting a cruel truth about the mercenary exigencies of the social world he has come to know. And it is also in The Importance of Being Earnest (in the second act of the original four, printed here, which is not the more usually performed three-act version prepared at the behest of Wilde’s actor manager) that Wilde lets us see for a moment the disasters that can strike when access to funds is not assured. A solicitor tracks down Algernon and serves him with a writ for Ernest’s debts. Holloway prison beckons, like a premonitory warning of the dramatist’s own fate, so shortly to unfold, in a society where ruin could be immediate and merciless. That among the various topics of the age that the characters address conversationally in the plays – the Married Women’s Property Act, German philosophy – is bimetallism, should not then surprise, since we are eavesdropping on a social caste for whom money is a defining element.
In his plays Wilde subjects the hypocrisies and cruelties of the English establishment to a withering moral critique. Yet he does so without investing his plays with a wearying sense of self-importance or indeed with earnestness. They remain wonderfully theatrical, undeniably entertaining, even as they challenge the ethical assumptions of the world in which such entertainment is discovered. The question, for example, as to what constitutes virtue in a woman in both Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance is shown to have no ready answer in the moral values of the age with their simplistic, grotesquely hypocritical moral absolutes. In both a character is disturbed by the moral ambiguity of past lives as they effect their own and by the inadequacy of a black and white sense of right and wrong. Lady Windermere for all her puritanism finds herself trapped by circumstance and her own nature in a compromising position from which she has to be rescued by the woman ‘with a past’, Mrs Erlynne, who is in fact, though she never comes to know this, her own mother. Gerald in A Woman of No Importance must come to terms with the fact that his mother bore him illegitimately.
Both plays deal therefore in the kind of material that makes for melodrama and the revelations of boulevard theatre and comedy in general. They possess accordingly a dramatic atmosphere – with the concealments, intercepted letters, costume accessories which are vital to the plots, overheard and misinterpreted conversations, confusions of apparent motive – that would imply to an audience dramatic dénouements eagerly to be expected, in which all will be revealed in a comedic reassertion of harmonious order, the evil punished and the good rewarded. Wilde’s achievement in such plays is therefore to maintain the dramatic impact of the conventions within which he worked but to deny the audience the kind of terminal gratifications implicitly promised in the form and theatrical style of his theatre. Instead he leaves his audiences with an altogether more problematic sense of things than the ostensible matter and mode would allow them to anticipate.
For the endings of Wilde’s plays are profoundly equivocal. Lady Windermere has learnt something of herself by the conclusion of Lady Windermere’s Fan but certainly not all, left as she is in the dark about her true mother. Mrs Erlynne rightly judges, we feel, that her daughter’s future with her husband requires such ignorance. And Mrs Erlynne is to embark on a marriage with Lord Augustus founded on a necessary deception. Hester, Gerald and Mrs Arbuthnot have to leave England at the end of A Woman of No Importance since its social reality cannot accommodate their subversive, uncomfortably raw authenticity of feeling. The youthfully corrupted Sir Robert Chi
ltern in An Ideal Husband at the last is saved from the ruin which has pursued him in the person of an adventuress and blackmailer not because he defied her in refusing to make the speech in the House of Commons she demanded but because his tormentor has been hoist by her own petard. He and Lady Chiltern at the last share an oddly ambiguous kind of redemption in which they are permitted to continue to enjoy the fruits of a crime and the power it has made available, only as they respond to their extreme good fortune in a mature understanding of matrimonial love, though one in which women’s freedom seems to be sacrificed.
As Kerry Powell has remarked about Lady Windermere’s Fan in a comment that applies to the dramatist’s social comedies in general: ‘thus did Wilde work through the melodramatic formula, only to upset everything at the end by repudiating the categorical assumptions about right and wrong, sin and punishment, upon which this curious dramatic type was founded.’
A key figure in the Wildean dramatic universe is the dandy – the droll, epicene, epigrammatic commentator on the foibles of the age. And as dramatist Wilde invests a good deal of the moral authority of his plays in such figures. For in their languid, sardonic, worldly knowingness they create for themselves a position in their world that implies an observational, superior status to the other characters in the plays and to the social order in which they function as brilliantly self-possessed wits. Cecil Graham in Lady Windermere’s Fan and Mrs Allonby in A Woman of No Importance are two such figures as is Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband who Wilde introduces in the following terms:’A well-bred, expressionless face. He is clever, but would not like to be thought so. A flawless dandy, he would be annoyed if he were considered romantic. He plays with life, and is on perfectly good terms with the world. He is fond of being misunderstood. It gives him a post of vantage.’ At the beginning of the third act he is further glossed as one who ‘stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought’. Such a figure can bear the moral weight that Wilde requires him to carry in the play (it is he who by a strategem rescues Sir Robert; who articulates the conviction that it is love ‘that is the true explanation of this world’) since he seems totally present to himself, wholly aware of and at ease with the complex realities of his own nature which he expresses in the guise of paradox.