by Oscar Wilde
Such a passionate sublimation of desire might seem inconsequential or academic to many modern readers, especially since the action of “Mr. W. H.” takes place not in lovers’ traditional haunts but in libraries and quiet book-lined rooms. However, we must recall that the Criminal Law Amendment Act framed “gross indecency” so loosely that displays of affection between men might suddenly prove as incriminating as sexual acts. If it was not to fall afoul of the law, homosexual representation required what we might term a hermeneutics of evasion and concealment, whereby the existence of same-sex love might be denied as fact at the very moment it made its presence felt. The sublimation of desire into a literary text, especially one in which desire between two men seems to be obscurely represented, gives powerful literary expression then to the sudden need of homosexual men after 1885 to perform a delicate balancing act, between full deniability or “innocence” on the one hand, and the search for some full and adequate register of desire on the other.
Wilde himself stated that he wrote “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” to correct “the shameful perversion put on Shakespeare’s sonnets by Hallam and a great many French critics.”64 As already indicated, the idea that Shakespeare’s fair youth was a young man named Willie Hughes had originated in the late eighteenth century with Tyrwhitt and Malone. But it had been contemptuously dismissed by the early Victorian critic Henry Hallam and his contemporaries, and by the mid-1880s scholarly attention had turned to identifying the dark lady of the last twenty-eight sonnets. Insofar as it is a tale about Shakespeare’s sonnets merely, Wilde’s story may be considered an attempt to give new life to Tyrwhitt’s and Malone’s theory.
But “Mr. W. H.” is far more than a story about Shakespeare’s sonnets, and its emotional force lies principally in the fluctuations between conviction and uncertainty which its central characters undergo. These fluctuations are also a key element of the new homosexual hermeneutics of evasion and concealment insofar as they raise far-reaching questions about what Erskine calls “the value of evidence.” For Wilde’s story suggests that understanding properly depends not on “demonstrable proof or formal evidence, but on a kind of spiritual or artistic sense.” It is through acts of imagination rather than documentations of evidence that truth comes to be known. As the poet John Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all / … ye need to know.” Or as Wilde himself puts it in “The Truth of Masks,” the “aesthetic value” of Shakespeare’s writings “does not in the slightest degree depend on their facts, but on their Truth, and Truth is independent of facts always.”
It is in this light that the story’s preoccupations with forgery and acting take on special interest. “Mr. W. H.” opens with a debate about forgery, the narrator insisting at one point that “so-called forgeries [are] merely the result of an artistic desire for perfect representation,” and a forged painting stands at the story’s center—not as an object of contempt, but rather as a genuinely “artistic” creation whose power persists long past the moment when its factual pretensions are exposed. Enchanting in its beauty and verisimilitude, the forged portrait inspires understanding more completely than any documentary evidence is able to do, bearing out Socrates’s contention in Plato’s Phaedo that “Thought is best when the mind is gathered into herself and … takes leave of the body and has as little as possible to do with it … aspiring after true being.” It is not the only forgery in the story, moreover, because actors, too, awake “the popular consciousness … by means of feigned passions and mimetic methods,” and even the once evidence-obsessed Erskine becomes an actor in the spectacle of his own death.
Like the forged portrait that stands at its center, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” represents another instance of Wilde’s search for a “form remote from reality.” And although the story is hardly a fairy tale, it too can be considered an effort to “deal with modern problems in a mode that is ideal and not imitative.” Indeed, of all Wilde’s short stories, it is the one that most clearly reveals the stakes at play in the tension between ideal or imaginative forms, on the one hand, and realistic, empirically verifiable forms on the other. The story is intimately connected with the historical moment of its composition, obliging us to consider the complex politics of homosexual expression no less forcefully than the fairy tales oblige us to consider the problems of private property, social injustice, and the neglect or abuse of children. But more than this, “Mr. W. H.” insists on the power of imagination, and like the forged portrait, its fictive character is indispensable to its critique of positive fact as the basis of understanding. Form is inseparable from content, and as with all of Wilde’s short fictions, the story stands or falls on the strength of its narrative, on the human drama represented (or at least hinted at) in its plot, and above all on the captivating power of Wilde’s language. More than any other of his short fictions, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” is a testament to the power of language and its capacity to change lives. “Words, mere words,” Wilde reflects in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: “what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?”65 The reflection might be said to capture Wilde’s special genius as a writer for enchanting his reader while suggesting new worlds that are better, different, and more receptive to love than the one we presently inhabit. Without doubt it also expresses eloquently why readers of many different stripes continue to take pleasure in the “subtle magic” of Wilde’s short stories 130 years after they were first composed and published.
Mr. Oscar Wilde, 1889. Photograph by W. & D. Downey.
NOTES
1 Andre Gide, Oscar Wilde: A Study, tr. Stuart Mason
2 Sir William Wilde, Irish Popular Superstitions (Dublin, 1852); Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms and Superstitions of Ireland (London and Boston, 1887). For detailed discussion of the influence of Irish folktales and legends on Wilde’s story collections The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), see Anne Markey, Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: Origins and Contexts (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011).
3 Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 11, and Barbara Belford, Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius (New York: Random House, 2000), 18. See too Davis Coakley’s assertions that “Oscar absorbed much of the folklore of the west of Ireland” and at Moytura, the country villa built by his father in the west of Ireland, “listened to the stories of Frank Houlihan, a Galway man who worked for his father.” (Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish [Dublin: Town House, 1994], 99).
4 Oscar Wilde, “Some Literary Notes,” Woman’s World (Jan. 1889).
5 According to the scholar David Upchurch, The Picture of Dorian Gray “is an inverted retelling of the Tír na Nóg [Land of Youth] theme. Dorian, like Oisín … does not age, but the world goes on” (Upchurch, Wilde’s Use of Celtic Elements in The Picture of Dorian Gray [New York: Peter Lang, 1993], 24).
6 Lady Wilde writes in her preface to Ancient Legends that the Irish peasant possesses an “instinctive belief in the existence of certain unseen agencies that influence all human life.”
7 The Duchess of Paisley speaks for many of Wilde’s readers when, early in the story, she tries anxiously “to remember what a cheiromantist really [is]” and hopes it is “not the same as a cheiropodist” (p. 41 below).
8 The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-David (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 262, 636, hereafter cited in notes as CL. On the night of 14 February 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover Lord Alfred Douglas, left at Wilde’s club a calling-card on which he had scrawled “For Oscar Wilde, posing sodomite.” When Wilde received this card two weeks later, he foolishly decided to prosecute Queensberry for criminal libel. For details about how Wilde’s failed libel su
it in turn led to his own prosecution and conviction for “gross indecency,” see Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 33–36.
9 Wilde reformulated this idea on a number of occasions, most notably as the central joke in The Importance of Being Earnest, in which the shockingly unromantic Lady Bracknell at one point proclaims “A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are far too many idle men in London as it is.” See too the title of a book, How to Live Above one’s Income: for the Use of the Sons of the Rich, that Wilde jokingly proposed cowriting with Lord Alfred Douglas.
10 Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” tr. Harry Zohn, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 92.
11 Deirdre Toomey, “The Story-Teller at Fault: Oscar Wilde and Irish Orality,” in Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha H. McCormack (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 25.
12 See also Walter Pater’s comment “there is always something of an excellent talker about the writing of Mr. Oscar Wilde” (“A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde,” signed review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Bookman [Nov. 1891], 59; reprinted in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970], 83).
13 The Court and Society Review and The World were published in London and aimed at an English readership. Blackwood’s, headquartered in Edinburgh, and Paris Illustré, headquartered in Paris, reached an international audience. Earlier in the century Blackwood’s had published Percy Shelley, Thomas de Quincey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and George Eliot, among others, and by Wilde’s day the magazine had a large circulation in Britain, as well as in the United States, where it was copublished by Leonard Scott of New York. Similarly, Paris Illustré, which appeared simultaneously in French and English editions, was copublished in Paris, London, and New York.
14 Mark W. Turner and John Stokes write that Wilde was “always a man of the press” (introduction to Journalism I, ed. John Stokes and Mark W. Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013], xii). Wilde published some seventy press articles and reviews between 1885 and 1887 alone, including nine for the Court and Society Review, and he transformed the magazine Woman’s World in the two-year period (1887–1889) in which he was its editor.
15 “The Portrait of Mr. W. H,” published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1889, was never republished in Wilde’s lifetime. However, Wilde revised the story extensively for republication as a book, and at one point his publishers Elkin Mathews and John Lane announced a book edition as forthcoming. The longer, revised text was first published in 1921, after the manuscript had been lost for many years. Extracts from it not contained in the original are contained in the Appendix.
16 Wilde’s original title, “The Birthday of the Little Princess,” echoes well-known Andersen tales such as “The Princess and The Pea” and “The Little Mermaid,” in the latter of which Andersen repeatedly characterizes the little mermaid as a “little princess.” Both Cristina Pascual Aransaez and Jessica Straley suggest that Wilde’s story draws directly from Lang’s Blue Fairy Book (1889): Aransaez suggests that Wilde draws upon Lang’s retelling of “Beauty and The Beast,” while Straley suggests that it draws from Lang’s retelling of “The Yellow Dwarf.” But Lang’s Blue Fairy Book was not published till nearly eighteen months after “The Birthday of the Little Princess.” If “The Yellow Dwarf” was an influence, it is far more likely that Wilde had in mind the Countess D’Aulnay’s original telling of “The Yellow Dwarf” or some mid-Victorian dramatic adaptation of it.
17 CL 350.
18 Harry Marillier, unpublished memoirs, quoted in Jonathan Fryer, “Harry Marillier and the Love of the Impossible,” The Wildean 28 (Jan. 2006): 6. For Wilde’s fascinated love for Marillier, see CL 266–274 passim.
19 CL 385.
20 Wilde, “Some Literary Notes”; CL 340. Jacomb-Hood also designed the publisher’s logo for David Nutt. In his memoirs Jacomb-Hood tells us that he had known Wilde “for some time before this, when my studio was in Manresa Road, where he often came in and would sit smoking cigarettes and entertaining me and my model” (G. P. Jacomb-Hood, With Brush and Pencil [London: John Murray, 1925], 115). Wilde’s remark to Jacomb-Hood “I must come round and see your young anarchist Cunningham Graham” (CL 340, a reference to Hood’s good friend the Liberal MP R. B. Cunningham Graham, who had taken part in the Bloody Sunday protest at Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887) suggests possible political affinities between Wilde and Hood. For Crane’s political affinities with Wilde and the contents of The Happy Prince, see Markey 88–89.
21 Roger Lancelyn Green, Andrew Lang, A Critical Biography (London, 1946), 81. Mrs. E. M. Field, The Child and His Book (London: Wells, Gardner, Darton, 1891), 235.
22 CL 494, 617.
23 Alexander Galt Ross, unsigned review of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Saturday Review, 20 Oct. 1888, reprinted in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Beckson, 61. The force of Ross’s criticism, which was printed anonymously, is all the stronger when we consider that he was a good friend of Wilde and also the brother of Wilde’s lover, Robert Ross. Within days of his review’s appearance, Alexander Ross would back Wilde for membership in the Savile Club, and many years later, along with his brother, he proved himself one of the few friends who remained true to Wilde after his imprisonment. Wilde valued Ross’s opinions highly: on his release from prison, Wilde named Alexander Ross as one of just seven individuals to be allowed to read his lengthy confessional prison letter, now known as De Profundis; and ten months later, in February 1898, Wilde was curious to know what Ross thought of his just-published Ballad of Reading Gaol.
24 CL 388.
25 Introduction to The Short Fiction, ed. Ian Small, vol. 8 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xxxii. The gift of books was, as Small notes, an important form of self-advertisement: in 1893 no fewer than 100 copies of the first edition of Wilde’s play Salomé were held back from sale for the author’s private use.
26 CL 350.
27 CL 349.
28 CL 349.
29 CL 352.
30 CL 355, 388.
31 CL 436. See too Wilde’s comment to Smithers that “The Happy Prince” “is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art” (CL 355).
32 CL 770; “Appendix B: The 1891 Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, ed. Nicholas Frankel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 273.
33 CL 354.
34 Wilde’s first two books, as well as the final book he published in his lifetime, were books of poetry. Ravenna (Oxford: Thomas Shrimpton, 1878) contains the narrative poem for which Wilde won Oxford University’s Newdigate Prize and was a coterie publication. Shrimpton routinely published each year’s Newdigate Prize poem, and Wilde himself bought many of the copies printed, as gifts for friends. By contrast, Poems (London: David Bogue, 1881) went into several editions and was widely (though not positively) reviewed and noticed on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1895, a few months before his arrest and imprisonment, Wilde published six prose poems in The Fortnightly Review. He ended his career with The Ballad of Reading Gaol (London: Leonard Smithers, 1898), a poem that also went into numerous editions and proved Wilde’s bestselling book in his own lifetime.
35 CL 422.
36 See n.14 above.
37 CL 205.
38 CL 372.
39 See CL 372, n.2. Wilde was evidently at work on such a translation in 1888, telling W. E. Henley “I shall be Flaubert II” (CL 372).
40 CL 930.
41
Pater, “Style,” in his Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1889), 20.
42 Introduction to A House of Pomegranates, with an introduction by H. L. Mencken (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925).
43 “The Critic as Artist,” in Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions, The Soul of Man, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 195.
44 Wilde, “Some Literary Notes,” Woman’s World (Jan. 1889).
45 Ricketts was a significant force in the genesis of typography and book printing as art forms. His typographic experiments in A House of Pomegranates saw full fruition later in books such as John Gray’s Silverpoints (1893), Wilde’s The Sphinx (1894), and the books he printed using original type fonts at his private press, the Vale Press (1896–1904).