Books: Scented Fountain

THE WORKS OF OSCAR WILDE (1,119 pp.)—Edited by G. F. Maine—Dutton ($4.95).

Like many another dashing Irishman, from Swift to George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde deemed it his destiny to invade England and take London by storm. He succeeded in fulfilling this destiny because he knew that though Britons never yield to force, they are ready to surrender the Bank of England itself to a man who can make them laugh.

His literary conquests are, perhaps, not over. Right now, Wilde is having something of a publishing renaissance in the U.S. In addition to this one-volume edition of Wilde’s collected works, bookstores offer a collection of his bright sayings (The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde; John Day; $4) and a half-personal, half-literary memoir by his son, who took the name Vyvyan Holland (Son of Oscar Wilde; Dutton; $3.75). All of these anticipate the centenary of Wilde’s birth (1856). Is he worth rereading? Much of his work is, and almost all is worth at least re-browsing.

Soapbox Y. Salon. It is startling to recall that Wilde, whose works read like period pieces, and Shaw, whose works seem almost contemporary, were born in the same year. Shaw proved more durable: he grew old enough to reach his second childhood, while Wilde never quite outgrew his first. Yet, like Shaw, Wilde resembled a fountain of social defiance. Both men were socialists, both loved to confound and educate their audiences with startling paradoxes, both were masters of clear, succinct prose. One of the many major differences between them was that Shaw believed style to be a byproduct of sincerity, while Wilde insisted that style alone could create sincerity. It was in Shaw’s nature to be a teetotaler, to dress in all the sincerity of rough Jaeger woolens, to stand on a soapbox and preach rebellion in pouring rain. Wilde made it his duty to be “a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion,” and to preach revolution only in the best London drawing rooms. Shaw said bluntly: “All great truths begin as blasphemies,” while Wilde remarked, with his lips ever so lightly curled: “If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.”

Of all Wilde’s works, the comedies stand up best (The Importance of Being Earnest, A Woman of No Importance). It is still impossible not to smile when Wilde seizes upon some normally dismal aspect of human relations and translates it faithfully and accurately into the language of comedy. It is this most-human humor that is Wilde’s greatest gift to English literature. Much as he loved to pretend that he was too detached an artist to have “sympathies,” every word he wrote shows that he was much too softhearted (and not really intelligent enough) to possess the large hatreds of a Swift or the noisy spites of a Sean O’Casey. If his plays date, it is not because the humor has gone bad, but because the plots are usually as sappy and mawkish as the worst of Dickens’.

Yet even the least playable plays and the least readable stories are full of the sparklers that Wilde could not help scattering all over the place, like a fairytale character who sneezes diamonds instead of germs. These fragments of Wilde’s work will probably outlive the whole. Some typical Wilde shots:

¶I sometimes think that God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated His ability.

¶The only way a woman can ever reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible interest in life.

¶The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

¶Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life.

¶In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the other is getting it.

¶Young men want to be faithful and are not; old men want to be faithless and cannot.

¶To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies. ¶There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

A Stringed Lute. Not all Wilde epigrams merely amuse. Many cannot be read without an almost haunting sense of familiarity—because so many of the playful paradoxes in which Wilde turned the world upside down have since become realities. Seeing Lord Henry, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, demolish morality in the flick of an opium-scented cigarette, one is unavoidably reminded that, in the 20th century, whole philosophies have been based on brutal versions of elegant sophistries such as his, and whole armies on the philosophies, and whole empires on the armies.

Wilde himself, of course, was haunted by morality. As it pursued him, he either laughed at it or grew maudlin about it. He recognized that cynicism is but another side of sentimentality. In De Profundis, the confession he wrote toward the end of his two-year prison sentence for homosexuality, Wilde explained exactly—and sentimentally—why his brilliant career ended so ignominiously. “What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion … I ceased to be lord over myself … I allowed pleasure to dominate me.”

It is not surprising that the weakest of Wilde’s works are those that reflect what he himself considered the weakest part of his character. Few of his poems pass muster today; they are the lush, overripe productions of a man who got “a curious joy” (a “kick” is the modern word; out of being “spendthrift of my own genius” and let himself “drift with every passion till my soul / Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play.”

Humor v. Sorrow. The same garnished taste spoils the plays La Sainte Courti-sane and Salome, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and even De Profundis itself. The fairy tales are still charming to read, though they, too, present a problem: peopled with Disney characters who serve only to make bittersweet, intellectual points, they are neither for children (who prefer Grimmer stuff) nor wholly for adults, but perhaps only for people in those in-between years that British Novelist J.R.R. Tolkien (TIME, Nov. 22) so happily calls the “tweens.”

The gods who had endowed Wilde so richly with comic gifts refused to allow him the bonus of tragedy. Apart from The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde produced nothing in the three years between his release from prison and his death (in 1900, of cerebral meningitis). Humor was his nature, sorrow only his perversity—as he himself may have realized, for it is said that when confronted with a huge bill for a surgical operation toward the end of his life, he sank back into the arms of the Comic Muse, saying: “Ah, well, then, I suppose that I shall have to die beyond my means.”