In the period following Wilde’s death in November 1900, Robert Ross, his faithful friend and the executor of his estate, lost no time in devoting his considerable energies to the publication of a collected edition of Wilde’s complete works. He faced a daunting task, and the challenge differed substantially from volume to volume. As far as Wilde’s dramatic works were concerned, in the cases of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest he would have had to approach Lewis Waller and George Alexander for copies of scripts in their possession, had it not been for the assiduous efforts of the risk-taking London publisher Leonard Smithers, who came on the scene only after Wilde had been released from prison. At that point Ross made it his business to introduce them to one another and to urge Smithers to publish the long poem begun by Wilde before his release. A work motivated by the melancholy facts of his incarceration and events that occurred in prison, The Ballad of Reading Gaol was brought out in 1898, becoming the first of three book-length publications by Smithers of works by Oscar Wilde.
The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband had followed from Smithers’s press in the summer of 1899. As a result of Wilde’s insistent requirements, these two volumes were uniform in every way with the two major plays of his that had already been published, Lady Windermere’s Fan and A Woman of No Importance.[1] And so, in the first years after Wilde’s death, when Ross was gathering texts and materials for the purpose of bringing together a complete, multi-volume collection of the works of his deceased friend, in an edition to be published by Methuen and Company, instead of having to depend on house typescripts or inelegant acting editions of the plays, where they existed, he was able to use the texts of those much superior editions published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane (Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1893), by John Lane (A Woman of No Importance, 1894), and by Leonard Smithers (The Importance of Being Earnest and An Ideal Husband, 1899). In this way, Wilde can be seen to have taken care to leave for the benefit of posterity properly edited and published texts of his major dramatic works.[2] And so Ross found himself in the enviable position of using as copy-texts for his Complete Works editions of these four plays that had all been seen through the press by the author himself.
The first collected edition of Wilde’s works was published by Methuen in 1908, under the general editorship of Ross, in a limited edition of one thousand copies, plus an additional eighty copies on Japanese vellum. Wilde’s literary aspirations, as interpreted by Ross, are fully embedded in the style and substance of this publication. Stuart Mason, Wilde’s bibliographer, added greatly to the potential store of information about the reception of Wilde’s published works by appending to his citation of each work a list of reviews. Following up many of the thirteen reviews Mason added to the citation of the 1980 Collected Works reveals a substantial breadth of response, capturing a considerable range of high opinion but also identifying serious limitations and in some cases even intemperate denigration. In great contrast to the almost complete absence of reviews of The Importance of Being Earnest on its publication in 1899, nine years later this beautiful set of volumes brought out by Methuen under the conscientious and thorough editorship of Ross garnered numerous critical responses. Of the many reviews that appeared, beginning in March,[3] several are of particular value and interest, others illustrate the low opinion in which he was held by some writers, and some reflect a deep, conscientious approach to Wilde’s now ostensibly complete oeuvre that calls for detailed description and evaluation.
Perhaps the earliest review of Ross’s edition appeared anonymously in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette, on 15 March.[4] Borrowing as his own the title Wilde himself gave to his long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, the writer considers it “a suitable motto for Wilde’s life and works,” trusting that this collected edition will draw attention away from the man himself to his books. Among them, his “best and most characteristic work” includes The Importance of Being Earnest. And among the plays, “the chief place must be given” to this one, for its “sheer irresponsibility, its wonderful wit, its distorted logic,” which “all remind one that there was an Irish dramatist before Mr Bernard Shaw.”
All the same, the reviewer continues, the fact is that Wilde is “the supreme English example of the second-class artist,” the man who possesses “little originality,” but who “never borrows without improving, or without adding something individual and rare and distinctive.” Having read through these volumes, the reviewer comes away with this “chief thought,” namely, Wilde’s “inability to understand character, to grasp the importance of life.” His people are “ideas, types,” resulting from his having placed too much emphasis on the abstract and attaching “an enormously exaggerated importance” to words. In fact, Wilde was “astonishingly deficient in psychology.” That is to say, his great interest in ideas came at the expense of “some correlation in life.” His failure, consequently, to “remember the people he lived among” deprives him of the right to be seen as a great artist.
And yet there are reasons why his writing is worth remembering and considering, the critic concludes. His style has not been done proper justice to. There are passages “of astonishing power and beauty” in his prose works, which are always worth reading “for their wit.” Indeed, there is some merit to his claim that he stood “in symbolic relations” to the art and culture of his age. Finally, although the debt of the age to William Morris is far greater than the debt to Oscar Wilde, it was the latter’s “Irish impudence and Irish pride” that carried Morris’s gospel into circles where it would otherwise “have taken longer to penetrate.” This, apparently, is the best that can be said of him.
Another early review, published in late March, was a lengthy piece by J. A. Spender, entitled ‘Out of the Depths’—a reference to the title Ross had given earlier to his redacted edition of Wilde’s long letter to Alfred Douglas from prison, De Profundis. Spender, long-term editor of the Westminster Review, might well have assigned the task to one of his reviewers, but instead took it on himself, producing a frankly evaluative assessment of the man, the works, and the edition.[5] Specific in his criticism of the inferior binding of an otherwise beautiful and appropriate multi-volume edition of the collected works of a major author, he attributed this defect (shared, he said, by editions of Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and other classic English writers) to a characteristically English compromise with appearances. Otherwise, Methuen has given a “worthy form” to “some of the most remarkable English prose and verse of the nineteenth century,” serving to rescue Oscar Wilde from various kinds of “unworthy exploitation” that threatened his reputation. It is the British public that may be thanked or blamed for this treatment, Spender asserts, allowing itself to be amused by Wilde’s plays while refusing “to tolerate his name on the playbills.”[6]
As evidenced by this edition, he believes, one hopes the time has come when the works and the man himself may be judged entirely on their several merits. He proceeds to make a series of careful demarcations along these lines, distinguishing in a business-like way “the man from the artist and the artist from his work.” Wilde’s personal tragedy was undeniably terrible; we must now allow him to have “its fullest benefit”—that is, that posterity, if it thinks of him at all, will think first of his work. Spender, considering himself in a position to drive this process, to initiate it by responding to a debt we owe “to ourselves and to English literature,” takes this cause to heart. And so he now turns resolutely to the works, citing first the titles of the four major comedies, which “captured the English-speaking world” and still “revive many bright and happy memories.” Having added to “the gaiety of nations,” in the well-known phrase, their author stands as a “benefactor to the race.” He has revived Sheridan’s legacy by providing us with plays that are “excellent literature,” not only actable but readable.
Citing the titles of the rest of the works, spread out through this series of volumes, Spender goes on to attempt an appreciation of their “quality and spirit.” Like Goldsmith, Wilde touched nothing that he did not adorn. He enriched whatever he handled and always enlightened it, “sometimes by a new aspect, a new setting, a fresh and penetrating point of view; sometimes by a profound and illuminating thought.” His paradoxes were often “flashes of sound philosophy.” Spender devotes an entire long paragraph to what he sees as Wilde’s debt to Matthew Arnold, who influenced his style and his thought. Like Arnold, there was always, in whatever he wrote, “a very serious criticism of life, based on wide and thorough scholarship.” And, like Arnold, he frequented “the best that has been thought and known in the world.” For all that, Spender cannot help admitting that in some of Wilde’s work there occurs “a touch of the morbid and mephitic.” The latter term comes as a surprise and perhaps even a shock to the reader, to find Wilde, after being the subject of such apparently unstinting praise, suddenly accused not only of morbidity but of writing that gives off an offensive, foul-smelling odor. Spender makes no apology for this extreme accusation, nor does he cite any specific examples; he merely continues to illustrate what he characterizes as “tragical premonitions,” sure indicators of the “public disgrace” that the author felt was now in store for him. Almost despite himself, Spender is drawn to the horrors depicted in Dorian Gray, a work of fiction that he views as “both a parable and a prophecy.” To call it both of these things, Spender must realize, is to collapse the distinction between the man and the artist that he has devoted such considerable effort to maintain. From this critic’s point of view, Dorian Gray emerges as every bit as much autobiography as De Profundis. The only recourse left to him as reviewer, he now believes, is to apply the moral of Dorian Gray to Wilde’s work: “to his fine edition of it, to his contribution to English literature.” That application he makes by quoting Wilde’s description of the portrait of Dorian discovered on the wall of his house after his death, depicting “all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty,” in despite of all that Dorian himself had done and suffered.
And so it seems that, ultimately, the best we can settle for, in Spender’s estimation, is a determined effort to evoke Wilde’s “better and enduring self and his works,” notwithstanding “all that his lower and perishable self did and suffered.” Despite Spender’s evident intention to present to readers of the Westminster Gazette an objective, wide-ranging overview of this significant editorial tribute to a writer who deserves no less, he finds himself drawn into a much more personal, perhaps even compromising and uncomfortable evaluation of a writer whose works, he strongly insists, must be viewed separately and distinctly from their author but which end up demonstrating their absolute connection with him.
A comparably lengthy treatment of Ross’s edition was offered by Edward Thomas, who would become one of the poets of the first world war and meanwhile served as a prolific reviewer for the Daily Chronicle. In a long, thoughtful piece of ultimate denigration called “Wit and Dalliance,” published in mid-April,[7] Thomas began by calling attention to what he saw as the “extraordinary variety” represented by the Ross edition. No writer in recent times, Thomas said, has equaled Wilde’s versatility. And yet the only thing that connects one type of work with another is largely the presence of the epigrams Wilde was so fond of repeating in book after book. These works in aggregate appear to be “too deliberate”—produced in order to justify his belief that he could do these things and do them “exceedingly well.” There is no doubt that they all “sprang from the heart and the brain” of the author; but they are works of fancy, not of imagination, works “of wit, not of humour.”
Continuing his analysis of Wilde’s shortcomings, Thomas states his view that Wilde was not a creator. “He decorated.” The only thing he created in his life was Salome. It was true that “The Critic as Artist” was almost the best thing written about criticism since Coleridge, but even there Wilde’s “decorative instinct” invented “a sea of words to hide the pearls.” It was indeed a sad fate, in Wilde’s case, for an author who “thought so much of art and the artist” that he ended up exemplifying someone who described beautiful things and talked about beautiful things as if that were the same as creating them: “He used beautiful words about beautiful objects, and thought it art.” And yet, for all the care he takes to identify the limitations Wilde exhibited as a writer, Thomas finds much to praise—within limits. He is “admirable.” His prose plays form “exquisite patterns.” What “grace and abundance” lie everywhere, “what wit and dalliance!” His writing can be like a dress made entirely “of jewels and fine gold”—but a dress that can burden the wearer and crush her to the ground. Or his writing may be “swift, sharp, and hard, logic and paradox.” In either case, it is writing “on parade,” invariably calling attention to itself. Wilde’s words have a value separate from what they are intended to express. Finally, it is literature that comes as a result of “craft rather than art.” It relates to “wallpaper and carpets,” not to life. It is literature “of the idle classes, for the idle, by the idle.” Life “flows past it,” while it “languidly watches the waves.”
Thomas’s own poetic biases, and perhaps his class biases as well, are increasingly on view as he proceeds to relegate Wilde and his writings to a subsidiary, secondary place among the authors of his age. He cannot offer straightforward acknowledgment of Wilde’s ostensibly singular position, given his mastery of a great range of genres and styles, without at the same time identifying a singular, pervasive deficiency that serves to draw all the works, with very few exceptions, down to a subordinate level of excellence.
Around this same time of mid-April, Charles Edward Montague, theatre critic for The Guardian, published his review of the Ross collected edition. He took the opportunity to confirm what appears to have been his long-standing view of Wilde’s limitations as a dramatist and writer. His readers might have thought of Wilde’s writings before this edition appeared as “the sum of a great many very bright flashes, all separate.” That same impression only increases, the more one reads his work in the aggregate.[8] His genius for writing wanted “the instinct for structure.” For example, his verse has the kind of beauty of “a tangle of climbing flowers with no trellis to support it. When it came to his plays, he would “hang whole panoplies of his brilliance” on nothing more sturdy than “an old clothes-horse” of a plot, as in An Ideal Husband. His criticism, as “absorbing” as is the dialogue of the “Critic as Artist,” betrays a critical system that amounts to “the mere denial of system and almost of coherence.” And in “De Profundis,” one is constantly “amazed by the freshness of illumination” momentarily cast on some theme that, overall, however, indicates the author “has not mastered the simplest conditions of an ineffectual, or even an unabridged, life.”
Montague is unrelenting in his determination to place Wilde’s “great powers” in a context that made his blunders seem “natural.” He had “independence and originality of mind” in only the second degree, not the first. His passion to scandalize the bourgeoisie, to knock a stupid person “all of a heap” whenever he opens his mouth, was a form of parasitism. For it was the very presence of the bourgeois that kept him going. Montague identifies this as a “secondary form of parasitism,” which can be discerned in almost everything that Wilde wrote. It had the effect of setting him against what might have been “his own natural development.” He might have attained a “sovereign sanity” comparable to George Meredith’s “purest independence” of mind, had he not maintained his intention to offend dull people. Like Disraeli, he showed “an irremediable strain of second greatness” in his craving for “curious, rich, exotic, and even abnormal stuff” to concentrate on. His impulses always drove him further and further into “paradox and perversity.”
And so, Montague concludes, reading this edition renews one’s impression of the author’s fixed limits, although it also reminds the reader of “his fine bursts of eloquence” and of “his melody and the passionate ingenuity of his critical arguments.” As well, it reminds the reader of the curious wit of his comedies, in which characters are themselves witty while being placed also in “a circumambient atmosphere of the author’s own wit.” The result is the emergent irony of his playing on them while they play wittily on one another.[9]
Arthur Symons’s review in the Athenaeum, published in May, reflected this writer’s distinctive profile as an observer of popular culture and almost by instinct a skeptic, inclined toward a cynical view of literary achievement. He felt it was still too soon for an overall judgment of Wilde’s works, which he viewed as those of a “prodigious entertainer.” It was too soon because the elements of Wilde’s creation were only now, eight years after his death, beginning to settle into some kind of perceivable order, and there is evidently no agreement on the relative merit of his contributions. The volumes of this complete edition allow the reader to trace at close hand the forward and backward movement of a mind that was never fully certain of the direction it might take. What drew Wilde to become a dramatist, as in the case initially of Lady Windermere’s Fan, was his discovery that the wittiness endemic to such works as his Intentions—”the most amusing book of criticism in English”—could be turned to profitable account by embedding it in a series of plays. The Importance of Being Earnest is easily “the most perfect” of his four major plays, even though this author’s last play is “really the least witty, and too serious in its parade of the circumstances” (whatever that might be said to mean). Like many other reviewers of this multi-volume edition, Symons passes over Salomé and the fragmentary A Florentine Tragedy, as well as the early plays The Duchess of Padua and Vera, all included by Ross, without mention.
And so, in this fashion, Symons goes on to alternate blame and praise in almost a mechanical way. The four plays are all experimental pieces, he explains, and each is different from the other in some ingenious manner: “always a fan, or a glove, or a letter, or a handbag by which somebody is incriminated or identified.” The handbag in The Importance is surely the most striking, “an unparalleled invention of its kind.” Speaking for Wilde himself, Symons ventures to conclude that he would have been happy if his reputation persisted as “the most brilliant and entertaining wit of his time.”[10]
Perhaps the most incisive, penetrating critique of the Ross edition was mounted by an author and critic who was also a fellow playwright. The first six volumes published by Ross in his edition of the Collected Works contained close to all of Wilde’s surviving dramatic art, and St John Hankin, the author of an account of the plays published hard on the heels, it would seem, of their appearance, used the generous space allotted to him in the May issue of the Fortnightly Review to lay out a long, persistently critical account of these works, comprehensive in its coverage and unrelenting in its revelation of the faults and shortcomings of every dramatic work brought together in Ross’s inclusive assemblage. They ranged from the earliest, Vera; or, The Nihilists and The Duchess of Padua, through Wilde’s only play originally written in French, Salomé, to the three major comedy-dramas and the very last, the farcical Importance of Being Earnest. Even though the general company of reviewers of the 1908 Ross edition brought unusual intelligence, sophistication, and experience, along with notable bias in some cases, to the task of reacting to this first collected edition of the works of Oscar Wilde, Hankin was surely one of the most qualified persons to comment critically on Wilde’s dramatic output. Himself a dramatist of some real standing in the professional theatre, he was an experienced critic too, and a fearless one as well.
Taking an artistic point of view, Hankin began by identifying what he believed was “the most serious work” that Wilde produced, as well as the “most brilliant” and “most sincere” of his dramatic works. That play was The Importance of Being Earnest. He lavished genuine, unstinting praise on it:
With all its absurdity, its psychology is truer, its criticism of life subtler and more profound, than that of the other plays. And even in its technique it shows, in certain details, a breaking away from the conventional well-made play of the ’seventies and ’eighties in favour of the looser construction and more naturalistic methods of the newer school.
He viewed this “trivial comedy” as constituting the author’s “nearest approach to absolute originality”—despite his belief that Wilde remained always “an imitator rather than an original artist.” And yet Hankin also saw this last play of Wilde’s as dramaturgically a transitional work. Given sufficient time, Wilde would have followed the lead embodied in this last play and proceeded to discard “the machine-made construction of the Scribe-Sardou Theatre,” beginning to employ the drama as by rights an artist should, “for the expression of his own personality.” This play, then, viewed properly in retrospect, would have revealed itself after the fact as a harbinger of plays that would have qualified him to be taken seriously as a dramatist. What was regrettably his final work for the stage reveals itself, Hankin believes, as a new type of play. Being as it is a farce, not a farcical comedy, it nevertheless behaves, in spirit and treatment, as a comedy, and so is fundamentally different from farcical comedy. Only two other plays, both of them by Shaw, share a commonality with Wilde’s: Arms and the Man and The Philanderer.The type of this commonality is psychological farce, the “farce of ideas.” Into this traditional farcical mechanism these two authors have breathed ‘a new spirit.”[11]
Perhaps all that Hankin means by this term is a spirit of comedy driven by more particular conscientious or theoretical ideas. But he leaves his reader frustrated by moving abruptly away from the idea as it emerges in connection with Wilde’s most interesting play to one of the less interesting, early works, The Duchess of Padua, where Hankin proceeds to take up more general questions of characterization—a topic that proves to be the central issue of his critique. What he has in mind is the identification of what he views as a tell-tale characteristic of Wilde’s dramaturgy, common to all his major characters: a paucity of significant emotional dimension. He sees this as the root cause of Wilde’s failure as a dramatist, and the weak point in all of his plays. The most prominent example of this weakness, and so the most revealing one, is Lady Bracknell. This is “the greatest achievement of the Wilde theatre,” an immortal creation in her own right and “the fine flower of his genius,” wonderfully but finally not profoundly executed. She therefore epitomizes the failure of all Wilde’s major characters and so the central shortcoming of his dramatic art:
Lady Bracknell is brilliantly done, but she is a brilliant surface only. She has no depth and no subtlety. Wilde has seen her with absolute clearness but he has seen her, as it were, in two dimensions only, not in the round. That is the weak point of all Wilde’s character drawing. It lacks solidity. No one can hit off people’s external manifestations, their appearance and mannerisms, their social insincerities, more vividly or more agreeably than he. But he never shows you their souls. And when it is necessary that he should do so, if you are really to understand and to sympathise with them, . . . he fails.
Hankin finds himself at a loss to explain the cause of this failure. Analysis of character in depth calls for “imaginative sympathy of a very special kind,” he asserts. Either Wilde did not possess this valuable quality of mind, or was lacking it in sufficient intensity. In fact, Hankin believes, he “despised the theatre.” Whereas Shaw was irresistibly attracted to the form of the drama and the opportunity it gave him for promulgating his beliefs and convictions, Wilde simply responded to the market, finding that crafting plays was a lucrative kind of artistic activity. Observing the kinds of plays that afforded such handsome rewards to fellow playwrights, he examined their work with “contemptuous acumen” and then blithely followed their example. The reason Salomé is his best play is that he wrote it for himself, and was pleased to give it to Sarah Bernhardt when she asked for it.[12] How, then, explain The Importance of Being Earnest, an even greater success? That play was written by Wilde with a certain conviction, Hankin acknowledges, and it embodied “the author’s own temperament and his attitude towards life.” Nonetheless, he despised the drama, and it took vengeance on him. He possessed a great facility for writing dialogue and conceiving believable characters, and his “sense of theatre” was quite remarkable. But he failed to take his art with any seriousness. In this age of Strindberg and Ibsen, Brieux and Hauptmann, “he was content to construct like Sardou and think like Dumas fils.”
This might have been enough finally to damn the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, but Hankin has more to say and so carries his probing analysis further, into a larger dimension of stricture. Embracing not only the author in question but the society in which he lived, Hankin singles out the entire society from which Wilde’s audience was drawn. They were to blame, too, because they failed to do anywhere near enough to support greater dramatic and theatrical aspiration, remaining satisfied instead with mere commercial and financial success. It was the age itself, Hankin concludes, and not just Wilde, that exhibited all too evident failure. Personally, we may now observe in a latter-day judgment, Hankin had lodged his hopes in the high standards achieved for a short time by Harley Granville Barker and John Vedrenne and their idealistic venture to mount, in three seasons at the Court Theatre (1904-1907), plays, including two of Hankin’s own (and even more by Shaw), that might outlast the common fate of commercial theatre. But that had gone by, the previous year, and it was in this context of personal and professional failure that Hankin, who seemed uncompromisingly bitter about the experience, was now summing up the work of a deceased dramatist who, no different from anyone else, he thought, took the theatre as he found it and cynically composed a series of “pot-boilers” for the entertainment-hungry multitude. The contemporary theatre could do nothing more with a talent as fine as Wilde’s, Hankin concludes, except “to degrade and waste it.”[13]
Another review of the Ross edition of importance for its critical insights came from Harold Child, a founder of the Times Literary Supplement. In this same publication, in the issue of 18 June, he explained that he had read the twelve volumes of the Ross edition so far published. In the present case the breadth of this experience as a reader allowed him to identify what remained as “the abiding taste,” a taste “of disappointment and disillusion.” Of the several faults that Child finds in his subject, the deepest is an invincible shallowness. Wilde never once accomplished genuine introspection, nor was ever pressed to “search in himself for himself.” Possessed of a mind as keen as Whistler’s, he did not have that painter’s high faith or conviction, attributes that enabled him to “defy the crowd.” Child’s stern conviction of Wilde’s mediocrity and insincerity conditions his evaluation of the full range of writing and the lights that admittedly frequently emerge from them. He recounts how Wilde had “played at poetry and criticism and philosophy, with astonishing skill,” and had done even more than that with comedy. Well known for the witty epigrams that studded his speech and his criticism, they became even more “sparkling and exquisite” once embodied in his plays, where they achieved “a new dignity and a new importance” that established the real atmosphere of those works. His short story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” introduced a comic vein he then perfected in The Importance of Being Earnest, where “in tossing off a trifle he conquered a kingdom.” And yet, for all the singularity of that achievement, contemplating the twelve handsome volumes of the Ross edition raises a persistent image, that of a man regarding himself in the mirror and taking up an actor’s pose, the stance of “a private jester of amazing shrewdness, a genius for perfect impromptu, infinite wit, audacity, and gaiety.” Finally, however, nothing more than that: the image not of an artist, but only of a craftsman.[14]
Under the guise of objective reasoning and qualified praise, Harold Child’s description of Wilde’s writings takes on a pronounced ad hominem character. The review amounts to a deeply derogatory personal judgment. It would be some time, during which many editions of single and collected works by Wilde were published in England, America, on the Continent, and elsewhere, and many full-dress productions of his dramatic works mounted on international stages, before the reputation of this author would be so well rehabilitated that it would no longer inhibit the unbiased acceptance of his writings.
Reginald Turner’s anonymous review, ‘The Works of Oscar Wilde’, appeared in the Daily Telegraph for 8 July 1908. Turner had the inside track at the Telegraph, having been raised by the owners of that newspaper and given the chance to pursue a career in writing there. A prominent member of the London literary scene in the ’Nineties and on into the early years of the next century, Turner conducted an important correspondence with Max Beerbohm and also with Oscar Wilde, whom he knew along with other members of his circle quite well. He was at Wilde’s side when he died, in 1900. And so Turner was in an advantageous position to compose a paean of praise on the occasion of Ross’s publication of the Collected Works.
There is little doubt, Turner said in this long piece for the Telegraph, that Wilde’s writings “are destined to have a permanent place in our literature’” His critical essays will be perused “for the beauty of their prose and the insight of the critic,” whose epigrams pierce and whose paradoxes illuminate. These paradoxes “are never merely fantastic” and never invented only “for a passing effect,” for they always “contain a germ of truth.” No author ever “so deftly combined wit with humour” or caused “fun with a touch of pathos which brings tears to our eyes while we laugh.” His four comedies constitute “the best and brightest examples of dramatic literature since Sheridan.” Turner proceeds to acknowledge the extent to which Wilde borrowed from other writers, but explains that he did so “deliberately” and in doing so improved them. By “the originality of his treatment” and “the sureness of his touch” he made them “his own.”
Having this collection of Wilde’s works, Turner explains, enables us now to see “how unique” a writer he was, both in method and variety. He left no side of the craft untouched, nor did he fail in any of these to distinguish himself. His Salomé was “a feat never before attempted by an English writer.” Greatly undervalued by English readers, this play has long been viewed as a classic on the Continent, where it has “made its author’s name more widely known than that of any other contemporary English man of letters.” Notwithstanding his reputation as a writer, behind all these writings lies the impression of an author “greater than his work,” the sense of “a master craftsman manipulating his puppets and his phrases at his will.”
Turner closes his review with a sincere compliment to Robert Ross as the editor of this edition, for his “devotion, courage, and capacity.” Not only do these volumes stand as “a perpetual delight to readers and the proof of their author’s extraordinary gifts,” but they serve also as a monument to Ross’s “splendid loyalty and steadfast friendship.”[15]
Viewed in the context established by Robert Ross’s ambitious, precedent-setting, and altogether brilliant editorial achievement, accomplished a mere eight years after Wilde’s untimely death, the criticism inspired by the Collected Works of 1908 takes on an indisputable edge of irony. Critics evidently have as much bad to say as they have good to perceive, in Wilde’s writings and in the man himself. Taken in sum, the reviews of the Ross collected edition betray a deeply divided critical attitude, more often than not a division not just between some reviewers and others but in a viewpoint uncomfortably lodged in the individual reviewer himself. There is far more to this than mere difference of opinion, or a condition of chronic indecisiveness, for it appears to reflect a virtually insoluble dilemma, faced and articulated by almost every critic who wrote about the topic: the deep difficulty of making an objective judgment about the writings of an author who defied the commonly accepted moral views of the community in which he lived and wrote, an author who in fact exceeded the tolerance of almost all of even the most forgiving members of that community, who ultimately made himself a pariah whose name could not even be mentioned in polite circles—and who yet had written some of the most brilliant literature of the day, had commandeered the attention of theatre audiences and the reading public, and who had revealed a genius for self-publicity, making himself the undisputed center of public attention, but then had violated whatever trust his followers had invested in him and had defiantly gone his own way, to his own apparent ruin and to the outrage of all who had been foolish enough to be taken in by his blandishments. How was a reviewer expected to be calm, forthright, and objective about writings that emerged under such uniquely adverse conditions? It is not surprising that writers for the Westminster Review, the Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, and other prominent publications of the day found it hard going to write measured, well-balanced, and effective critiques of the contents of the impeccably edited volumes produced by that author’s faithful and enterprising friend. One senses the almost transparent turmoil, barely half hidden, in Wilde’s dear friend Reginald Turner’s beginning statement: “In his life the author’s personality dominated and crushed his writings,” but “now that the personal figure is fading, the works themselves stand forth in a clearer and more definite light.”[16] What is surprising is that some of these reviewers could do so at all, despite their sense of the regrettably brief time that had elapsed between the author’s death and the demands of the circumstance in which they now found themselves.
It is in this fraught context that we must read the critical reviews of the 1908 Ross edition of Wilde’s collected works and make the best sense we can of the products resulting from reviewers’ confrontation of a very hard task. We may then go on to maintain a wary eye for variations of opinion and judgment that occur in the criticism of The Importance of Being Earnest in days to come. As we progress through writings that continue to emerge, our challenge is to aim at a clear understanding of the developing context, over succeeding years, of critical responses to a work that routinely calls for the best efforts of readers, actors, producers, and, to be sure, critics as well—and then rewards them as few other works in the dramatic repertory have ever been able to do. That is one aspect of the secret of the enduring popularity and significance of Wilde’s last, and best, play.
- See Frankel, Wilde’s Illustrated Books, 13-15, 184n. ↵
- Wilde’s Salomé, over which he labored long and hard, is a separate story; see the edition of the play in Wilde, Complete Works, Plays 1, Vol. V. ↵
- See the partial list in Mason, Bibliography of Wilde, 460. ↵
- In Carcere et Vinculis’, Pall Mall Gazette, 15 March 1908, 1-2. ↵
- J. A. Spender, “Out of the Depths: The New Edition of Oscar Wilde,” Westminster Gazette, 28 March 1908, 9-10. ↵
- Spender is remembering George Alexander’s desperate attempt to keep his production of The Importance of Being Earnest alive, in the waning days of April 1895, by removing Wilde’s name from the hoardings and programmes. ↵
- Edward Thomas, “Wit and Dalliance,” Daily Chronicle, 13 April 1908, 3. ↵
- "or see his plays acted,” Montague added in editing this review for inclusion in his collection of reviews, Dramatic Values, 175. See the chapter entitled "Oscar Wilde’s Comedies," in which he expands and rewrites his review of the 1908 edition substantially, including the following discussion of The Importance of Being Earnest: " . . . this play is no mere rib-tickler, like some string of puns. All the early talk of Jack and Algernon is quite veracious social portraiture. Among a portion of the comfortable unemployed, some fifteen years ago, there was current just that vein of chaff, a special blend of the knowing and the infantine, a kind of cynic simplicism." The play has been accused of being too full of "mere stock farcical mechanics," but Wilde’s use of it in this play "is the work of a comic genius—Worthing’s entry, for instance, in deep mourning for the brother whom he had only pretended to have, and whom he now pretends to have lost, to the house in which his friend is at the moment personating that fictitious brother. That entry is an example of true theatrical invention. To an audience, knowing what it knows, the mere first sight of those black clothes is convulsingly funny; it is a visible stroke of humour, a witticism not heard but seen, and it is precisely the richness in this gift of scenic or spectacular imagination that most distinguishes dramatists from other imaginative writers’ (187-9). ↵
- C. E. Montague, “Oscar Wilde’s Works,” The Guardian, 13 April 1908, 9. ↵
- Unsigned review, The Athenaeum, 16 May 1908, 598-600, in Wilde: Critical Heritage, ed. Beckson, 294-301. ↵
- St John Hankin, “The Collected Plays of Oscar Wilde,” Fortnightly Review, 83, new ser., 1 May 1908, 791-802. ↵
- See Joseph Donohue, “Wilde in France: The ‘Salome’ Typescript, Sarah Bernhardt, and the Production that Never Was,” TLS, 11 Sept. 2015, 14-15. ↵
- Hankin, “Collected Plays of Wilde,” 791-802. ↵
- Unsigned review, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 1908, 193, in Beckson, Wilde: Critical Heritage, 302-7. ↵
- [Reginald Turner], “The Works of Oscar Wilde,” Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1908, 6. ↵
- Daily Telegraph, 8 July 1908, 6. ↵