- THEATER CHRONICLE
303
bisexual man, it was perhaps deliciously comic that a man should have
one name, the tamest in English, for his wife and female relations, and
another for his male friends, for trips and "lost" week ends; but Wilde
was a prude-he went to law to clear his character- and the antisocial
jibe dwindles on the stage to a refined and incomprehensible titter.
Yet, in spite of the exhausting triviality of the second act,
The
Importance of Being Earnest
is Wilde's most original play. It has the
character of a ferocious idyl. Here, for the first time, the subject of
Wilde's comedy coincides with its climate; there is no more pretense of
emotion. The unwed mother, his stock "serious" heroine, here becomes
a stock joke-"Shall there be a different standard for women than for
men?" cries Mr. Jack Worthing, flinging himself on the governess, Miss
Prism, who had checked him accidentally in a valise at a railroad
station twenty-five years before. In
The Importance of Being Earnest,
the title is a
blague,
and virtue disappears from the Wilde stage, as
though jerked off by one of those hooks that were used in the old days
of vaudeville
to
remove an unsuccessful performer. Depravity is the
hero and the only character, the people on the stage embodying various
shades of it. It is deepest dyed in the pastoral region of respectability
and innocence. The London
roue
is artless simplicity itself beside the
dreadnought society dowager, and she, in her turn, is out-brazened by
her debutante daughter, and she by the country miss, and she by her
spectacled governess, till finally the village rector with his clerical clothes,
his vow of celibacy, and his sermon on the manna, adjustable to all
occasions, slithers noiselessly into the rose garden, specious as the Serpent
Himself.
The formula of this humor is the same as that of the detective
story: the culprit is the man with the most guileless appearance. Normal
expectations are methodically inverted, and the structure of the play is
the simple structure of the paradox. Like the detective story, like the
paradox, this play is a shocker. It is pure sport of the mind, and hence
very nearly "English." The clergyman is the fax; the governess the
vixen; and the young bloods are out for the kill. Humanitarian con–
siderations are out of place here; they belong to the middle class. In–
sensibility to the feelings of others is the comic "vice" of the characters;
it is also their charm and their badge of prestige. Selfishness and ser–
vility are the moral alternatives presented; the sinister impression made
by the governess and the rector comes partly from their rectitude and
partly from their menial demeanor. Algernon Moncrieff and Cecily
Cardew are, taken by themselves, unendurable;
the
meeching Dr. Cha–
suble, however, justifies their way of life by affording a comparison–
it is better to
be
cruel than craven.
Written on the brink of his fall,
The Importance of Being Earnest
is Wilde's true
De Profundis;
the other was false sentiment. This is hell,
