304
PARTISAN REVIEW
and if a great deal of it is tiresome, eternity is, as M. Sartre says, a bore.
The tone of the Wilde dialogue, inappropriate to the problem drama,
perfectly reflects conditions in this infernal Arcadia; peevish, fretful,
valetudinarian, it is the tone of an elderly recluse who lives imprisoned
by his comforts; it combines the finicky and the greedy, like a piggish
old lady.
Fortunately, however, for everyone, there is a goddess in the play.
The great lumbering dowager, Lady Augusta Bracknell, traveling to
the country in a luggage-train, is the only character thick and rudi–
mentary enough to be genuinely well-born. Possibly because of her
birth, she has a certain Olympian freedom. When she is on the stage–
during the first and the third acts-the play opens up. The epigram,
which might be defined as the
desire
to say something witty, falters
before her majesty. Her own rumbling speech is unpredictable; any–
thing may come out of her. Where the other characters are hard
as nails, Lady Augusta is rock. She is so insensitive that the spoken
word reaches her slowly, from an immeasurable distance, as if she were
deaf. Into this splendid creation, Wilde surely put all the feelings of
admiration and despair aroused in him by Respectability. This citadel
of the arbitrary was for him the Castle; he remarked, in his later years,
that he would have been glad to marry Queen Victoria. Lady Augusta is
the one character he could ever really imagine, partly, no doubt, because
she could not imagine
him.
Her effrontery surpasses his by being per–
fectly unconscious; she cannot impose on the audience for she does
not know they are there. She is named, oddly enough, after Bracknell,
the country address of the Marchioness of Queensberry, where Wilde,
as it turned out, was less at home than he fancied. The irony of the pas–
toral setting was apparently not lost on the Marquess of Queensberry,
who arrived at the first night with a bunch of turnips and carrots.
J ean Cocteau, it is said, has modeled his life on
The Portrait of
Dorian Gray.
If
this is so, one cannot help but feel that
The Eagle Has
T wo Heads
(Plymouth Theater) was written by the Albright portrait.
Grandiloquent and lurid in the old-fashioned royalist mode, this story
of a poet and a queen suggests that the attic of Cocteau's mind was
n ever as smart as the downstairs: a schoolgirl was there all along read–
ing romances and trying on costumes. "Dressing up" has been, all along,
M. Cocteau's subject; the romantic temperament in
Thomas the Im–
poster, L es Enfants T erribles,
and
Le Grand Ecart,
revealed itself as
an heroic fraud, a shabby and magnificent lie. The beauty of these
works trembled in the equipoise between truth and falsity; comedy was
the predicament of his suffering figures, an irony enforced by the age.
In
The Eagle Has T wo H eads,
the tension has broken, posturing is no
longer serious; it is solemn. The eagle is
not
double-faced.
MARY McCARTHY
