A PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
391
done but th£; results of his re-examination of Wilde's writing and ideas
seem to
coniirm,
even, I suspect, for Mr. Woodcock himself, the tradi–
tional view, i.e., that all that is worth reading of Wilde is
The Im–
portance of Being Earnest,
the letters to the Daily Chronicle on prison
conditions, some stanzas from
The Ballad of Reading Gaol,
and a
passage here and there from
The Decay of Lying
and
The Critic as
Artist.
When Yeats said of Wilde that he was by nature a man of action
who "might have had a career like that of Beaconsfield, whose early
style resembles his, being meant for crowds, for excitement, for hurried
decisions, for immediate triumphs," he was right in the negative sense
that Wilde was not by nature an artist, but positively he was wrong,
for the politician and the artist are alike in that both are primarily
interested in deeds and only secondarily interested in securing the
approval of others, whereas Wilde is the classic case of a man who is
completely dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone.
The artist does not want to be accepted by others, he wants to accept
his experience of life which he cannot do until he has translated his
welter of impressions into an order; the public approval he desires is
not for himself but for his works, to re-assure him that the sense he be–
lieves he has made of experience is indeed sense and not a self-delusion.
Similarly, the politician solicits public approval not for his own sake but
because, without it, he is impotent to do what he thinks should be done.
Writing for Wilde, on the other hand, was, as he himself admitted,
a bore because it was only a means to becoming known and invited
out, a preliminary to the serious job of spell-binding. Most great talk–
ers have probably belonged to this psychological type but in Wilde's
case his peculiar kind of conversation makes it particularly clear; his real
forte was not intellectual wit, like Talleyrand or Sidney Smith, but the
inspired and good-natured nonsense of a precocious child, a gift which
had, it is reported, the power to charm away heartaches and melan–
choly. A person with this passionate need to be loved has constantly to
test those around him by unconventional and provocative behavior, for
what he does or says must
be
admired not because it is intrinsically
admirable but because it is
his
act or remark. Further, a person with
a need to be loved universally is frequently homosexual. The sexual
act comes to play the same role vis-a-vis those with a lesser degree of
consciousness, the young, the working-classes etc. that conversation plays
vis-a-vis those with an equal degree; it becomes a magic role of
initiation into worlds which one cannot approach on a conscious level.
In a homosexual of this kind--corresponding to the test of eccentric
