Richard Ellmann
ROMANTIC PANTOMIME IN OSCAR
WILDE
The disrepute into which estheticism fell at the end of the
nineteenth century did not lose Oscar Wilde his favorite audience
of the young, even in this country. For a time the First World War
countered his tenets by discrediting graceful communication and
by causing artists to stop using the word art.
It
seemed that the
ambiance of truth must properly be crude and inarticulate: style
consisted in laying hold of the aptest monosyllables. Today pas–
sionate muteness has in its turn become stale, and the verbal dexterity
of Wilde reasserts itself, as if minds had begun to long for such
pontifical impudence. Rupert Hart-Davis's splendid edition of Wilde's
letters and new books on Lord Alfred Douglas, Ada Leverson, and
John Gray, indicate a renewed interest in Wilde as a man, while
the production of
Lady Windermere's Fan
this spring in Moscow, and
of
The Importance of Being Earnest
in Paris, confirm that
his
comedies transcend class, fashion, and nation. He is likely to remain
the one writer of the nineties whom everyone reads or, more pre–
cisely, has read.
Some of his persistent interest lies in a characteristic that, along
with his girth, he shares with Dr. Johnson: he was greater than any
of his works, and occupies, as he himself insisted, a "symbolical"
relation to
his
age. He was highly conscious of living at the end of
the nineteenth century rather than at its beginnings, and he empha–
sized directly or by implication what he held to be his differences
from his predecessors. He complained that Byron, for example, was
too much involved with the passions. He enforced that particular
contrast by declaring in a letter that in the late Victorian age
it
is
the scabbard which wears out the sword.
If
the early romantics had
