352
RICHARD
ELLMANH
she is as frail as the next woman, and owes her rescue to a person
whom she had once felt free to despise. Dorian Gray deprives himself
of
his
painted concealment. Wilde liked to confuse the issue by re–
peating that he had treated life itself as the supreme mode of fic–
tion, but it was the destruction of this mode that animated his crea–
tive writings. The hand that languidly holds the lily suddenly shakes
an admonitory finger, just when we had forgotten that admonitions
could exist. The ultimate virtue in Wilde's essays is pretense, but
the denouement of his dramas and narratives, no matter from what
varied sources he borrows their plots, is always the same: pretense
is let go.
From this point of view his wit can be regarded as essential
to his personality rather than as one of its decorative flourishes.
Wilde, it is true, made out in
De Profundis
that his taste for per–
versity in passion was like his taste for paradox in the sphere of
thought, but as with all his confessions, those social acts close to
pantomime, this one was too easy. The essence of his wit is that it
is
a shrinkage of fat truths, a constant ripping away of society's masks.
If
the exposure is never reduced to seriousness, that is because the
reader must be titillated with hyperbole, not faced down with grave
rebuttals. "The Portrait of Mr. W. H." is a good example of an
epigram writ large. The old theory that Shakespeare loved Willie
Hughes is put forward, accepted, rejected, and half-accepted again
by three characters. Each of the characters is to some extent an
imposter. The narrative becomes a Gidian mystification. Every fraud
leads to exposure, but a little fraud is still left over, just as in
Lady
Windermere's Fan
a succession of harmless new lies cover up the
discovery of old ones. The lid is put on the jack-in-the-box only to
have him jump up again, and the last remark of the narrator, who
has found a new fraud in the previous witnesses, is "But some–
times ... I think that there is really a great deal to be said for the
Willie Hughes theory of Shakespeare's Sonnets." The naked truth
still eludes us, but several layers of falsehood have been stripped
away.
Exposure or usually near-exposure is always the focal point in
Wilde's plays. We burn to show what we are.
Salome
derives its
weird power from Wilde's circling about the maskless truth as
his
herqine dances about Jokanaan's head. Salome strips the veils from
