OSCAR WILDE
353
her body, and all semblance of restraint from her mind, so that the
play ends in open lust except that this is always viewed in archaic,
ritualized terms (adapted later by Yeats), and that its object is a
saint remote at the bottom of a well or later his trunkless head.
Wilde's greatest work,
The Importance of Being Earnest-the
only
one of his creative writings where the tension of an epigram is
sustained throughout- has the same note in a lower octave: Bunbury
and Uncle Ernest, those delightful exercises in self-projection and
self-concealment, must die. Frivolous Jack, if he would flutter the
ladies, must be Ernest at the last. Even Prism is exposed.
It
is easy
to guess what effort to free himself lay behind this recurrent and
dominating interest on the part of Wilde's characters in giving them–
selves away. In fact, Wilde's urge to play at confessing seems so
overpowering that the Marquis of Queensberry, instead of being his
villain, appears in retrospect as the agent who made up Wilde's
mind when Wilde intended never quite to make it up.
To bring imposture to a crisis, Wilde has to attribute to each of
his
characters some secret crime which he can then live down for
a while only to have it finally discovered. He dignified this pretense
of social innocence in
The Picture of Dorian
Gray
by making it a
kind of Faustian pact, complete with a Gretchen for Dorian to
betray, and Dorian sells his soul not to the devil but, in the ambiguous
form of his portrait, to art. In Wilde's rather simple-minded method
of composition by contrasts, Dorian is countered by Sybil Vane,
whose offense-the one which loses her Dorian's love-is to give
herself to life rather than to art. She becomes as much in love as
Juliet and so cannot act the part on the stage, for to feel a part too
deeply is to become, in the eyes of others, histrionic. Mastery on
the stage, as in life, consists in not feeling too much too crudely.
Then Lord Henry is in a somewhat malign fashion on the side of
art, holding that it is disengagement, while Basil Hallward, though
a painter himself, is on the side of life, and feels that a painter must
necessarily be absorbed into his painting, Dorian, falling under
Lord Henry's Mephistophelean tutelage, takes seriously what Lord
Henry takes lightly, shares Wilde's too often stated preference for
art over life, and of course comes to grief with it. Estheticism, em–
braced as a new gospel, becomes diabolical, just as life, seen as
all
in
all, becomes boring. Wilde recognized something defective in es-
