354
RICHARD ELLMANN
theticism, just as he half-accepted the world's ambivalent pleasure
in his own wit by putting his best remarks into the mouths of
his
most sinister characters. Perhaps he dimly perceived that the force
of his work might ultimately lie in the attempt of his heroes to make
their lives into masquerades, only to be found out, in his own
passion for art as a deception which penetrates a fraud. He did not,
of course, give up his wit, except in
Salome,
where the Biblical prose
and the use of French become an overblown substitute for it and
another revamping of old rhythms. His story, "Lord Alfred Savile's
Crime,"-in which the young man, informed by a fortune-teller he
will kill somebody, tries unsuccessfully to murder several relatives and
finally, to make the prophecy good, kills the fortune-teller-is a parody
of Wilde's own conscious sense of guilt as something to fill the mind
almost as ornamentation. Sometimes his characters, in their zeal
to confess, confess crimes they have not committed, like the young
man in
The Duchess of Padua
or Mrs. Erlynn in
Lady Windermere's
Fan.
But whatever they confess, confess they must.
In self-abasement they are usually rescued with fairy-tale speed
and indulgence. Wilde cancelled his nightmare of being found out
with lighthearted dreams of pardon and transfiguration. After being
crucified, he says in the poem "Humanitad," we shall be whole
again. In his best comedies, where he is most at home, he guarantees
that no character will be hurt or abused or punished. The truth once
out, it can be hushed up again. A Woman of No Importance finds
forgiveness from her illegitimate son and his wealthy fiancee. The
Ideal Husband, after a few hours of suffering, enters the Cabinet
with honor, and we almost concede his argument, which so pleased
Bernard Shaw, that it requires courage to do wrong. The king in
Wilde's fairy-tale who out of sympathy for the afflicted dresses as
a beggar finds that his rags are merely a disguise, since they turn
to golden raiment as proof that to humble is to exalt oneself. To
repudiate one's legacy, to be a foundling; to repudiate one's life, to
become a prisoner; these make the spirit wealthy and earn remittance
of the body's sins; they haunt Wilde's writings as they must have
engrossed his thoughts, and they are experiences in actuality compar–
able to his dream of becoming marmorean in a work of art.
For his real self is only varnished with corruption. Like
his
heroes, he retains an essential innocence. We may dissimulate our
