OSCAR WILDE
355
badness but not our goodness. Tetrarch Herod is unexpectedly
squeamish about deaths inflicted by others. Murderers often lose
heart. Dorian Gray, after having ruined so many men and women
in dreadful, undisclosed ways, cannot bear to have a hunter kill a
rabbit; this tenderness, portrayed again in the fairy-tale, "The Star–
Child," with the same rabbit as its illustration, is related to Dorian's
remorse, which brings him back again and again to the contempla–
tion of his sins until he cannot bear to look at them any more. But
even at that stage his violent action is noQt to destroy himself but to
get rid of his picture. It is only the image which he means to at–
tack, and his own death is a side-effect and an unintended one. For
in the pinch Dorian like Wilde is carried along to consequences he
does not foresee or entirely desire.
We can be grateful foQr Wilde's preoccupations, since they give
his
wit its special quality, of surprising and undeceiving without dis–
lodging us, and since they agitate his puppet plays into vitality.
Under the waving of peacock plumes, the brooding over an impos–
sible self-immolation is always going on, whether Wilde concedes it
tragically in
Salome
(though that confession is couched in French)
or renders it comic in
The Importance of Being Earnest.
Always en–
dangered, he laughs at his plight, and on his half-acquiescent way
to the loss of everything jollies society for being so much harsher
than he is, so much less graceful, so much less attractive. He chaffs
us and asks for liking, ingratiatingly allows or half allows his errors,
begs
for mercy with panache. And once we have recognized that
his
charm is precarious, its eye on the door left open for the witless
law,
it becomes even more triumphant.
(This piece is part of a series of revaluations of "modern" writers.
Other essays will appear in coming issues. )
