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PARTISAN REVIEW
context ofWilde's career but was prevented from doing so by a natural de–
sire to complete the book (which he had worked on for twenty years) as
expeditiously as he could. Whether this is so or not, as the story moves into
the strange and heady culture ofthe early 1890s, one begins to feel a thin–
ness in the narrative. Beardsley, Symons,
The Yellow Book
-
they are all
duly mentioned, but they remain vague sketches in the background of the
picture ofWilde. The effect is to put the question of whether Wilde matters
to us as a figure who can stand on his own - in the way, for example, that
Dickens and Joyce seem to matter to us - in the foreground of the book. The
question is certainly worth posing, even
if
we should conclude that Wilde in
fact does not quite matter to us in that sense.
It
would have been easy
enough to have demonstrated Wilde's importance to his own time and left the
larger issue in abeyance. Ellmann's book, by design or otherwise, presents us
with a more difficult challenge.
Ellmann addresses the problem ofWilde's relation to his own century in
this way: "His language," he writes, "is his finest achievement. .. .It takes
what has been ponderously said and remakes it according to a new perspec–
tive and a new principle.
An
older generation's reassuring platitudes and tired
certainties are suddenly infused with youthful intransigence, a sort of pontifi–
cal impudence that commands attention. We have the pleasure of affirming
the
ancien rigime
and of rebelling against it at the same time. Long live the
king, we say, as we cut off his head." The part about language seems, as a
general statement about Wilde's work, ill-judged : surely, whatever else it is,
The Picture of Dorian
Gray
is an extremely badly written novel. But the
phrase "pontifical impudence" rings true, and so does the general sentiment.
Ellmann's assessment echoes Yeats's - that Wilde found himself in the
shadow of older writers he could not repudiate - but it recognizes, as Yeats's
does not, the degree to which Wilde was coolly conscious of his predicament
and, rather than ducking it, put it to use.
This analysis ofWilde's place in nineteenth-century culture is a model
for what is finest and truest in EHmann's portrait. The popular image of
Wilde obscures many things about him, and one is that he was an exception–
ally smart man. He knew what he was doing even when he was doing
things he knew he would regret. More than this, he had a genuine intellectual
comprehension of his century and its values. He chose too often to express
this comprehension in witticisms that can be easily snipped from their con–
texts and converted into outrageous and one-dimensional slogans; but it is a
mistake to think he was merely clever, or that his cleverness was shallow.
When Ellmann proposes that "Wilde is one of us," it is this remarkable acuity
ofWilde's that makes him seem right. Unlike Arnold or Carlyle or Ruskin,
Wilde seems to have understood the nineteenth century in terms very close
to the way we understand it today. He saw where its naturalism cut against
its romanticism, where its scientistic view of the world cut against its moral
