LOUIS MENAND
259
faith, the extent to which "what everyone says" in late Victorian society was
the opposite of "what everyone does" - and he knew what in those incon–
gruities was peculiar to his time and what was peculiar to the human condi–
tion. Wilde cannot be called a modernist writer, but he had a modernist intel–
lect
Why is it, then, that when Ellmann writes, "Wilde was a moralist, in a
school where Blake, Nietzsche, and even Freud were his fellows," we feel he
has reached too far? The claim forces us to separate our sense of the intellect
from our sense of the work. Wilde the man is a figure deduced from many
clues - from the testimony left by those who knew him or heard him speak
(Ellmann prints a transcription of one ofWilde's lectures made by someone in
the audience who used a set of diacritical symbols to indicate Wilde's unusual
inflections); from what has been recorded of his celebrated table talk
(including the lambent, oblique parables and "tales of the early Church" he
sometimes invented); from his letters. By these accounts, Wilde was a man
ofextraordinary character. Although he could be offensively supercilious and
vain,
he was most of the time generous, good-natured, emotional, ingratiating,
self-confident. He had a large view of his world, its limits and its possibilities;
and his moral sense was subtle, unconventional, and (with a few very striking
exceptions) usually right
But these aren't qualities we associate automatically with Wilde's liter–
ary work. One of the few contemporary critics not enchanted by
The
Importance of Being Earnest
was George Bernard Shaw; he thought the
play "heartless." Though the judgement feels narrow, it does not feel wrong.
The play is the most masterful ofWilde's literary achievements, but it shares
with his other work a mechanical quality. Its mastery, in fact, seems
to
de–
rive from the aplomb with which Wilde puts his machinery on display -like a
magic trick that works even after the secret has been revealed. Something
floats free of the machinery; but as with the something that floats free of
Pale Fire
and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,
it is not quite a
human thing. The play ends up pointing at itself - in ways that become less
interesting the more they are examined - and not toward the world outside
itse1£
Wilde's thought, as it emerges in his published work, is consistent - and
even, arguably, systematic.
It
handles the philosophical implications of its
premises with almost careless brilliance - as in the imaginary dialogues "The
Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist," which examine the effect of the
principles of scientific determinism on aesthetic values with a daring that
outstrips even Pater's. In the end, though, very little remains to carry away.
Wilde's writing - to apply a standard that seems dated but whose relevance,
given Ellmann's claim, is inescapable - does not change our lives. Wilde
always promises to scandalize us, but like most purveyors of scandal what he
has to say is never
personally
shocking, in the way that the work of Blake
