Melbourne Punch - Thursday, April 11, 1895

CURRENT NOTES

UNDERNEATH the horror and loathing excited by the revelations made in the Wilde versus Queensberry libel action there exists a general feeling of profound regret that so extraordinary and interesting a personality as was the Oscar Wilde of a fortnight back should have been sunk and lost in the fearful mire in which it has been so suddenly engulfed. For the last two years Wilde has been, if not the most, one of the most conspicuous literary figures in London, which practically means in the world. We have many greater men, but none in this decade in whom genius, audacity and marvellous egotism are combined with such effect, none who drew upon himself at one time the eyes and the attention of the reading and play-going public of Europe, Asia, Africa, America and Australia as he has done. Oscar Wilde has been a conspicuous man for fifteen years or more; but previous to the production of "Lady Windermere's Fan," his most successful and most brilliant play, he was known to the multitude merely as the butt of the wits, literary and dramatic, small and great. Starting as a boy almost, he commanded the attention of the English-speaking world with his æsthetic craze, his stock-in-trade being a good education, some knowledge of art, much talent, and that unequalled audacity that has never left him til now — though it may be expected that even now his astonishing egotism has not forsaken him, and that it will enable him to face a situation which would crush another man into the dust.

Since the lapse of the æsthetic craze, with its absurd gabble, its limp, bilious devotions, and its preposterous mummery of lilies, sunflowers, and grotesque attitudes, Wilde has figured largely as a contributor to London papers and periodicals; but his work attracted little attention, excepting from the cognoscenti. Even his most famous, or infamous, novel, "Dorian Gray," had no vogue, although it contained most of the characteristic smartness that appears in his recent dramatic works. He was recognised as a brilliant writer of prose that coruscated with epigram and paradox, and as a gifted weaver of erotic verse and a deft sonnetier. His plays, however — "Lady Windermere's Fan," "A Model Husband," and "The Importance of Being Earnest" — elevated him at a jump into the front rank of contemporary dramatists, and made his fortune whilst endowing him with fame quite different from that which he had previously enjoyed, since it was the fame the world bestows upon its geniuses, and not the notoriety it gives to its cranks. His plays are cleverly constructed, and the dialogue is not equalled in the quality commonly called smartness by that of any of his rivals. In fact, his dramatic work is overloaded with sparks and flashes of wit, suggesting the idea that the author had collected the epigrams of a clever life and loaded his plays with them: and it is a fact that for the latter ones he has drawn upon his old resources, and selected the gems of wit from much of his earlier work to brighten up the dialogue.

To-day Wilde is the object of world-wide execration and disgust. There is, unfortunately, no room for any belief but that he is all he has been represented to be by the Marquis of Queensberry, and the suggestion is that worse remains to be told. Within the last twelve months this man has been interviewed by almost every weekly paper of importance in England, and by most of the dailies; his comings and goings and smallest actions were deemed worthy of record; his portrait was continually appearing in the illustrated journals, and where it did not appear one was pretty sure to find that of his wife or his two handsome boys, or pictures of his magnificent home. Now he is providing matter for the morning and evening papers which provokes loathing in the heart of every healthily-constituted and clean-living reader. The whole affair is shocking in the extreme, and it is only those who are wise after the fact, and who pretend to have found grounds to suspect the unspeakable truth in Wilde's literary work, who are not profoundly amazed to find in a man they had appreciated as a genius a moral leper and a living veritable sink of iniquity. It is admitted that the ethics disclosed in Oscar Wilde's writings were of the slimmest, and he made a parade of his indifference to religious teachings and beliefs, and of his pretensions to be a law unto himself in his recognition of right and wrong, but nothing of this suggests the revolting facts that have just come to light. One of Wilde's pet epigrams has a peculiar significance just now — "What is the use of the lower orders," he asks, "if they do not set us a good example?"