It’s his birthday today. One of my heroes.

His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman – also in the canon of Irish literary history certainly, not to mention its politics and social upheaval. (She has a cameo in a great book I read recently about Irish revolutionary, Thomas Francis Meagher, The Immortal Irishman. She led the kind of life which leads, inevitably, to endless cameo appearances in other historic peoples’ biographies.) My father knew a lot about Speranza, of course. She was a poet, a radical, an Irish nationalist. In 1864, the dedication in a new edition of her poems reads:

Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde

‘I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That country’s a thing one should die for at need’

Before we go any further, I’d like to link to my review of Rupert Everett’s The Happy Prince, about Oscar’s sad final years – it’s not a perfect movie, but Everett has insight and empathy for Oscar, as well as a personal understanding coming from the inside. Well worth seeking out.

His father was a fascinating man as well, a physician who specialized in the eye and ear; to this day there are procedures referred to as “Wilde’s incision”, for example, or “Wilde’s cone of light”, dating back to the mid-1860s, when William Wilde was practicing in Ireland. He was also a writer, and published books on all kinds of things: one of his main interests was the archeology in Ireland, and he published a catalog of antiquities from one particular archeological site, and the book now sits in the National Museum of Ireland. He also published books on folklore, legends, wives’ tales – all the things his patients told him, their own received history and “cures” for their ills.

Wilde went to Oxford, starting at 20 years old. Oxford was the first time he found notoriety (while there, making a splash with his wardrobe and his interior decorating, he was quoted as saying “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.” People wrote horrified op-ed columns about the decadence of today’s youth in response). Wilde set about losing his Irish accent, and created a persona: he wore formal wear, he was obsessed with decorating his room, he had an “outfit” for everything. Wilde was interested in aesthetics and what aesthetics might have to do not only with art but also character, personality, style. (There’s a reason Camille Paglia devotes not one, but TWO chapters on Oscar Wilde in her magnum opus Sexual Personae. He’s the only figure who got two chapters. In many ways, he was the birth of modern “personality” as we know it. Presentational, performative, aesthetic, sexually fluid.)

While at Oxford, he encountered many of the writers and philosophers who would make the deepest imprint on him, and leave him forever changed.

One of the things I love about Wilde is his suggestibility. He was open, receptive. It made him mercurial because he took everything on, tried it out for a bit, and then was willing to put it aside if it didn’t work for him. He really wrestled with his literary and philosophical influences. He argued with them in the papers he wrote at Oxford, he took them on, tried to see what he could absorb or reject in his own (still in its infant stage).

Many of his influences (Pater, Swinburne, mainly) were very controversial, the New Romantics, the aesthetes. They were viewed as demonic, pagan, un-Christian, effete sensuality. Wilde was not really a decadent aesthete (as many of his “buddies” actually were. I use quotation marks because these people were the very definition of fair-weather friends). Wilde enjoyed art and beauty but he had too rigorous a work ethic to be a true decadent. (This why HE had to take the fall. If some nobody poet-wannabe gets convicted of sodomy, nobody would care. But THE Oscar Wilde? Let’s get HIM and they’ll ALL run for cover. Which is exactly what happened.)

At the height of his celebrity, Wilde grew extremely careless. He allowed the Marquess of Queensberry into his life.

This dreadful gargoyle of a person brings homophobia to a new level, even back then. Even back then, his frothing at the mouth was viewed as unseemly and perhaps even a wee bit suspicious. The Marquess doth protest too much, you know?

Wilde fell in love with the Marquess’ son, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde was, essentially, a good-hearted generous man, and he could not perceive the danger. With the benefit of retrospect, you watch the slow march of events in Wilde’s life, and you can feel the increasing menace, you can feel how much the winsome Lord Douglas wanted to “get back at” his wretched father by using the famous Oscar as his weapon.

People often characterize Wilde as a witty dandy-queen “brought down” into the muck, but I don’t think this is accurate. Yes, he was the main promoter of the aesthetic movement, and he counseled people on what books to read and how to dress and interior decorate, but it was always for a deeper purpose. The man was not shallow. He was too funny to be shallow. He is mis-read, to this day, as a witty “bitchy” writer of drawing-room comedies. People still can’t really DEAL with – or, hell, even PERCEIVE – how radical Oscar really was. His jokes could topple empires. They re-align your brain. They actually make you think. Christopher Hitchens wrote that Wilde’s lines were “once heard, never forgotten”. It’s so true. You hear one of his lines once (like the line in the title of this post), and they will never ever leave you. They STICK. They seem to turn the accepted world upside down – right? But what they are REALLY doing is turning the world – which is upside down – back upright, the way it SHOULD be.

He was beloved, in his time. He was celebrated, a celebrity. But he flirted with danger. Not just sexually. His was a multi-pronged attack on hypocrisy and unfairness, snobbery and heartlessness. He was controversial BEFORE he was famous. He was insulted left and right.

Wilde handled the insults thrown at him with good humor, more often than not skewering his opponents. He finally encountered someone who could not be stopped, a man with a chip on his shoulder the size of the British Empire, determined to “save” his sodomite son from further corruption. (This story goes deeper, however. It is truly fucked up: one of the Marquess’ OTHER sons had also been caught in a compromising relationship with a man. This other son killed himself, right around the time Queensberry started harassing Oscar Wilde. So. Imagine. This short angry little man had two gay sons, both of whom were living in an openly gay manner. In 1895. It had to have pushed all this guy’s gay buttons. Not to mention the fact, and this gets graphic: also around this time, his second wife divorced him, claiming PUBLICLY that 1. his penis was too small for effective intercourse and also 2. he was impotent and their marriage remained unconsummated. She said this to the WORLD. It was at this horribly unfortunate crossroads of sexual anxiety, where Oscar Wilde drifted into view. Oscar didn’t stand a chance. )

Illustration for Oscar Wilde’s “Salome”, done by Aubrey Beardsley

Wilde found himself a pawn in a struggle between father (Marquess of Queensberry) and son (Lord Alfred Douglas). Lord Douglas was the instigator. He forced the confrontation. Wilde did not approve of how the Douglas family treated one another. Lord Douglas would send telegrams to his father, saying stuff like, “You are a silly stupid man” and Wilde would shake his head and remark, “You shouldn’t talk to a parent like that.”

Here Wilde was, telling his lover to show some respect for the man threatening to ruin him, the man who left notes under his door calling him a “sodomite”, who staged protests outside theatres where a play of his was running – who was doing everything possible to make Wilde miserable as well as criminal. Wilde had class. Real class.

He, a man of exquisite manners and taste, who loved his parents and remained close to his mother all the days of his life (his father passed away earlier) found himself embroiled in a scandal that would not go away, no matter how hard he tried to smooth things over. Wilde knew Douglas could ruin him. Perhaps that was part of the thrill. The beautiful boy bringing doom with him has a long history. In reading about Wilde, I never feel he is vindictive or cruel. He was clever, and often merciless in his critiques, but not cruel.

The Marquess accused Wilde of sodomy. Sodomy was a crime. So okay. It’s bad, and awful – in today’s standards – but back then, not the end of the world. You could have just said, “it’s all rumor and conjecture, I am innocent.” Wilde, though, egged on by Lord Douglas, sued the Marquess for libel. This was the defining moment. By choosing to sue, Wilde sealed his own fate. The entire thing might, might, have gone away if Wilde had not sued. His suing meant there would be a trial, and a trial meant he would have to reveal WHY he had sued, and also reveal WHAT the Marquess’ accusation had been. As the details came pouring out, the world recoiled from the man they loved, literally last night when they gave him a standing ovation.

In the 1895 trial, Charles Gill, the prosecutor, asked Wilde about the “love that dare not speak its name”, a quote from a poem by Lord Douglas (the only memorable thing that little troublemaker ever wrote). Wilde, a broken man, answered, in a now-famous speech:

The ‘Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a young man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.

Caricature of Oscar Wilde, by Max Beerbohm

Max Beerbohm, writer/drama critic/caricaturist and an old friend of Wilde’s was there the day Wilde made the speech and wrote to a friend afterwards:

Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that dares not tell his name was simply wonderful and carried the whole court right away, quite a tremendous burst of applause. Here was this man, who had been for a month in prison, and loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He has never had so great a triumph, I am sure, as when the gallery burst into applause – I am sure it affected the jury.

It did not.

Wilde was given a sentence of two years hard labor.

Wilde wrote about his passage to prison:

On November 13th 1895 I was brought down here from London. From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at … When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was of course before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed, they laughed still more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.

On today, Oscar Wilde’s birthday, a man who has given me so much pleasure, has made me laugh until my stomach hurts, I didn’t mean to write about all his pain and suffering, but I found I couldn’t help it. His suffering had an air of the sacrificial lamb about it. It was excessive. In 1897, while in prison, he wrote the blisteringly painful De Profundis, a long letter to Alfred Douglas, a wail of pain and betrayal. It’s very difficult reading. Across the centuries, you can feel his pain.

Of late I have been studying with diligence the four prose poems about Christ. At Christmas I managed to get hold of a Greek Testament, and every morning, after I had cleaned my cell and polished my tins, I read a little of the Gospels, a dozen verses taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple romantic charm of the Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek; it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and dark house.

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is, of course, Wilde’s long poem about his experiences in prison (full text here).

Those only familiar with his plays will immediate recognize the radical alteration of his style. Those familiar with Oscar Wilde’s other poems will also immediately see (just by looking at the poem on the page) that he is up to something different. His poems were usually lush, intricate, with long lines on the page. Ballad of Reading Gaol looks like Kipling. It is a ballad.

In one of his published lectures, “Speranza in Reading: On ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol'”, Irish poet and Nobel prize winner Seamus Heaney makes the case that Wilde, by “coming back” to the ballad form (and its propagandistic purposes), was “coming back” to the example led by his mother, Speranza, who also had her trials and tribulations in the public court (although not as literal as Wilde’s.) She was in the center of a couple of major scandals, some involving her husband, and she behaved with fierce loyalty and grace. Heaney uses Speranza as the jumping-off point to talk about the various versions of “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, not to mention Yeats’s inclusion of it in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, a version with some very interesting edits by Yeats himself. Yeats was trying to protect Wilde, even after his death, from his own rhetorical excesses. You can read more about Heaney’s essay here.

Here is an excerpt from Heaney’s essay.

‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ is Wilde’s poem of human solidarity, his attempt to produce, in Kafka’s great phrase, a book that would be an axe to break the frozen sea in each of us. Bu the literary fact of the matter is that the axe which is still capable of shattering the surfaces of convention is neither the realistic ballad which Yeats fashioned nor the original romantic plea from which he extracted it; it is rather the hard-edged, unpathetic prose that Wilde created in dialogues like ‘The Decay of Lying’ and dramas like The Importance of Being Earnest. His brilliant paradoxes, his over-the-topness at knocking the bottom out of things, the rightness of his wrong-footing, all that exhilarated high-wire word-play, all that freedom to affront and exult in his own uniqueness – that was Wilde’s true path towards solidarity. The lighter his touch, the more devastating his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground. But when he stepped on earth to help the plight of lesser mortals, he became Oisin rather than Oscar. His strength dwindled and his distinction vanished. He became like other men. He became one of the chain-gang poets, a broken shadow of the brilliant litterateur who had once written that ‘Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.’ By the time he wrote the ballad, however, his aim had come to be the telling of the ugly true things:

The vilest deeds like poison weeds
Bloom well in prison-air:
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there:
Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair

For they starve the little frightened child
Till it weeps both night and day:
And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool,
And gibe the old and grey,
And some grow mad, and all grow bad,
And none a word may say.

Each narrow cell in which we dwell
Is foul and dark latrine,
And the fetid breath of living Death
Chokes up each grated screen,
And all, but Lust, is turned to dust
In Humanity’s machine.

All the same, if the propagandist ballad is not Oscar Wilde’s proper genre, it is still a kind of writing which was naturally available to him from the start. His mother, Jane Francesca Elgee, had begun her writing career in Dublin in the 1840s with a series of fiery patriotic poems published in the Dublin Magazine. Writing under the pseudonym of ‘Speranza’ and under the impression that her family name, Elgee, meant that she was descended from the Alighieri family – as in Dante Alighieri – the future Lady Wilde composed poems that proclaimed a heartfelt sympathy for the plight of the famine victims in Ireland and a firebrand’s enthusiasm for the cause of rebellion against British rule. Speranza herself, of course, was from a well-to-do Dublin Unionist background, so her association with Charles Gavan Duffy and other activists and intellectuals in the circle was already an act of rebellion, an embrace of the forbidden other which foreshadowed her son’s more extreme rejection of the conventional pieties. And Oscar in his turn was very much in favour of the company she had kept.

Wilde did not last long after his release from prison. He had lost everything, most of his friends, his entire library, his social standing, his career, his health.

In 2009, a new book came out by Thomas Wright called Oscar’s Books, an examination of how reading formed Oscar Wilde’s life. I read it, and it’s wonderful. (A personal story about this book here.) Brenda Maddox, who wrote Nora, a biography of James Joyce’s wife, in her review of the book, wrote:

Among the humiliations Wilde suffered after being sent to prison were not only compulsory silence – prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another – but deprivation of books. All he had in his cell at Pentonville, apart from his bed (a plank laid across two trestles), were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. When at last his sympathetic MP won him permission to have more books, Wilde nominated Pater’s The Renaissance along with the works of Flaubert and some by Cardinal Newman. These were allowed, but only at the rate of one a week. Moved to Reading Gaol, he found himself under a more sympathetic prison governor. His book request lists after July 1896 show him developing an interest in more recently published titles, including novels by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Wilde later said that he also read Dante every day in prison and that Dante had saved his reason.

There was a giant auction at his house to pay off his debts, and his books were sold off. It was a circus, many people there just to get a ghoulish view of the sodomite’s lodgings. A couple of his remaining friends actually went out and tracked down many of the books sold that day, buying them back for Oscar when he got out of prison. Now those are real friends.

At first, he was denied any books while incarcerated. But eventually, the milder warden (mentioned by Maddox) asked if Mr. Wilde could write out a list of the books he would like, and he would see what he could do. The warden would look over the list, catch sight of one controversial title, and scold Mr. Wilde (“This book helped cause all of your troubles, Mr. Wilde …”), but in general, the warden did his best to provide Wilde with a makeshift library. Friends began to send books to the prison. The nice warden would bring them to Wilde’s cell, and Wilde would break down in tears at the sight.

In Wilde’s prison file, there is a letter from an anonymous “Irishwoman”, written in 1895. It brings tears to my eyes. Listen:

Please give Mr. Wilde the book. I have never ever seen him but it must indeed be a hard heart utterly unacquainted with God’s love that does not bleed for such a shipwrecked life … I feel this book which I send, may be helpful. Faithfully yours, an Irishwoman.

The greatest gift we can give to others is kindness and understanding. I wish I knew what book she had sent him. I imagine a prayer book. Across the centuries, I love this anonymous Irishwoman as someone who represents the best in all of us.

After his release, Oscar moved to a small village in France. On Nov. 16, 1897, he wrote to a friend:

It is curious how vanity helps keep the successful man and wrecks the failure. In old days half of my strength was my vanity.

Maddox writes in her review:

When he was discharged in May 1897, he was not allowed to take his accumulated books with him and faced what he called the horror of ‘going out into the world without a single book’. But friends rallied round. Entering the hotel room in Dieppe where he was to begin his exile, he found it full of books furnished by his friends and he broke down and wept.

During his exile, he reconnected with Lord Douglas, something many of his friends warned him against. Life had broken him. He converted to Catholicism on his death-bed, something he wanted to do for years. His father didn’t let him convert back when he was younger. Catholicism was way beyond the pale for people of the Wilde’s class and standing, but Wilde never got over yearning for it. A local Catholic priest was found in the middle of the night, and baptized Oscar Wilde on his death bed.

I came to him first the way I think it is best to come to him: as an actor, working on his plays in college.

There is a stark tragedy in the life of Oscar Wilde, and yet his work is the opposite of tragic. He is one of the only playwrights who makes me laugh out loud just reading his words on the page (Shakespeare is the other one). To me, his major life’s work was not his own life (although he did try to create an artistic life, an aesthetic life), or his prose works, his essays, his poetry (all formidable stuff) – and neither do I see his major life’s work as his sacrifice at the end, a martyr to future gay generations, an example of a dignified man who paid the ultimate price. A hero, essentially. Which I believe he is. All of these things are extremely important, and you cannot understand Oscar Wilde without understanding all of these elements.

But for me, it’s about the plays: A Woman of No Importance (my thoughts here), The Importance of Being Earnest (my thoughts here), An Ideal Husband (my thoughts here). There is his true legacy.

The epigrams leave a huge mark as well, sprinkled throughout all of his work, including the plays. What he does with his famous epigrams is quite unsettling. He up-ends expectations. He leads you one way and then reveals something else. You are put off balance. It is easy to understand why the powers-that-be found him disturbing. His epigrams are not just clever. You think you’re going one way when he starts out, it feels good and right you are going that way, and then in the second half of the epigram he scrambles everything up, leaving you in a state of chaos.

Hopefully you’re laughing throughout.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the scenes in The Importance of Being Earnest, a perfect scene, a classic example of two objectives doing battle.

GWENDOLEN. Are there many interesting walks in the vicinity, Miss Cardew?

CECILY. Oh! yes! a great many. From the top of one of the hills quite close one can see five counties.

GWENDOLEN. Five counties! I don’t think I should like that; I hate crowds.

CECILY. [Sweetly.] I suppose that is why you live in town? [Gwendolen bites her lip, and beats her foot nervously with her parasol.]

GWENDOLEN. [Looking round.] Quite a well-kept garden this is, Miss Cardew.

CECILY. So glad you like it, Miss Fairfax.

GWENDOLEN. I had no idea there were any flowers in the country.

CECILY. Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London.

GWENDOLEN. Personally I cannot understand how anybody manages to exist in the country, if anybody who is anybody does. The country always bores me to death.

CECILY. Ah! This is what the newspapers call agricultural depression, is it not? I believe the aristocracy are suffering very much from it just at present. It is almost an epidemic amongst them, I have been told. May I offer you some tea, Miss Fairfax?

GWENDOLEN. [With elaborate politeness.] Thank you. [Aside.] Detestable girl! But I require tea!

CECILY. [Sweetly.] Sugar?

GWENDOLEN. [Superciliously.] No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more. [Cecily looks angrily at her, takes up the tongs and puts four lumps of sugar into the cup.]

CECILY. [Severely.] Cake or bread and butter?

GWENDOLEN. [In a bored manner.] Bread and butter, please. Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.

CECILY. [Cuts a very large slice of cake, and puts it on the tray.] Hand that to Miss Fairfax.

[Merriman does so, and goes out with footman. Gwendolen drinks the tea and makes a grimace. Puts down cup at once, reaches out her hand to the bread and butter, looks at it, and finds it is cake. Rises in indignation.]

GWENDOLEN. You have filled my tea with lumps of sugar, and though I asked most distinctly for bread and butter, you have given me cake. I am known for the gentleness of my disposition, and the extraordinary sweetness of my nature, but I warn you, Miss Cardew, you may go too far.

CECILY. [Rising.] To save my poor, innocent, trusting boy from the machinations of any other girl there are no lengths to which I would not go.

GWENDOLEN. From the moment I saw you I distrusted you. I felt that you were false and deceitful. I am never deceived in such matters. My first impressions of people are invariably right.

CECILY. It seems to me, Miss Fairfax, that I am trespassing on your valuable time. No doubt you have many other calls of a similar character to make in the neighbourhood.

One of the most satisfying scenes ever written, which is why it is done so often in acting classes. A perfect lesson for young actors on how to play your objective, while trying desperately to look like you are NOT playing an objective, which is how most people live their lives in real life. Easier said than done, but that’s a great scene to practice with.

Oscar Wilde is buried in Paris, and his grave has been repeatedly defaced and destroyed by vandals. To this day. The epitaph reads:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts will always mourn.

Some quotes from (and about) Wilde below.

_____________

Mankind has been continually entering the prisons of Puritanism, Philistinism, Sensualism, Fanaticism, and turning the key on his own spirit: But after a time there is an enormous desire for higher freedom – for self-preservation.

_____________

The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

_____________

To win back my youth … there is nothing I wouldn’t do – except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.

_____________

Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly.

_____________

From Oscar Wilde’s Phrases and Philosophies For the Use of the Young:

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.

_____________

From Wilde’s 1899 review of Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour:

Socialism is not going to allow herself to be tramelled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereotyped into an iron formula. She welcomes many and multiform natures. She rejects none and has room for all. She has the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild worship of a lost and buried past. And all of this is well. For to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.

[Please note the eerie prescience of this. The echo of Alexander Dubček’s “Socialism with a human face”, which helped launch the Prague Spring, which was then crushed.]

_____________

Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw, if it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role. We have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the manner of the doing and the saying, constantly evoke the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by art.

_____________

To disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity.

_____________

from a letter Wilde wrote to Walt Whitman:

Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much. But he has not allowed himself to be a part of the living world and of the great currents of interest and action. He is of priceless value and yet he lives apart from his time. He lives in a dream of the unreal. We, on the other hand, move in the very heart of today.

_____________

Wilde on Walt Whitman:

He is the grandest man I have ever seen, the simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age and is not peculiar to any people. Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times.

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From The Importance of Being Earnest:

Algernon Montcrieff: “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.”

_____________

To be either a Puritan, a prig or a preacher is a bad thing. To be all three at once reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

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From Wilde’s 1899 review of Edward Carpenter’s Chants of Labour:

The Reformation gained much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the Socialists determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon the people. However, they must not be too sanguine about the result. The walls of Thebes rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very dull city indeed.

_____________

The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer; at any moment he might have been transformed into marble or bronze and become noble in art forever.

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“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

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Praise makes me humble. But when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.

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On Dr. Max Nordau’s book “Degeneracy”:

I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr. Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

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1883, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott:

All the great men of France were cuckolds. Haven’t you observed this? All! In every period. By their wives or their mistresses. Villon, Moliere, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Musset, Balzac, kings, generals, poets! Those I mention, a thousand more that I could name, were all cuckolds. Do you know what that means? I will tell you. Great men, in France, have loved women too much. Women don’t like that. They take advantage of this weakness. In England, great men love nothing, neither art, nor wealth, nor glory … nor women. It’s an advantage, you can be sure.

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1883, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott:

Now, one of the facts of physiology is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite. Nature’s example of dramatic effect is the laughter of hysteria or the tears of joy. So I cannot cut my comedy lines. Besides, the essence of good dialogue is interruption.

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1885, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marillier

There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.

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1885, letter of Oscar Wilde to James Whistler

Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.

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To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne’s aim. He seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave … He is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his personality, and he has succeeded. We have the song, but we never know the singer … Out of the thunder and splendour of words, he himself says nothing. We have often heard man’s interpretation of Nature; now we know Nature’s interpretation of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.

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As for George Meredith, who could hope to reproduce him? His style is chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.

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How much truer Imagination is than Observation.

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The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say “mither” instead of “mother” seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialism.

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Actors are so fortunate. They can choose whether they will appear in tragedy or comedy … But in real life it is different. Most men and women are forced to perform parts for which they have no qualifications.

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It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

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Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

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We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.

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Wilfrid Seawen Blunt, diary entry about a luncheon he attended, where Wilde was present:

Of all those present, and they were most of them brilliant talkers, he was without comparison the most brilliant, and in a perverse mood he chose to cross swords with one after the other of them, overpowering each in turn with his wit, and making special fun of [Margot] Asquith, his host that day, who only a few months later, as Home Secretary, was prosecuting him.

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letter of Oscar Wilde to W.B. Maxwell

You mustn’t take a story that I told you of a man and a picture. No, absolutely, I want that for myself. I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.

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Oscar Wilde, responding to a critic who balked at all of the literary references in “Dorian Gray”:

I cannot imagine how a casual reference to Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into evidence of a desire to impress by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most ordinary of scholars is perfectly well acquainted with the Lives of the Caesars and with The Satyricon. The Lives of the Caesars, at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at Oxford for those who take the Honour School of Literae Humaniores; and as for The Satyricon, it is popular even among passmen, though I suppose they have to read it in translations.

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George Bernard Shaw to R.E. Golding Bright, Nov. 19, 1894

You must give up detesting everything appertaining to Oscar Wilde or to anyone else. The critic’s first duty is to admit, with absolute respect, the right of every man to his own style.

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Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw:

He hasn’t an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.

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Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature – it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist to sympathise with a friend’s success.

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Mallarme is a poet, a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes in French, because in that language he is incomprehensible, while in English, unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a gift, not everyone has it.

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Ernest Hemingway:

“Wilde was said by people who knew him to have been a better talker than a writer.”

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Conscience must be merged in instinct before we become fine.

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Jeanette Winterson, “The Semiotics of Sex”:

“When I read Adrienne Rich or Oscar Wilde, rebels of very different types, the fact of their homosexuality should not be uppermost. I am not reading their work to get at their private lives, I am reading their work because I need the depth-charge it carries.

Their formal significance, the strength of their images, their fidelity to language makes it possible for them to reach me across distance and time. If each were not an exceptional writer, neither would be able to reach beyond the interests of their own sub-group. The trust is that both have an audience who do not share the sexuality or the subversiveness of playwright and poet but who cannot fail to be affected by those elements when they read Rich and Wilde. Art succeeds where polemic fails.”

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1891 letter from Stephen Mallarme to James Whistler

No O.W. —! just like him! He pushes ingratitude to the point of indecency, then? — And all the old chestnuts — he dares offer them in Paris like new ones! — the tales of the sunflower — his walks with the lily — his knee breeches — his rose-colored stiff shirts — and all that! — And then ‘Art’ here — ‘Art’ there — It’s really obscene — and will come to a bad end — As we shall see — and you will tell me how it happens —

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I detest nature where man has not intervened with his artifice.

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1891 letter of Oscar Wilde to Edmond de Goncourt

One can adore a language without speaking it well, as one can love a woman without understanding her. French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.

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As one reads history, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

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Perhaps an apocryphal story, from 1882:

Customs official: “Anything to declare?”
Oscar Wilde: “Nothing but my genius.”

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1891, letter of Andre Gide to Paul Valery

Forgive my being silent: after Wilde I only exist a little.

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“Know thyself!” was written over the portal of the ancient world … the message of Christ to man was simply, “Be thyself.”

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I can see they are servants by their perfect manners.

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For do you know, all my life I have been looking for twelve men who didn’t believe in me …. and so far I have only found eleven.

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Poem by Dorothy Parker:

Oscar Wilde

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

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Poem by John Betjeman: (in which his mother won’t let him play with his friend Bobby, and he has no idea why):

“Narcissus” Happy birthday, to Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde. You were the pioneer in a cruel and vicious world. You made the ultimate sacrifice for being who you were. You deserved so so much better.

Although I have focused much today on your tragedy, it is your humor and your plays that ring across centuries, not just your martyrdom. Your works will live forever.

 
 
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