Unicorns — Text and Context

It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the note of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana--or Oscariana--which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy," his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and "horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and spongers, his end might have been different.

I've heard many eloquent talkers in my time, best of them all was Barbey d'Aurevilly, of Paris, after whom Oscar palpably modelled--lace cuffs, clouded cane, and other minor affectations. But when Oscar was in the vein, which was usually once every twenty-four hours, he was inimitable. Edgar Saltus will bear me out in this. For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few equals. It was amazing, his conversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne--(in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O. W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: "I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody.... I should think you in America must be as tired of his name as we are in London of Mr. Barnum's and his Jumbos")--Milton, Tennyson, or for his prose, a dilution of Walter Pater and Flaubert. His Dorian Grey, apart from the inversion element, is poor Huysmans's--just look into that masterpiece, A Rebours; not to mention Poe's tale, The Oval Portrait; while Salome is Flaubert in operetta form--his gorgeous Herodias watered down for uncritical public consumption. It is safe to say the piece--which limps dramatically--would never have been seriously considered if not for the Richard Strauss musical setting. As for the vaunted essay on Socialism, I may only call attention to one fact, _i. e._, it does not deal with socialism at all, but with philosophical anarchism; besides, it is not remarkable in any particular. His Intentions is his best, because his most "spoken" prose. The fairy-tales are graceful exercises by a versatile writer, with an excellent memory, but if I had children I'd give them the Alice in Wonderland books, through which sweeps a bracing air, and not the hothouse atmosphere of Wilde. The plays are fascinating as fireworks, and as remote from human interest. Perhaps I'm in error, yet, after reading Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Huysmans, I prefer them to the Wilde imitations, strained as they are through his very gay fancy.