Being and becoming compared with doing. Defence of egotism. "The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful."
Schoolmasters. Self-culture, not the culture of others, the proper aim of man. The idea is dangerous: so are all ideas. Ernest suggests that the fact that a critical work is subjective places it below the greatest work, which is impersonal and objective. Gilbert replies that "the difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is absolutely subjective." Critics not even limited to the more obviously subjective forms of expression, but may use drama, dialogues, narrative, or poetry. He then turns more particularly to the critic"s qualifications. He must not be fair, not be rational, not be sincere, except in his devotion to the principle of beauty, Journalism, reviewing, and prurience. Intrusion of morals into art. Further consideration of the critic"s qualifications. Temperament, its cultivation through decorative art. A digression on modern painting, returning to the subject of decorative art. The influence of the critic should be the mere fact of his existence. "You must not ask of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself." It is not his business to reform bad artists, who are probably quite irreclaimable.
Remembering, but not alluding to Whistler"s attack, he lets Ernest ask, "But may it not be that the poet is the best judge of poetry, and the painter of painting?" Gilbert replies, "The appeal of all art is simply to the artistic temperament." Great artists unable to recognize the beauty of work different from their own. Examples:--Wordsworth on Keats, Sh.e.l.ley on Wordsworth, Byron on all three, Sophocles on Euripides, Milton on Shakespeare, Reynolds on Gainsborough. The future belongs to criticism. "The subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily." The use of criticism. It makes culture possible, makes the mind a fine instrument, "takes the c.u.mbersome ma.s.s of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence." It recreates the past. It makes us cosmopolitan.
Goethe could not hate France even during her invasion of Germany.
Comparison between ethics and aesthetics. "To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive." "Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us." A swift summary, with a graceful transition to the dawn and opening windows over Piccadilly.
Such is the skeleton of thought that connects all that is said, and, disguised by a wonderful skill, makes even the transitions delightful, and remembers the main purpose again and again without ever wearying us by allowing us to be conscious of repet.i.tion.
But, forgetting these mechanics and listening to that light-hearted conversation, we become aware that we are enjoying the exposition of a point of view without an understanding of which Wilde would be unintelligible as either man or writer. It does not represent him completely; a man"s points of views are as various as his moods. But, with "The Decay of Lying," it does represent what was, perhaps, the dominant mood of his life. The dialogues overlap, but do not contradict each other. It can hardly have been chance that divided them in _Intentions_, by "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," that reflects the mood directly opposite, the mood in which he delighted to see a personality express itself in clothes, in vice, in action of any kind other than the vivid inaction of art. It is more likely to have been self-knowledge.
For the mood that dictated the study of Wainewright was akin to that in which he found it an astounding adventure to entertain poisonous things.
"It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement." Wilde"s tragedy may be traced to the conflict between these moods, the one inviting him to life, the other to art. In either case, life or art matched its colours to seduce his temperament. The mood of the dialogues was that in which he turned, not necessarily always to writing, but to seek experience in art. In this mood he preferred, if you like to put it so, to take life at second-hand, and was happier to speak of Corot than of twilight, of Turner than of sunset. In this mood, like Vivian, he did not seek in j.a.panese art to know j.a.pan, but rather to learn a new country "anywhere out of the world." Ancient Greece did not mean to him the Peloponnesian War, but the candour of Grecian statuary and the small figures of Tanagra, in the folds of whose dancing dresses, that seem always to have caught the tint of the evening sky in their terra-cotta, he found the secret of quite another country than the Greece of the historian. It was always his pleasure to begin where others had ended, and criticism rather than creation came to mean for him the delicate adventures of the intellect, such a life as was the best part of his own. And so criticism became creation for him, building its impressions into things beautiful in themselves, and transforming the life of the critic into something no less delightful than the subjects of his contemplation.
Such a theory of criticism had not been stated before his time, though there had been such critics and such criticism. The abstract usually follows the concrete, and the practice dictates the precept. Wilde had in his mind as he wrote such fine flaming things as Swinburne"s study of Blake, and such slow-moving magnificent pageants as "Marius the Epicurean," in which Pater had criticized a century of manners and ideas. And, perhaps, he did not forget his own "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," that was "a study in green," as well as a summary of the life and talents of Ja.n.u.s Weatherc.o.c.k of The London Magazine.
Beautiful criticism had been made as long ago as when Sidney wrote of the "blind crowder," whose song moved his heart like the sound of a trumpet. But men had not known what they were doing, and made lovely things with quite another purpose. Coleridge set the key for many men"s playing when he said that "the ultimate end of criticism is much more to establish the principles of writing, than to furnish rules how to pa.s.s judgments on what has been written by others; if indeed it were possible that the two could be separated." And Mr. Arthur Symons, who has in our own day made fine critical things, yet says, quite humbly, that "the aim of criticism is to distinguish what is essential in the work of a writer," and again, that "criticism is a valuation of forces." Hazlitt was no further from the truth when he wrote, in a pleasant, rather malicious article on the critics of his time, that "a genuine criticism should, as I take it, reflect the colours, the light and shade, the soul and body of a work." Criticism, as Wilde saw it, was free to do all these things, but had a further duty to itself. Hazlitt, and those who read him in his own day, thought that he was giving opinions, talking, reflecting "the soul and body of a work"; but it is for himself that we read him now, and his subjects and opinions matter little beside the gusto and the fresh wind of the chalk downs that make his essays things in themselves and fit for such criticism as he liked. Wainewright too, who learnt from Hazlitt, "deals," as Wilde saw, "with his impressions of the work as an artistic whole, and tries to translate these impressions into words, to give, as it were, the literary equivalent for his imaginative and mental effect." But he did not say so, and perhaps Walter Pater"s essays were the first to make it impossible not to recognize that criticism was more than a series of judgments, opinions and ideas, necessarily subordinate to the thing criticized.
Wilde, at any rate, recognized this, and carried pa.s.sive recognition into active proclamation of a new creed for critics. He gave them a new creed and a new charter, and, if he had done nothing else, would have earned a place in the history of our literature. He showed that they were free to do all they had ever attempted, to track the secret stream of inspiration to its source, to work out alike the melody and counterpoint of art, to discover its principles, to enjoy its examples, to paint portraits, to talk with their sitters, to enounce ideas, to catch the fleeting sunlight and shadow of impression. They were free to do all this, and for a creed he taught them that criticism is itself a creative art, perhaps the most creative of the arts, certainly an art to be practised with no less delicate care than that of the maker of poems, the teller of stories, the painter of pictures, the man who captures a melody, or the man who shapes a dream in stone.
My private predilections may have led me to lay too much emphasis on the main contention of "The Critic as Artist." I hope not, but must take this opportunity of remembering that, like "The Decay of Lying," this dialogue is rich in other matter than theory. Wilde never, unless in the essay on Wainewright, deliberately set himself to estimate an artist or to paint a portrait. But throughout the two dialogues are scattered fragments of vivid criticism, sometimes a little swift and careless, always subordinated as notes of colour to the prevailing scheme of the whole, but never impersonal or dull. It is impossible to read a page of _Intentions_ without experiencing a delightful stimulus. It is, in my opinion, that one of Wilde"s books that most nearly represents him. In nothing else that he wrote did he come so near to pouring into literature the elixir of intellectual vitality that he royally spilled over his conversation.
The fourth essay in the book is not on the high level of the others. It is more practical and less beautiful, was written earlier than the rest, and published in the year after Wilde"s marriage. It is interesting, but less as a thing in itself than as an indication of the character of Wilde"s knowledge of the theatre. I have therefore pa.s.sed it over to the next chapter.
VII
THE THEATRE
There is a public glory in the art of the theatre, a direct and immediate applause that is nearer to the face-to-face praise and visible worship that is won by conversation than the discreet approval of readers of books. Of all the arts that of the drama is most likely to attract the talker for talk"s sake. By its means he can set his fancies moving on the boards, fling his metaphors dressed and coloured on a monstrous screen, and entertain a thousand listeners at once. Hazlitt never wrote a play; but his was talk with a purpose. He talked to learn, to teach, to think aloud. But Lamb, who talked for the delight of himself and his friends, tried to amuse a larger audience with "Mr. H.,"
and, when that play was d.a.m.ned, joined heartily in the hisses, for fear of being mistaken for the author. Those who conspired at the Mermaid Tavern to send brave argosies of wit trafficking on a bluer sea than ever sailed Drake"s galleons were playwrights to a man. Particularly the theatre attracts those dandies among authors and talkers, for whom social means as much as artistic success--Steele, Congreve, Wilde.
Congreve, like Wilde, went to Trinity College, Dublin (though he was not an Irishman), came to London with but little money, was a public character before he was twenty-five, cared as much for society as for art, grew fat with success, and became a gentleman of the world. The differences between his comedies and Wilde"s are not due to different aims in writing, but only to differences in their personalities, and to the change in public taste during the two centuries that pa.s.sed between "Love for Love" and _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Not until Congreve had had three plays successfully acted did he write one of which "but little ... was prepared for that general taste which seems now to be predominant in the palates of our audience."
It is important in considering Wilde"s early comedies to remember the character of the audience with which he had to contend. His was a public that asked to feel as well as to smile, a public that had grown accustomed to smile with tears in its eyes, a public that was best pleased to laugh loudly and to sob into handkerchiefs, and judged a play by the loudness of the laughs and the number of the handkerchiefs that it made necessary. He had not a Restoration audience of men and women with sharpened wits and a delight in their exercise, ready to smile and quite unready to take anything seriously except amus.e.m.e.nt. It is for that reason that he called _Lady Windermere"s Fan_ "A Play about a Good Woman," instead of making Mrs. Erlynne a Sylvia and punishing Lord Darlington with a marriage.
The spectacular effects of the theatre, the possibilities of delightful dialogue, the public glory, of which he was always rather greedy, drew Wilde to the writing of plays. But beside these less intimate motives he had a genuine dramatic instinct that kept him from his early youth intermittently preparing himself as a playwright. The first thing he wrote after the publication of _Poems_ was a play. He took it with him to America, and on his return wrote another. With the charming braggadocio of one who was quite determined that there should be an Op.
x.x.x. he printed Op. II. on the t.i.tle-page of the private issue of _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_. His public recognition as a playwright was deferred till 1892, but after the writing of _Vera_, which, I suppose, was Op.
I., he seldom ceased to observe and to plan for the stage.
The character of Wilde"s study of the theatre was shown in "The Truth of Masks," and in the dramatic criticism that he wrote in the years immediately following his marriage. It was a study of methods and concerned no less with stage-management than with the drama. Nearly thirty years ago he made a plea for beautiful scenery, and asked for that harmony between costumier and scene-painter that has been achieved in our day by Charles Ricketts and Cayley Robinson under the management of Mr. Herbert Trench. He remarked that painted doors were superior to real ones, and pointed out that properties which need light from more than one side destroy the illumination suggested by the scene-painter"s shadings. From the first his dramatic criticism was written in the wings, not from the point of view of an audience careless of means, observant only of effects. _Vera_ may have been dull, and _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_ unplayable, but actors, at least, shall have no fault to find in the technique of _Lady Windermere"s Fan_. That play seems to me to be no more than a conscious experiment in the use of the knowledge that Wilde had sedulously worked to obtain.
There was a continuity in Wilde"s interest in the theatre wholly lacking in his pa.s.sing fancies for narrative or essay-writing. This, with the fact that his plays brought him his first financial success, has made it usual to consider him as a dramatist whose recreations are represented by his books. Even Mr. Symons, in his article on Wilde as "An Artist in Att.i.tudes," finds that his plays, "the wittiest that have been seen upon the modern stage," expressed, "as it happened by accident, precisely what he himself was best able to express." I cannot help feeling that this is a little unjust to him. His most perfectly successful works, those which most exactly accomplish what they attempt, without sacrificing any part of themselves, are, perhaps, _The Importance of Being Earnest_ and _Salome_. Both these are plays. But neither of them seems to me so characteristic, so inclusive of Wilde as _Intentions_, _De Profundis_, _The Portrait of Mr. W. H._, or even _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. His plays are wilfully limited, subordinated to an aim outside themselves, and, except in the two I have just mentioned, these limitations are not such as to justify themselves by giving freedom to the artist. Some limitations set an artist free for an achievement otherwise impossible. But the limitations of which I complain only made Wilde a little contemptuous of his work. They did not save his talent from preoccupations, but compelled it to a labour in whose success alone he could take an interest.
It is impossible not to feel that Wilde was impatient of the methods and the meanings of his first three successful plays, like a juggler, conscious of being able to toss up six b.a.l.l.s, who is admired for tossing three. These good women, these unselfish, pseudonymous mothers, these men of wit and fashion discomfited to make a British holiday; their temptations, their sacrifices, their defeats, are not taken from any drama played in Wilde"s own mind. He saw them and their adventures quite impersonally; and no good art is impersonal. Salome kissing the pale lips of Iokanaan may once have moved him when he saw her behind the ghostly footlights of that secret theatre in which each man is his own dramatist, his own stage-manager, and his own audience. But Lady Windermere did not return to her husband for Wilde"s sake, and he did not feel that Sir Robert Chiltern"s future mattered either way. He cared only that an audience he despised should be relieved at her return, and that to them the career of a politician should seem to be important. Not until the production of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ did he share the pleasure of the pit. I know a travelling showman who makes "enjoy"
an active verb, and speaks of "enjoying the poor folk" when, for coppers, he lets them ride on merry-go-rounds, and agitate themselves in swing-boats, which offer him no manner of amus.e.m.e.nt. In just this way Wilde "enjoyed" the London audiences with his early plays. He did not enjoy them himself.
Hazlitt said of Congreve that "the workmanship overlays the materials; in Wycherley the casting of the parts and the fable are alone sufficient to ensure success." Wilde may not have read Hazlitt on "The English Comic Writers," but his earlier plays suggest a determination to "ensure success" after the manner of Wycherley, and to overlay the base material necessary for that purpose with wit"s fine workmanship after the manner of Congreve. The fables, the characters, the settings, were chosen on account of their experience; all were veterans with reputations untarnished by any failure in popularity. Some were taken from the English stage, some from the French; all served as the machinery to keep an audience interested and carry Wilde"s voice across the footlights. In the theatre, as in storytelling, he was not unready to work to _bouts-rimes_.
I say, to carry Wilde"s voice across the footlights: that is exactly what his plays do. Those neat, polished sentences, snapping like snuffboxes, are often taken from the books that hold what he chose to preserve of his conversation. An aphorism that has served the author of _The Soul of Man_ and shone for a moment in _Dorian Gray_ is given a new vitality by Lord Illingworth, and what is good enough for Lady Narborough is a little better in the mouth of Dumby. Wilde was never without the power, shared by all amateurs of genius, of using up the odds and ends from one pastime to fill out the detail of another. Doing things, like Merimee, for wagers with himself, he would make plays that should be powerful in their effect on other people, but he would reserve the right to show, even while making them, that he could do something else. He learnt from Musset, and believed, with Fortunio, that "a pun is a consolation for many ills, and a play upon words as good a way as another of playing with thoughts, actions, and people." He consoled himself for his plots by taking extraordinary liberties with them, and amused himself with quips, bons-mots, epigrams and repartee that had really nothing to do with the business in hand. Most of his witty sayings would bear transplanting from one play to another, and it is necessary to consult the book if we would remember in whose mouth they were placed. This is a very different thing from the dialogue of Congreve on the one hand or of J. M. Synge on the other. The whole arrangement in conversation, as he might appropriately have called either _Lady Windermere"s Fan_, _An Ideal Husband_, or _A Woman of No Importance_, was very much lighter than the story that served as its excuse and sometimes rudely interrupted it. It was so sparkling, good-humoured and novel that even the audience for whom he had constructed the story forgave him for putting a brake upon its speed with this quite separate verbal entertainment.
I suppose that this forgiveness encouraged him to believe that the situations and emotional appeals he borrowed from melodrama were not necessary to his success. In _The Importance of Being Earnest_ he threw them bravely overboard, and wrote a play whose very foundation was a pun. Nothing could be a better proof of the inessential nature of those tricks with which he had been making sure of his audience than the immense superiority of this play to the others. Free from the necessity of living up to any drama more serious than its conversation, it preserves a unity of feeling and of tone that sets it upon a higher level. Wit is a little heartless, a little jarring, when flashed over a crisis of conscience, even when we know that the agitated politician is only a figure cut from an ill.u.s.trated paper and mounted on cardboard.
And pa.s.sion, whether of repentance or of indignation, is a little _outre_ in a picture-gallery where Lord Illingworth has said that a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life. In those first three plays, even when Wilde makes a serious effort to get dramatic value out of, for example, the Lord Illingworth"s worldly wisdom, he is quite unable to disguise the fact that it is an effort and serious. Those plays are interesting, amusing, clever, what you will, but their contradictions have cost them beauty. It is not in the least surprising that _The Importance of Being Earnest_, the most trivial of the social plays, should be the only one of them that gives that peculiar exhilaration of spirit by which we recognise the beautiful. It is precisely because it is consistently trivial that it is not ugly. If only once it marred its triviality with a bruise of pa.s.sion, its beauty would vanish with the blow. But it never contradicts itself, and it is worth noticing that its unity, its dovetailing of dialogue and plot, so that the one helps the other, is not achieved at the expense of the conversation, but at that of the mechanical contrivances for filling a theatre that Wilde had not at first felt sure of being able to do without. The dialogue has not been weighted to trudge with the plot; the plot has been lightened till it can fly with the wings of the dialogue.
The two are become one, and the lambent laughter of this comedy is due to the radioactivity of the thing itself, and not to glow-worms incongruously stuck over its surface.
It is not easy to define the quality of that laughter. It is not uproarious enough to provide the sore throat of farce. It is not thoughtful enough to pa.s.s Meredith"s test of comedy. It is not due to a sense of superior intellect, like much of Mr. Shaw"s. It is the laughter of complicity. We do not laugh at but with the persons of the play. We would, if we could, abet the duplicity of Mr. Worthing, and be accessories after the fact to the Bunburying of Algernon. We would even encourage Lady Bracknell"s determined statement, for we are in the secret, and we know--
She only does it to amuse, Because she knows it pleases.
The simultaneous speech of Cecily and Gwendolen is no insult to our intelligence, nor do we boggle for a moment over the delightful impossibility of Lane. We are caught from the beginning by a spirit of delicate fun. We busy ourselves in the intrigues, and would on no account draw back. _The Importance of Being Earnest_ is to solid comedy what filigree is to a silver bowl. We are relieved of our corporeal envelopes, and share with Wilde the pleasure of sporting in the fourth dimension.
Nothing better ill.u.s.trates Wilde"s extraordinary versatility than his almost simultaneous business as two entirely different dramatists. The one wrote the plays we have been discussing, the other, plays so different from these in character that it is hard to believe that they are the work of the same man. These other plays have been called "romantic," a word that hardly distinguishes them from the "romantic"
comedy of _The Importance of Being Earnest_. Still, Gautier and Flaubert have made it possible to attribute to that word a flavour of the South and the East, and these plays have Southern and Eastern settings that are harmonious with their contents. There is no laughter in these plays.
They are nearer to _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_ than to comedy. Wilde delighted in laughter, but also in a quality in emotion almost hostile to laughter, a quality that I can best describe as magnificence. In his prose books both are expressed; if his dramatic writing had been limited to the four plays that brought him success, it would have seemed that the Wilde who wrote _The Sphinx_ had not been represented on the stage.
But, when he was writing _Lady Windermere"s Fan_, or a little earlier, he wrote down, swiftly, as if to relieve himself, a play whose mood was at the opposite end of his range. And, while _The Importance of Being Earnest_ was filling the St. James"s Theatre, he was trying to finish _La Sainte Courtisane_, and had submitted to a manager the latter part of _A Florentine Tragedy_, which he had never been able to begin. When he was released from prison, he left the ma.n.u.script of the first in a cab, and did not complete the second. He had imagined, while in Reading Gaol, two other such plays as _Salome--Ahab and Isabel_, and _Pharaoh_.
These, unfortunately, like _The Cardinal of Arragon_, portions of which Wilde was accustomed to recite, were never written. The non-existence and the incompleteness of these plays are explicable on other grounds than those of inclination. I think that if _Salome_ had been produced with success as soon as it was written, Wilde would very likely not have written his plays about good women and conscience-stricken men of State, or, having written one, would have written no more. It is possible that we owe _The Importance of Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing _Salome_ at the Palace Theatre.
For though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams. He would rather have been a magician than a jester. The well-dressed modern plays starved too many of his intimate desires. He was unable to clothe magnificent emotions in evening dress. But applause was necessary to him. He made sure of it by the modern plays, and had not a chance of securing it by anything else. And so there are four social comedies, and only one _Salome_.
Of the unfinished plays, as they are printed in his works, there is little to be said. _La Sainte Courtisane_ is a beautiful fragment, suggesting a story rather intellectual than emotional, but an admirable framework on which to drape a cloak of imagery. The motive is the same as that of _The Portrait of Mr. W. H._ The woman covered with jewels is converted by the hermit to the love of G.o.d, and he by her to the love of the flesh. They lose their own beliefs in imparting them, and the hermit goes to Alexandria, while the woman remains in the desert. The dialogue is of the same character as that of _Salome_, which we shall presently discuss. We cannot tell how fine a play it might have been. _The Florentine Tragedy_ is less fragmentary. As Wilde left it, it was the latter part of a play in one act in blank verse, beginning with the surprisal of the lovers by the husband. The whole of the conversation between the three had been written. To fit the play for presentation on the stage, Mr. Sturge Moore wrote a preparation for it that cannot be far different from Wilde"s design, and is now printed with the rest. It is not the business of this book to consider the brilliant and vigorous poetry of Mr. Sturge Moore, though it is impossible not to remember with delight pa.s.sages from many of his books, always rich in ore, and again and again melting into purest gold. His induction to Wilde"s play is perfectly calculated. He catches the spirit of Wilde"s verse, and subdues his own to agreement. His is the difficult task of so drawing Bianca"s character that she shall be able without incongruity to beg the young lord to kill her husband, and, when the young lord is himself killed, to come dazed towards the merchant she has despised, with the question--
"Why Did you not tell me you were so strong?"
and receive the answer--
"Why Did you not tell me you were beautiful?"
Wilde"s is a piece of c.u.mulative drama that keeps up an increasing tension in the audience from the moment that the husband enters till the moment when the lover dies and those two sentences are spoken. The play resembles _The d.u.c.h.ess of Padua_ in being unable to disguise an aloof intention, an extraneous will-power, that is perfectly hidden in the earlier _Salome_.
It is surprising to think that _Salome_ was not written with a view to production. It was only offered to Sarah Bernhardt when she asked Wilde why he had not written a play for her. The stage-directions, I am told, set almost insoluble problems to the manager, whose ideas are limited by the conventions of the modern theatre. The final speech of Salome is of a length that demands, if abridgment is to be avoided, a consummate actress and an audience in a state of extraordinary tension. But, since the play induces such a tension, the lack of an actress can hardly be urged as a blemish on its technique. And since, when the play is produced it is extremely successful, we can only rejoice that it has shown, if only accidentally, the inadequacy of once accepted dogmas of theatrical presentation. An appeal to the populace is not good criticism, but no badly built play can show such a record of success as _Salome_. Mr. Ross will, I am sure, allow me to use some of the heavy fire of facts with which he answered those critics who spoke of the play as having been "dragged from obscurity" when it was produced in England in 1905. "In 1901, within a year of the author"s death, it was produced in Berlin; from that moment it has held the European stage. It has run for a longer consecutive period in Germany than any play by any Englishman, not excepting Shakespeare. Its popularity has extended to all countries where it is not prohibited. It is performed throughout Europe, Asia, and America. It is played even in Yiddish."
But before discussing the play itself let me set down the facts on both sides of the mild controversy over the writing of it in French. Wilde had talked of the play for some time before he wrote it, and talked of it chiefly in Paris. Frenchmen had applauded the fragments he recited.
It was to them that he wished to show it when completed. This is the reason why it shares with "Vathek" and "The Grammont Memoirs" the distinction of being a work written in French by an English-speaking man of genius. It has been suggested that the language made it possible, but _La Sainte Courtisane_ is enough to show that it could have been written in English. There are slight disagreements over Wilde"s knowledge of French. M. Andre Gide says that "he knew French admirably, but pretended to have to look for the words for which he meant his listeners to wait.
He had almost no accent, or at most only what it pleased him to retain to give a new and strange aspect to his words." On the other hand, M.
Stuart Merrill writes of his speaking French with a fantasy that, pleasant enough in conversation, would have produced a deplorable impression in the theatre. For example, Wilde ended one of his stories with "Et puis, alors, le roi il est mouru."
These pieces of evidence must be remembered when we consider the composition of _Salome_. Mr. Ross says: "The play was pa.s.sed for press by no less a writer than Marcel Schwob, whose letter to the Paris publisher, returning the proofs and mentioning two or three slight alterations, is still in my possession. Marcel Schwob told me some years afterwards that he thought it would have spoiled the spontaneity and character of Wilde"s style if he had tried to harmonize it with the diction demanded by the French Academy." M. Merrill says: "Un jour Wilde me remit son drame qu"il avait ecrit tres rapidement, de premier jet, en francais, et me demanda d"en corriger les erreurs manifestes. Ce ne fut pas chose facile de faire accepter a Wilde toutes mes corrections.... Je me rappelle que la plupart des tirades de ses personnages commencaient par l"expletif: _enfin!_ En ai-je a.s.sez biffe, des _enfin!_ Mais je m"apercus bientot que le bon Wilde n"avait en mon gout qu"une confiance relative, et je le recommandai aux soins de Rette. Celui-ci continua mon travail de correction et d"emendation. Mais Wilde finit par se mefier de Rette autant que de moi, et ce fut Pierre Louys qui donna le dernier coup de lime au texte de _Salome_." In comment, I shall do no more than notice that the play was written in 1891, and not published till 1893.
The two stories do not necessarily contradict each other, for Marcel Schwob did not suggest that he saw the ma.n.u.script, and M. Merrill"s reminiscence is concerned with _Salome_ long before it was sent to the printers.
The question is not one of any great importance. It is sufficient for our purpose to observe that the French of _Salome_, whether as Wilde wrote it or as it survived the emendations of his friends, is very simple in construction. Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea, did not use the finer subtleties of the language in which she loved Iokanaan. A perusal of Maeterlinck"s "Les Sept Princesses" had taught her to use a speech whose power depends on its simplicity. She, Herod, Herodias and all their entourage, speak like children who have had a French nurse. Their speech is made of short sentences, direct a.s.sertions and negations, that run like pages beside the progress of the play. They show, these short sentences, what is happening, the more forcefully, because they are themselves aloof from it and busied with their own concerns. For example:--