The medievalism of Pugin and the Pre-Raphaelites, dominant in Victorian culture
for a generation, was now to become one of the poses of the Aesthetes, and a source
for one of the styles of the Decadents. But Patienceproved prophetic of the relations
ofthe artist and the press in the age of the media. A good way to hit the headlines is
to allow rumours of your private life to scandalize public morality, a trail blazed by
Byron and followed by modern British ‘conceptual artists’ in the 1990s. Wilde and
James Whistler, who were among those laughed at on the stage of D’Oyly Carte’s
Savoy operas, sat in the front row at the first performance. Wilde was then sent by
D’Oyly Carte on a lecture tour of the USA to be, in the words of Max Beerbohm, ‘a
sandwich board for Patience’. But the gods of publicity know that there is a time to
build up and a time to tear down, and the doubts of ‘everyone’ about the ‘particularly
pure young man’ were to be horribly fulfilled in Wilde’s very public decline and fall.nA revival of drama
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingall O’Flahertie Wills Wilde(1854–1900), son of a famous Dublin
surgeon,had gone from Trinity College to Oxford, then to London, which he made
his headquarters, to publicize aestheticism and himself. A brilliant talker, he put his
art into his lifestyle.Fascinating as Wilde’s act is, his achievement is less than that of
the comparably flamboyant Byron. Serious emotion comes out as sickly sentiment
in his early poems and fiction, and in The Ballad of Reading Jail (1898) and De
Profundis (1905),written after his fall. (Lord Queensbury had accused Wilde of
homosexual practices, a serious legal offence – Wilde’s relations with Queensbury’s
son, Lord Alfred Douglas, gave rise to the charge, though some of the facts remain
obscure.Wilde rashly sued for libel, lost, and went to jail, dying in exile in France
and converting to Rome on his deathbed.) The Romantic movement is sometimes
dated from ‘Ossian’ Macpherson’s ‘The Death of Oscar’ (1759). Ossian provided
Wilde with his first and second names, names of legend. The death of Wilde began
a legend of Saint Oscar, which has been the source of much newspaper copy and a
little literature.
Wilde is a brilliantly provocative critic, but his distinction lies in his comedies,
Lady Windermere’s Fan,A Woman of No Importance,An Ideal Husband and The
Importance of Being Earnest, staged in 1892–5. The last has been rated the best
English comedy since Sheridan, Goldsmith or even Congreve, and is more quoted
than any play not by Shakespeare. Only Bernard Shaw was unamused. The play on
Ernest and ‘earnest’ is resolved in the play’s last line, in which Jack Worthing discov-
er s that he is in fact Ernest Moncrieff, and is thus able to marry Gwendolen Fairfax,
who will only marry him ifhe is called Ernest. He releases his ward, Cicely Cardew,
to marry Algernon Moncrieff. The cleverly managed plot is a pretext for absurd
dialogue full of paradox. Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s mother, questions Worthing
about his background,and finds that he has money.
LADY BRACKNELL: And now to minor matters. Are your parents living?
JACK: I have lost both my parents.
LADY B: Both? To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune – to lose both seems
like carelessness. Who was your father? Was he born in what the Radical papers call
the purple of commerce, or did he rise from the ranks of aristocracy?314 11 · LATE VICTORIAN LITERATURE: 1880–1900