ABSTRACT
Mr. Oscar Wilde’s play belongs to the school of which The Red Lamp is a conspicuous example. It is, like The Red Lamp, a play which owes its title and its theme to a piece of domestic furniture. In the one piece the fortunes of a Russian Princess depended upon the position of a lamp as scarlet as the cry of Montanaro’s passionate parrot. In the other piece the fortunes of an Englishwoman depend upon the proprietorship of a fan as white as Lady Windermere’s fortuitous innocence. As a rule plays built up round some inanimate object are rather boring; but that could not be said of The Red Lamp or of Lady Windermere’s Fan. On the contrary both are very amusing plays. Mr. Wilde’s pictures of exalted London life are as faithful as Mr. Tristram’s studies of St. Petersburg society; if Mr. Tristram was more adventurous, Mr. Wilde is more epigrammatic. Indeed, it is obvious that Mr. Wilde regards a play as a vehicle merely for the expression of epigram and the promul-gation of paradox. Lady Windermere’s Fan is not really a play; it is a pepper-box of paradoxes. The piece is improbable without being interesting. It is a not too ingenious blend of the Eden of Mr. Edgar Saltus, with The Idler of Mr. Haddon Chambers, and the Francillion of Alexander Dumas the Younger. Its people act in an unnatural manner without arousing sympathy or hostility by their actions. The situations are weatherworn. But the paradox is the thing, not the play. The Great God Paradox has his impassioned prophet in Mr. Wilde and all Mr. Wilde’s puppets chant his litany. It has a quaint effect to find, in this Cloud-Cuckoo-Town of Mr. Wilde’s, all its inhabitants equally cynical, equally paradoxical, equally epigrammatic. Were the trick to become too stale it might prove tiresome, for it is, after all, but a question of inverted vocabulary. Mr. Wilde’s figures talk a Back Slang of their own; once accept the conditions of the game, and the fantastic becomes the familiar. Black is white, day is night; well and good, by all means. But what next? While it is fresh, however, this kind of fantasy is exceedingly diverting.…
