ABSTRACT
A dramatic critic of credit and renown made a confession to me the other day. ‘I have been spending the morning,’ said he, ‘in trying to write my notice of Oscar’s new play, and I have found it jolly tough work. It’s easy enough to point out scores of faults, and one has to point them out; but, hang it all, one can’t help feeling that there is more in the fellow than in all the other beggars put together.’ That happens to be precisely my own experience. I feel that the ‘other beggars’ can, many of them, give Mr. Oscar Wilde points and a beating at the mere cat’s-cradle game of dramatic intrigue-weaving, and yet in point of intellect none of them can touch him. Nine English playwrights out often, with all their technical skill, their knowledge of ‘the sort of thing the public want, my boy,’ strike one as naïve persons; they accept current commonplaces, they have no power of mental detachment, of taking up life betwixt finger and thumb, and looking at it as a queer ironic game. But Mr. Wilde is the tenth man, sceptic, cynic, sophist, as well as artist, who moves at ease amid philosophical generalisations, and is the dupe of nothing-except a well-turned phrase. This temperament is common enough among the bookmen, but among the playwrights it is exceedingly rare. And it is a temperament peculiarly sympathetic to the critic; because, when it occurs with a lower vital power, it is the very temperament which finds expression in criticism. In a play of Mr. Pinero or Mr. H.A.Jones, or one of the ‘other beggars,’ there is, I feel, always something fundamentally alien from my own mental processes. Under no conceivable circumstances can I fancy myself writing one of these plays. But, impudent as the assertion may seem, a play of Mr. Wilde’s is just the sort of play which I am sure I could have written-had I Mr. Wilde’s ability. The ‘other beggars’ differ from me in kind; Mr. Wilde differs from me only in degree. I am quite aware that that difference isstill enormous. All I want to make clear is that the fact of Mr. Wilde’s temperament being the critical temperament-raised to a higher powerprompts criticism to treat Mr. Wilde with peculiar tenderness.
