ABSTRACT
It is somewhat surprising to find Mr Oscar Wilde, who does not usually model himself on Mr Henry Arthur Jones, giving his latest play a five-chambered title like The Case of Rebellious Susan. So I suggest with some confidence that The Importance of Being Earnest dates from a period long anterior to Susan. However it may have been retouched immediately before its production, it must certainly have been written before Lady Windermere’s Fan. I do not suppose it to be Mr Wilde’s first play: he is too susceptible to fine art to have begun otherwise than with a strenuous imitation of a great dramatic poem, Greek or Shakespearian; but it was perhaps the first which he designed for practical commercial use at the West End theatres. The evidence of this is abundant. The play has a plot-a gross anachronism; there is a scene between the two girls in the second act quite in the literary style of Mr Gilbert, and almost inhuman enough to have been conceived by him; the humour is adulterated by stock mechanical fun to an extent that absolutely scandalizes one in a play with such an author’s name to it; and the punning title and several of the more farcical passages recall theepoch of the late H.J.Byron. The whole has been varnished, and here and there veneered, by the author of A Woman of no Importance; but the general effect is that of a farcical comedy dating from the seventies, unplayed during that period because it was too clever and too decent, and brought up to date as far as possible by Mr Wilde in his now completely formed style. Such is the impression left by the play on me. But I find other critics, equally entitled to respect, declaring that The Importance of Being Earnest is a strained effort of Mr Wilde’s at ultra-modernity, and that it could never have been written but for the opening up of entirely new paths in drama last year by Arms and the Man. At which I confess to a chuckle.
