ABSTRACT
Conversely, there is such a thing as the insincere presentation of sincerity. Wilde, it is clear enough, was much under the influence of two great Frenchmen, Augier and the younger Dumas, whose authority in the theatre, though on the wane, was even then scarcely to beignored. From Augier he took his ‘natural’ sons who unwittingly raise an arm against their father, and his ‘adventuresses’ vainly attempting to force the portals of ‘society’; from Dumas fils he took what no English dramatist can afford even to touch, the tirade. Both these men were serious at heart, where Wilde never was; both did sincerely present sincerity, which Wilde never could. Both, in short, were romantic, with the perfervid emotionalism of the romantic tradition; and it was with an eye on its tendency to degenerate into the mere simulation of emotion that Sainte-Beuve said, l’écueil particulier du genre romantique, c’est le faux.1 You will find le faux in Wilde so soon as you turn to any of his presentations of the sincere. The husband and wife in Lady Windermere’s Fan are mere mechanical dolls, who are none the more human for behaving like lunatics. The mother and son and the Puritan maidens in A Woman of No Importance discredit virtue and seriousness by their hopeless inferiority in interest to the vicious and frivolous of the company. The Puritan maiden delivers a Dumasian tirade
against English society, with variations by Wilde (‘It lives like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold’) which is not only rhetoric, but ‘twopence coloured’ rhetoric. For mark the peculiar penalty of insincerity: it not merely makes a nonentity of the author’s personage, but ruins his style!
