ABSTRACT
Lady Windermere’s Fan-which, as I was unable to be present on the first night, it was impossible to notice last week, while it was absolutely a novelty-shall receive to-day a brief, though by no means an unfavourable comment. In it Mr. Oscar Wilde-whose unconventionalities (of speech and cigarette, for instance) lie, after all, very muchupon the surface-has managed to write a play by no means so extraordinarily unlike other people’s as he might enjoy to believe, and as certain of the critics, on whom the speech and the cigarette appear to have made a great impression, have good-naturedly and gently assumed. The construction, the story, even the very moral of the story-unassisted even by speech and cigarette-these things could have been much as they are. Many a dramatist would have been capable of them. The ‘incident of the fan’ has recalled to everybody quite a recent work of Mr. Haddon Chambers’s; but it has hardly, I suppose, occurred to the least intelligent to suggest plagiarism. There is here doubtless a mere coincidence, and it is only worth mentioning because it is an instance of the extent to which Mr. Wilde and the dramatist who is confessedly accepted and ‘popular’ have travelled the same road. Nuances of treatment there are certainly-apart altogether from his unrelaxcd smartness of dialogue-yes, yes, let me say, also, certain boldnesses of conception, which separate Mr. Wilde, in this the most serious of his efforts, from even the clever playwright who is bent upon conciliating the sympathies of the upper boxes, and who has it upon his mind to square the conduct and final disposition of his characters with the views of life which may obtain among the readers of Mr. William Black and Dr. George Macdonald. There is the character of Mrs. Erlynne, for example: a woman not without good points, though with infinite faults and a past that she knows has been disgraceful. The dramatist bent upon conciliation would have made her repentant; Mr. Wilde does nothing of the kind. He recognises the nature of the woman, and is faithful to the formula that the leopard does not change her spots. Much more than Bohemian-for Bohemia has room for unselfishness, and exacts, as the very condition of its citizenship, a capacity for impulsive affection-more, much more than Bohemian, demimondaine in the true sense-the sense of Dumas fils1 what would Mrs. Erlynne do among the proprieties and domesticities? Did she repent at the end, her’s could be only such a taming and a penitence as that of the down-trodden Jew in ‘Holy Cross Day,’ whose penances and humiliations had no meaning and no heart in them, but were devised simply that they might
Usher in worthily Christian Lent.
