ABSTRACT
There is no freshness in Mr. Wilde’s ideas; there is no freshness in his method of presenting those ideas. Flaubert long ago exhausted all that was to be got out of making John the Baptist the hero of a story of sensualism. When the adaptors of Flaubert put his story upon the stage they well-nigh exhausted the possibilities of shocking any shockable Christian by the device of skirting blasphemy. But the imitation which dominates the play follows it into particulars. The appearance of Salomé before the soldiers seems but a reminiscence of the appearance of Salammbô before the mercenaries, chilled in the process of reproduction. Herodias has her hair powdered with blue, another effect from Flaubert. Was not Salammbô’s hair powdered with a violet dust when she first appeared before the eyes of Matho; was not the hair of the Queen of Sheba powdered with blue when she appeared, a phantasm, before the eyes of Anthony in the desert? The squabbles of the Jews among themselves do but parody the squabbles of the Christians in the Tentation. The passion of the young Syrian for Salomé is a recollection of Gautier in the mood of Une Nuit de Cléopâtre. As for the portions that belong to Maeterlinck-the jugglery with the moon’s resemblances, the short, repeated sentences in the phrase-book manner-they, in the words of Celia, are laid on with a trowel.
