ABSTRACT
We are somewhat late in noticing Mr. Oscar Wilde’s latest play-but as to that there is a certain proverb. By dint of long persistence in a habit of whimsical eccentricity, not to mention the authorship of Lady Windermere’s Fan, Mr. Wilde has more or less fairly earned his right to be taken seriously as a dramatist. In every line A Woman of No Impor-tance betrays itself as the work of Mr. Wilde, and the two characters Lord Illingworth and Mrs. Allonby are, as a matter of dialogue, absolutely Mr. Wilde himself. The story-an extremely slight one for four acts-cannot be regarded as pleasant or satisfactory, though there is no need to attach any great importance to the reminiscences of other plays which crop up from time to time. A peer of brilliant conversational powers has just appointed as his secretary a young fellow whom a chance meeting with the mother, his former victim and mistress, reveals as his own natural son, contends with the mother for the right to control and promote the youngster’s career, and finally, with no great show of feeling, offers her marriage, which she refuses. This is the story which begins somewhere in the second act, and leaves mother, son, and a young American heiress whom he is about to marry, on their way to live out their lives in a country where their pitiful, if not shameful, history is unknown. Lord Illingworth is a bad man, so bad in his talk that Mr. Henry Arthur Jones or the London Journal would have made him a duke at once, and mean enough in his actions to qualify as a subject for a pessimistic lady novelist. He is not quite human, and is little more than a machine for the utterance of paradox and epigram, most of them, though by no means all, wonderfully clever, but bearing upon them the hall-mark of insincerity. To make the character reasonably possible this insincerity should have been merely affected, for the man has quite enough to do to atone for his early sin. That atonement should have been made and accepted. A further reason for such an amendment may be found in the character of Mrs. Arbuthnot. There is no need to be too nicely analytical here; but, although, according to the rather strained morality of the good young American heiress, such a union might be a disgrace, Mrs. Arbuthnot’s motherly instinct might have prompted her to a sacrifice which we cannot think would have been very costly either from a dramatic or a worldly point of view. Truth to tell, Gerald Arbuthnot is far from interesting, and Hester Worsley is, like him, something of a bore and a prig. Indeed, Mr. Wilde does not shine as a depictor of candour and innocence. His enthusiasms are flat and his moralizings tedious. Gerald’s interest in his patron appears to be prompted by his hope of advancement, and the whole force of the strong, if not very novel, situation at the end of the third act is completely destroyed by the fact that his bold intervention, when his sweetheart has been insulted by Illingworth, follows on his mealy-mouthed comment on his mother’s story.
