ABSTRACT
Oscar Wilde’s legacy as essayist, fanciful story-teller, poet, and novelist, will probably be dealt with by others. I say probably, for the numerous band that used to consecrate panem et circenses1 to him, and was only too glad to obtain leave to hold one of the multi-coloured streamers waving from his triumphal car,— that band had dwindled down to a few stray devotees, fair friends in bad weather. The rest have shunned the artist because the man had gone under. But I wish to speak here of the dramatist who raised such great hopes, who did so much in a short space of time, and then suddenly withered like a tree struck by lightning. Oscar Wilde has contributed but four plays to our stage, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of no Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of being Ernest, while a fifth, Salomé, which was perhaps his best, was written in French and prohibited by the censor. These four plays all run more or less on the same lines. They are what one could call society plays, pictures of fashionable life in which an unmistakable air of reality is happily wedded to playful satire. Their greatest merit is their dialogue; the plot is of secondary importance, and the characterisation is such as one would expect from an observant man who has seen much and read more. In other words, Oscar Wilde did not dive very deeply below the surface of human nature, but found, to a certain extent rightly, that there is more on the surface of life than is seen by the eyes of most people-he believed as much in veneer as in deep, untarnishable colour. And, as in the drama veneer is likely to please, while depth of colour is often productive of dulness, he preferred to concentrate his acumen on the language rather than on the underlying humanity of his plays. In this he proved that he knew himself, for lightness of touch, not to say a certain flippancy, was a paramount feature of his gifted nature; and when he was all gaiety, sardonism, and persiflage, as in The Importance of being
Ernest, he was happiest. The Aristophanic vein sparkled in it, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that this last English play of the unfortunate author was the wittiest comedy of the nineties.
