Oscar Wilde

by G.K. Chesterton
Originally published in the Daily News, 1909.
Later collected in A Handful of Authors.
The time has certainly come when this extraordinary man, Oscar Wilde, may be
considered merely as a man of letters. He sometimes pretended that art was
more important than morality, but that was mere play-acting. Morality or
immorality was more important than art to him and everyone else. But the very
cloud of tragedy that rested on his career makes it easier to treat him as a mere
artist now. His was a complete life, in that awful sense in which your life and
mine are incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our sins. In that sense one
might call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect equation; it cancels out. On
the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil; on the other the healthy
horror of the punishment. We have it all the more because both sin and
punishment were highly civilized; that is, nameless and secret. Some have said
that Wilde was sacrificed; let it be enough for us to insist on the literal meaning
of the word. Any ox that is really sacrificed is made sacred.
But the very fact that monstrous wrong and monstrous revenge cancel each
other, actually does leave this individual artist in that very airy detachment
which he professed to desire. We can really consider him solely as a man of
letters.

About Oscar Wilde, as about other wits, Disraeli or Bernard Shaw, men wage a
war of words, some calling him a great artist and others a mere charlatan. But
this controversy misses the really extraordinary thing about Wilde: the thing
that appears rather in the plays than the poems. He was a great artist. He also
was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise
the tricks that he employs. A vulgar demagogue is not a charlatan; he is as
coarse as his crowd. He may be lying in every word, but he is sincere in his style.
Style (as Wilde might have said) is only another name for spirit. Again, a man
like Mr. Bernard Shaw is not a charlatan. I can understand people thinking his
remarks hurried or shallow or senselessly perverse, or blasphemous, or merely
narrow. But I cannot understand anyone failing to feel that Mr. Shaw is being as
suggestive as he can, is giving his brightest and boldest speculations to the
rabble, is offering something which he honestly thinks valuable. Now Wilde
often uttered remarks which he must have known to be literally valueless. Shaw
may be high or low, but he never talks down to the audience. Wilde did talk
down, sometimes very far down.
Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the
public. They professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist
must not work for the bourgeois. The truth is that no artist so really great ever
worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of
thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect
on the middle classes. He studied them with exquisite attention, and knew
exactly how to shock and how to please them. Mr. Shaw often gets above them
in seraphic indignation, and often below them in sterile and materialistic
explanations. He disgusts them with new truths or he bores them with old
truths; but they are always living truths to Bernard Shaw. Wilde knew how to
say the precise thing which, whether true or false, is irresistible. As, for example,
"I can resist everything but temptation."
But he sometimes sank lower. One might go through his swift and sparkling
plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real
epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram
which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization. This is
what I mean by saying that he was strictly a charlatan - among other things. He
descended below himself to be on top of others. He became purposely stupider
than Oscar Wilde that he might seem cleverer than the nearest curate. He
lowered himself to superiority; he stooped to conquer.

One might easily take examples of the phrase meant to lightly touch the truth
and the phrase meant only to bluff the bourgeoisie. For instance, in "A Woman
of No Importance," he makes his chief philosopher say that all thought is
immoral, being essentially destructive; "Nothing survives being thought of."
That is nonsense, but nonsense of the nobler sort; there is an idea in it. It is, like
most professedly modern ideas, a death-dealing idea not a life-giving one; but it
is an idea. There is truly a sense in which all definition is deletion. Turn a few
pages of the same play and you will find somebody asking, "What is an immoral
woman ?" The philosopher answers, "The kind of woman a man never gets tired
of." Now that is not nonsense, but rather rubbish. It is without value of any sort
or kind. It is not symbolically true; it is not fantastically true; it is not true at all.
Anyone with the mildest knowledge of the world knows that nobody can be such
a consuming bore as a certain kind of immoral woman. That vice never tires
men, might be a tenable and entertaining lie; that the individual instrument of
vice never tires them is not, even as a lie, tenable enough to be entertaining.
Here the great wit was playing the cheap dandy to the incredibly innocent; as
much as if he had put on paper cuffs and collars. He is simply shocking a tame
curate; and he must be rather a specially tame curate even to be shocked. This
irritating duplication of real brilliancy with snobbish bluff runs through all his
three comedies. "Life is much too important to be taken seriously"; that is the
true humorist. "A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life"; that is the
charlatan. "Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the
improbable"; that is said by a fine philosopher. "Nothing is so fatal to a
personality as the keeping of promises, unless it be telling the truth"; that is said
by a tired quack. "A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not
love her"; that is wild truth. "Good intentions are invariably ungrammatical";
that is tame trash.
But while he had a strain of humbug in him, which there is not in the
demagogues of wit like Bernard Shaw, he had, in his own strange way, a much
deeper and more spiritual nature than they. Queerly enough, it was the very
multitude of his falsities that prevented him from being entirely false. Like a
many-coloured humming top, he was at once a bewilderment and a balance. He
was so fond of being many-sided that among his sides he even admitted the
right side. He loved so much to multiply his souls that he had among them one
soul at least that was saved. He desired all beautiful things - even God.

His frightful fallacy was that he would not see that there is reason in everything,
even in religion and morality. Universality is a contradiction in terms. You
cannot be everything if you are anything. If you wish to be white all over, you
must austerely resist the temptation to have green spots or yellow stripes. If you
wish to be good all over, you must resist the spots of sin or the stripes of
servitude. It may be great fun to be many-sided; but however many sides one
has there cannot be one of them which is complete and rounded innocence. A
polygon can have an infinite number of sides; but no one of its sides can be a
circle.