This section contains pertinent, and occasionally pithy, comments on Mr Wilde by his contemporaries, those who have felt his influence and those who have sought to avoid it. The commentors are as diverse as Dorothy Parker, James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Neil Bartlett and Camille Paglia.

Laurence Housman: In his introduction to Echo de Paris:

. . . the impression left on me . . . is that Oscar Wilde was incomparably the most accomplished talker I had ever met. The smooth, flowing utterance, sedate and self-possessed, oracular in tone, whimsical in substance, carried on without halt, or hesitation, or change of word, with the queer zest of a man perfect at the game, and conscious that, for the moment at least, he was back at his old form again; this, combined with the pleasure, infectious to his listeners, of finding himself once more in a group of friends whose view of his downfall was not the world's view, made memorable to others besides myself a reunion more happily prolonged than this selected portion of it would indicate.

George Bernard Shaw: On conversation with Mr Wilde:

Wilde and I got on extraordinarily well on this occasion. I had not to talk myself, but to listen to a man telling me stories better than I could have told them.... And he had an audience on whom not one of his subtlest effects was lost. And so for once our meeting was a success; and I understood why Morris, when he was dying slowly, enjoyed a visit from Wilde more than from anyone else.

James Joyce: On Mr Wilde's detractors:

His detractors . . . an imperfectly warm-blooded race, apparently conceive him as a great white caterpiller.

Percival Almy: Writing in Punch, 1894:

His admirers are divided into two classes: first, those who do not believe a word he says--who call him Humourist; and secondly, those who are perfectly satisfied with the truthfulness of his statements as applied to their neighbours--who call him Satirist; and as these two classes constitute a very large proportion of Society, the secret of Mr Wilde's popularity as a writer is at once proclaimed.

W E Henley: Editor, National Observer:

There is not a man or woman in the English-speaking world possessed of the treasure of a wholesome mind who is not under a deep debt of gratitude to the Marquess of Queensberry for destroying the High Priest of the Decadents. The obscene impostor, whose prominence has been a social outrage ever since he transferred from Trinity Dublin to Oxford his vices his follies, and his vanities, has been exposed, and that thoroughly at last.

Dorothy Parker: On Mr Wilde's mastery of the epigram:

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to make an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

I suppose there are now few survivors among the people who had the delight of hearing Oscar Wilde talk. Of these I am one.

I have had the privilege of listening also to many other masters of table-talk--Meredith and Swinburne, Edmund Gosse and Henry James, Augustine Birrell and Arthur Balfour, Gilbert Chesterton and Desmond MacCarthy and Hilaire Belloc--all of them splendid in their own way. But assuredly Oscar in his way was the greatest of them all--the most spontaneous and yet the most polished, the most soothing and yet the most surprising.

That his talk was mostly monologue was not his own fault. His manners were very good; he was careful to give his guests or his fellow-guests many a conversational opening; but seldom did anyone respond with more than a very few words. Nobody was willing to interrupt the music of so magnificent a virtuoso. To have heard him consoles me for not having heard Dr Johnson or Edmund Burke.

Camille Paglia: On Mr Wilde on Art:

Wilde constantly talks about Art, but his actual commentary on the visual arts is sparse and inert. I think that, as a primarily verbal intelligence, he had little feeling for painting. Whistler made some tart remarks about Wilde's trespass into his territory. Wilde's stage directions to An Ideal Husband are full of allusions to art, comparing the characters to paintings by Van Dyck, Watteau, Lawrence. There is a chatty superficiality or name-dropping: Watteau would have loved to paint them. 52 Paintings are being seen vaguely and generically.

Neil Bartlett: On the significance of De Profundis:

. . .Of course, Oscar Wilde did not say nothing. Neither are we silent. We should not assume that gay London stopped, even temporarily, after the trial. In prison, knowing that everything he wrote would be scrutinized by the prison censors, Wilde tried to speak again. In the images of a writer imprisoned he recognized a true image of his condition. He wrote another letter, one which contains the following phrase: You must read this letter... right through, though each word may become to you as the fire or knife of the surgeon that makes the delicate flesh burn or bleed. At the top of the page he wrote H.M. Prison, Reading, and then he begins the letter, as before, with Dear Bosie. This is no simple or hurried note. It takes up eighty-four pages in the Complete Works, and is an elaborate and obsessive attempt to say exactly what the court had not wanted to hear: what had actually happened in his life, his life with Douglas. It amasses the fondly and bitterly remembered details of that life not as evidence for or against the author, but in order to describe what happened. This letter (which we now call De Profundis) abolishes the titillating drama of revelation and indiscretion. Although we do not believe that Wilde ever really told the truth, we recognize this impulse to record the actual details of a career. We are moved and fascinated because rarely, if ever, had so many consecutive pages been devoted to describing this strange business of what two men do when they are together.
 
 

                                                          THOUGHTS
 

                                                            © Carolina Gómez Martínez

                                                            Created 20-12-2000