The chain of Fate is forged with strong links. Wilde’s life was shaped with all the rigour of a Greek tragedy, and though he had ample opportunities to elude his doom, he stood his ground, as if obedient to a summons of destiny from a sphere beyond human calculation. What Nietzsche calls amor fati can mean a conscious embrace of what must be endured. Wilde practised that heroic virtue in prison, with a consciousness that his ordeal was a ‘debt to society’ in a more than ordinary sense: ‘I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards…. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion…. The thing that I have to do, if the brief remainder of my days is not to be maimed, marred, and incomplete, is to absorb into my nature all that has been done to me…. Whatever is realised is right.’ But there is also a more passive, unconscious amor fati, and this seems to have guided Wilde’s erring steps from the start. Here I should like to chart the course of his destiny by focusing on the role played in it by a certain musical comedy, and noting an uncanny parallel with the role played in the destiny of Socrates by a certain farcical drama.
Aristophanes
Aristophanes’s (c. 447 - c. 386 BCE) Clouds (Nephelai) is a topsy-turvy farce, satirizing a ridiculous fad, just as Gilbert and Sullivan’s light opera Patience (1881) does. Aristophanes targets the intellectualist cult surrounding Socrates, while Gilbert and Sullivan target the aesthetic cult of which Oscar Wilde was quickly identified as the central figure. The term ‘Aristophanic’ was used at the time both of Wilde’s comedies and of comic satires on him, and W. S. Gilbert in particular attracted the epithet; his politically charged play The Happy Land, banned by the Lord Chamberlain, was ‘the nearest approach to Aristophanes seen on the Victorian stage. Of course Punch said it was Aristophanes with a whip and bludgeon’ (Jane W. Stedman). Gilbert had not been to Oxford but to King’s College, London, and so may not have been as well-acquainted with the classics as Wilde. Max Beerbohm remarked in 1894: ‘It is how many years since Patience was produced? Yet our Aristophanuncules are still pegging away at him.’ That Wilde must often have been referred to as a ‘corrupter of youth’ like Socrates is suggested by another remark of Beerbohm’s to that effect.
Clouds was produced in 423 BCE and revised later. Plato’s Symposium, composed after Aristophanes’s death, purports to describe a dinner of 416 BCE. ‘Rather surprisingly, Socrates is not made to show any resentment, nor Aristophanes any embarrassment, on the subject of The Clouds; this although Plato believed, as we know from his Apology, that The Clouds were a factor in creating the prejudice that contributed to Socrates’ condemnation in 399. I think we must here regard Plato as being faithful to the relation between the two men at the assumed date of the party. Neither Socrates nor Aristophanes could have any idea in 416 what would happen in 399’ (Alan H. Sommerstein). Aristophanes is remembered as a flayer of Socrates and his movement just as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience is seen as demolishing aestheticism. But in both cases the comic dramatists were closer to their alleged targets than to the mob that bayed for their blood. Socrates may well have enjoyed being caricatured by Aristophanes, and may himself have been more irreverent at the age when Aristophanes first knew him than the older sager man whom Plato portrays. Wilde likewise did not resent this kind of irreverent publicity, and indeed launched his own career as a promoter of Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera, impersonating their aesthete Bunthorne in the USA.
Richard Ellmann says that ‘He finished off Gilbert and Sullivan in The Importance of Being Earnest, where the stage direction says of Jack and Algernon, “They whistle some dreadful popular air from a British opera.”’ But actually that could be a homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, for their ‘topsy-turvy’ style of farce is a major influence on the play, along with a tradition of Victorian farce. In the end did Gilbert and Sullivan finish him off? For launched on his American tour as a promoter of Patience, ‘Wilde found ways to act and speak in full knowledge that they would be mocked. To be derided so was part of his plan. Notoriety is fame’s wicked twin: Wilde was prepared to court the one in the hope that the other would favor him too.’ The most dangerous of Aristophanes’s jabs at Socrates was the charge of atheism, which could carry a death sentence. Strepsiades, a bumpkin, is awed by the singing of the clouds, who have taken the form of young women:
Strepsiades [in raptures]: How fantastic! How divine!
Socrates: Yes, these are the only truly divine beings—all the rest is just a lot of fairy tales.
Strepsiades: What on earth—! You mean you don’t believe in Zeus?
Socrates: Zeus? Who’s Zeus?
Strepsiades: Zeus who lives on Olympos, of course.
Socrates: Now really, you should know better. [Confidentially] There is no Zeus.
Later Strepsiades imparts this good news to his son, who scolds him for his credulity. Much fun is drawn from this, but at the end the disillusioned Strepsiades and his son burn down the Thinkery, most of all, as Strepsiades declares, because of its blasphemy against the gods. Socrates luckily escapes with his life: ‘What happens to him is too little for someone who has committed a capital crime, but it is the utmost that could befall him in a comedy’ (Leo Strauss). It seems that the original version of the play ended with Strepsiades’s triumph through using the Thinkery’s methods for his low ends, and that because this subtle satire was misunderstood Aristophanes replaced it with the clearer judgement staged in the later version.
Here is how Socrates (in Plato’s account) ruefully recalls at his trial the comic caricature that had stuck in people’s minds and that he found it impossible to shake off:
‘Socrates is an evil-doer, and a curious person, who searches into things under the earth and in heaven, and he makes the worse appear the better cause; and he teaches the aforesaid doctrines to others.’ That is the nature of the accusation, and that is what you have seen yourselves in the comedy of Aristophanes; who has introduced a man whom he calls Socrates, going about and saying that he can walk in the air, and talking a deal of nonsense concerning matters of which I do not pretend to know either much or little…. Very many of those here present are witnesses to the truth of this, and to them I appeal. (Trans. Jowett)
The appeal came too late, and Socrates’ professions of ignorance were just what would irritate his hearers. Wilde’s appeal to his literary values in his first trial also came too late, and probably told against him in a world that was in reaction against aesthetic ‘poseurs.’
Despite its satirical character, Aristophanes’ play has moments of striking beauty, in the choruses by the clouds themselves, whose costumes must also have been striking. Wilde’s first published work is a translation of one of these, marking a fateful relation to the work:
Cloud-maidens that float on for ever,
Dew-sprinkled, fleet bodies, and fair,
Let us rise from our Sire’s loud river,
Great Ocean, and soar through the air
To the peaks of the pine-covered mountains where the pines hang as tresses of hair.
Wilde’s tragic fate was being woven from the moment of his debut. Or if ‘character is destiny’ then his unbridled pursuit of his individual tastes assured that this destiny would be realized to the full, taking him to the heights of fame, and of considerable artistic achievement, and then plunging him to the depths of infamy.
Wilde was conscious of Aristophanes as the supreme model of his comic genre. Reviewing a book by his tutor John Pentland Mahaffy he says that it ‘misses the fine freedom of Aristophanes, with his intense patriotism, his vital interest in politics, his large issues, and his delight in vigorous national life.’ These were virtues Wilde himself cultivated, notably as the author of The Soul of Man under Socialism and of a projected treatise on prison reform that, broken by prison himself, he lacked the strength to write. In his comedies, too, especially An Ideal Husband, Wilde touches on large issues of political life. In Intentions, he connects Aristophanes with W. S. Gilbert: ‘that great career which costume has always played in comedy from the time of Aristophanes down to Mr. Gilbert.’ Perhaps he was thinking of the costumes of Patience, which revelled in the styles of the aesthetic movement. The piece has moments of lyrical musical beauty amid its absurdity, such as ‘Prithee, pretty maiden,’ with its haunting ‘O, willow waly’ refrain. Just as ‘I’m a man of propertee’ inflects the charm of this number, so the clouds of Aristophanes bear clichés in their bosom as well as rude pokes from Stepsiades.
Wilde’s Hellenism was a blessing to his youth but a liability in his maturity, particularly of course in the mad erotic career that he would have seen the Greeks as encouraging. His ‘deep and long-lasting engagement with Plato’ is shown by the annotations to Jowett’s The Dialogues of Plato. The most frankly homoerotic of the dialogues, the Charmides, had a special charm for him. He told an American reporter in 1882 that his Keatsian erotic poem ‘Charmides’ (1878-79), in 109 six-line stanzas, was his ‘most finished and perfect’ poem. It lost him some friends.
Cultivating admiration of the Greek world during his years in Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde did not realize that the dreams of a Walter Pater were not made for the real world. Victorian England was not ready for a revival of the eros-friendly ethos of classical Athens (and even there its reception was not unmixed). Wilde blended Christianity with his Hellenism: ‘Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never liked the idea that we knew of Christ’s own words only through a translation of a translation. It is a delight to me to think that as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him.’ With ‘muscular Christianity’ in the ascendant such remarks were liable to be excoriated as effete. Exegetes today may scoff at Wilde’s suppositions, yet who can deny that he was within his rights to imagine a Hellenized Christ, or that there may not be some special providence in the fact that the words of Christ are conveyed to us only in the Greek tongue?
The American Tour
Wilde established his image as an aesthete even before the beginning of his London career. As a pupil at Portora he already stood out as a dandy and a Hellenist. In Trinity College he cultivated ‘his Pre-Raphaelite sympathies, his dandiacal dress, his Hellenic bias, his ambiguous sexualty, his contempt for conventional morality.’ ‘He filled his rooms at Oxford with lilies.’ ‘At one time he banished all the decorations from his rooms, except a single blue vase of the true aesthetic type which contained a “Patience” lily.’ This was mocked from the start: ‘The 1875 Oxford and Cambridge Undergraduate’s Journal satirized him as the outlandishly dressed aesthete O’Flighty (a play on O’Flahertie, his unambiguously Irish middle name)’ (Michèle Mendelssohn).
Aesthetes were already parodied on stage in Tom Taylor’s Victims, which had lampooned Swinburne, and John Hollingshead’s The Grasshopper, which tackled Whistler with his consent in 1877. This play may also have parodied Wilde, as did Where’s the Cat? by James Albery, November 1880; ‘Wilde made a point of not seeing it,’ until Ellen Terry took him along three months into its run. F. C. Burnand's The Colonel, a hit in February 1881, was an attack on aesthetic shams; Wilde thought it poor. None of this predictable mockery discouraged Wilde in the least; rather it spurred him to further audacity and bravado, and this comic virtue, too, was to precipate his tragic downfall.
In the first performance of Patience, ‘perhaps to deflect attention from Wilde, [George] Grossmith played Bunthorne as Whistler.’ ‘The maidens’ hopeless love for Bunthorne came naturally out of Wilde’s gathering in Keats House…. It was Wilde too who had “walked down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in his mediaeval hand’—rather a Renaissance hand—or at least was said to have done so.”’ Interestingly, the opera underlines a Japanese component to Aestheticism, a foretaste of The Mikado four years later. In his confession of being an ‘aesthetic sham’ Bunthorne says, ‘I do not long for all one sees/That’s Japanese.’ As the very opposite of the London businessman that the rival poet Grosvenor vows to become:
A Chancery Lane young man,
A Somerset House young man,
A very delectable, highly respectable,
Threepenny-’bus young man!
Bunthorne evokes:
A Japanese young man,
A blue-and-white young man,
Francesca da Rimini, miminy, piminy,
Je-ne-sais-quoi young man!
An aesthetic ‘Early English’ uniform for the soldiers would have ‘a cobwebby grey velvet, with a tender bloom like cold gravy, which, made Florentine fourteenth century, trimmed with Venetian leather and Spanish altar lace, and surmounted with something Japanese—it matters not what.’ Whistler was a pioneer of Japonisme.
'Wilde was aware that aestheticism had a history which long preceded the coinage in 1750 of the word ‘aesthetic’ by the philosopher Baumgarten. In an article of 4 September 1880, he pointed out that in Plato’s Symposium the host, Agathon, was ‘the aesthetic poet of the Periclean age.’ The proponent of the lily called attention to the title of Agathon’s lost play, The Flower. Not only Plato but also Aristophanes had portrayed Agathon in ‘brilliant colours,’ said Wilde. Actually the latter, in his Thesmophoriazusae, mocked aesthetic effeminacy more sharply than Rhoda Broughton by having Agathon go among the women in drag.' (Ellmann)
To what extent is Wilde a model for Patience? According to Arthur Jacobs, ‘In the cartoons which George du Maurier contributed to the pages of Punch, “Postlethwaite” and “Maudle” (a splendid back-formation from maudlin) were the two caricatured apostles of the cult whose affected conversation was larded with such expressions of approval as “too jolly utter.”’ Du Maurier was to design the costumes for Patience, drawing on the flamboyant dress of the 24-year old Wilde (but Jane Stedman says that Gilbert himself took over the task). ‘According to H. Montgomery Hyde, Wilde’s biographer, some of Wilde’s peculiarities were portrayed in both Archibald Grosvenor the “idyllic poet” and Reginald Bunthorne, the “fleshly poet”…. Contrary to general opinion at the time, Wilde never walked down Piccadilly thus adorned. Anyone could have done that, he used to say. “The difficult thing to achieve was to make people think I had done it.”’
The American trip seemed a blithe comedy, as, with a Civil War that took 600,000 lives behind it, American society flocked to the apostle of beauty, the ladies anxious to build ‘the house beautiful’ and the men beginning to ‘reconsider their maleness’ after the military devastation. Roy Morris’s account of the year-long tour touches lightly on homophobic reactions, quoting newspaper references to ‘aesthetic and pallid young men in dress suits and banged hair’ (the latter a ‘dead giveaway’ as to their sexual preference) loitering furtively ‘at the rear of the theater.’ ‘Frequent allusions in the national press to Wilde’s “effeminate” voice and mannerisms linked him to his purportedly gay audience’ whom the Brooklyn Daily Eagle called ‘a school of gilded youths eager to embrace his peculiar tenets,’ while the Washington Post referred to ‘young men painting their faces… with unmistakable rouge upon their cheeks.’ ‘The homosexual demimonde was quick to adopt Wilde as one of its own—perhaps quicker than he was ready to be adopted.’ Morris’s reference to ‘the generally good-natured kidding he received from Americans of all ages and walks of life’ understates a darker undercurrent highlighted in Michèle Mendelssohn’s recent account: Wilde was caricatured as a Simian Irishmen, a black. But Morris himself reproduces a Harper’s Weekly sketch of Wilde as an ‘aesthetic monkey’ and a Washington Post visual comparison of Wilde and the Wild Man of Borneo, a circus attraction of the time.
Patience was his visiting card: ‘Wilde waited with well-honed timing until the stage Bunthorne, embodied by J. H, Ryley, made his next appearance, tricked out as Wilde. “Caricature is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre,” Wilde observed, leaning forward over the box as the entire audience turned in their seats to gape at the real-life Bunthorne.’ Dion Boucicault warned: ‘The press seems to lend itself to this heartless exhibition which may afford amusement to some, but will be fatal and ruinous to its object.’ Yet Wilde came though it all with the greatest aplomb, and this success may have emboldened him for later public exhibitionism, underestimating the forces that would eventually bring him down. As Gerd Rohmann remarks: ‘Norbert Kohl confirms that, most tragically, Wilde mistook that theatre goers’ applause and amusement for assent and acclaim of his own extravagant and provoking life style by the Victorian bourgeoisie.’
It is true that the Wilde of the Bunthorne period disappeared after his lecture tour of 140 American cities and towns petered out. ‘The Oscar of the first period is dead,’ Wilde wrote to Robert Sherard. ‘We are now concerned with the Oscar Wilde of the second period, who has nothing in common with the gentleman who wore long hair and carried a sunflower down Piccadilly.’ The Wilde who bestrode the American continent was a much bigger and more imposing figure than the fictional Bunthorne. Yet the ridicule that greets Bunthorne was a sort of base-line to which reception of Wilde could always revert. An unashamed and courageous master of high camp, though not explicitly homosexual until his speech in court on ‘the Love that dare not speak its name,’ Wilde flamboyantly flaunted his personality, flouting Philistine sensitivities, underestimating the rage he was kindling in many manly breasts.
Did Socrates have a similar guileless cockiness and cocksureness? As a philosopher who secured the highest fame without penning a single word he must have been a publicity hound, recklessly sharing his mind and body with the multitude. In all the sources he does come across as a very unsettling person, who hardly registers the full impact of his cleverness on his disgruntled hearers.
Both Socrates and Wilde had a serious intent in their outrageousness. They began as comic gadflies, cocking a snook at societal conventions, but within that role we detect the lineaments of the earnest prophetic truth-teller, the potential tragic martyr. Wilde’s mother, Lady Jane Wilde, wrote incendiary patriotic poems under the name ‘Speranza,’ and her spirit of defiance carried over to him. When the scandal broke, it was she who urged him to face the music.
Scandal
The Wilde scandal brought down the curtain on the ‘tragic generation,’ as Yeats called it. English decadence would be further pursued only on foreign soil, by such as Baron Corvo in Italy and by Sir Edmund Backhouse in Beijing. Backhouse (1873-1944) became a Roman Catholic a few years before his death, and the scabrous memoirs he wrote are the last dying breath of Catholic decadence, a literary tradition going back to Baudelaire and embracing Verlaine, Huysmans, Joseph Peladan, with extensions in Pierre Klossowski. As Neil McKenna shows, the full details of Wilde’s sexual career have remained in the shade for over a century, though Wilde’s confessional impulse ensures that the documentation is very rich, and can now be accessed in a key of celebration. Yet Wilde would no doubt receive a harsher sentence today, given the fraught concern with the age of consent.
‘Women liked him, and sometimes fell a little in love with him. Men, on the other hand, were often hostile, irrationally so.’ It was this violent reaction that Wilde recklessly mocked, stoking it to white heat. The aesthete was a figure of fun, tinged with some disgust, in 1881, but after the Wilde trials this figure became amalgamated with the gutter, and to parade as an aesthete after that date meant to be identified as criminal. Even today, some amateur theatrical groups playing the ever-popular Patience tend to be embarrassed by Bunthorne, especially his song’s third stanza (one You Tube performer repeated the second stanza instead):
Then a sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion must excite your languid spleen,
An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean!
Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band,
If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand.
And every one will say,
As you walk your flowery way,
‘If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me,
Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!’
It is not only the ‘manly men’ who abhorred Wilde; in the general revulsion at the trials fellow-aesthetes rejected him as compromising. Edward Burne-Jones disowned him as ‘that horrible creature that has brought mockery of everything I love to think of, at the bar of justice today.’ Henry James’s hostility to Wilde may also stem from dismay at the campy tone he had imprinted on the delicate values that James also promoted. James had pilloried aesthetes in the figures of Morris Townsend in Washington Square (1880), Gilbert Osmond in Portrait of a Lady (1881)—the names Morris and Gilbert may allude to their famous bearers; Gabriel Nash in The Tragic Muse (1890) is modelled on Wilde.
In court Wilde projected the Platonic ideal of Greek love that he had glorified. But now the blithe and comic language that Plato had licenced took a tragic twist; a letter-letter to Douglas had reached the wrong destination:
'Of course, I discern in all our relations not Destiny merely, but Doom: Doom that (always) walks swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of Blood…. You send me a very nice poem of the undergraduate school of verse for my approval: I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits: I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcisse or some one whom the great God of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love. The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets transposed to a minor key. It can be understood only by those who have read the Symposium of Plato, or caught the spirit of a certain grave mood made beautiful for us in Greek marbles. It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either University who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit, or culture, to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases. Look at the history of that letter! It passes from you into the hands of a loathsome companion, from him to a gang of blackmailers: copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager of the theatre where my work is being performed: every construction but the right one is put on it: Society is thrilled with the absurd rumours that I have had to pay a high sum of money for having written an infamous letter to you: this forms the basis of your father’s worst attack. I produce the original letter myself in Court to show what it really is: it is denounced by your father’s Counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt innocence: ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge: the Crown takes it up: the Judge sums up on it with little learning and much morality: I go to prison for it at last. That is the result of writing you a charming letter.'
It was when asked to explain the closing line of Douglas’s poem, ‘Two Loves,’ that Wilde gave his most famous answer in court: ‘“The Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare,’ which ‘made an unforgettable impression on all those who heard him, not least the jury,’ and ‘were described by some who heard them as the finest speech of an accused man since that of Paul before King Herod Agrippa.’ This success emboldened Wilde to resume his witty style, as when asked about his compromising letter to Douglas: “‘Do you think an ordinarily constituted being would address such expressions to a younger man?” “I am not, happily I think, an ordinarily constituted being.”’
Wilde still tried to talk as if a comedy were in progress, but that was a vain protest against tragic fate.
'I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy, and that you [Lord Alfred Douglas] were to be one of the graceful figures in it. I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy, and that the sinister occasion of the great catastrophe, sinister in its concentration of aim and intensity of narrowed will power, was yourself, stripped of that mask of joy and pleasure by which you, no less than I, had been deceived and led astray.'
Sir Travers Humphries, assistant to Wilde’s defence counsel Sir Edmund Clarke, in his foreword to Hyde, says of Wilde’s second trial after the failure of the first jury to convict: ‘That astute advocate Montague Williams used to say “the second barrel is nearly always fatal.”’ Humphries also has a remark that touches on our subject:
'Oscar Wilde was no popular favourite. The cult of ‘Art for Art’s sake,’ in the form in which it was rife at the time when Wilde was an undergraduate at Oxford, and later in London, when he may be said to have been its High Priest, had long been out of favour with the virile youth of the day. Aestheticism had ben ridiculed out of existence by W. S. Gilbert in Patience during the early eighties. Patience… was still frequently played, while its tunes and its songs could be heard in every drawing-room. Wilde in the witness-box showed himself to be a ‘poseur,’ and ‘poseurs’ were at a discount with those who laughed at Gilbert’s invitation to cultivate a "sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion…."'
But surely the popularity of the songs does not suggest an entrenched distaste; Wilde may have thought that the old comic benevolence toward poseurs still held sway. But the language in which the Daily Telegraph greeted Wilde’s conviction is not that of W. S. Gilbert: ‘The grave of contemptuous oblivion may rest on his foolish ostentation, his empty paradoxes, his insufferable posturing, his incurable vanity.’ Indeed such fulminations could fall on Gilbert himself. The word ‘poseur’ acquires a precise association in these contexts—not just some Frenchified pretentiousness but specifically homoerotic provocation; as suggested in the phrasing of Queensberry’s notorious card: ‘For Oscar Wilde posing Somdomite,’ no doubt echoed in Carson’s interrogation of Wilde: ‘C: So far as your works are concerned, you pose as not being concerned about morality or immorality? W: I do not know whether you use the word “pose” in any particular sense. C: It is a favorite word of your own? W: Is it? I have no pose in this matter.’
Wilde had woven ethereal images of homoerotic love in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,’ but in The Picture of Dorian Gray, pounced on by Edward Carson in the first trial, he had moved on, into the very terrain that the law was targeting. Read from a certain angle, ‘the book celebrates the triumph of sex over love, of sensation over spirit, of the body over the soul.’ Yet Basil Hallward is a martyr to the old Platonism, and Dorian’s sexual corrruption is melodramatically punished. ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am; Lord Henry what the world thinks me; Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.’ Worried by the fierce press reception of the novel, which included calls for his prosecution, Wilde had argued with the editor and reviewer of St James’s Gazette, insisting that his tale was a parable about the dangers of sexual indulgence. In the heat of discussion he declared that ‘I mean every word I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in Dorian Gray’—just the kind of candour that was to prove fatal in court.
The literary dimension of Wilde’s trial was soon overshadowed by the sordid testimony of the rent boys, but it remains nonetheless not the trial of a sex offender only, but also of a literary figure. Similarly the trial of Socrates turned on his cultural image as much as on actual civic offences. One wonders if Wilde ever meditated the parallel between Socrates and himself as regards their theatrical entrance and exit. Both perished by their fame, yet their fate sealed their fame. Their personalities, unassimilable by society, have proven uncannily imperishable. ‘Know yourself’ was Socrates’s watchword: ‘Be yourself’ was Wilde’s. The cost was high for both, yet if they had not paid it they would not have been the Socrates and the Wilde that lodge with such persistence in our memory.
For the full text, with notes, see Journal of Irish Studies 34 (2019):76-89.
Thank you for sharing this delightful piece!
Posted by: PJ Johnston | March 29, 2020 at 12:49 AM