Like many of his generation, as a young man he donned the cloak of aestheticism, commonly known then as ‘art for art’s sake’. Art was to be divorced from morality and, as a result, had no social or political content to convey. Since Britain was going through another phase of its long industrial revolution (some historians have referred to it as the second industrial revolution), in which objects were made by machines rather than by craftsmen or artists, the divorce or disengagement from social circumstances might have been predicted.
After achieving fame, in the 1880s, as the popular spokesman of the Aesthetic Movement, Wilde became the unofficial leader of the Decadent movement of the 1890s, which can roughly be dated from the publication of the first magazine version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in June 1890. He has been identified therefore as a writer of the fin de siècle, who delighted in artifice and parody, celebrated style and pastiche, and mocked the values of previous decades. In Wilde’s time the end of Victorianism (and all it had come to represent) was in sight but nothing had taken its place. It was a time of spiritual, moral, social and artistic chaos, when even the most formidable conviction began to crumble, slide and eventually dissolve. It could be said that he lived in a worn-out society, theatrical in its art, theatrical in its life, theatrical even in its piety. The meanings of the nineteenth century had been hollowed out. Everything seemed to be on display, like the halls of Swan and Edgar’s. Wilde knew by heart the lesson of Balzac’s villainous hero Vautrin: ‘There are no longer any laws, merely conventions: nothing but form’. He responded to the theatricality around him by turning his conversation into an art, his personality into a symbol, and his life into a mystery play.
The fin de siècle of the nineteenth century was in part represented by the Yellow Book which flourished in the 1890s as the leading journal for aestheticism, decadence and symbolism – a trinity of terror for those who maintained a solid mid-Victorian sensibility. In March 1894 its first editorial announced that the aim of the magazine was ‘to depart as far as may be from the bad old traditions of periodical literature … It will be charming, it will be daring, it will be distinguished.’ It was not greeted with any great enthusiasm, and was discounted by some as a pile of ‘hysterical and nonsensical matter’. Its first art editor was Aubrey Beardsley, and he has been considered the progenitor of the startling yellow covers which were already associated with the more flamboyant French fiction of the era. Among the contributors in its short life were Max Beerbohm, Henry James, H. G. Wells and William Butler Yeats. It represented the gay death of the nineteenth century.
It might be presumed that Oscar Wilde was on the list of the Yellow Book’s contributors, but in fact he never took part in the enterprise and professed to despise it. Nevertheless Wilde remained, and still remains, the defining figure of the last years of the century, simply because he turned its values on their head. He was the ‘Other’ of late Victorian culture, dominated as it was by jingoism, John Bullism, Pooterism and black and white Puritan morality. He was enamoured of ‘beauty’ and ‘art’ rather than ‘truth’ and ‘reality’, which he regarded as second-rate, and baneful fictions.
We could easily extend the list of binary opposites further – Wilde was queer, rather than straight, and through his openly homosexual lifestyle he boldly challenged middle-class domesticity. He was concerned with surfaces rather than depths, the body more than the soul, and aesthetics instead of ethics. He was ‘serious’ about everything Victorians regarded as ‘trivial’, and vice versa. His addictions to ambiguity, indeterminacy and inconsistency were no less subversive. Rather than excavating and expressing a single, monolithic self, in his life and writings he effortlessly invented and discarded identities, referring to insincerity as ‘a method by which we can multiply our personalities’. His mercurial genius naturally expressed itself in the drama and the dialogue, in the paradox and in the parable, genres and forms in which he could perform a number of his selves and present a debate between doctrines rather than a single view. It is no surprise, then, that many commentators portray Wilde as a confirmed Nietzschean engaged in a furious war against Victorian morality, and in the transvaluation of late nineteenth-century middle-class Christian values.
Wilde was so much the master of his period that he could effortlessly adopt all its disguises and convey all its effects. He delighted in trying out and testing the limits of each literary form. He brought hilarious and provocative comedy back to the English stage, from which it had been exiled for many years. He invented the prose poem in English, and was a pioneer of symbolic drama. He was also one of the first authors to write a ‘French’ novel, Dorian Gray being French in subject and style, if not in language. That novel was fiercely satirical of English middle-class mores. The 1890 magazine version attracted outraged and outrageous reviews, in a large part because of its homoerotic overtones, which would have been even more pronounced had the publisher not censored Wilde’s radical and explicit typescript. Yet the outcry did not stop Wilde adding new chapters to the story the following year, for its publication as a novel in book format, in which he characterizes England as ‘the native land of the hypocrite’, and the English as a race that ‘balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy’.
In 1891 Wilde also composed his political essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ for the Fortnightly Review, in which he attacked the ‘stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism’ that pervaded English culture. Wilde rails against English public opinion, which, he says, exercises a ‘tyranny’ over art, politics and ‘people’s private lives’ through the press.
‘The Soul of Man’ expresses Wilde’s commitment to an anarchistic form of socialism. Its attacks on hypocrisy were however directly related to Parnell, and at the journalists and MPs who hounded him out of politics after his relationship with the married Kitty O’Shea became public knowledge at the end of 1890. Wilde’s criticism is a token of his staunch support for Irish Home Rule and of his essential Irishness – something recognized by everyone who knew him well, from the English Alfred Douglas to his compatriots Shaw and Yeats. Wilde’s Irishness allowed him to understand, and satirize, the English of the late Victorian period, because he was an insider-outsider, a man who shared their language but did not share the values and vision that informed and were propagated by that language.
On this language issue Wilde made some interesting pronouncements. ‘French by sympathy,’ he described himself in the winter of 1891, ‘I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.’ During his American lecture tour of 1882 he also declared: ‘I do not know anything more wonderful, or characteristic of the Celtic genius than the quick artistic spirit in which we adapted ourselves to the English tongue. The Saxon took our lands and left them desolate. We took their language and added new beauty to it.’ So English–Irish relations offer a political context for Wilde’s paradoxes and his lush prose poetry. He was a colonial subject inverting and embellishing the language of the ruler, exposing its hidden prejudices and doublespeak. It is no coincidence that Wilde (like Samuel Beckett) wrote in French as well as English, and that in the early Nineties he contemplated becoming a French citizen when his French-language play Salomé was banned by the English censor from the London stage. ‘I am not English,’ he told a journalist at this time. ‘I am Irish – which is quite another thing’ – a pointed comment at a time when Ireland was nominally part of a ‘United Kingdom’.