THE PICTURE OF OSCAR WILDE

For devoted readers, Karl Beckson has assembled The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia, the kind of reference book only writers like Shakespeare and Dickens used to enjoy. Merlin Holland — Wilde’s grandson and the man who recently determined that a much-reprinted picture, supposedly of Wilde cross-dressed as Salome, is actually of a Hungarian (and female) light-opera singer — has just published the family’s collection of photographs, The Wilde Album.

Richard Ellmann’s standard 1987 biography Oscar Wilde remains in print, as do early memoirs by Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw and Gary Schmidgall’s 1994 The Stranger Wilde. Just out in paperback is Juliet Gardiner’s Oscar Wilde, a lighter popular biography, and brought back into print for the occasion is the Wilde volume in the “Literary Lives” series from Thames & Hudson. And that’s to say nothing of the dozens of new literary studies such as Jonathan Fryer’s Andre & Oscar: The Literary Friendship of Andre Gide and Oscar Wilde.

In much of this centenary boom, Wilde is celebrated not as a great writer, but as a gay writer — interest in his work not even a close second to interest in his sexuality. He may have been the most applauded playwright of the nineteenth century, a poet, essayist, novelist, and as sharp a coiner of wicked epigrams as English has ever known. But what is that compared to the fact that he was prosecuted for gross indecency in 1895, served two years in prison, and died a broken man in 1900 at the age of forty-six? As one playgoer said at a showing of Gross Indecency, “He was a great writer and they treated him horribly.” In the deadly sincerity of 1990s America, the most insincere wit of 1890s England has become a poster-boy for anti-judgmentalism: “St. Oscar, the homosexual martyr.”

There has been some reaction against this dismissal of Wilde’s work in favor of his life — and against the deliberate ignoring of those parts of his life (like his return to Catholicism before his death) that ill accord with the preferred vision of a brave homosexual victim of Victorian hypocrisy. The actor Stephen Fry has decried attempts to portray Wilde “primarily as a gay martyr.” In the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has retold Wilde’s life in a way that shows how much a creature of his own time, not ours, he was.

But even these reactions against the usurping of Wilde for modern purposes fail to treat him in a systematic way. There’s something just too fascinating about his life and personality, some lure that seems to prevent a grappling with his work: A gesture toward the dramatic perfection of The Importance of Being Earnest, a deprecating wave at weaknesses in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and even the best of critics are off once again on the inescapable tale of his life — and especially the story of how (with the slander suit he brought against the Marquis of Queensberry for illiterately accusing him of “posing as a Somdomite”) Wilde like some mad Victorian Oedipus instigated his own destruction.

The fact remains, however, that Wilde’s work and the ideas in them beg for close inspection. And upon that inspection, Wilde proves prosecutable on purely intellectual grounds. As much as some of his writing celebrates decency, generosity, and kindness, most of it constitutes a giddy attack. Wilde was a cultural aristocrat who made it his business to injure the culture that made him so interesting, and he did much to kill the things he loved.

Wilde could write at times like a sappy Aesop with a heart of gold. The best of his fables show that, at some strange remove from the heterosexual-baiting of The Importance of Being Earnest, he had all the traits of a good children’s writer: sweet, awe-inspired, colorful, and poetic.

In “The Selfish Giant,” for example, a misanthropic giant expels a group of children playing in his garden — whereupon his beautiful yard is frozen in permanent winter. It is not until the children sneak back that spring returns, and, in perfect fairy-tale fashion, the giant realizes his folly in trying to enjoy his garden alone. But the story then takes a sudden and — for our contemporary picture of Wilde — very strange turn. Though the reformed giant plays with all the children in his garden, he doesn’t see the first little boy he welcomed until one day, years later, when the boy returns with injured hands and feet:

“Who hath dared to wound thee?” cried the Giant; “tell me that I may take my big sword and slay him.”

“Nay!” answered the child: “but these are the wounds of Love.”

“Who art thou?” said the Giant, and a strange awe fell on him, and he knelt before the little child.

And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, “You let me play once in your garden, today you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise.”

And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the Giant lying dead under the tree, all covered with white blossoms.

George Bernard Shaw once called Wilde “Nietzschean,” but Nietzsche is hard to see in a story like “The Selfish Giant.”

Similarly, in “The Happy Prince,” a gold-plated statue with sapphires for eyes and a ruby in his sword sends a swallow to give his gold and jewels away to the poor and destitute of the city. And after all the gold plate and jewels are gone, the swallow, who had planned to fly south for winter but stayed to assist the prince, freezes to death. But at the story’s end — in another unexpectedly Christian twist — the town councilors, seeing that the prince has lost all his luster, decide to melt him down:

“What a strange thing!,” said the overseer of the workmen at the foundry. “This broken heart will not melt in the furnace. We must throw it away.” So they threw it on a dust-heap where the dead swallow was also lying.

“Bring me the two most precious things in the city,” said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.”

“You have rightly chosen,” said God, “for in my garden of paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me.”

A man who’s capable of having one of his characters pronounce, “You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is . . . the best thing in fiction the English have ever done,” as Wilde did in A Woman of No Importance, is capable of enormous flippancy. But there’s little evidence in his fables that his flippancy extends to God. Most critics want to dismiss Wilde’s religious leanings: Ellmann declares that the fables “suffer from florid figures . . . and biblical pronouns.” But parents looking for religious stories to read to their children could do far worse.

Even The Picture of Dorian Gray (which, because of its not-too-hidden homosexual themes, was used against Wilde at trial) proceeds on the assumption that man has a soul that bears witness to every wrong he commits. The plot also assumes, not without humor, that immoral people are ugly. When Basil Hallwood paints a marvelous picture of the young, handsome Dorian Gray, Dorian wishes he could remain forever as he looks in the portrait. His wish granted, Dorian begins a life of incredible vice, remaining always handsome while the painting gets uglier and uglier. Several years, several murders, and many unspeakable sins later, Dorian Gray kills Basil Hallwood, and then — stabbing the portrait — kills himself.

In the preface to Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote, “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” When his novel became evidence at his trial, however, he begged his friend Frank Harris to testify that it was indeed moral. Its morality is interesting. The plot is a cautionary tale aimed against those whom Wilde most resembled: witty urbane types, socialites free from the obligations of family and work, completely unburdened people whom he would elsewhere describe as perfect. Dorian’s life, luxurious and free, makes rich soil for soul-killing vanity. Dorian Gray can even be read as a critique of the aesthetic, art-for-art’s-sake movement of which Wilde was the most famous proponent.

In similar ways, Wilde’s work after his imprisonment — his long, sing-songy The Ballad of Reading Gaol and his strangely uninformative apologia, De Profundis — can be included in the never-to-be-published anthology of “The Moral Writings of Oscar Wilde.” But most of the rest of his work counts against him. The Importance of Being Earnest clearly shows Wilde’s runaway instinct for satire: “Clever as it was,” George Bernard Shaw said, “it was his first really heartless play.” The entire action turns on two young men who use false identities to cover up their philandering. Endlessly mocking marriage, the script was an enormous success:

Algernon: In married life, three is company and two is none.

Fack: That my dear young friend is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.

Algernon: Yes; and that the happy English home has proved in half that time.

By the second act, of course, Algernon is ready to marry a girl he has known for only an hour, and romance rises from the ashes of cynicism. The frenetic scenes that make Wilde’s play a traditional farce — with its impossible coincidences and incredible good fortune — arise not from the characters who are at times indistinguishably witty in the Wildean manner, but from the melodramatic plot. It is as though Wilde had made a deal with the audience to insult them and then pretend he hadn’t, while they pretended there had been no insult in the first place.

Ellmann argues that Wilde’s prose genius surfaced with such essays as “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” a mock-sensitive description of a real-life artist and poisoner named Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Wilde describes the writer’s artistic evolution from painting as a child to reading Whitman as a young soldier. After describing Wainewright’s (minor) literary accomplishments — including the very Wildean aphorism, “I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it is consistent with itself is the question” — Wilde gives a detailed account of the artist’s career as a poisoner. Wainewright, in his murderous way, actualized his potential much as an artist creates his art: “He recognized that Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.” Of the murders Wainewright committed, Wilde adds, “There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture.” There was even artistic sensibility in the killings. A friend once demanded an explanation for the last of his victims. “Yes, it was a dreadful thing to do,” Wainewright agreed, “but she had very thick ankles.”

This is Wilde at his amoral best, out to shock. And yet, even here he makes a curious attempt to defend the morality of his amoral view, arguing that history cannot corrupt, therefore we should not mar its hilarity or viciousness with moral judgment. But one cannot avoid thinking that Wilde respects Wainewright both as an artist and a man — for Wainewright fulfilled his personality in its artistic as well as its murderous bent.

Wilde was never exactly serious, but he was never exactly harmless either. In “The Critic as Artist,” a dialogue between a literal-minded nabob and a caricature of Wilde, the inspired but sophistic style of the author is given full range. The Wilde character recreates, after many departures and much sarcasm, the view of Matthew Arnold about the importance of criticism to culture: “It is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age. It is Criticism, as I hope to point out myself some day, that makes the mind a fine instrument.”

Though he often praised other arts, Wilde actually knew little besides literature. “Wilde started as an apostle of Art,” George Bernard Shaw observed; “in that capacity, he was a humbug.” Even his sympathetic early biographer Frank Harris admitted, “Wilde continually pretended to a knowledge of music which he had not got.” And the result is that criticism turns into a caricature of Wilde himself: the self-creation of the individual through skillful play with language.

The Wilde character argues that criticism, like murder in Waine-wright’s case, is the art of self-expression. And the highest criticism is “the record of one’s own soul.” Such criticism proves not to be about accuracy, but about the ability to incite the imagination of others. Self-knowledge is jettisoned in favor of self-creation — the painting of a picture of the self for others to see. Oscar Wilde does have his descendants around today, but they are not necessarily the homosexuals who want to claim him: The body piercers, confessional performance artists, and creators of Internet personas all share Wilde’s vision of the self unreal except in the eyes of others.

“When we reach the true culture that is our aim,” the Wilde character says in “The Critic as Artist,” “we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible . . . because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul.” The same wish for a world beyond morality appears in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” an essay he decided to write after hearing George Bernard Shaw lecture on the subject and one of the few moments in which Wilde wrote with a sincere effort to persuade.

“The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is undoubtedly the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon everybody,” he starts off in the paradoxical form beloved by Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, and nearly every other late-Victorian writer. Wilde’s socialism has its admirers. Christopher Hitchens declared in a 1988 column in the Nation that Wilde sought something greater than the “compassion” run hollow by modern Democrats: “If we see a slum, a ghetto, a beggar, or an old person eating pet food, we should not waste pity on the victim. We should want the abolition of such conditions for our own sakes. The burden of enduring them is too much.”

Wilde’s socialism, however, was the result not of solidarity with the poor, but of contempt for them. After arguing that charity merely prolongs poverty “by keeping the poor alive, or, in the case of the very advanced school, by amusing the poor,” Wilde claims, “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is immoral and unfair.” He had no faith in the dignity of man apart from material circumstances: “Wealthy people are, as a class, better than impoverished people, more moral and more intellectual.” This is socialism untouched by love for mankind.

In one of his cruelest, funniest bits of criticism, Wilde quipped that the painter James Whistler “always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital ‘I.'” But socialism for Wilde turns out to mean only individualism, and “the most intense form of individualism” turns out to mean only art, and being an artist turns out to mean only being a witty manipulator of language who creates himself in the eyes of the public — which is to say, someone like Wilde. The importance of socialism, for Oscar Wilde, means the importance of being Oscar Wilde.

A more specious defense of a political philosophy would be hard to find, but it is the summit of his attempts to think his way through his ideas, and it raises what ought to be a serious question: Why celebrate Wilde?

His current promoters — those who insist on using Wilde to bring about a cultural confrontation with homosexuality — have for the most part simply ignored his work. But it is, of course, that work which earns him a right to our consideration. And any fair evaluation will recognize that Wilde was a writer of enormous gifts, a minor classic of English literature. His writing remains charming and sunny and possessed of a wit so genuine it could not be wrecked even by his lapses into melodrama, over-writing, and lugubrious sentimentality.

A fair evaluation of his writing, however, will also reveal that he was not much of a thinker. Most of the time his thoughts were chaotic; when he tried to comb them out, he succeeded only in tangling them more; and when at last the reader straightens them for him, they prove to have been horrible thoughts to begin with. We should remember that the confused perniciousness of Wilde’s life is not enough to ruin the literary wonders of his work. But we should also keep in mind that the wonder of Wilde’s work is not enough to redeem the confused perniciousness of his ideas.

David Skinner is managing editor of the Public Interest.