The Over-rating of Oscar Wilde

How often a throwaway remark will ignite more interest than the main theme of an article.  When I said that Oscar Wilde was over-rated, I thought I was stating an uncontroversial truism. To say that someone is over-rated isn’t to say that they are no good at all (as some readers seem to think). Of course Wilde was a talented writer, and who could doubt it, or dispute it? But does he deserve his current status, as a sort of literary superstar or demi-god? For comparison, George Bernard Shaw, who was considered at least as witty in his time, has rather faded in recent years, though he has a more substantial body of work to his credit.

I don’t think Wilde was a genius on the level of, say, Charles Dickens. I’m not sure where I would place him, in fact. I just think he is too much praised, for reasons of cultural politics.

Do those who admire him,  admire him for his writing? In which case, which parts of it qualify him for the Pantheon of the Great? There’s a sentimental story or two, some plays, some essays, a long poem and a novel more praised than read. Let us start with the novel. How many people have actually read ‘Dorian Gray’ right through, without skipping to the supernatural bit about the portrait, except because they felt they rather had to?  I should have thought most people, at any stage in history,  would find its overheated, precious, affected style rather cloying.  There are some good lines in ‘The Importance of being Earnest’ . But does it rise beyond that?  Will it endure? Would it have endured as long as it has had its author not been either notorious (approx. 1895-1965) or a hero of the revolution (approx. 1965 to the present day)? The other plays are rarely performed.

The epigrams are amusing, but once again are they so overwhelmingly wonderful as to confer greatness? ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ contains some memorable lines (though I remain baffled by the claim that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’. Does he? Why?) . But how does it compare, for instance,  with the poetry of A.E. Housman?     

If you want late-Victorian or Edwardian wit, I think the short stories of H.H. Munro (‘Saki’) are at least as clever if not rather more so (it is nowadays widely assumed that Munro, too, was homosexual, but only assumed, since if it was so, he did not seek martyrdom for it).  P.G. Wodehouse (my brother suspected, and could argue cogently for the idea,  that Wodehouse got his idea for Jeeves from a scene in ‘Importance’) is much, much funnier and a far better writer – a fact often forgotten because he is so funny, and fails to deal with weighty themes, indeed runs as fast as he can to get away from weighty themes,   and it is therefore assumed that he is not also great.  

I suspect that Wilde’s current fame and standing have much more to do with his role as martyr, the harbinger of the sexual revolution, cruelly punished for being ahead of his time. Well, the punishment was indeed cruel and stupid,  and the law under which it was done should never have existed in the first place. But it did exist, and Wilde, in my view, deliberately chose his martyrdom and consciously  took known risks (see his remark about ‘feasting with panthers’) which he knew were great.  

He provoked his own prosecution with an extraordinarily rash libel suit.   He then refused to take the opportunity to leave the country before he was arrested, as he could easily have done (and I think it likely that the authorities of the time hoped he would do).  As far as he was concerned, I suppose this was a matter of man facing his tormentors and standing up to them. But it did not affect only him.  The consequences for his wife and sons were, without qualification, tragic and are very hard to read about to this day. I do not think Wilde’s martyrdom advanced the cause of tolerance by one half-inch, then or later. Quite possibly, it retarded it.  It is not a terribly heroic story, though it is a desperately sad one, and his crudely vandalised tomb in Paris remains one of the most dismal and dispiriting sights in Europe, decades after the passions and griefs it records were spent.  It is as if a great, despairing groan had been rendered in solid stone. But this sadness has no bearing – or rather, it should have no bearing –on the standing of his work.