Oscar Wilde's Socialism

...Literature is not much indebted to Mr...

...The first subtext is of course a homosexual one...

...In a similar vein, Wilde reviewed the poems that Wilfred Scawen Blunt published from prison, and announced that the self-righteous Tory "intellectual" Arthur Balfour had, if nothing else, improved Blunt's style and address as a poet by committing him to jail for his agitation upon the Irish question...

...one that was to reverberate long after his death...

...The walls of Thebes rose up to the sound of music, and Thebes was a very dull city indeed...

...I fear that hardly points to any very serious state at the last...

...In The Importance of Being Earnest, the same polemical objective is pursued, but by satirical means...

...Other private or encoded jokes in the play range from the risque and the nearly obvious (such as the tragedy of young men not turning out to resemble their mothers) to the argot of homosexual tradecraft...

...Of no play in the whole repertory of well-loved drama could this be more truly said than Oscar Wilde's masterpiece in three acts, The Importance of Being Earnest...

...Drawing on Bakunin and Nechayev's Revolutionary Catechism, and on his reading of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Wilde fashioned a play about propaganda by deed...

...Indeed, one expert on this period, Frances Banks, has argued convincingly that much of the play is also a satire on the Cecil dynasty, whose scion, Robert Marquess of Salisbury, was three times a Tory prime minister in the late Victorian epoch...

...Wilde was the only public figure in London to sign Shaw's petition about the Haymarket martyrs...

...A parallel exhibition, entitled Entartete Musik, had as its poster and advertisement a thicklipped Negro blowing into a saxophone and displaying a star of David on his lapel...

...Under no circumstances should socialism become the brute collectivization of existing drudgeries...

...Wilde, who was by this time being hideously maltreated in an English prison, attempted a feeble defense by pleading that if homosexuality was an illness it should not be punishable but treatable—a sad hostage to fortune...

...a radical elite, contemporary with Marx himself, which wrote and acted with great distinction...

...Approving Edward Carpenter's sentiment, which was common in those brave radical days, that the masses did indeed have an appreciation of beauty and finesse, he closed by saying: The Reformation gained much from the use of popular hymn-tunes, and the Socialists seem determined to gain by similar means a similar hold upon the people...

...Here, in a well-turned aside, is the cruelty and thoughtlessness of all theorizing about the deserving rather than the undeserving poor...

...q FALL • 1995 • 519...

...In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (which had to be published for a time as The Soul of Man in order to avoid objections from publishers and distributors) Wilde had subjected the bourgeois order to a merciless critique...

...Nordau's assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr...

...It cannot be mistaken to see in this and other Wildean observations a coded plea for the right to live as a sexual outlaw, an eternal dissident and an enemy of the regimented, the "healthy," and the "natural...

...It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up...

...Of many of the proletarian anthems, Wilde wrote that "almost any mob could warble them with ease...

...British secret police circles were later to use the weapons of blackmail and moral exposure to destroy two of the bravest spokesmen for Irish independence—Charles Stewart Parnell and Sir Roger Casement...

...The effect of this rather flippant-seeming introduction was to peel the whiskers from the face of Church and State, which had bound every citizen into a nexus of obligation and guilt...

...And all of this is well...

...In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, men like this fought to build up an educated labor movement, to win independence for Ireland, and to advance and guarantee the rights of women...

...The terrible year of 1914, and the attendant capitulation of the Socialist International, put an end to what had been one of the most revolutionary and democratic periods in modern history...

...Second, Nordau's Jewishness and Zionism did not prevent the resuscitation of his book by the Nazis after Germanys defeat in the First World War...

...Like most penmen he overrates the power of the sword"), it demonstrates that he could dispose also of a solid and grounded political intelligence...

...This action led to a feverish discussion among the anti-czarist forces about the morality and efficacy of "individual terrorism," partly because the assassination proved both popular and effective...

...Her instinctive class consciousness makes her the arbiter of every scene...

...What captivity was to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish...

...I am not employing the terms "aristocracy" or "noble" by accident...

...Everybody is supposed to marry for money and give up liberty...

...In a tremendously prescient review in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1889, he saw precisely why England's hold on Ireland would weaken: If in the last century she tried to govern Ireland with an insolence that was intensified by race hatred and religious prejudice, she has sought to rule her in this century with a stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions...

...They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility...

...CunninghameGraham, the friend and inspiration to Joseph Conrad, who rounded off a whole career of travel and writing and anti-imperialist adventure by getting himself elected as the first explicitly socialist member of the House of Commons...

...He took an active interest in the rising labor movement, and in the work of William Morris and other leading critics of capitalist utilitarianism...

...Few girls of the present day have any of the really solid qualities, any of the qualities that last, and improve with time...

...He occupied a position somewhere between Karl Marx and William Morris...

...the prosecution of Wilde himself for immorality on the evidence of the first two trials) marked his utter eclipse and decline...

...between the idea that labor was something to be transcended and the idea that it was something to be made artistic and enjoyable...

...Inquiring of Jack the suitor whether he has any politics, and receiving the answer that "I am afraid I really have none...

...Though this review, too, contained some instances of Wilde at his most aphoristic ("That the government should enforce iniquity and the governed submit to it, seems to Mr...

...Britain was at the time engaged in a grim, self-righteous attempt to hold onto its oldest colony in Ireland...

...The kernel of his credo, however, is to be found in the offhand remark made by Algernon Moncrieffe at the opennof The Importance, where he reflects, "Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them...

...In all of Wilde's radical writing there is an unashamed belief that those who suffer or dare for freedom are a kind of elect—not the insipid and overbred aristocracy of wealth and property that he lampooned, but an elect nonetheless...

...Claims of genius were merely neurotic, said Nordau, and homosexuality was the greatest degeneracy of all...

...From then on, the choice would be made between official and routine Laborism and the disciplined apparatus of Leninism and its mutations...

...For Wilde, all talk of "the masses" and "the people" was suspect, because these categories were made up of individuals and it was the free development of each individual that counted...

...Or come in the evening at any rate...

...Much of it was a statement of desire rather than belief in any case, and later sections of the review betray some misgivings...

...She rejects none and has room for all...

...When she hears that Cecily will inherit a hundred and thirty thousand pounds she declares, "Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her...

...He was always to be upset and disillusioned by the failure of this play, which was based upon the true story of Vera Zasulich, a proto-Bolshevik woman who assassinated the St...

...Just to increase the frisson, it's worth noting that Blunt's volume of poems was entitled In Vinculis, later to be the subtitle of Wilde's own prison testimony De Profundis...

...There was originally a fourth act to the play, in which Algernon was taken to Holloway Prison for failing to pay his bills at the Savoy...

...America and American influence has educated them...

...I've already mentioned William Monis, who is remembered still as a Pre-Raphaelite and aesthete rather than as an orator and polemicist...

...The intention of Balfour and his class, by committing Wilde to jail, was to achieve something like the opposite effect...

...To this day, the supporters of the ultraOrthodox and ultranationalist forces in Israel refer to assimilated or secular Jews as "Hellenized"— the worst insult in their lexicon, and one that might have called forth a sympathetic smile from Wilde...

...In identifying the sources of that degeneracy that was sapping the vital fluids of civilization, Nordau made a prime exhibit of Wilde...

...In an 1889 review of Edward Carpenter's socialist songbook Chants of Labour, Wilde wrote that Socialism is not going to allow herself to be trammeled by any hard and fast creed or to be stereo518 • DISSENT Wilde's Socialism typed into an iron formula...

...This was written a hundred years before the fall of the Berlin Wall...

...What between the duties expected of one during one's lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one's death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure...

...Looked at in the right way, or played to the knowing ear, even the cloakroom at Victoria Station—scene of the loss of the famous handbag—takes on the charged association of a cruising spot or pickup joint...

...just as it was morally deaf to preach strict dieting to those suffering from malnutrition...

...The two young men who feature as the play's central rivals, Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieffe, are both portrayed as leading double lives, and as adopting alter egos, in order to pursue their true desires...

...This more or less precisely describes the dilemma of the English aristocracy when faced with the Industrial Revolution, and captures it more neatly than Engels ever managed to...

...Even as it is, the banter of The Importance does throw one shadow forward into the future...

...In particular, he had shown the Victorian attitude toward marriage as an exercise in the mean-spirited preservation of private property, as well as a manifestation of sexual repression and hypocritical continence...

...It exuded admiration for racial strength, nature-worship, orthodox manliness, and artistic convention...

...In this centennial of Wilde's triumph and ignominy, what can be done to honor his play as it should be honored...

...The two girls in the play are named Gwendolen and Cecily...

...Cecily," the name given to one of the weightless and vapid society girls, was also gay vernacular for transvestite rent-boys...

...It is, indeed, dear Lady Bracknell who continually gives the game away...

...To be "earnest" in Victorian London was to be gay in the slang of the underworld and the demi-monde ("I hear he's frightfully earnest") so that one of the coded laughs at least was up in lights in the middle of the most ostensibly moral and bourgeois capital in history...

...Given Shaw's own interest in eugenics, that was quite a strong reply...

...And Wilde was a personal friend of another Russian revolutionary, Sergei Kravchinski, who had also shot a czarist torturer and who lived as a well-liked emigre in London circles...

...Balfour for his sophistical Defence of Philosophic Doubt, which is one of the dullest books we know, but it must be admitted that by sending Mr...

...They dine with us...

...Queensberry's counter-attack...

...The second of the two subtexts—the socialist one—is less fraught with ironies, and less apparent to superficial reviewers, but is in fact what gives the play its muscle and nerve...

...This does not entitle us to forget a more noble and defeated tradition, in which Wilde, among others, took an honorable place...

...Richard Ellmann points out very deftly the ambivalence of his Sonnet to Liberty, in which he expressed distaste for those whose anger arose from mere resentment: Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know— Yet at the close of the poem, Wilde also distinguishes himself from the Lady Bracknell types who talked selfishly about the "worst excesses of the French Revolution" and predicted that education for the poor would "lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square": ...and yet, and yet, those Christs that die upon the barricades, God knows it I am with them, in some things...

...Though he was skeptical of organized religion and in most conscious moments considered himself a Hellenist, he employed biblical and prophetic imagery to mark off martyr from mob...

...The practice of leading a secret life under a pseudonym, known as "Bunburying," would have had some members of the audience biting on their umbrella handles...

...Absurd and hilarious dialogues about betrothal, inheritance, marriage settlements, and financial dispositions are the very energy of the play...

...However, they must not be too sanguine about the result...

...Blunt to jail he has converted a clever rhymer into an earnest and deep-thinking poet...

...FALL • 1995 • 517 Wilde's Socialism One might also mention R.B...

...I am a Liberal Unionist," she ripostes, "Oh, they count as Tories...

...The magazine, which ran to exactly one edition, was suggestively entitled The Chameleon...

...But the game is deeper than that...

...The volume was dedicated to Cesare Lombroso, pioneer of racist phrenology and coiner of the pseudo-science of the "criminal type...

...Wilde's set also included Blunt, who probably did more than any other single author for the emancipation of the colonies, and who is an honored figure today in Egypt, India, Ireland, and other former precincts of the Empire on which the sun never set (and on which, as the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor once remarked, the blood never dried...

...First performed in 1895, to applause that has never died away, it coincided with Wilde's challenge to the infamous Marquess of Queensberry and with his decision to face his tormentors in court...

...But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way...

...The hero is beyond doubt Prince Paul Maraloffski, who falls out with the czar and joins the revolutionary conspirators...

...This addiction to paradox, which was always his most penetrating method in any case, led Wilde to state at the opening of The Soul of Man Under Socialism that socialism's great benefit would be the abolition of that "sordid necessity of living for others" that was everywhere so oppressive...

...That drama, which also fell into three acts (Wilde's suit...

...It was a stern and somewhat dirty-minded philippic against those who led unwholesome lives or who professed admiration for unnatural philosophies...

...The Importance is so diverting and witty and fast-moving, and so replete with imperishable characters and mots, that it has been a staple of Anglo-American drawing-room comedy for generations...

...For to make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing...

...When Jack Worthing tells Canon Chasuble that his invented brother has died, and "seems to have expressed a desire to be buried in Paris," the worthy Canon shakes his head and says: "In Paris...

...Elements of this tension are apparent in Wilde's play Vera or, The Nihilists, in which he foreshadowed the coming Russian revolution...

...In 1892 the German author Max Nordau published his book Entartung, which translates either as "Degeneracy" or "Degeneration...

...everybody is constrained to pretend that they are marrying for love or romance...

...How clever of the audience, replied Barker, to lick off the sugar and leave the bitter pill unswallowed...

...In every scene of The Importance of Being Earnest there is at least one joke about the railways, with a repeated play on words that depends for its effect on the echoes of "line" and "lineage...

...At home it had but learned the pathetic weakness of nationality...

...Petersburg chief of police in January 1878...

...The name Bloxam is used for a minor character, but those in the know would have recognized Jack Bloxam, editor of a high-risk homosexual aesthetic magazine to whom Wilde had promised Phrases and Philosophies For the Use of theYoung ("The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible...

...An entirely new factor has appeared in the social development of the country, and this factor is the Irish-American and his influence...

...What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered...

...Max Nordau was, with Theodor Herzl, one of the founders of political Zionism...

...His biographer was his daughter, Lady Gwendolen Cecil...

...It was for guessing at the secret hatred and coldness, which at all times underlay the English profession of charity and moral hygiene, that he made the enemies who rejoiced in his abjection...

...To mature its power, to concentrate its actions, to learn the secrets of its own strength and of England's weakness, the Celtic intellect has had to cross the Atlantic...

...Imperialist war—the outcome of an ostensibly "liberal" imperium—had very nearly returned civilized Europe to a barbaric state...

...If that FALL • 1995 • 515 Wilde's Socialism denouement had been retained, the coincidence between art and life would have been almost unbearable...

...It's unlikely that Wilde's mordant observations about the empire's treatment of his homeland would have escaped the attention of the prurient...

...Pressing him further on his eligibility and inquiring as to whether his money is in land or investments, she is told, "Investments, chiefly," and muses aloud: That is satisfactory...

...Froude, as it certainly is to many others, the true ideal of political science...

...Recovering a little of his old form after his release, he said, "I quite agree with Dr...

...Its contribution has largely been forgotten, because as George Dangerfield so hauntingly records in his book The Strange Death of Liberal England, it was overwhelmed by the First World War that it tried so hard to prevent...

...It is a safe bet that Wilde would have appreciated the joke, because we know that he concealed at least one and—I would argue— probably two subtexts in his brittle dialogue...

...in a strange land it realized what indomitable forces nationality possesses...

...There is little if any strain involved in making these conjectures, because we know that Wilde read the literature of socialism, attended meetings, and kept company with leading socialists such as Shaw (who didn't like The Importance, typically regarding it as frothy...

...She welcomes many and multiform natures...

...Bernard Shaw wrote a riposte to Nordau, staunchly maintaining that here in a new and more virulent form was the traditional superstition that the stock was weakening and civilization going to the dogs...

...Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots...

...And, despite the cloud under which its author languished for so long (a cloud, as someone once observed, hardly bigger than a man's hand) the play has been deemed fit for even the most demure school productions and amateur fiestas...

...When I married Lord Bracknell," says Lady Bracknell, "I had no fortune of any kind...

...In a good democracy," opines this prince at one crucial moment, "every man should be an aristocrat...

...Wilde's misgivings about socialism—that it would prove humorless, uniform, and hostile to the untamed and the emotional and aesthetic were to be fully materialized in National Socialism...

...Those who have visited the exhibitions of Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art") put on by the Nazis will see the force of the campaign that listed "pacifism" and antimilitarism along with mental illness, physical deformity, and the mockery of religion as enemies of the state...

...Within a few years of Wilde's death, the American citizen Eamon de Valera had in effect out-generaled the British empire...

...He might have wished to protest that this was taking the business of paradox too far...

...She has the attraction of a wonderful personality and touches the heart of one and the brain of another, and draws this man by his hatred of injustice, and his neighbour by his faith in the future, and a third, it may be, by his love of art or by his wild worship of a lost and buried past...

...The Salisbury family motto, just for good measure, is Sero Sed Serio: "Late but in earnest:' And the great family estates were linked to London by a network of those railways in which the landed classes took such an early and profitable interest...

...Only this year came yells of anguish from the British Tories as a Republican guerrilla was greeted on the White House lawn, and London (which believed itself to have an exclusive "special relationship" with theAmerican Empire) gnashed impotently at this reminder of blood debts incurred decades before...

...Two historical ironies arise from this littleremembered combat...

...Wilde never lost his revulsion 516 • DISSENT Wilde's Socialism against sermonizing of this kind, and maintained that it was finer to steal rather than to beg...

...It was this set of affinities, indeed, which involved Wilde in almost his last polemical battle...

...Wilde's banter at Balfour's expense was exactly designed to be of the sort that would land him in trouble—Blunt himself noticed the same tendency at a lunch for Herbert and Margot Asquith, when Wilde teased the entire assembly of the Establishment and won every round—but at least this serves to correct the later picture of Wilde as an epicene dandy whose sallies were confined to the lounge...

...We can therefore situate Wilde firmly in the company of the Victorian socialist aristocracy...

...Degeneration" became the summary word for everything—cosmopolitan, Mediterranean, skeptical—that the New Order regarded as weak or treacherous in the German character...