This year marks the 125th anniversary of the publication of Oscar Wilde's Intentions, a book of essays and dialogues on aesthetics that included one of his most celebrated works, The Critic as Artist. To mark the anniversary, we are republishing the literary critic Terry Eagleton's review of The House Beautiful: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetic Interior (by Charlotte Gere with Lesley Hoskins, published by Lund Humphries), which originally appeared in The Art Newspaper's July/August 2000 issue.
The aim of this opulently illustrated book, published in connection with an exhibition at the Geffrye Museum to commemorate the centenary of Oscar Wilde’s death, is to set its flamboyant protagonist in the context of the Aesthetic Movement of his day. The movement was never quite as self-conscious, programmatic an affair as the book’s capitalising of its title might suggest, since aesthetes are about as easily organised as toddlers. But the volume gives us an erudite account of that extraordinary efflorescence of aesthetic life, all the way from a taste for the Japanesque to the Arts and Crafts Movement, from Morris’s Oxford Street firm to Bohemian Chelsea and Queen Anne furniture, which marks the sensibility of the fin-de-siècle. We learn of exotic artistic enclaves in Hampstead and St John’s Wood, of the influence of Whistler and Walter Pater, of the period’s passion for blue and white china and deliciously decadent knick-knacks, all of which was curiously coupled in some cases with an evangelising social conscience.
All this is then brought to a fine focus in an account of Wilde’s celebrated house in London’s Tite Street, a name perhaps more appropriate for some other Irish writers, with its Chippendale furniture, white walls and carpets and Thomas Carlyle’s writing desk, all of which was to be knocked down for a song at auction when its proprietor fell into disgrace. With their customary vindictiveness, the agents of the Establishment sold off his entire library of rare books at two or three pounds a bundle, knocked down a Whistler painting for a shilling, sold off his children’s toys for thirty shillings and stole some letters to his wife.
Wilde’s choicest work of art, however, was undoubtedly himself. This Irish émigré with the hulking body of a navvy spent a lifetime sculpting himself into shape, chipping away at the odd rough patch of personality, erasing the last traces of Nature. He was the great self-fashioner of his age, converting the stereotypical idle Paddy into the stereotypical indolent Patrician. He was clay in his own hands, awaiting his transformation into the magnificent objet d’art known to the world as Oscar Wilde. Wilde was a brilliant impersonator of himself, a self-plagiarist and self-promoter who was a piously dedicated to his own pleasure as an acolyte to a high priest. In this resolute narcissism, he could compensate a little for the misery of those lonely rooms with rent boys in cheap hotels; at least he knew that when he woke up in the morning, he would still be there for himself.
If Wilde was an aesthete, it was partly because he detested Nature as boring, drearily predictable, singularly unconvincing in its performance. He saw Nature as intolerably stereotyped, and one reason he was gay was no doubt because heterosexuality seemed so tediously clichéd. His own life was one long unnatural practice, his selfhood a theatre, his personality a ceaseless exchange of masks. Even his wretched career in Reading gaol becomes material for yet further self-fashioning, as in De Profundis he reverently, insolently recreates himself as the suffering Christ. His final pose, in short, was to be done with all posing. In all of this he was in flight from that drearily predictable, singularly unconvincing place not known as Nature, but as Ireland, and his sense of selfhood as a fiction is that of the colonial subject in exile. Truth for Wilde simply meant an ironic awareness of his own unreality; and he thus saw himself as superior to the English, who were just as unreal as he was, but were obtusely unaware of the fact.
“Was Wilde really Irish, or is Eagleton just making that up?”, I heard a woman ask her companion during a London performance of my play Saint Oscar. The answer, I suppose, is that he was both really Irish and making himself up. Wilde, for whom all selfhood was fleeting, provisional, self-contradictory, cobbled himself together as he went along, with all the self-transformative freedom of a work of art. A truth in art, he once remarked, is one whose contradiction is also true; and of nothing was this truer than his own brilliant, blighted career.
He hailed from the city which his literary compatriot James Joyce spelt as “Doublin”, and everything about him was doubled, hybrid, ambivalent. His name, for a start, which yokes the Gaelic Oscar to the English Wilde; his sexuality, as a reputable married man who enjoyed a spot of rough trade; and his politics, as a devout Socialist who would frequent only the very best restaurants. He was socialite and sodomite, victor and victim, upper-class and underdog, a darling of English high society whose enchanting tales for children are almost all secret revolutionary tracts.
Just as the house at Tite Street was a shade too perfect, more museum than living space, so Wilde himself, having stepped off the boat from Dublin and rapidly shed his brogue, became like many an émigré to these shores rather too impeccably English. To be too fastidiously, too meticulously the genuine article is simply to betray the fact that one is not. The real patrician can take his personality for granted, whereas Wilde had to work on it with all the skill of an interior decorator. It was just that the interior in question was his soul, not a drawing room. Wilde believed, however, that the soul was to be cultivated by being externalised, that its inner reality was itself a matter of appearances. His aim was not to be deep, but to be profoundly superficial. In doing so, he hoped to subvert that oppressive moral earnestness which in England passed for spiritual depth, and which was eventually to destroy him. What brought him to his doom was less the fraught dealings with the odious Lord Alfred Douglas and his psychopathic sire, than the fact that he dared to live his life with the glorious, self-delighting pointlessness of a work of art. The finest aestheticism is not one which substitutes art for life, but one which turns life itself into a triumphant artefact. And in his genius in accomplishing this end, Oscar Wilde has few rivals.
Terry Eagleton is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University