Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture - Ohio University Press & Swallow ...

ohm, provided an unapologetic defense of Wilde’s achievements. Beerbohm
courageously devoted the second half of his theater review in the Saturday Review
to a thoughtful assessment of a man whose death “extinguishes the hope
that the broken series of his play might be resumed.”³₅ (Beerbohm cleared these
remarks with his editor in advance, lest there be any objection to mentioning
Wilde’s name.)³₆ Even if, in Beerbohm’s judgment, Wilde was not “what one calls
a born writer,” this was not a hindrance to Wilde’s art. Wilde, Beerbohm observes,
came to creating drama “when he was no longer a young man,” and the playwright
correspondingly brought to the form not only his skills “as a thinker and
a weaver of ideas” but also his established prowess “as the master of a literary style”
(230, 231). No matter how much Wilde might be faulted for writing in a manner
that bore “too close a likeness to the flow of speech,” Beerbohm judged that “this
very likeness . . . gave him in dramatic dialogue as great an advantage over more
careful and finer literary stylists as he had over ordinary playwrights with no pretence
to style” (231). In other words, for Beerbohm it is unquestionable that “now
Wilde is dead” the public “will realise . . . fully, what was for them involved in his
downfall”—namely, “how lamentable the loss to dramatic literature” (232).
Three days after this supportive notice appeared, a one-act play by Beerbohm
opened as a forty-minute curtain-raiser for Mr. and Mrs. Daventry. In November
of that year, Stella Campbell had approached Beerbohm to provide a dramatic
adaptation of his story “The Happy Hypocrite” (1896), which was first published
in the Yellow Book—the initially controversial quarterly magazine that, in its
earliest issues, helped focus attention on an emergent body of Decadent writing
in Britain. Beerbohm’s witty narrative amounts to a playful inversion of Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, revised 1891). Whereas Wilde’s Dorian Gray remains
youthfully unblemished as he commits increasingly heinous crimes, Beerbohm’s
Sir George Hell dons the mask of a saint to conceal that he is no longer an infamous
Regency libertine but a man who lives instead in marital bliss under the
hypocritical pseudonym “George Heaven.” At the end of Wilde’s story, Dorian
Gray comes face to face with the portrait hidden away in his home, where it has
grown hideous through acts of violence and betrayal. By comparison, when a
former lover threatens to destroy the saintly-looking George Hell’s happiness,
the demand that he remove his mask leads to a surprising outcome: his face beneath
has become as impeccable as the flawless waxen device affixed to it. Instead
of hiding under the mask, Sir George therefore has come to embody it, in a style
that strikingly runs against the grain of the moral that sends Dorian Gray to his
Introduction 11