Shared wit of Whistler and Wilde

Oscar’s play (I was there on Saturday) strikes me as a mixture that will run…though infantine to my sense…There is so much drollery – that is, ‘cheeky’ paradoxical wit of dialogue, and the pit and the gallery are so pleased at finding themselves clever enough to ‘catch on’ to four or five of the ingenious – too ingenious – mots in the dozen, that it makes them feel quite decadent and raffiné …The ‘impudent’ speech at the end was simply inevitable mechanical Oscar – I mean the usual trick of saying the unusual…

How about that for a piece of lese-majesty. Few would dare write it about St Oscar today, when the aspiration to appear at once infantine and decadent has become universal. Yet the reflections of Henry James on Lady Windermere’s Fan seem irrefutable. Audiences ‘catch on’ to Oscar because the inversion he practised was so formulaic you couldn’t miss it, and because he was a naughty as well as a funny man. Like doting mothers the English can never get enough of naughtiness. Yet how deep was his wit, and how original was it? James McNeill Whistler claimed to have been his friend Oscar’s tutor, and they were frequently in each other’s company. Listening to them together must have been like watching a rap contest of transcendent quality, though the gibes got personal after their break, when capping one another turned to putting each other down.

,img>You could see the initial attraction. Both were outsiders of a sort, one sexually, the other by nationality. Both had a high regard for their art, though their genius was not unalloyed; Wilde’s brilliance is currently oversold, for pietistic reasons, while Whistler produced one great painting of his mother, some etchings and the ‘Nocturnes’. They also shared a strain of insecurity. In Whistler this was expressed in justified worries about the longevity of his canvases, a concern neatly reflected in the decay of the portrait of Dorian Gray.