![]() The epigrams that appear there routinely reappear more than once, as in the case of Cecil Graham’s remark in Lady Windermere’s Fan about “Experience,” that it is “the name that men give to their mistakes,” a remark originally made by the Russian prime minister in Vera and then again in Dorian Gray. This acerbic tone of condemnation pervades the entire chapter, appropriately entitled “Comedy as Self-Degradation.” There can be nothing good or redeeming about Wilde’s dramatic art. His plays seem the work of two authors, Oscar Wilde providing dialogue similar to conversations in The Picture of Dorian Gray while some hack supplied Wilde “with the plots and all the emotional scenes and tirades where the action progressed.” In fact, Roditi explains, the hack was Wilde himself, harried by creditors, desperate to realize commercial success, and eager to market the epigrams he had been squandering so unprofitably on social conversation. The English world this critic sees as the background within which the dramatist wrote his comedies and other plays was a decadent, restless period marked by craven capitulation to French influences, to which Wilde also broadly succumbed. ![]() We find ourselves in a public arena that, according to Roditi, draws out an entirely different and contrary aspect of Wilde’s talent. He makes discriminating distinctions, contributes considered judgments, and appears to be well on his way pursuing the aim of his study, which he says is “to indicate the central position that Wilde’s works and ideas occupy in the thought and art of his age, and in the shift of English and American literature from established and aging Romanticism to what we now call modernism.” He adds that, amid the confusion of late Victorian criticism, he hopes to show that Wilde’s “ingenious, imaginative and vigorous dialectical thought appears monumental.” Carrying the reader along, he arrives at his chapter on the plays, specifically the comedies-and introduces an entirely new and suddenly hostile tone. He appears to have read all of Wilde’s works with care and studied widely in the great collection of Wilde in the William Andrews Clark Library in Los Angeles. In a book called simply Oscar Wilde, over the space of more than one hundred pages Roditi offers a series of chapters on the poetry, the prose poems, criticism, and fiction. ![]() In particular, in 1947 a book of criticism by Edouard Roditi and an article by James Agate on the plays (published in the year of Agate’s death), followed in 1951 by a wholly negative assessment by St John Ervine, evinced an uncompromisingly derogatory attitude toward the dramatist and his writings. ![]() At the same time, there was evidence that a partly hostile reexamination was occurring of Wilde’s much-improved reputation. In the ten years beginning in 1947, a world at relative peace once again presented an energizing opportunity for a variety of publications relating to Oscar Wilde, his plays, and especially The Importance of Being Earnest. ![]()
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