The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays Read Online

Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains, like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and come down into the valleys,

Thy body is hideous. It is like the body of a leper. It is like a plastered wall where vipers have crawled; like a plastered wall where the scorpions have made their nest. It is like a whitened sepulchre full of loathsome things.

In Salome, and especially when we are in Salome’s mind, we are in the “unknown land ... where all things are perfect and poisonous,” the land of the mysterious brain in which “everything takes place.”

The style, or styles, that Wilde uses in Salome might in part be described by a passage from Dorian Gray, where Wilde comments on Huysmans’s A Rebours, which he characterizes as “a psychological study of a certain young Parisian, who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own.... One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modem sinner.” Huysmans’s style, Wilde says, consists of “elaborate paraphrases” and “subtle monotony,” terms that can be applied to much of Salome. More exactly, in Salome Wilde often uses a style that is supposed to remind us of the Bible, with its repetitions, its lack of subordination, its unusual metaphors, and its catalogs. Here, for instance, is a passage from the Old Testament:

Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain,

And here is Wilde’s Jokanaan, prophesying the coming of Christ:

When he cometh, the solitary places shall be glad. They shall blossom like the lily. The eyes of the blind shall see the day, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened. The new-born child shall put his hand upon the dragon’s lair, he shall lead the lions by their manes.

The real function of this style, however, is not merely to imitate the Bible but to isolate the characters. Often the characters seem to be captivated by their own sentences, compelled to go on and on, and, surrounded by Pater’s “thick wall of personality,” they often seem curiously unaware of other characters, “each mind [to quote Pater again] keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream world.” The opening passage, which we have already glanced at, in which the Young Syrian and the Page of Herodias comment on the moon is only the first of many examples:

THE YOUNG SYRIAN. How beautiful is the Princess Salome to-night.

THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: Look at the moon! How strange the moon seems. She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. You would fancy she was looking for dead things.

THE YOUNG SYRIAN: She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. You would fancy she was dancing.

This is scarcely dialogue (an exchange of speeches) as any dramatist before the late nineteenth century conceived of dialogue. For another example of Wilde’s “Biblical” style we can look at part of one of Salome’s speeches to Jokanaan:

It is thy mouth that I desire, Jokanaan. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate-flowers that blossom in the garden of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets, that herald the approach of kings, and make afraid the enemy, are not so red. Thy mouth is redder than the feet of those who tread the wine in the wine-press.

The tower of ivory, the pomegranates, the blast of trumpets, the roses, the kings, the wine and the wine-press, remind us of passages in the Bible; but even more important for Wilde’s purpose is the sense, conveyed by this style, that, as in Pater’s thought, Salome’s varying perceptions or sensations of Jokanaan are all that she can know of Jokanaan. There is also in this passage an incantatory quality (we remember Wilde’s pride in “the recurring phrases of Salome, that bind it together like a piece of music with recurring motifs”), which Wilde felt moved the drama toward music, in accordance with Pater’s dictum that “All the arts aspire to the condition of music.” In De Profundis Wilde speaks of himself as an artist “making beautiful colored musical things such as Salome.” Earlier playwrights thought that they were making plays, chiefly out of plot and character. The reference to “beautiful colored ... things” reminds us that Wilde is, of course, also much influenced by the theories of the French Symbolists, which shaped not only lyric and dramatic poetry but also painting. Thus, in 1890 the French painter Maurice Denis—who was a close friend of the actor-manager who gave Salomé its first public performance—wrote words that were to become famous: “Remember that a picture—before being a war horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote—is essentially a plane surface covered with colors arranged in a certain order.” That is, a work of art first of all is an independent creation, not an imitation of nature. In some of Wilde’s comments on art, this comes to mean that subject matter is irrelevant and that art is chiefly decoration, but often the point is that a work of art is something designed to evoke feelings (and pleasure) in the perceiver. (I will return to this idea when I discuss The Importance of Being Earnest.) Thus, we come back to the passages on the moon: the different perceivers are not really describing the moon as it is, but are describing and conveying to us their feelings.