That seems like carelessness,” we are not in the realm of kindness or gallantry. And it is certainly true that whatever gallant statements occur in Earnest are undermined. Thus, after Miss Prism identifies the old handbag as hers, Jack exclaims, “Miss Prism, more is restored to you than this handbag. I was the baby you placed in it.” He goes on to call Miss Prism “mother,” and then, when she indignantly says, “Mr. Worthing, I am unmarried,” he heroically responds:

Unmarried! I do not deny that is a serious blow. But after all, who has the right to cast a stone against one who has suffered? Cannot repentance wipe out an act of folly? Why should there be one law for men, and another for women? Mother, I forgive you. (Tries to embrace her again.)

Out of context, a daring speech—though here not daring of course, but comic, since it is addressed to the prim Miss Prism.

What, then, is the play about, or is it about nothing? Some readers see it as a variant of Wilde’s three earlier witty society dramas with their characters who try to conceal shameful secrets: They find, in this motif of a secret, a veiled allusion to Wilde’s homosexuality—a sort of ambiguous confession, or, rather, an ambiguous challenge to society, since his sinners are strong figures, modern versions of Salome, who also defies society. Something has already been said of Wilde’s view that the artist is a sort of brother to the criminal; to this it should be added that Wilde’s taste in sex included good-looking semi-criminal types whom he romanticized: “It was like feasting with panthers,” he wrote in De Profundis: “The danger was half the excitement.” But too much can be made of the view that the plays are daring revelations of a dangerous secret. Secrets are the stuff of much drama, from Oedipus (Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother) to the present, and they were especially common in the well-made plays of the late nineteenth century. It is easy enough to reject this view that the play is a sinner’s artful confession and thus an effort at self-exculpation, but is the play merely what Wilde said it was, something “by a butterfly for butterflies”? In his letters, where Wilde never hesitates to take his works seriously and to lecture his reader on them, none of the comments about Earnest suggests that the play is to I taken seriously: “The great charm of the play is in the dialogue”; “my play is really very funny”; and (as late as 1899), Earnest is “a fanciful absurd comedy.” None of this is inconsistent with Wilde’s statements, made throughout his career as a writer, that (to quote from “The Decay of Lying”) “Art never expresses anything but itself,” or, to quote the first lines of the Preface to Dorian Gray, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.” This is much of a piece with Maurice Denis’s statement, already quoted, 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.” But to this it can be replied that Earnest is filled with talk about important matters, such as love and marriage and divorce and illegitimacy, education, class relationships, appearance and reality, and death. How seriously does the play allow us to take these themes? Wilde subtitled the play “A Trivial Comedy for Serious People,” and he told a friend that the play has a “philosophy.” What was this philosophy? Wilde explained: “We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” This is, of course, again the language of the dandy, designed to shock—but also, perhaps, to stimulate thought and to induce a new perspective.

Perhaps the play is about exactly what its title announces, the importance of being earnest—even in play. Algernon says to Jack, “I happen to be serious about Bunburying. What you are serious about I haven’t got the remotest idea. About everything, I should fancy. You have an absolutely trivial nature.” Algernon is mistaken in his view of Jack, but the point here, reenforced by the title and by the end of the play, is that one must find something to be serious about, i.e. one must not live a mechanical, conventional life but must (in Pater’s words in the Conclusion to The Renaissance) burn with a “hard, gemlike flame.” In the earlier witty plays Wilde tried, at least in some passages, to be serious about the world around him, but this task (dare one say it?) was too much for him. The Soul of Man Under Socialism, where Wilde writes as a polemicist rather than as an artist, too clearly shows that Wilde was not in any reasonable definition of the term a profound thinker about matters other than the arts. In Earnest, however, he determined at last to be serious only about comedy, and he wrote a masterpiece. Perhaps, then, we can accept Shaw’s view that the play is inhuman without accepting his evaluation that it is therefore unworthy. (Elsewhere Shaw made amends of a sort, saying that he picked up his “passion for fun from Oscar Wilde.”) Again we are reminded of Pater’s Conclusion, where, after characterizing “success in life” as the ability to burn with a gemlike flame, an ability to get “as many pulsations into life as possible,” Pater says: “Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” Salome burned with a gemlike flame, and presumably the play about her is supposed to induce in the spectator a similar intensity. In Earnest, Gwendolyn provides us with a delightful comic version: “This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.” Substitute Shaw’s “rib-tickling” for Gwendolyn’s “suspense,” and we get an intensity that surely Pater did not have in mind but that nonetheless has established the play among the great comedies of the world.

 

A final, bibliographical point: Wilde drafted Earnest in four acts, but was persuaded by the producer to reduce it to three. Acts II and III were combined to form the present Act III, chiefly by the omission of an episode concerning one Gribsby, which we print as an appendix. The omission of this episode from the final version of the play is a real loss, but it should be pointed out that the four-act version is essentially a draft—it lacks much of the wit of the later, three-act version—and cannot by any means be regarded as the play that Wilde would have put on the stage if it had not been for the interference of the producer. The three-act version is the version that he approved for production and later (with the addition of small improvements in the dialogue) for publication. When in 1898 he prepared The Importance of Being Earnest for publication he knew that the stage version was far in advance of his earlier, four-act draft. For instance, in the manuscript (four-act) version Algernon’s “Now produce your explanation, and pray make it remarkable” is followed by these rather dead sentences: “The bore about most explanations is that they are never half so remarkable as the things they try to explain. That is why modern science is so absolutely tedious.” This passage appears also in the typescript of the three-act version, but it is crossed out there. Wilde continued to revise, even on the proofs he received from the publisher, and so in the published version we get something much more concise and much better: “Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable.” To regard the four-act version as authoritative, then, is to reject Wilde’s many improvements.