The Vital Importance of Wilde’s bons mots

Emily EellsCREA (Centre de recherches anglophones)

Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense

AbsintheAfter the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you seem them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. (“Reminiscences” by Ada Leverson)

Zola, EmileM. Zola’s characters … have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them? In literature we require distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with the account of the doings of the lower orders. (“The Decay of Lying”)

Karl Beckson, 1996.

Il n’y a qu’une sorte d’amour, mais il y en a mille différentes copies.Nos vertus ne sont, le plus souvent, que des vices déguisés.

“everyone was repeating his ‘mots’”. Ada Leverson, Letters to the Sphinx

“Every writer of any individuality has, so to speak, his trademark; but there are times when the output of Mr Wilde’s epigram factory threatens to become all trademark and no substance. » (William Archer on An Ideal Husband, Pall Mall Budget 10 January 1895)

“his one-liners had the perfect pitch and promise of a struck tuning-fork, but they issued from an imagination in which far deeper harmonies were latent and constantly in search of more resonant forms of expression.” Seamus Heaney

Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand, eds. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of the Mind in the Making, 1989.

Ian Small, Oscar Wilde Revalued 1993.

You can’t make a fool of a person unless he is a fool already

To enter married life with a man incapable of deception would augur ill for a happy future.

A woman should know nothing before marriage, and less afterwards.

I have never sown wild oats : I have planted a few orchids.

“Leading a double life is the only proper preparation for marriage-”

“I don’t know any Duchess who could be described as the thin edge of any wedge-”

Beauty “Rien n’est vrai que le beau.”

La beauté est parfaiteLa beauté peut toute choseLa beauté est la seule choseau monde qui n’existe pas a demi [sic]

“dans la vie morale il est beau de quelquefois faire naufrage”

Joseph de La Font Le Naufrage ou la pompe funèbre de Crispin Si vous voulez, malgré l'orage, Voguer encore en ce beau jour, Que ce soit sur la mer d'Amour : Il est beau d'y faire naufrage. L'Amour en quittant le rivage, Promet toujours un heureux sort ; Avec lui, jusque dans le port, Il est beau de faire naufrage.

Lord Henry The Picture of Dorian Gray (chapter 17) ‘Yesterday I cut an orchid, for my button-hole. It was a marvellous spotted thing, as effective as the seven deadly sins.’

Algernon. I never have any appetite unless I have a buttonhole first.

“Ones [sic] buttonhole may be allowed to be romantic in feeling, but ones [sic] necktie should be distinctly classical both in style and treatment.” (manuscript note)

“The buttonhole in particular, the only socially acceptable form of male floral adornment, became a charged site in Wilde’s and the fin de siècle’s homoerotic imagery. Associated with dandies, Aesthetes and Decadents, the exotic boutonnière was a sign of questionable masculinity. The insertion of flowers into eyelets, furthermore, functioned as a symbol of and precursor to sexual activity.”

Alison Syme, A Touch of Blossom : John Singer Sargent and the Queer Flora of Fin-de-Siècle Art.

Sentiment is all very well for the button-hole. But the essential thing for a necktie is style. A well-tied tie is the first serious step in life”. Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, act 3.

An Ideal husband Beginning of Act 3Stage directions : LORD GORING enters in evening dress with a buttonhole. […]LORD GORING Got my second buttonhole for me, Phipps?PHIPPS Yes, my lord.[Takes his hat, cane, and cape, and presents new buttonhole on salver.]LORD GORING Rather distinguished thing, Phipps. I am the only person of the smallest importance in London at present who wears a buttonhole.PHIPPS Yes, my lord. I have observed that,LORD GORING [Taking out old buttonhole.] You see, Phipps, Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature. “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of Young” The Chameleon Oxford, December 1894

Lord Henry : “ I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."

“The Decay of Lying” (1891). “If […] we regard Nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him ‘Laodamia,’ and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature gave him ‘Martha Ray’ and ‘Peter Bell,’ and the address to Mr. Wilkinson’s spade.”

To The Spade of A Friend by William Wordsworth Composed while we were labouring together in his Pleasure-Ground.

Spade! with which Wilkinson hath till'd his Lands,And shap'd these pleasant walks by Eamont's side,

Thou art a tool of honour in my hands;I press thee through the yielding soil with pride.

Who shall inherit Thee when Death hath laidLow in the darksome Cell thine own dear Lord?

That Man will have a trophy, humble, Spade!More noble than the noblest Warrior's sword.

With Thee he will not dread a toilsome day,His powerful Servant, his inspiring Mate!

And, when thou art past service, worn away,Thee a surviving soul shall consecrate.

Whenever the necessities of life are dearer/ cheaper than the luxuries of life the community becomes uncivilized. Bread should be always dearer than flowers.

Manuscript note

“I love the theatre ; it’s so much more real than life”

“The world is a stage but the play is badly cast” Lord Arthur Savile's Crime

Il est bien plus intelligent de dire des sottises que d’en écouter, c’est également beaucoup plus rare.

It is much cleverer to talk nonsense than to listen to it, my dear fellow, and a much rarer thing too.” Algernon 4 act version

“[…] the literary fact of the matter is that the axe which is keenest, the one which is still most capable of shattering the surfaces of convention, is […] the hard-edged, unpathetic prose that Wilde created […] in dramas like The Importance of Being Earnest. His heady paradoxes, his over-the-topness at knocking the bottom out of things, the rightness of his wrongfooting, all that high-wire word-play, all that freedom to affront and to exult in his uniqueness - that was Wilde’s true path to solidarity. The lighter his touch, the more devastating his effect. When he walked on air, he was on solid ground.”

Seamus Heaney