Oscar Wilde once said in court: 'I have never given adoration to anybody
but myself.' You can tell he was joking. But still, he could be very candid
about other people, preferably other artists, who would, in turn, be fairly
critical of Oscar. Here are a few examples.
This is Oscar speaking.
About Alexander Pope:
There are two ways of disliking poetry: one way is to dislike it, the other
is to read Pope.
About George Meredith:
His style is a chaos, illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer, he
has mastered everything but language.
Meredith is a prose Browning and so is Browning: he uses poetry as
a medium for writing prose…
About William Wordsworth:
Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a Lake Poet. He found in
stones the sermons he had already hidden there.
About Henry James:
He writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
James is developing, but he will never arrive at passion, I fear…
About Algernon Swinburne:
He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal.
About Robert Yelverton Tyrell:
If he had known less, he would have been a poet.
About James McNeill Whistler:
Whistler, with all his faults, was never guilty of writing a line of poetry.
Whistler has opened the eyes of the blind and has given great encouragement
to the shortsighted.
Mr Whistler always spelt art, and I believe still spells it, with a
capital 'I'.
About George Bernard Shaw:
Bernard Shaw is an excellent man. He has not an enemy in the world - and
none of his friends like him.
About Charles Dickens:
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without
laughing.
Dickens has influenced only journalism.
About John Keats:
As I stood before the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as
a Priest of Beauty slain before his time, and the Vision of Guido's St
Sebastian came before my eyes…
About Longfellow:
He was in himself a beautiful poem, more beautiful than anything he ever
wrote.
Longfellow is a great poet only for those who do not read poetry.
About Emile Zola:
M. Zola is determined to show that if he has not got genius, he can at
least be dull: and how well he succeeds!
About Alfred Lord Tennyson:
How can a man be a great poet and lead the life of a country gentleman?
Think of a man going down at eight o'clock with the family, and writing
Idylls of the King until lunchtime!
About Walter Pater:
He is a Presbyterian Verlaine.
About André Gide:
He is an egoist without an ego.
Wilde on Mallarmé:
Mallarmé is a poet, a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes
in French, because in that language he is incomprehensible, while in English,
unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a gift, not everyone has
it.
Wilde on Catulle Mendès:
This devil of a man is terribly amusing.
About Maurice Maeterlinck:
He is a bon garçon. Of course he has quite given up art. he only
thinks of making life sane and healthy, and freeing the soul from the trammels
of culture. Art seems to him now a malady. And the Princess Maleine an
absurdity of youth. He rests his hope of humanity on the Bicycle…
About Max Beerbohm:
He has the gift of perpetual old age.
And here's what people thought of Oscar.
Walt Whitman says:
What a fine boy. I was glad to have him with me, for his youthful health
and buoyancy are refreshing.
A Canadian newspaper during the American tour:
He looks like a cross between a comic opera villain and a charlatan.
Edmond de Goncourt in his diary:
Dined with de Nittis with the English poet Oscar Wilde, an individual of
doubtful sex who talks like a third-rate actor, and tells some tall stories,
but gave us an amusing picture of a town in Texas.
Robert de Montesquiou calls Oscar:
'Antinoüs of the Horrible'
James McNeill Whistler says:
What has Oscar in common with art? except that he dines at our tables and
picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces?
Oscar - the amiable, irresponsible, esurient Oscar - with no more sense
of a picture than of the fit of a coat, has the courage of the opinions…of
others.
Wilde not only trifled with my shoe, but bolted with the latchet.
Punch about Oscar's poems:
The poet is Wilde,
But his poetry's tame.
The Pall Mall Gazette about Oscar's American lectures:
Probably no one laughs (in his sleeve) at and despises these mock-hysterical
aesthetes more than does the Great Prophet himself - who, by the way, is
not much of a prophet in his own country, Ireland, and not much of a poet
in this.
Henry James says:
"Hosscar" Wilde is a fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad, an unclean beast.
Ce monsieur gives at last on one's nerves.
The World, after Oscar had cut off his long hair:
Our Oscar is with us again, but, O,
He is changed who was once so fair!
Has the iron gone into his soul? O no!
It has only gone over his hair.
The New York Times, about Oscar's play Vera:
We do not doubt the sincerity of Mr Oscar Wilde who, nevertheless, has
given us cogent reason to doubt his sincerity.
The Bat, after Oscar's marriage:
At last he went and cut his hair-
The soil proved poor and arid
And things are much as once they were-
He's settled down and married!
Marshall P. Wilder observes:
The first time I saw Oscar he wore his hair long and his breeches short;
now, I believe, he wears his hair short and his trousers long.
Lady Colin Campbell used to call Oscar:
'that great white caterpillar'
William Butler Yeats says:
As a writer, he seemed unfinished; a man who, by sheer vehemence of nature,
all but saw the Grail.
Mme Arman de Caillavet said:
Mr Wilde is a cross between Apollo and Albert Wolff (the dramatic critic
of Le Figaro - an enormous, corsetted, made-up homosexual)
Paul Valéry joked that Oscar was as:
A symbolic mouth à la Redon which swallows a mouthful and mechanically
transforms it at once into a satanic aphorism.
Percival Almy in 1894:
His veracity is terrible... and all the more terrible because it is implied
rather than direct. He leaves us not a lie to cover us... Oh, he is a grim
physician!
The Idler in 1882:
Imagine a wilderness of Wildes! It would be like a sky all rainbows.
Shaw on Wilde:
I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of heaven shut against him. He
is too good company to be excluded.
Verlaine on Wilde:
This man is a true pagan. He possesses the insouciance which is half of
happiness, for he does not know penitence.
Cyril Connolly writes in Previous Convictions:
My three days with Wilde's letters are no proof of his genius. On the whole
they are viscous, even oppressive, they adhere rather than delight and
one is left with the impression of having escaped at last the clutches
of some great, greedy beetle.
Jean Moréas concluded:
This Englishman is a shit.
You could say that, contrary to many of his critics, Oscar could
at least insult people in a witty manner…
