“The Best Way of Misgoverning Ireland”: National Character and the “Art and Morality” Debate

On 5 July 1890, the Scots Observer's anonymous reviewer (identified decades later as Charles Whibley) denounced Dorian Gray, which had just been published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, as “false art – for its interest is medico-legal,” “false to human nature – for its hero is a devil,” and “false to morality – for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity” (“Reviews and Magazines” 181).Footnote ³ These assertions about art, human nature, and morality triggered a controversy that dominated the newspaper's correspondence columns for months. The following week (12 July), Wilde complained to the editor, W. E. Henley, that the review “confuse[s] the artist with his subject-matter,” since an artist “has no ethical sympathies at all” and regards “[v]irtue and wickedness” merely as “means [to] a certain artistic effect” (“Mr. Wilde's Rejoinder” 201). Henley's accompanying Note replied that it was “legitimate for a critic to hold and to express the opinion that no treatment, however skilful, can make the atmosphere tolerable to his readers” (202).

Which is more important – “treatment” or “atmosphere,” “artistic effect” or “subject-matter”? This question was integral to the ensuing debate. A review of Henley's Views and Reviews (1890), appearing below the Note, highlighted a connected question, implicit in both the Dorian review and Wilde's response: what is the relationship – if any – between art and morality? Inferring Henley's aesthetic philosophy to be that “[a]rt is simply un-moral,” the reviewer disagrees, claiming even Henley must confess that the immorality of Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami (1885), a “most vile and abominable work – written, if any book ever was, by a ‘bounder’ for ‘bounders,’” disbars it from becoming “perfectly and truly artistic” (“[The Writer]” 202).

This review provided an opening for the crafty Whibley to enter the debate the following week (19 July) under his own name. Placed under the new heading “Art and Morality,” his letter seems partly intended to deflect suspicions that he was Wilde's reviewer (226), which he was. Whibley refers to the “old battle between subject and treatment” and claims that Bel-Ami is deficient because the author “has not handled his subject like an artist”; thus, what the “reviewer is disposed to regard as immorality” is “nothing but a lack of proportion” (226). Maintaining that “critics . . . may only condemn or applaud” the artist's “treatment” and that art is, indeed, “un-moral,” Whibley pivots back to Dorian, pretending to disagree with the novel's reviewer about the reasons for its inadequacy: “You find in it art and no morals; I detect in its pages lots of morality and no art” (226; 227). From one of Henley's letters to Whibley, we know that Henley directed this new strategy, since he believed Wilde's first letter had made a strong rebuttal: “if he keeps us to our first utterance he has us in a tight place” (Selected Letters 193). Henley appears confident – “[o]ur second has him, I think” – yet his description of Wilde as “a dexterous & slippery bitch” reveals doubts (193). Advancing the new evaluation, Whibley argues that Wilde “lacks the tact and restraint to give us an artistic representation of a hero who is half Jack-the-Ripper, half Gaveston” and that it “must be peculiarly painful to him” to be “hailed by at least one religious print as a moral reformer” (227).

Whibley's intervention provoked a response from H. the following week (26 July) that did not mention Dorian but nonetheless triggered the development of an “Irish dimension” in the novel's second edition. Opposing Whibley, H. declares that “the clear and obvious duty of the critic . . . is to discuss both the subject treated and the treatment of the subject, and if he considers that one is praiseworthy and the other is not, to say so as plainly as possible” (253).Footnote ⁴ He provides an intriguing example:

H. then concludes by stating that a critic has “the duty of denouncing crime, vulgarity, Radicalism, and obscenity whenever he meets them” (254).

H.'s letter introduced Irish politics for the first time into the “Art and Morality” debate, but the topic arose frequently in the anti-Parnellite Scots Observer. For example, the issue containing the Dorian review also described a recent speech by Parnell as a “bitter outburst of provincial-nationalism . . . [that] can hardly fail . . . to awaken misgivings in the bosom of the honest and easy-going British Home Ruler. If any such there be” (Notes 160).Footnote ⁶ Four months earlier, Henley had published “Cleared,” Rudyard Kipling's versified vilification of Parnell (424). In addition, H.'s letter was accompanied by Kipling's “Belts,” one of the “Barrack-Room Ballads,” in which an Irish soldier regrets participating in “a row . . . [b]etween an Irish regiment an’ English cavalree” that leads to a shooting death: “’Tis all a mericle to me as in the Clink I lie: / There was a row in Silver Street – begod, I wonder why” (252-53). These lines, which reinforce a connection between Irishness and unthinking violence, would be cited later in the debate.

In the next issue (2 August 1890), Whibley dismisses H.'s ballad example: “He is frank enough to confess that were he a musical critic, he would take advantage of his position to give utterance to political banalités [. . ., and in] a similar process of reasoning he is doubtless prepared to condemn any novel . . . bound in green or . . . printed by a Home Ruler” (279). In this same issue, Wilde responds to Whibley's previous letter, finding “admirable” its “insistence on the right of the artist to select his own subject-matter” but denying that he – Wilde – would find “peculiarly painful” the approbation of “the foremost Christian papers” (279). Wilde then advances an aphorism that would reappear in the Preface to the 1891 Dorian, a circumstance that constitutes one of several direct connections between the debate and Wilde's revision process:

The following week (9 August), Whibley resumed his attack, delighting in depicting Dorian as “improving literature” and himself as the defender of “those who do not believe that an obtrusive moral is indispensable to every work of art” (303).Footnote ⁸ In addition, the dimension of nationality introduced in H.'s first letter was revived in T. E. Brown's classification of the artist who “selects dirt”:

However, Brown condescendingly maintains that Wilde, unlike Zola, does not have the artistic strength to control successfully his questionable material (304). J. MacLaren Cobban, the final contributor to this issue's forum, also invokes briefly the national dimension – and reinforces the stereotype of the violent Irish – by observing that “[t]he critics have banged each other with bladder and peas over the head with commendable cheerfulness and enthusiasm, and (like Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Irishman in a recent ballad in your journal) ‘Begod, I wonder why!’” (304).Footnote ⁹

The next issue (16 August) contains Wilde's third and final letter, this time responding to Whibley, Brown, and Cobban.Footnote ¹⁰ Claiming that Cobban has converted Wilde's “paradox” into “a tedious truism,” Wilde invokes the national dimension raised by previous commentators but, in a crucial turn, he directs it against England, not Ireland: “The English public like tediousness, and like things to be explained to them in a tedious way” (333). He had used this same tactic in his first and third letters to the St. James's Gazette, claiming that “the English public . . . takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral” and that the Gazette's review of Dorian “really makes one despair of the possibility of any general culture in England,” where “Puritanism . . . is always marring the artistic instinct” (Complete Letters 429, 432). However, the “Irish dimension” that is implicit in these earlier critiques of England becomes explicit in the third Observer letter:

As we can see, this is a direct response to H.'s “God Save Ireland” example, from the 26 July issue of the Scots Observer.

Now, it is true that Wilde had reproved English “misgoverning [of] Ireland” in earlier philosophical and literary reflections. In February 1890, he speculated that Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzŭ “might have something to say to Mr. Balfour about his coercion and active misgovernment in Ireland” (Reviews 535). The year before that, he described J. A. Froude's novel The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889) as an unwitting “record . . . of the incapacity of a Teutonic to rule a Celtic people against their own wish” (Reviews 281). Two years before that, he described the anti-Irish nationalism of John Pentland Mahaffy's Greek Life and Thought (1887) as displaying “an amount of political bias and literary blindness that is quite extraordinary” (Reviews 209).Footnote ¹¹ Nevertheless, the pivotal difference in the case of Wilde's third letter to the Observer is that his indictment arises during the defense of his own work's ethics and aesthetics.Footnote ¹²

The Observer published other highly relevant essays during the Dorian debate. We do not know whether Wilde read them, but, given their subject-matter, it seems very likely that he did. For example, “National Types. In England” (the first of a five-part series on different countries) appeared in the same issue as Wilde's third letter (16 August). In light of the national and political references in the Dorian controversy, the essay's praise of the English probably caught Wilde's attention. Channeling Matthew Arnold, the essayist states that the lack of “sentiment” in the “modern Englishman” produces “good and lasting qualities,” of “moderation, fairness, presence of mind,” “[t]he first” being “the great note of English politics” (329). The Englishman is “the best man of business in the world, for he looks naturally on things as they are, never mixes sentiment with affairs, and seeks his own advantage, yet in an honourable and open way” (329). We learn that “of all the rulers of alien races he is incomparably the justest and the best”; it may be that “he neither understands nor sympathises; but he goes calmly and irresistibly on his way, true to essential rules of justice and conduct, strong in the sense of his own superiority, and imperturbable in the hour of danger” (329–30). Allowing that “English life” lacks a “spiritual touch” and may often be “dull and commonplace,” the writer nevertheless perorates rapturously: “There is no department of human excellence – art, war, politics, science, life – in which she [England] has not shown an irresistible preponderance [and] she has so largely moulded the modern world, and is responsible for so much in its constitution, whether spiritual or material, that to conceive of it without her is a task beyond imagination” (330).

Five weeks later (27 September), the Observer unveils the picture of Irish national character, in which references to “[t]he shillelagh” being “a more aesthetic weapon than the clog” and the Irishman's ability for the “well-told lie” almost make one suspect an allusion to Wilde (485). The writer acknowledges some positive qualities in the Irish (“easy courtesy [. . . and h]igher in the scale . . . an exquisite polish, a rare refinement”) but quickly turns to the negative (485):

Unsurprisingly, the newspaper (now re-titled the National Observer) was jubilant about the revelation of Parnell's affair with Katharine O'Shea and the split in the Irish Parliamentary Party, and it gleefully ironized the ensuing rhetorical and physical violence: “Need it be remarked how conclusively these several incidents point to the fitness of this high-spirited, manly, independent, and truly astonishing people to govern themselves and the Ulstermen besides?” (20 December 1890; Notes 109).

Another essay exposes disturbingly the racism underpinning this imperialist irony. “The New Nigger Question” maintains that “the black” in the United States is “an animal – human certainly, but of a humanity which is half-way to the baboon” and that “[t]he white crust of the South is threatened with submersion by the black bog which is welling up from underneath” (17 January 1891; 214):

The essay's conclusion aligns its diatribe with the Observer's imperial perspective: “The application of all this to Ireland and Indian Native Congresses is – as Mr. Kipling might say – another story. A story which men of sense can tell for themselves” (215).

What can we learn by examining the Observer between July 1890 and January 1891? To recap, Whibley's anonymous review attacked Dorian for allegedly immoral subject-matter. When Wilde defended the artist's right to choose subject-matter, Whibley, under his own name, attacked the novel for allegedly inartistic treatment. Then H. introduced an Irish political dimension through his Fenian ballad example, a dimension that recurred in Brown's references to Swift and “mental rottenness” and Cobban's allusion to Kipling's belligerent Irish soldier. In response, Wilde also invoked a national dimension, condemning “the English public['s]” affinity for “tediousness” and the English government's “misgoverning [of] Ireland.” In the same issue, an essayist on national character extolled the English and, a few weeks later, assailed the Irish. Finally, in late 1890 and early 1891, the Parnell scandal and party split gave the Observer the chance to spew further chauvinism and racism.

“The Inherited Stupidity of the Race”: Wilde's Irish Counter-Of fensive against English and British National Character in the Second Edition of Dorian Gray

How did the Scots Observer's “Art and Morality” debate and its essays praising English and attacking Irish national character shape Wilde's revision of Dorian? We do not know when he ceased revising, but he sent “correct[ed . . .] proofs” in early March 1891.Footnote ¹⁴ By that time, the Fortnightly Review had carried both “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1 February 1891) and “A Preface to ‘Dorian Gray’” (1 March 1891), the first volleys of his counter-offensive against his denigrators. Josephine Guy has argued that “The Soul” is “not serious” and “needs to be seen for what it was designed to be – entertainment,” but one of the essay's less flippant goals is to preview the critique of English and British national character that would soon be unveiled in Dorian's second edition (“History” 77, 73).Footnote ¹⁵ Thus, “The Soul” often invokes the national dimension in a way that appears designed to counter the anti-Wilde and anti-Parnell material published in the Observer during the previous summer and fall. For example, Wilde claims that “Byron's personality . . . was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English” and that “[t]here is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century [. . .] on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality” (“Soul” 298, 306). Wilde's critique emerges most forcefully in his denunciation of “English public opinion” when, implicitly, he links (what he sees as) the malicious and lubricious attacks on Parnell with those directed against himself during the Observer debate: “English public opinion . . . tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers” (310). Condemnations of English national character occur repeatedly in “The Soul” (305, 307, 309-10, and 317), and the essay also refers to the artistic subject-versus-treatment crux that featured in the Observer correspondence (306-8). A month later the Fortnightly Review published Wilde's preface to Dorian. Although it avoids national identifications, several of its aphorisms directly emerge from the debate. For example, “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”; as noted, this initially appeared in Wilde's second letter to the Observer (Complete Letters 441; Dorian 168). “No artist has ethical sympathies”; as Bristow notes, this derives from Wilde's first letter to the Observer, in which he states, “An artist, sir, has no ethical sympathies at all” (Dorian lvii, 167; Complete Letters 439). The preface's claims that “[t]here is no such thing as a moral or immoral book” and that “[t]he moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist” echo recurrent topics in the Observer debate (Dorian 167). In addition, the aphorism “No artist is morbid. The artist can express everything,” which appeared only in the book's preface and not in the Fortnightly preface, may derive from the references to morbidity in the letters that William Archer and T. E. Brown contributed to the Dorian debate (Dorian 167; Observer 280, 304).Footnote ¹⁶

Nevertheless, the Wildean polemics catalyzed by the harsh reception of Dorian's first edition reverberate most profoundly in the novel's revised text, producing its distinctive “Irish dimension.” Decreasing slightly the work's homoeroticism, Wilde greatly increased its anti-Englishness and anti-Britishness.Footnote ¹⁷ For example, the 1890 edition contains only two mild critiques of England and Britain, both uttered by Lord Henry. The first is “If one puts forward an idea to a real Englishman, – always a rash thing to do, – he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong . . . only . . . whether one believes it one's self” (Dorian 11). And the second is “[I]n London [as opposed to Paris] people are so prejudiced” (75). With minor changes, these observations reappear in the 1891 edition, but they are joined by a host of new and much harsher critiques (Dorian 175-76, 251).Footnote ¹⁸ Some involve subtle modification: in 1890, Lord Henry complains that “the public are really not equal to the mental strain of having more than one topic every three months”; Wilde changes this to “the British public” (156; 347). Similarly, in 1890, Lord Henry protests at attending an early performance by Sybil Vane: “What an hour! It will be like having a meat-tea”; revising this, Wilde adds, “or reading an English novel” (45; 217). Lord Henry also voices several longer reproaches that challenge exactly the kind of claims advanced in both the Observer's “Art and Morality” debate and its national character essays:

Although Lord Henry's animadversions could conceivably be attributed to his cynicism, they are echoed by the narrator, who, in a series of new passages, mocks “the British mind” and “those characteristic British faces, that, once seen, are never remembered” (320, 315):

“[D]octrinaire,” it should be noted, was a frequent term of disapproval in the Observer: for example, an essay on golf in the issue containing H.'s letter (26 July 1890) stated that “[n]o time-honoured name is safe from assault by the doctrinaire” (“The Decadence” 241), and essays in the issues of 25 October and 15 November 1890 also contain negative uses of the term (594; 653).

In another important addition, Dorian, like Lord Henry, disparages English hypocrisy, in terms that suggest a veiled defense of not only Wilde but Parnell:

Basil agrees that “England is bad enough . . . and English society is all wrong,” but he wants his friend to be better than his surroundings (294).

Nonetheless, as another revision shows, Dorian's taunt about “the native land of the hypocrite” rebounds on him. In 1890, Wilde left in doubt Dorian's motivation for sparing Hetty Morton: “Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell?” (162). In 1891, he removed the doubt: “No. There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In hypocrisy he had won the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now” (356).Footnote ²⁰ Thus, Dorian, the denouncer of English hypocrisy, is ultimately forced to recognize himself as just another English hypocrite.