Ellmann was published. It is written not just by a fine biographer, but by a
literary critic and scholar of high distinction. Now it can be said that
justice has been done to the life, but other issues still need elucidation.

The problem of Wilde's wit remains. His Irish contemporaries were
sure from the outset that the English would misunderstand it. Wilde's
younger contemporary and friend W. B. Yeats reviewed Lord Arthur
Savile's Crime in 1891 for United Ireland--that is, as an Irishman of his
time speaking to his countrymen of a fellow countryman. This is part of
his notice:

'Beer, bible and the seven deadly virtues have made England what she is,'
wrote Mr Wilde once; and a part of the Nemesis that has fallen upon her is a
complete inability to understand anything he says. We should not find him so
unintelligible--for much about him is Irish of the Irish. I see in his life and works
an extravagant Celtic crusade against Anglo-Saxon stupidity. ¹

Joyce, again with a shared Irish background, thought the comedies
'brilliant', and placed Wilde along with Irish writers of comedy from
Sheridan and Goldsmith to Bernard Shaw as 'like them, court jester to
the English'. ² And Shaw himself, whose own wit is perhaps the nearest to
Wilde's that we have seen, teased out more of the implications of what
Yeats said above, when he reviewed An Ideal Husband in 1895.

First, there were the epigrams, which seemed to evoke almost
resentful laughter:

They laugh angrily at his epigrams, like a child who is coaxed into being
amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage and agony. They protest that the
trick is obvious, and that such epigrams can be turned out by the score by any one
lightminded enough to condescend to such frivolity. As far as I can ascertain, I am
the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at
will. ( Beckson176)

Much more remains to be said about the epigrams, of course, about their
techniques of interference with unthinking cliché, and about Wilde's
major objects of attack: hypocrisy, cant, moral rules raised to absolutes,
moral rules debased to mindless conventions, uniformity, Philistinism,
and generally life distorted or limited by preconceptions. But Shaw
comes back to the question of Wilde's Irishness, and what Yeats called

-viii-