"Amiel and Lord Beaconsfield": An Unpublished Review by Oscar Wilde

"Amiel and Lord Beaconsfield": An Unpublished Review by Oscar Wilde Anya Clayworth & Ian Small University of Birmingham "AMIEL AND LORD BEACONSFIELD"1 is an incomplete and unpublished review by Oscar Wilde of three works: Mrs Humphry Ward's English translation of Henri-Frédéric Amiel's Journal intime and two volumes of the letters of Benjamin Disraeli, "Home Letters"— The Letters of Lord Beaconsfield 1830-1831 and Lord Beaconsfield's Correspondence with his Sister 1832-1852.2 The date of the piece is not known, but it is probably 1886. Certainly it could not have been written before 1886 because that was the year of the publication of the second of the Disraeli volumes under review, and it is extremely unlikely to have been written much after 1886 simply because the piece would have lost topicality. The reason for Wilde's failure to complete the review is unclear. He does not mention it in his letters and it does not appear in Mason's bibliography.3 The most likely reason is that Wilde was simply unable to place the review (Amiel's Journal intime had already been quite widely noticed in the press) and that as a result he simply abandoned it. Nonetheless the essay is of interest for two reasons. First, it throws light on Wilde's writing practices and second it can be seen as corroboratory evidence for the cooling of his relationship with his old Oxford mentor, Walter Pater. Wilde's strategy in the review is simple. He introduces his topic and then, by the use of skilfully selected quotation, he contrasts the personalities of Amiel and Disraeli as they are revealed in their writing. In fact, quotation forms the substance of the review. The heavy use of quotation was not in itself uncommon in late nineteenth-century 284 CLAYWORTH & Small : wilde periodical reviewing, although rarely do reviewers quote as copiously as Wilde does. In this respect "Amiel and Beaconsfield" is reminiscent of Wilde's lecture on Chatterton, where the text is almost completely made up of extracts lifted wholesale (but, as with Wilde's later "borrowings," unacknowledged) from Daniel Wilson's Chatterton: A Biographical Study and David Masson's Chatterton: A Story of the Year 1770. Like the lecture on Chatterton, then, "Amiel and Beaconsfield" represents an unsophisticated example of tactics which Wilde would later adopt and refine in the rest of his oeuvre. The first, the early signs of which we may glimpse in Poems (1881), is the wholesale appropriation and manipulation of the work of others. The second tactic, which looks forward to the critical dialogues of Intentions, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Society Comedies, concerns Wilde's penchant for constructing a narrative through dialogue (in the case of the review, of course, a dialogue which is artificially created). In this sense, "Amiel and Beaconsfield" can be read as an early example of Wilde's relish for dialectical argument. It is also possible to see "Amiel and Beaconsfield" as part of a larger preoccupation of Wilde in the 1880s—a refashioning of himself in distinction to Oxford academic life. Mrs. Humphry Ward was the translator of Amiel's Journal. Through family and marriage she was well connected in Oxford literary circles, and on at least one occasion she used those connections to log-roll her work. She sent a copy of her translation of Amiel to Walter Pater at the end of 1885. Pater reviewed it extremely favourably for the Manchester Guardian in March 1886.4 He compared Amiel with Pascal and suggested that the book would become province of "serious lovers of good literature."5 Wilde disliked Mrs. Humphry Ward and by the mid-1880s was beginning to define himself against what he increasingly saw as the intellectual timidity of Pater's Oxford circle.6 So, by contrast, his sympathies are with the ambitious, flamboyant, worldly and dandiacal Disraeli (of the 1840s, that is, rather than the statesman of the 1870s) and not with Amiel, whom he describes as a "psychological Narcissus" whose life represented "the most tedious of all tragedies, a tragedy without a hero."7 For Wilde, the Journal intime is only the "barren record of emotions."8 In this sense...