Wilde, Shaw, and the Play of Conversation

Wilde, Shaw, and the Play of Conversation J.L. WISENTHAL I "[1]n proportion to the opportunities," Shaw told an audience in February I 889, "competent actors of Caesars are much scarcer than real Caesars, the inevitable conclusion being that, for any given man whatsoever, it is much easier to be Caesar than to act Caesar."I Such a line of argument might well bring to mind another Dubliner who was making his name as a writer and talker in London in the 1880s, and as it happens Wilde was in the audience that afternoon to hear Shaw's lecture to the Church and Stage Guild on "Acting , by One Who Does Not Believe in It." At the end of his talk Shaw invited his audience to enlighten him by a frank discussion, but (according to the contemporary report of the occasion, drafted by Shaw himself) "the discussion, after all, did not get beyond a volley of questions and fragmentary remarks from Mr William Archer, Mr Oscar Wilde," and others.2 On that day in early 1889 Wilde also heard Shaw say that "All art is play; and all play is make-believe," as part of an argument that "the true goal of the stage-player is self-realization, expression, and exhibition" and that "the drama can only progress by making higher and higher demands on the players ' powers of self-development and realization."3 All of this is not at all far from attitudes in Wilde's critical essays. In particular, Shaw's assertion that "it is much easier to be Caesar than to act Caesar" is echoed by Wilde's Gilbert , in "The Critic as Artist" in the following year, I 890. In response to Ernest's challenge, "even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it," Gilbert asserts: "More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is, of course, obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."4 The actor, the talker, and the writer are on a higher plane than the mere doer. When later in the I 890S Shaw wrote a play about Caesar, he made the man Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 206 The Play of Conversation 207 of action a great talker, and the play touches on the very issues that Wilde takes up in "The Critic as Artist." Here Caesar is talking aboutthe Nineties aesthete Apollodorus (one of the play's many deliberate anachronisms), whom Rufio has dismissed as a popinjay. CAESAR .•. No: Apollodorus is good company, Rufio, good company. RUFIO Well, he can swim a bit and fence a bit: he might be worse, if he only knew how to hold his tongue. CAESAR The gods forbid he should ever learn! Oh, this military life! this tedious, brutal life of action! That is the worst of us Romans: we are mere doers and drudgers : a swarm of bees turned into men. Give me a good talker - one with wit and imagination enough to live without continually doing something!S Caesar's attitudes here sound very much like those of Gilbert in "The Decay of Lying," and - leaving aside any question of influence, which is not what I am concerned with - it is clear that Shaw had an interest in the aesthetic issues that Wilde was exploring, and talking about cleverly and elegantly, in his critical essays at the end of the 1880s. There is much to be said about the relationship between Shaw and Wilde, and Stanley Weintraub has recently described it in an informative essay that cites their comments on each other, which reveal their mutual respect and admiration.6 The connection that I want to focus on is suggested in the passages I have been quoting from Wilde and Shaw, and it is also nicely indicated in Matthew Arnold's essay from the mid-1860s, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." A principal subject of this essay is one that...