The Meaning of The Importance of Being Earnest

THE MEANING OF THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST IN ACT II OF The Importance of Being Earnest Jack returns to his country house and announces the death of his supposed brother, the profligate Ernest. DR. CHASUBLE. Was the cause of death mentioned? JACK. A severe chill, it seems. MISS PRISM. As a man sows, so shall he reap. DR. CHASUBLE. (Raising his hand) Charity, dear Miss Prism, charity! None of us is perfect. I myself am peculiarly susceptible to draughts. This sequence is more than a delightful joke. It is symptomatic of the emotional and intellectual attitudes that underlie the play and, in fact, W'ilde's work. v\That we laugh at, perhaps a little uneasily, is Chasuble's inability to distinguish between a moral and a physical quality. When the rector cautions Miss Prism about the inevitable imperfections of man and goes on to name one of his own, we naturally expect a moral failing, but we get instead a susceptibility to draughts. If we are uneasy, it is because in the world in which Dr. Chasuble exists, the world of perfect Wildean dandyism, the rector's attitude is entirely reasonable. This is a world of pure form, and the distinction between a moral and a physical failing, between external and internal, does not exist. Chasuble is right and we are wrong. Even such a brief analysis of one line suggests that the conventional description of The Importance as, in the words of Arthur Symons, "a sort of sublime farce, meaningless and delightful," is inadequate. William Archer was so puzzled by the play that he asked, "What can a poor critic do with a play which raises no principle, whether of art or morals ... and is nothing but an absolutely wilful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality?" With the advantage of distance, we can see now that art and morals are precisely the subjects of The Importance of Being Earnest and that the world of dandyism, though delightful, is far from meaningless. For Wilde, dandyism was a philosophy and an attitude toward life. Embodied in his plays, it functions as a rationale for the actions and attitudes of his characters, as a coherent system which forms the basis for their thoughts and their conduct. In the great tradition of the 42 1963 MEANING OF Tke Importance of Being Earll.est 43 Romantic exile artist, Wilde rejected the middle-class, Philistine sodety of his day. Its coarseness, its pitiless morality, and its incomprehension of beauty were all alien to him. Searching for a new basis for life, Wilde, the most extreme of esthetic critics, turned to the only part of experience in which he had faith, to art-whose secret for him lay always in the achievement of perfect form. He took form, the basis of art, turned it into a philosophy of life in 'INhich esthetics replaces ethics and, as we shall see, introduced it into his plays cloaked with the elegance and wit of nineteenth-century dandyism. This dandyism, from which Wilde drew so many elements sympathetic to him, had existed long before he made use of it. The nineteenth century produced many dandies, and Wilde must have seen himself as a follower of sUu;' men as Brummell, Byron, d'Orsay, and, probably above all others, Benjamin Disraeli. In Disraeli, Wilde saw an artist like himself, a man apart from the crass bourgeosie, whose wit and extraordinary dress were instruments with which he had achieved a position of 'power. With Disraeli in mind, a remark by Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance, "a man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world," is a little less bizarre than it at first seems. Disrae1i, however, was only an example. The theorists of dandyism as a philosophy of life and art were Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and Charles Baudelaire. Barbey d'Aurevilly, still a figure of some note when Wilde frequented Parisian literary circles, had produced Du Dandysme et de Georges Brummell, the most elaborate nineteenthcentury disquisition on dandyism. Barbey never saw dandyism as a mere matter of elegance in dress, but as a phjlosophy, as a "manner of living composed entirely of nU3...