Matthew Parris is Wild about Wilde

Not many people know that Oscar Wilde was a full-time journalist, still fewer that he was the editor of a ladies' magazine: The Woman's World. We do not easily picture Wilde, the dandy, exquisite, and aesthete, attending marketing meetings and outlining strategies for increasing circulation. I opened this book in a mood more of curiosity than of expectation. And the genius is there from page 1.

Insight after insight, aphorism after aphorism, laugh after laugh. This is no hidden talent, no muffled voice: it rings out from every page. I light -almost at random - on his description of British rule in Ireland: 'stupidity that is aggravated by good intentions'. The mystery is not that a nondescript hack transformed himself into a glittering wit; the mystery is that Wilde did not make his name as a journalist and was not sought after as a columnist before his plays and books ever reached public attention. Here is a wide-ranging, restless, and modern intellect with the gift of ready humour and elegant prose. Remember, he writes, 'that Ireland has extended her boundaries, and we now have to reckon with her not merely in the Old World but also in the New'. It cannot be easy to invest advice on women's clothing with hilarity and bite, but here is Wilde on the divided skirt, in the Pall Mall Gazette: 'I regard these things as mere wicked superfluities, tragic proofs that the divided skirt is ashamed of its own division.' Here he reviews a Handbook to Marriage: 'Most young married people nowadays start in life with a dreadful collection of ormolu inkstands covered with sham onyxes, or with a perfect museum of salt-cellars.' In the same magazine, with humour but an underlying seriousness of purpose, he prosecutes his theory that there is little point in telling people what they ought to read ('nothing that one can learn is ever worth learning') but that the inclusion in school curricula of 'The Worst Hundred Books' would save much ignorance and time.

Nor does this collection contain simply a treasury of epigram, invective, and wit. Beyond the polished literary pearls for which we justly prize Wilde, I am struck here by further qualities which he displays with impressive consistency. When he wants - and as a journalist he does want - Wilde can write in clean, spare English, using quite short sentences and unornamented prose. Of Swinburne¹s poetry he asks: 'Does it really convey much? Does it charm? Could we return to it again and again with renewed pleasure? We think not. It seems to us empty.' 'To make men Socialists', he writes, 'is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.'

What a mind! What a tongue! And, constrained as journalists are and aesthetes are not, to string his fancies on a steel thread rather than pile them in a glittering heap, Wilde-the-journalist, unlike Wilde-the-poet-playwright, is seldom precious and never silly. I could even say (but you would accuse me of sub-Wildean paradox) that Oscar's plays were really just a preparation for Oscar's journalism, but unfortunately the plays came later.

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