OSCAR Wilde was the one of the Victorian era's greatest literary entertainers, and his popularity has proved so enduring that it thrives even in 2007.
The Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and novelist was yesterday voted the UK's wittiest person of all time in a poll conducted by a digital TV channel, which just goes to show that television has not yet made philistines of us all (even though Jeremy Cla
rkson came in at No 4 on the list). We celebrate Oscar for his epigrammatic wit, his polished plays and, above all, his originality. The man who reputedly told New York customs officials that "I have nothing to declare but my genius" holds a place in the popular imagination as a one-off, a maverick visionary who arrived on the scene fully formed to thrill and scandalise in equal measure.
But the truth, it has been revealed, is rather different. Whatever Wilde's talents were, originality was not one of them. "Wilde is known for being this big, very original personality," says Dr Michèle Mendelssohn, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. "But that personality came about by attaching himself to other people, being a sycophant and getting enough of these people until he could do his own thing. We allow Wilde the licence to be a plagiarist, but if any one of my students did this sort of thing - my God!"
Mendelssohn's latest book - Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, which is the result of six years' research - explores the extent of Wilde's plagiarism and, for the first time, exposes his secret debt to the American novelist Henry James. She shows that although they met only a few times and did not hit it off, the two men were obsessed with each other. It was an obsession that shaped their best known works such as Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and James's The Turn of the Screw.
"The more I did the research, the more I became sure about it," she says, sitting in her seventh-floor office overlooking Edinburgh's George Square. "There are clear parallels. Wilde goes out of his way to review James's novels, to keep tabs on him and to say he's not the future of American literature. James feels the same anxiety towards Wilde: he's keen to keep tabs on him, but doesn't respect what he's doing."
That Wilde was a shameless magpie, borrowing whatever literary gems caught his eye, has been an issue ever since 1881 when the Oxford Union refused an inscribed volume of his poetry because it was too derivative of "more deservedly reputed authors" such as William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, John Donne, Lord Byron, William Morris and "60 more". But only now with Mendelssohn's book has the degree of his appropriation of his rival's ideas been made known.
The theft, says Mendelssohn, takes two forms. The first is in Wilde's early critical writings when he was defining himself as the poster boy for the Aesthetic movement, the post-Romantic philosophy that cherished beauty and believed in art for art's sake. Wilde, who was 11 years younger than James, had a lot of catching up to do if he was going to stake his claim as more than a mere Aesthetic wannabe. "At times the plagiarism is word-for-word, but more often it's very heavy-handed paraphrasing passed off as his own," says Mendelssohn. "He can't bring himself to use quotation marks."
The second example of borrowing is in the close paraphrasing of James that crops up in Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. "It begins with Dorian Gray in this painter's studio being spoken to by a critic," she says.
"The critic persuades him to go off and have what I think is a gay life with him. The critic's name is Lord Henry and a lot of the things he says are very similar to what Henry James is saying in his literary criticism. Later, Dorian is almost murdered by a character called James, so there's this Henry/James thing going on."
The allegation of literary theft is long-standing and one of which Wilde was fully aware. "Of course I plagiarise," he told Max Beerbohm, the writer and caricaturist. "It is the privilege of the appreciative man." It was a privilege he exercised in his encounters with the classics and the leading thinkers of his day such as his mentors at Oxford University, John Ruskin and Walter Pater. In his reviews, he would absorb the arguments of the essays he was writing about, revising them so that they became indistinguishable from his own analysis, frequently plagiarising himself in the process. Whether you would call this revision or theft is a matter for debate.
"In his literary criticism, he writes a review of something and he reinterprets it, then when he needs to write something of his own, he goes back to the review and appropriates it," says Mendelssohn. "Whatever was Swinburne, Whistler, Shakespeare or Henry James becomes Oscar Wilde."
On one much-quoted occasion, the painter James McNeill Whistler made a witty remark to which Wilde replied, "I wish I'd said that." "You will, Oscar, you will," was Whistler's telling reply. After Wilde appropriated another of Whistler's ideas, the painter damned him as an "arch-impostor and pest of the period - the all-pervading plagiarist".
"Wilde became a literary giant in his own right by standing on Whistler and James's shoulders," writes Mendelssohn. "By assimilating their views and casting them in his own mould, he refashioned himself as a professional author and the prime exponent of Aestheticism in the early 1890s."
What surprises Mendelssohn is how such allegations have lived alongside the contrary opinion that Wilde was a true original. The schism has a lot to do with Wilde's gift for self-publicity and his ability to invent an image of himself that stays with us to this day. "By the end of the 19th century, he's known as being wholly original," she says. "But in reality he's just a patchwork of Ruskin, Pater and Whistler. People like Whistler are screaming from the rooftops that Wilde is a plagiarist, but this doesn't stop other people from saying everything about him is original. He wasn't even doing a good job at hiding his sources. That's the difference between Wilde and every other great author: he is just exceptionally bad at hiding his tracks. You picture him writing these reviews with the books open and just copying out and reinterpreting as he goes. When he goes to the US as the voice of art and Aestheticism, Americans recognise him as a sham. Do people just want to believe? The mystery of Wilde is that he manages to persuade us, despite the fact that he's plagiarising."
To wriggle out of the charge of plagiarism, Wilde formulated a definition of Aestheticism that made literary theft a virtue. "To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own," he claimed in his essay The Critic as Artist in 1888. "Most people are other people," he would write in De Profundis in 1905. "Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." Whether being witty or serious, it was a theme he could never escape. Mendelssohn argues that, far from being an occasional borrowing, his assimilation and reformulation of the views of James and Whistler was "systematic" and integral to "Aestheticism's evolution".
One of the fascinating revelations of her book is quite how successful Wilde was at identifying himself with the Aesthetic movement. Her first illustration is of an American advert from 1882 which reads: "To be truly esthetic [sic] buy your ice cream and confections at JN Piercy's." Alongside this unlikely slogan is an image of Wilde, complete with floppy hair, cravat and velvet knee-length breeches. She points out that similar images of the author, who at the time had little literary output to his name, were used to sell hosiery, corsets, stoves and washing machines. Wilde had never endorsed such products and made no money from the adverts but, in an age long before today's celebrity-fuelled culture, he profited by association just as much as a Big Brother contestant will milk a career by hopping from one tabloid to the next. He had not invented Aestheticism, but he seemed to embody it, so much so that the illustrations that accompanied James's novel Washington Square show a languid, decadent character who looks like nobody so much as Wilde. This is all the more odd when you remember that James was by several years the older of the two, had been riding the Aesthetic bandwagon first and would go on to have a decidedly frosty relationship with a man he cattily described as a "fatuous fool, tenth-rate cad" and an "unclean beast".
"That was one of the times when I thought, 'How come nobody has seen this?' because it's so striking," says Mendelssohn about the illustrations. "James knew the illustrator and in every single illustration the man is Oscar Wilde. It must have been great for sales, like the ice cream, but the fact they were not friends makes this weird."
By the time of Wilde's great plays of the 1890s - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest - it is easier to see him as his own man, but even then, his famous epigrammatic wit was not without precedent. "When you read Whistler, he is very epigrammatic," says Mendelssohn. "He is self-promoting, self-producing, very concerned with his own appearance and a terrific dandy. Wilde sits at Whistler's feet until he is grown and then he emerges with all these epigrams, puns and witticisms. But maybe we remember Wilde more than Whistler because of the idea of him not caring what people say, being completely outlandish and having an inflated sense of self. He makes this patchwork from other people's ideas and, at the end of the day, I think this patchwork is original: if you look at the individual squares, they're not original, but the big picture is."
• Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture, by Michèle Mendelssohn, is published by Edinburgh University Press.
TALK ON THE WILDE SIDE1 "I have nothing to declare except my genius." - On passing through US customs in 1882
2 "Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." (Attributed)
3"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." (Attributed)
4 "A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal." - In the essay The Critic as Artist
5 "I think that God, in creating Man, somewhat overestimated his ability." (Attributed)
6 "The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about." - From The Picture of Dorian Gray
7 "Murder is always a mistake... One should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner." - From The Picture of Dorian Gray.
8 "I can resist anything but temptation." - From Lady Windermere's Fan
9 "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." - From Lady Windermere's Fan
10 "The English country gentleman galloping after a fox: the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable." - From A Woman of No Importance
11 "The truth is rarely pure and never simple." - From The Importance of Being Earnest
12 "The three women I had admired most are Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt and Lillie Langtry. I would have married any one of them with pleasure." (Attributed)
13 "If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners she doesn't deserve to have any." - On having to stand in the rain while waiting to be taken to prison.
14 "I am dying, as I have lived, beyond my means." - On accepting champagne shortly before his death
15 "Either that wallpaper goes or I do." - Reported to be on his deathbed in a Paris hotel room in 1900
The full article contains 2004 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
