Le Portrait De Monsieur W. H.
1889
Two men, one dinner, and a question that has tormented Shakespeare scholars for centuries: who was Mr. W. H.? Erskine invites his skeptical friend to examine a portrait of a beautiful young Elizabethan actor named Willie Hughes, whom his late friend Cyril Graham believed to be the sole inspiration for Shakespeare's sonnets. What follows is a deliciously erudite debate about art, forgery, and the nature of interpretation itself. Wilde uses this slim, peculiar narrative to ask whether great art requires a real subject, or whether the theory itself becomes beautiful enough to matter. The dialogue crackles with Victorian tension between cynicism and devotion, between the demand for historical truth and the seduction of aesthetic fantasy. As the portrait passes between them and the theory unfolds, the reader is drawn into a meditation on why we need to believe in the objects of our admiration.
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“It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.””
— Oscar Wilde
“All charming people are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.””
— Oscar Wilde
“No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.””
— Oscar Wilde
“The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.””
— Oscar Wilde
“No sooner, in fact, had I sent it off than a curious reaction came over me. It seemed to me that I had given away my capacity for belief in the Willie Hughes theory of the Sonnets, that something had gone out of me, as it were, and that I was perfectly indifferent to the whole subject. What was it that had happened? It is difficult to say, perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion I had exhausted the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life, have their positive limitations. Perhaps the mere effort to convert any one to a theory involves some form of renunciation of the power of credence. Perhaps I was simply tired of the whole thing, and, my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was left to its own unimpassioned judgment. However it came about, and I cannot pretend to explain it, there was no doubt that Willie Hughes suddenly became to me a mere myth, an idle dream, the boyish fancy of a young man who, like most ardent spirits, was more anxious to convince others than to be himself convinced.””
— Oscar Wilde
“and once read a paper before our debating society to prove that it was better to be good-looking than to be good.””
— Oscar Wilde
“Strange, that we knew so little about ourselves, and that our most intimate personality was concealed from us! Were we to look in tombs for real life, and in art for the legend of our days?””
— Oscar Wilde
“The soul, the secret soul, was the only reality.””
— Oscar Wilde
“The only apostle who did not deserve proof was St. Thomas, and St. Thomas was the only apostle who got it.””
— Oscar Wilde
