Oscar Wilde - The Soul of Man under Socialism

In the 19th century, Wilde remained a voice crying in the wilderness, and as such he also turned out to be a prophet of his own disaster. In the digital age, thinking wisely in analogies with the help of an imagination à la Oscar Wilde might help to avoid similar political fallacies as round about a hundred years ago. 9

Of course, I am thinking in terms of Wilde as an individual who failed utterly when confronted with the Victorian state and code of law as well as its hypocritical set of morals. As an Irishman, he incarnated the struggle his home country had to face in the conflict with the United Kingdom until independence came along with partition in 1921 after winning the First World War had not resulted in Britain honouring the promise of Home Rule given when Irish soldiers were still needed to fight the German Empire.

With the British Empire still a reality, its leaders only reacted when a stalemate in the War of Independence had been reached. This failure to go for compromise was to be repeated in the history of the Troubles from 1969 through 1998 after the Second World War had started the decolonization process and the dismantling of the Empire. Again, Ireland, and rightly this time, hoped for a solution brokered internationally. It was the US, the UK as well as the EU that helped the Good Friday Agreement turn Northern Ireland into a more peaceful province.

So when the UK called a Brexit Referendum and sought to deliver on the people’s vote in 2016, again without considering compromise either at home or abroad, politicians seemed to have forgotten the part the UK had been playing in the EU since 1973 – that of the “enfant terrible”, that is.

It is since the second semester of 2016 at the very latest that the Irish know why they once joined the EU. Facing twenty-six other European states united behind the Republic of Ireland, British politicians should have learned by now that this situation is highly symbolic of what is going to happen sooner or later: the twenty-six counties of Ireland will one day be re-united! 10

Eighteen months after this preface was first translated into English before being both revised, enlarged, and brought up to date, nobody could have foreseen that Wilde’s observations about Victorian society and public health might very soon be applied to the world at large and that at the very end of the transition period leading the UK out of the EU both the pandemic, the negotiations about a free trade treaty between the EU and the UK, and the Irish question would become almost inextricably entangled issues which only people able to look at life with some intellectual distance might have a chance to disentangle. Where, however, are such people to be found? The treaty resulting from many months of negotiations, however, suggests that whoever won the Brexit referendum, a moment thought to have revived a glorious past, that is, may well have lost the future.

Reading and re-reading this essay with a look to bringing this edition up to date has also helped to see how acutely Oscar Wilde was aware of cultural and cross-cultural movements, for he not only refers to Britain and the United States on the one hand, he also refers to France on the other hand, while pointing out developments of society and the arts relating to the Middle Ages as well as to the Renaissance period in the context of reflections on the culture of his own time.

Jörg W. Rademacher, Leer, East Frisia June 2019 – revised, added to, December 2020

“Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.” (p. 38)

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