LESS THAN EARNEST.(Oscar Wilde)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 08-MAY-06

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Of the many joys and miseries that buoyed or afflicted Oscar Wilde's soul, becoming a practicing Catholic was not one. Wilde's mother, the Irish nationalist-leaning poet and critic Lady Jane "Speranza" Wilde, insisted that her son be baptized in the Catholic faith, but Wilde's father, the surgeon and writer Sir William Wilde, took young Oscar's religious education in hand, ushering him into the Protestant Church. ("All women become like their mothers," Wilde wrote. "That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.") While still a student at Dublin's Trinity College, in the early eighteen-seventies, the young poet with distinctly Hellenic leanings did have a brief flirtation with the Eucharist. But, as Richard Ellmann points out in his expansive and sympathetic 1984 biography, Wilde's interest in the Catholic Church--with its robes, its incense, and its ritual of taking in the body of Christ in wafer form--was, for the playwright-to-be, an early manifestation of a passionate curiosity about form and spectacle.

Ellmann is too even-tempered a writer to mention that Wilde's attraction to Catholicism may have had something to do with his fascination with power. Wilde fell under the sway of Cardinal John Henry Newman's 1870 tract "Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent" soon after...

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