The Plays of Oscar Wilde

Galbraith reappears to counsel Beth, and to offer some gruff literary advice. Her husband is predictably fond of French novels. Galbraith, like Quentin Mallory, thinks that French novels have destroyed the French nation. Grand supports him, in a footnote, with an account of the cowardly behavior of Frenchmen during a recent emergency. The revaluation of Englishness that was in progress at the time undoubtedly reinforced the determination of British writers to steer clear of naturalism. Gissing relied heavily on it in his most popular novel, the semiautobiographical Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft (1903). As for Moore, well, he learned to despise the English during the Boer War, and took up Irishness instead. Gissing, Moore, and Grand fell back on English moralism. Other writers tried to sidestep the downward spiral of the decline plot without committing themselves to the counterbalance of moral absolutes. Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), for example, makes daz-618- zling play with the idea of degeneracy ...»