Generosity is not the first quality that we associate with the name of Ms. Dorothy Parker. But she did write the following rather resigned tribute and testament:

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram,

I never seek to take the credit;

We all assume that Oscar said it.

And so we do. "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." "He hasn't a single redeeming vice." "I can resist anything except temptation." "He is old enough to know worse." It's also worth bearing in mind the difference between an epigram and an aphorism. The former is merely a witty play on words (if one can use "merely" in such a fashion), while the latter contains a point or moral. "Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern. One is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly." In what press or public-relations office should that aphorism not be on prominent display?

Oscar Wilde's weapon was paradox, and his secret was his seriousness. He was flippant about serious things, and serious about apparently trivial ones. "Conscience and cowardice are really the same things. Conscience is the tradename of the firm." That could have been said by Hamlet, and was indeed uttered by him at much wearier length.

This year marks the centennial of Wilde's greatest triumph and also of his ultimate disgrace. It was on Valentine's Day 1895 that royal and aristocratic London was drawn in a body to see the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, one of the few faultless three-act plays ever written and certainly among the best-loved pieces of stagecraft in history.

But the moment of greatest adoration was also the occasion chosen by Nemesis. On that very opening night the Marquess of Queensberry, a thuggish aristocrat from the central casting of Victorian melodrama, made a scene at the stage door. Having failed to disrupt the performance, he left a bouquet of vegetables behind him and departed swearing vengeance on the man who was "corrupting" his extremely corrupt son, Lord Alfred Douglas. So intense was Queensberry in his campaign of defamation that Wilde was led into the greatest mistake of his life—a suit for criminal libel to clear himself of the "gay" smear, often known in the London homosexual underworld as the vice of being too "earnest."

By the end of the year, which featured a trial (also in three acts) during which Wilde had the tables turned on him, the cowardly theater manager had blotted out Wilde's name from the play's billboards (while continuing to take in record receipts), and Wilde himself was in the dock, indicted not only for committing what Victorians called "the abominable crime" of sodomy but also for committing it with a member of the lower orders. Bankrupt, humiliated, deserted by his friends and his lover, weakened by illness and betrayal, he became the target for every sort of pelting and jeering and hissing, and was used as a sort of public urinal by a society seeking a vent for its hypocrisy and repression. If and when Liam Neeson and Hugh Grant bring Oscar and his lover, Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas), to the screen for Mike Nichols, this will be their testing, crowning scene.

I recently made a pilgrimage to the grave of this great Irish rebel, who died in exile in Paris. On his deathbed he did certainly say that "I am dying beyond my means." He may or may not, on the other hand, have opened his eyes at the last, looked around the room, and murmured, "Either that wallpaper goes or I do."

In Pere Lachaise cemetery, among the sort of marble telephone booths favored by the deceased French bourgeois, one searches for and finds the memorial carved by Jacob Epstein.

It has been repeatedly smashed and defaced by Philistines, and is the only monument in the whole place which displays a warning against vandalism. An attempted restoration in 1992 could not repair the damage done when some yahoo broke the genitalia off the statue.

This lends unintentional point to the inscription on the plinth, which the vandal probably could not read:

And alien tears will fill for him Pity's long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men, And outcasts always mourn.

We have a tendency to forget that the man who wrote the exquisitely light Importance of Being Earnest also wrote the unbearably laden Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Picking one's way back to the graveyard gate, one cannot avoid the hundreds of young pilgrims who come, every day, to make a shrine out of the tomb of Jim Morrison. Poems, flowers, candles, scraps of clothing are heaped up to the memory of this lovely boy, cut off in full youth.

" . . . I am true love, I fill The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame."

Then sighing said the other, "Have thy will, I am the love that dare not speak its name."

These are the only lines for which Bosie will ever be remembered. Mutual flame. Gome on, baby, light my fire.

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Literature has an unpaid debt to Wilde, and so does philosophy. Take just one example of the former. As the curtain rises on The Importance of Being Earnest, we find a rich young bachelor in a fashionable London apartment, playing the piano. He imagines himself alone, and does not notice the butler. On seeing him, he utters the first words of the play:

ALGERNON: Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?

LANE: I didn't think it polite to listen, sir.

Perfect. The action then moves to take in a tyrannical aunt (Lady Bracknell), an absurd romantic and matrimonial skein (Algernon and Jack and Gwendolen and Cecily) that is solved by a genealogical coincidence, a country house, a rural clergyman, a subplot involving a fortune, a happy ending. What do we have here if not the whole fantasy world of P. G. Wodehouse?

Wodehouse almost certainly saw the play as a young man, and went on to give us aunts and butlers and futile young men without ever mentioning Wilde even in passing. Wodehouse had a horror of homosexuality, it is true. But the whole of middle England placed Wilde under a ban for several decades, only occasionally reviving him as a writer of supposedly innocuous drawing-room farce.

Wilde was flippant about serious things, and serious about apparently trivial ones.

The late Sir John Betjeman evokes the hushed conspiracy of silence in one of his early poems, "Narcissus." A mystified small boy is told by his parents that he can no longer play with his dearest friend, Bobby:

My Mother wouldn't tell me why she hated The things we did, and why they pained

her so.

She said a fate far worse than death

awaited

People who did the things we didn't know, And then she said I was her precious child, And once there was a man called Oscar

Wilde.

Thus screwing him up for life.

What Wilde knew, and touched, went very deep into the psyche. That great critic Desmond MacCarthy once listed four of Wilde's observations, in this order:

(i) As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

(ii) Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

(iii) Conscience must be merged in instinct before we become fine.

(iv) Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

MacCarthy argued that half of Tolstoy's philosophy is in the first quotation, and most of Yeats's theory of artistic composition is contained in the second. Samuel Butler's ethics are in the third quotation, and most of George Meredith's philosophy of love is in the fourth. Hesketh Pearson added that if you read Wilde's dictum "Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us" you have imbibed the core doctrine of Sigmund Freud. (And I would add that when Algernon says, in The Importance of Being Earnest, "Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility," he anticipates Newt Gingrich by a clear century.)

There is a revenge that the bores and the bullies and the bigots exact on those who are too witty.

Once heard, never forgotten. "A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." This is not frothy phrasemaking, but serious wit. Not that Wilde scorned the throwaway line, even when it was risky. In the early days of his troubles with the law, he ran into an actor friend in Piccadilly and said airily, "All is well. The working classes are with me ... to a boy."

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Apart from one very scratchy disc made during his American tour, there are no recordings of Wilde in public or in private. But we have it on the authority of some of the great Victorian socialites and conversationalists that he was like this all the time. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who knew everybody and went everywhere and was one of the great poets of the decade, went to a "brilliant luncheon" given by political hostess Margot Asquith and her husband shortly after their wedding. He could not keep the word "brilliant" out of his diary entry: "Of all those present, and they were most of them brilliant talkers, he was without comparison the most brilliant, and in a perverse mood he chose to cross swords with one after the other of them, overpowering each in turn with his wit, and making special fun of Asquith, his host that day, who only a few months later, as Home Secretary, was prosecuting him."

Yes, quite. There is a revenge that the bores and the bullies and the bigots exact on those who are too witty. Wilde could never hope to escape the judgment of the pompous and the hypocritical, because he could not help teasing them.

I personally find it hard, if not impossible, to read the record of his trial without fighting back tears. Here was a marvelous, gay, brave, and eloquent man, being gradually worn down by inexorable, plodding oafs and heavies. At first, Wilde had it all his own way, with laughter in the court. The grim, vindictive figure of Sir Edward Carson (later to take his Protestant rectitude into the incitement of a sectarian war in Ireland) was the grinding mill, with Wilde the leaping water:

"Do you drink champagne yourself?"

"Yes, iced champagne is a favorite drink of mine—strongly against my doctor's orders."

"Never mind your doctor's orders, sir."

"I never do."

The brutish Carson later asked Wilde how long it took to walk from his Chelsea home to a certain other address:

"I don't know. I never walk."

"I suppose when you pay visits you always take a cab?"

"Always."

"And if you visited, you would leave the cab outside?"

"Yes, if it were a good cab."

That was the last genuine laugh that Wilde got from the audience in court. Not long afterward, Carson, mentioning a certain servant boy, suddenly asked, "Did you kiss him?" and Wilde incautiously replied, "Oh dear, no. He was a peculiarly plain boy." And that was that. Carson seized the whip handle, and never let go.

When he had done, Wilde was haggard and shaken and exposed. He managed one great moment of defiance from the box, in which he gave a ringing defense of "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name." But the mill was now grinding in earnest, and he was trapped. At the close of the trial, the whores danced for joy in the streets, and mobs were spitting hatred, and dear Oscar was put to solitary work in a red brick Victorian prison. An ear infection that went untreated by his jailers and an auction of his possessions held by gleeful creditors contributed to his death in penury five years later, at age 46. No morality tale could have had a more satisfying ending. There had never been such a victory for the bluenoses and the pecksniffs since the public baiting of Lord Byron, about which Macaulay famously wrote, "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality."

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It wasn't only the British public that congratulated itself on the narrow escape from genius that it had undergone. Across the water in Germany, a sinister and twisted physician named Max Nordau had been at work on his book Degeneration. It was a powerful, if turgid, screed against what Nordau termed "Decadentism" in the arts of painting, music, poetry, and sculpture. Nordau's targets were Baudelaire, Swinburne, Zola, and Wilde—above all Wilde. He was not to be forgiven for his blasphemous pleasantries. Why, wrote Nordau splenetically, Wilde even spoke with disrespect of Nature! ("All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.")

Nordau strove constipatedly to establish a link between literary and aesthetic "degeneration" and the sexual, social, and political kind. He was an orthodox dogmatist and authoritarian, who also spoke in the new language of eugenics about the "diseased" and the "unfit." George Bernard Shaw wrote an essay, entitled "The Sanity of Art," defending Wilde and making fun of Nordau. And that might have been the last that was heard of him. Except that, after a debilitating war and a German defeat, the Nazi movement resurrected Nordau's book and his theory of degeneration.

By the mid-1930s (and we are still talking about the lifetime of Lord Alfred Douglas), German museums and universities and galleries had been purged of the "decadent," and artists of genius such as Otto Dix had their work confiscated and exhibited in a traveling show of "degenerate art," where wholesome German families could safely come and jeer. Homosexual conduct, of course, had become punishable even by death. The Philistines had really won this time, and were thoroughly enjoying themselves.

"The good end happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means."

Wilde, who did not outlive the 19th century (he died in 1900), is nonetheless a uniquely modern figure. If it is safe to say that the work of writers such as P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh and Ronald Firbank and Noël Coward is inconceivable without him, then it is safe to say that he is immortal. (Evelyn Waugh's short story "Bella Fleace Gave a Party" is lifted from a tale of Wilde's.)

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More recently, in his Eminent Domain, Richard Ellmann, acclaimed Wilde biographer, has argued that, "invited to dine with Oscar Wilde on Christmas day, 1888, [Yeats] consumed not only his portion of the turkey but all Wilde's aesthetic system, which Wilde read to him from the proofs of The Decay of Lying. Once expropriated, this was developed and reunified in Yeats's mind."

So, rather like Gore Vidal in our time, Wilde was able to be mordant and witty because he was, deep down and on the surface, un homme serieux. May his memory stay carnation-green. May he ever encourage us to think that the bores and the bullies and the literal minds need not always win. May he induce us to rise from our semi-recumbent postures.