oscar wilde aestheticism essay

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Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s « The Picture of Dorian Gray» (1890)

Cet article a été rédigé dans le cadre d'un stage à l'ENS de Lyon.

Introduction

When  The Picture of Dorian Gray  was first published in  Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine  in July 1890, it was decried as profoundly immoral even though some passages had already been censored by the publisher. One critic wrote for instance in the  Daily Chronicle  that it was “a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French  Décadents  – a poisonous book”, and denounced “its effeminate frivolity” and “its theatrical cynicism”  (([Anonymous], Review of  The Picture of Dorian Gray ,  Daily Chronicle , 30 June 1890, 7, repr. in Beckson (ed.),  Critical Heritage , 72. It is worth mentioning that the book was used as a piece of evidence of Oscar Wilde’s “gross indecency” during his trials in 1895.)) . Such attacks led to the publication of a revised edition in 1891, with six additional chapters and a preface in which Wilde rejected the attribution of moral values to works of art and literature , famously asserting that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written – that is all”. In a playfully provocative tone,  The Picture of Dorian Gray  explores the depths of human conscience and problematises literature’s influence upon the reader within a highly moralistic society.

1. A Gothic narrative of duplicity and transgression

Although not always categorised as such, The Picture of Dorian Gray is distinctively set in the tradition of the Gothic novel . Wilde’s Faustian tale of a man who sacrifices his soul for eternal youth and a life of pleasures features one of the genre’s essential themes: the violation of natural and moral laws, through which society’s deepest anxieties are represented. The “magical” painting in particular introduces a supernatural dimension which typically challenges the intelligibility of the world depicted and unsettles defined boundaries . As the portrait acquires “a life of its own” (113), the dichotomy between art and life is blurred, as well as the one between appearances and reality; the picture acts as a reversed mirror, reflecting Dorian’s true inner self (or soul) whereas he, “the original” Dorian (28), only shows the deceitful mask of youth and purity. This duplicity is revelatory of a chiaroscuro aesthetic which is reminiscent of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and creates a dark atmosphere. The personality split is however deeply aestheticised here, and partially transferred to a material object, the painting.

If, as Kelly Hurley declared, “Gothic provided a space to explore phenomena at the borders of human identity and culture—insanity, criminality, barbarity, sexual perversion”  ((Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996), 6.)) , Wilde’s novel is exemplary of the fin-de-siècle modern treatment of such themes. By the end of the nineteenth century, new scientific progresses and the emergence of concepts such as degeneration  ((Degeneration was a very influential concept in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which linked social behaviours with biological and hereditary features. Degenerationists feared the progressive decline of civilisation due to biological changes, and the concept of degeneration was used by ethnic nationalists to support eugenic theories and the marginalisation of individuals who were believed to be genetically inferior.)) ,  challenged the Victorian faith in rationality, and greatly encouraged writers to create characters who stretched the limits of science and humanity. Thus, the original sublime landscapes and fearful bandits of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) or Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) gave way to the mad scientists and monstrous creations of Stevenson’s novel or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), another major Gothic reference which comes to mind when reading Wilde’s novel. As in Shelley’s narrative, Dorian Gray is in a sense the object of Lord Henry Wollon’s experiment. The latter takes a perverse pleasure in observing the effects of his influence upon the young man, seeing in him “an interesting study” and the product of “his own creation” (55). As the narrator outlines: “he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended vivisecting others” (55). Henry is thus described as Victor Frankenstein’s alter ego, the creator of a destructive avatar who will eventually escape his control.  

In The Picture of Dorian Gray , the transgression of ethical and natural laws serves to demonstrate the limits of bourgeois values of respectability and integrity , in accordance with Wilde’s anti-authoritarian ideas. For in the novel, what is terrifying is not the behaviour of a Caliban-like foreigner (the mention of Shakespeare’s character in the Preface is in that sense significant), but the sinful attitude of an Englishman,  Dorian. In other words, the monstrous comes from within British society itself and from within culture (Basil’s art). In this modern tale of moral degradation taking place in “the native land of the hypocrites” (147), the Irish writer seems to point out the potential drifts of the ennui and indolence pervading the advanced civilisation that British aristocracy embodies.

2. A novel of self-development breaking up with Victorian traditions

Traditional Victorian society believed in the ethical role of literature, which was supposed to provide models of behaviour for the readers through the depiction of a character’s itinerary towards virtuous self-accomplishment. In this respect, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a dark rewriting of the traditional Bildungsroman , as it narrates the psychological and moral growth of the main character. “You have not realised how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now” (107), Dorian states to Basil, highlighting his own maturation. The beginning of the novel stages Dorian’s realisation of his own seductive potential and his progressive transformation into an image (quite literally), or rather, as it is repeatedly mentioned later on, an artistic ideal of beauty and purity.

The awakening of the innocent Dorian to life and its pleasures (and to homosexuality as some critics have suggested in comparison with Wilde’s personal life) is framed by the twin influences of Basil and Henry. These two characters act as embodiments of opposite pressures forging Dorian’s personality: Basil on the one hand is the optimistic, emotional and religious artist who trusts that the universe is guided by a moral code, whereas Henry more cynically advocates individualism and hedonism, and believes that morality is only arbitrary and relative. Torn between these two antithetical perspectives on human experience, Dorian Gray stands for humanity and embodies the moral issues faced by the nineteenth century as the rise of paganism and hedonism challenged Victorian values of puritanism and stoicism. The same conflict is dramatised in the novels of Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Emily Brontë, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Thackeray, Herman Melville or George Eliot, in which the protagonist’s purpose is to reconcile such antagonisms, and to find a stable middle-ground harmoniously reuniting heart and mind, desire and duty.

But unlike such novels where moral order is ultimately restored once the villains are punished and virtue triumphs, The Picture of Dorian Gray does not allow for such resolution and Dorian’s preference for Henry’s system of beliefs culminates in the murder of Basil. Furthermore, the novel ends on Dorian’s self-destruction, far from the traditional marriage epitomising personal fulfilment in nineteenth-century narratives. Basil’s unsuccessful attempts to redeem Dorian signal the failure of Victorian morality itself and of its attempts to instrumentalise literature and art for educational purposes . The novel turns into an illustration of the consequences of its downfall, and as such foreshadows pre-WWI novels like Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) or Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911) which depict a world where cosmic moral justice no  longer rules and characters are left to fend for themselves, struggling with their excesses and obsessions.

3. A manifesto of Wilde’s Aestheticism and its limits

More than a dark tale of supernatural immortality, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an illustration of Wilde’s aesthetic philosophy, known as Aestheticism. This intellectual and artistic movement became popular in Victorian England under the influence of the writer Walter Pater, in reaction against the new models brought by the industrial revolution which valued performativity and utility over aesthetic pleasure. Close to Theophile Gautier’s Art for Art’s sake credo, Aestheticism asserts the necessity for Art to emancipate itself from educational purposes and moral significance: “the sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate”, Wilde declares in The Critic as Artist  ((Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (London: Collins, 1966), 1048.)) . Similar statements are made in the Preface of the novel (“The Artist is the creator of beautiful things”, “No artist desires to prove anything”), and within the narrative by Lord Henry: “Beauty is a form of Genius – is higher indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation”, as he reveals to Dorian in their decisive first encounter (20).

Such beliefs, provokingly uttered by Lord Henry and put into practice by Dorian, led many critics to see in the novel a profoundly immoral narrative, whereas others have argued that it could be read on the contrary as a cautionary tale warning against the dangers of excess and vice, given that the protagonist eventually dies  ((Accusations of immorality came mostly from contemporary critics, from journals like the Daily Chronicle , or the conservative Scots Observer edited by the poet W.E. Henley. More recent studies have highlighted the moral ambiguity of the novel: Philip K. Cohen argues that Wilde is “at moral odds with himself” and that the novel, as a result, is characterized by “narrative schizophrenia” ( The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde [Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1978], 117-20). See also Gerald Weales (“Foreword,” The Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories [New York: New American Library, 1962]), and Kerry Powell  (“Oscar Wilde ‘Acting’: The Medium as Message in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Dalhousie Review 58 [1978]: 106) who dwells on the author’s “unresolved confusion”.)) .  The Preface would tend to suggest however that the novel’s ambition is beyond this controversy, and that t he book has no moral aim since it does not offer any clear conclusion, but rather provides philosophical observations on the human condition. Wilde proposes a profound meditation on the role of the artist , through the character of Basil whose depth has been reassessed in recent studies  ((See for instance Houston Baker, “A Tragedy of the Artist: The Picture of Dorian Gray. ”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction  24, no. 3 (1969): 349-55.)) and in whomWilde recognised himself: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps”, the author famously wrote in a letter of 12 February 1894  (( Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde , ed. Rupert Hart-Davis (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979), 116.)) .In that perspective, The Picture of Dorian Gray could be read as the tragic downfall of an artist who corrupted his artistic ideal ( Dorian) by mistaking his art for idolatry: “I worshipped you”, Basil confesses to the young man (2). Indeed, the role played by the painter in Dorian’s descent into moral degradation is not to be belittled: it is his picture which revealed to Dorian that he was worthy ofbeing admired and glorified. The novel thus ends on the destruction of the perverted artistic ideal embodied by the painting, the only way for art to return to its pure state. Wilde does not promote hedonistic instinct (embodied by Lord Henry) over conscience (represented by Basil) – nor the contrary, but rather suggests the necessity for both to unite. Indeed, Dorian’s confession to Basil (“Of course, I am very fond of Harry. But I know that you are better than he is. You are not stronger—you are too much afraid of life—but you are better”, 107) suggests that if Basil had possessed Henry’s strength and individualism, he might not have invested so much in the portrait and his encounter with Dorian might not have turned so tragically. Thus, according to Richard Ellmann, the novel represents “the tragedy of aestheticism” and “the aesthetic novel par excellence, not in espousing the doctrine, but in exhibiting its dangers”  ((Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), 297.)) .

Commented excerpt: Narcissus’s tragedy

In this passage, Dorian has just broken up with the actress Sybil Vane whom he had courted and intended to marry. Coming back home, he realises for the first time that the portrait has altered and rapidly links it to the cruel and selfish way in which he treated her:

As he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise […] In the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange. He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing. He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?  (87)

Dorian is here confronted with the direct and visible consequences of his behaviour as the portrait begins to bear the marks of corruption. The impossibility to identify himself completely with the painting, because of the expression of the mouth, inevitably reminds us of the myth of Narcissus who also failed to recognise his own image in the water. The same dissociation is at work, further highlighted by the presence of the mirror (significantly Lord Henry’s gift) which creates yet another double. This complex dynamic of duplication, or rather duplicity (in the moral sense) which led to Narcissus’s disappointment, announces more tragically Dorian’s downfall.

Wilde’s talent for combining elements of both fantastic and realistic narratives produces a “strange” text, where the personification of the painting (which comes to life) seems to contaminate the description: the shadows “shudder”, and the sunlight is “quivering” while the cruel expression “lingers”. His evocative and rich, ornate style builds up a chiaroscuro aesthetic which pervades the description through the contrast of lights and shadows, as if to better underline Dorian’s own psychological duality. The same precise and symbolic use of vocabulary which characterises Wilde’s writing can be seen in the expression “fantastic shadows”, which is also mentioned at the very beginning of the novel in the metaphorical description of flowers whose beauty is a “burden” (1), and later on again right before Dorian murders Basil (151). The scenes thus echo one another, ominous signs structuring the novel to highlight Dorian’s progression from innocence to monstrous self-destruction.

Bibliography

BAKER, Houston. “A Tragedy Of The Artist: The Picture of Dorian Gray .” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 24, no. 3 (1969): 349-355. www.jstor.org/stable/2932864 .

CARROLL, Joseph. “Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian Gray .” Philosophy and Literature 29, no. 2 (2005): 286-304. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/189431 .

CLAUSSON, Nils. “‘Culture and Corruption’: Paterian Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.” Papers on Language and Literature 39, no. 4 (2016): 339-64. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283516983_'Culture_and_Corruption'_Paterian_Self-Development_versus_Gothic_Degeneration_in_Oscar_Wilde's_'The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray '.

CRAFT, Christopher. “Come See About Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray .” Representations 91, no.1 (2005): 109–136. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2005.91.1.109 .

DUGGAN, Patrick. “The Conflict Between Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray .” Boston University Art & Sciences Writing Program , Journal, Issue 1, http://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/past-issues/issue-1/duggan/ .

LIEBMAN, Sheldon W. “Character Design in The Picture Of Dorian Gray .” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 3 (1999): 296-316. www.jstor.org/stable/29533343 .

LORANG, Elizabeth. “ The Picture of Dorian Gray in Context: Intertextuality and ‘Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.’” Victorian Periodicals Review 43, no. 1 (2010): 19-41.   www.jstor.org/stable/25732085 .

MANGANIELLO, Dominic. “Ethics and Aesthetics in The Picture of Dorian Gray .” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 9, no. 2 (1983): 25-33. www.jstor.org/stable/25512571 .

MATSUOKA, Mitsuharu. “Aestheticism and Social Anxiety in The Picture of Dorian Gray. ” Journal of Aesthetic Education 29 (2003): 77-100. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1a8a/d0fbef9c91942218b1472748cc9fbc7fbb48.pdf .

OATES, Joyce Carol. “ The Picture of Dorian Gray : Wilde's Parable of the Fall.” Critical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (1980): 419-428. www.jstor.org/stable/1343135 .

RIQUELME, John Paul. “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray .” Modern Fiction Studies 46, no. 3 (2000): 609-631. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/21511 .

WILDE, Oscar.  The Picture of Dorian Gray.  London: Harper Collins, 2010 [based on the 1891 book edition].

Pour citer cette ressource :

Louise Bailly , " Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s « The Picture of Dorian Gray» (1890) ", La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029) , septembre 2020 . Consulté le 12/04/2024 . URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/litterature-britannique/aestheticism-and-morality-in-the-picture-of-dorian-gray

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Introduction

• Published: October 1998
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This introductory chapter explains the theme of this book, which is about Oscar Wilde's essays on aesthetics contained in his book enentitled Intentions , which was published in London, England in May 1891. These essays include ‘ The Decay of Lying ’, ‘ The Truth of Masks ’, and ‘ Pen, Pencil, Poison ’. This book treats Intentions as a complex of personal attitudes, social affiliations, and cultural effects through which we can locate where Wilde tried to locate himself in the tumultuous world of late Victorian England. It provides facts about the essays' composition, publication, and reception.

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• Art Influencers

Oscar Wilde

Irish Writer, Critic, Aesthete

Summary of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde emerged in late nineteenth century London as the living embodiment of the Aesthetic movement . He won fame as a dramatist, poet and novelist whose ideas on art, beauty and personal freedom formed a formidable challenge to Victorian puritanicalism. At the same time, Wilde attracted public notoriety for his stream of witty aphorisms and his "effeminate" long hair, dandyish clothing and his devotion to flowers. He was halted at the height of his fame when sentenced to three years imprisonment for illegal homosexual activity. Ruined physically and financially, he lived out the final few years of his life in Paris, dying aged just 46. Wilde's star, which today burns brightest within the gay/queer community, has never diminished, however, and his legacy - exemplified by two classics of English literature, the Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the stage satire, The Importance of Being Earnest - prevails through screen biographies and countless reinterpretations of his works. But perhaps it was his flair for self-publicity and his oft-quoted witticisms that his name truly endures in the consciousness of the public.

Accomplishments

• Wilde's name is routinely linked with Théophile Gautier's famous maxim " Arte per amore dell' Arte " ( art for art's sake ). Guided by this maxim, Wilde did more than any other to cultivate the modern idea that art, as a pure product of the senses, could "prevent the death of the human soul".
• Wilde used the Aesthetic doctrine to promote the cult of beauty and pleasure and, as the physical embodiment of that ideal, he promoted hedonism as the way out of repressive Victorian culture and society. By liberating English literature from its Victorian preconceptions, he helped align British culture with the modernist values emerging on the European continent.
• Wilde found a way to marry the role of rebel and dandy. The rebel belonged to the realm of the bohemian while the dandy sat closer to aristocratic culture. Wilde plotted his own path; a dandy whose sartorial elegance was a symbol of his superiority of spirit and personal freedom rather that a symbol of his wealth and status. In this way, Wilde was perhaps the first to self-consciously treat public life as an artistic performance.
• While he claimed to live a life governed by no other responsibility than to enjoy excess and create beauty, Wilde did not shy away from calling for social and political reform. The strength of his political convictions have, however, been questioned by some scholars. And although he was apt to excuse his carnal proclivities as a "form of sexual madness", there can be no questioning Wilde's martyr-like status which has seen him canonized as an icon for the Gay Liberation movement.

The Life of Oscar Wilde

The greatest champion of the credo "art-for-art's-sake", Wilde professed that no "form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under" and that, as far as the true artist was concerned, any "authority over him and his art is ridiculous".

Oscar Wilde and Important Artists and Artworks

Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1872-77)

Artist: James Whistler

Whistler's Impressionistic treatment of Battersea Bridge evoked the hushed atmosphere of the river Thames at dusk; the foggy London skyline peppered with exploding fireworks. It was one of a series of paintings that many, including the critic John Ruskin, saw as an affront to standards in art. In June 1888, following the two men's recent re-acquaintance, Wilde gifted a copy of his new anthology, The Happy Prince , to Ruskin. Wilde's gift was accompanied by a note which read: "There is in you something of prophet or priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given to none other, so that your message might come to us with the fire of passion, and the marvel of music, making the deaf hear, and the blind see". One of the tales in the book was called "The Remarkable Rocket", a satire about a delusional toy rocket who believes that his "setting off" will take center stage at a royal marriage. The rocket has not realized that he will be "a mere footnote to the party". As the literary historian Anne Bruder describes it, "When the Rocket begins an exhortation on his superiority to the other fireworks and his importance to the future of the Prince and Princess, he pathetically begins to weep, and thus destroys his ability to be ignited. His fuse wet, he gets tossed onto a trash heap where uninterested children, who do not even watch the explosion, set him off as they walk away. And while the narrator tells us, "But nobody saw him," the Rocket dies swearing, "I knew I should create a great sensation". As Bruder concluded, "The placement of this tale in Wilde's oeuvre and his gifting it to Ruskin [...] was almost certainly an allegorical rendering of his former friend and famous egotist J. M. Whistler". Whistler's painting prompted Ruskin to accuse the artist of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face". Whistler's detestation of the critic led to him suing for libel, a lawsuit he won at great expense and which brought him just minor financial retribution. Unfortunately, the legal costs bankrupted the painter.

Oil on canvas - Collection of the Tate, United Kingdom

Illustration for Salomé, "J'ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan" (1893)

Artist: Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley was a fashionable young British illustrator who had made a name for himself by illustrating a book, Mort d'Arthur , by the medieval poet Malory. The book proved a favorite amongst the Pre-Raphaelites, with whom Wilde was initially affiliated through his admiration of the movement's maverick son, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Beardsley first met Wilde in 1891. He was somewhat spellbound by the author and even displayed a photograph of Wilde on his fireplace. When Salomé was first published (in English) in February 1893, the Pall Mall Budget magazine commissioned Beardsley for a drawing to illustrate the play's content. However, the magazine rejected the macabre, fantastical image that was based on the play's last scene in which Salomé kisses the lips of John the Baptist's severed head. It was a highly decorative, gruesome, and sexually suggestive vision, which Beardsley thought Wilde would appreciate. In the April of that year, however, an art publication called The Studio ran the illustration as part of its first edition. Wilde saw the drawing pre-publication and liked it so much he presented Beardsley with an inscribed copy of the earlier printing of the book which read thus: "March '93. For Aubrey. For the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the Dance of the Seven Veils is, and can see that invisible dance". The critic Peter Raby argued that "Beardsley gave the text its first true public and modern performance, placing it firmly within the 1890s - a disturbing framework for the dark elements of cruelty and eroticism, and of the deliberate ambiguity and blurring of gender, which he released from Wilde's play as though he were opening Pandora's box". As an interesting footnote, Beardsley became art editor of the fashionable magazine The Yellow Book which ran from 1894-97. Promoting the ideas of the Aesthetic movement, the magazine took its name from the "dishonourable" covering under which controversial French novels were hidden from public view (as the British Library notes, it is, in fact, a "yellow book" which corrupts Dorian Gray, that book generally thought to be Joris-Karl Huysmans's decadent 1884 novel A rebours ( Against nature )). The British Library records moreover that "when Wilde was arrested in 1895, there were rumours he had been carrying a yellow-bound book. Though this was actually Pierre Louÿs's French novel Aphrodite , a confused crowd thought it was a copy of [the] magazine, and gathered to throw stones at the publishers offices".

Line block print on Japanese vellum paper - Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Oscar Wilde and Whistler (1894)

Artist: Philip William May

The English satirist Phil May, a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, contributed many caricatures of actors, artists, and writers to London periodicals. His self-assured drawing style and his cutting wit attracted a devoted following with his illustrations published in book collections. His caricature of Wilde and the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler was reproduced in Phil May's Sketch-book , first published in 1895. The caption refers to Whistler's repeated accusation that Wilde plagiarized his ideas. May's caption reads: [Wilde]: "That was an awfully good joke you made last night. I wish I could say it was mine". [Whistler]: "You will my boy. You will". The acerbic Whistler's eagerness to court controversy, and his craving for the limelight, made him and Wilde natural friends and together they fronted the public image of the Aesthetic movement. Twenty-years older, Whistler initially regarded Wilde as a disciple demanding of his master's approval. Indeed, Wilde's editor, Frank Harris, believed that Whistler did more to influence Wilde's wit than any other acquaintance: "Of all the personal influences which went into the moulding of Oscar Wilde's talent, that of Whistler was by far the most important; Whistler taught him the value of wit and the power a consciousness of genius and a knowledge of men lend to the artist". However, as with many of both men's close friendships, theirs ended in acrimony. Whistler felt increasingly that Wilde, whose reputation was eclipsing his own, had copied his dandyish style of dress and speech (hence the caption in May's caricature). Responding to Whistler's charge of plagiarism, Wilde retorted, "as far as borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority over painters greater than himself". Wilde further opined, "Mr Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it with a capital I". Whistler retorted, "What has Oscar in common with Art? Except that he dines at our tables, and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces". By 1890 the two men's friendship had dissolved entirely with Wilde, ever one to have the last word, basing the murdered artist in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray on his friend-turned-nemesis, Whistler.

Pen and black ink, with black crayon and touches of blue crayon, on ivory laminate board - The Art Institute of Chicago

The tomb of Oscar Wilde (1914)

Artist: Jacob Epstein

For Wilde's tomb, the modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein created an enormous, horizontally-winged Art Deco Sphinx - carved from a 20-ton block of stone - giving the feeling of forward flight, suggestive of the poet as a messenger. The design may reflect Epstein's early interest in the primal sexuality of Indian and Egyptian art and statues of winged Assyrian bulls in the British Museum. Epstein was commissioned in 1908 to design the tomb, at a cost of £2000. His original sketches depicted two, grieving young men but, abandoning that plan, he drew inspiration from Wilde's poem, The Sphinx . Epstein initially planned a small angelic figure behind the Sphinx's ear, as a reference to the verse, "sing me all your memories". He also envisaged five figures on the Sphinx's headdress, one with a crucifix perhaps symbolizing martyrdom and Wilde's Catholicism. When the sculpture was previewed in 1912 (in Epstein's London studio), The Guardian reported: "one may see that this flying messenger, incomplete with worn eyes and the strange headdress, flying through our world with incredible swiftness, telling of beauty and of fatal mutiny against life, is at once a revelation and an enigma that will hold the attention of men as long as the great block of limestone lasts". After arriving in Paris, the Sphinx's unusually large testicles were covered over with plaster to be replaced with a bronze plaque of a butterfly. Epstein was furious and refused to attend the tomb's unveiling. The testicles were then stolen by vandals in 1961, leading to rumors that the cemetery manager was using them as a paperweight. The tradition in which visitors would kiss the tomb after applying greasy lipstick to their mouths led to the surface being eroded. In 2011, a glass barrier was erected around the lower half of the tomb to protect it. According to historian Ellen Crowell, the tomb "stands out like a sore thumb in a nineteenth-century cemetery whose sculptural aesthetic seems, to the modern visitor, overarchingly figurative and representational. It is precisely this aesthetic alterity that has, for one hundred years, prompted viewers to regard Epstein's 'Tomb for Oscar Wilde' as future- rather than past-oriented, more modernist than Victorian, a monument to enlightened pride rather than retrograde shame".

Hopton Wood stone - Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

From Oscar Wilde (1974)

Artist: Anselm Keifer

In this small and delicate early watercolor, Kiefer depicts a pale pink rose blooming against a dense and fluidly painted organic background. The inclusion of the words "von Oskar Wilde/für Julia" suggests that the rose is a gift from Wilde himself to Kiefer's then wife. It has been suggested that if the picture is turned anti-clockwise, the face of the artist can be seen in the flower. Keifer has said, "If you have a big idea, a big theme, you need a small format", and here, and in many other works, his interest in alchemy and transformation is reflected in the theme of growth and decay in nature. The image specifically references Wilde's touching fairy tale The Nightingale and the Rose . In it, the songbird sacrifices itself on the rosebush's thorns with the combination of the birdsong and its blood giving life to the red flower of love. The rose is then plucked by a lovestruck philosophy student who presents the flower to his true love. She however rejects him in favor of another suitor who brings her jewels. Brokenhearted, the injured third party turns back to philosophy, the only kind of life knowledge he understands (a knowledge certainly more "knowable" than love).

Watercolor and Gouache on paper - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A conversation with Oscar Wilde (1998)

Artist: Maggi Hambling

This "witty and amusing" sculpture/bench in central London resembles a sarcophagus with a sinewy bust of Wilde laughing, emerging from one end like the wisps of smoke from his cigarette. It is inscribed with a famous quotation from Wilde's play Lady Windermere's Fan : "We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". A permanent memorial to Wilde in central London was first suggested during the 1980s and early 1990s by fans of the playwright's work, including the Queer avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman. Following Jarman's death in 1994, a committee, including thespians Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, and the Irish poet and Nobel Laurette Seamus Heaney, brough the proposal to fruition with hundreds of individual donors and foundations contributing funds for the project. Following Danny Osbourne's Oscar Wilde Memorial Sculpture which was unveiled in Wild's birthplace (in Merrion Square, Dublin) a year earlier, Hambling's work was chosen from a shortlist of six. Hambling said of her work, "The idea is that he is rising, talking, laughing, smoking from this sarcophagus and the passer by, should he or she choose to, can sit on the sarcophagus and have a conversation with him". The memorial, while popular with passers-by, met with mixed critical reviews. Tom Lubbock, chief art critic for The Independent acknowledged the need for a Wilde memorial in London, and commended the project for its "real and proper Victorian public spirit", but he dismissed the work itself which he compared to a Madame Tussauds waxwork. He wrote: "We have nothing of the nerve, the folly, the ruin, the glory [of Wilde]. We have nothing for history - only the whimsical notion of us chatting cheerfully with this anodyne figment". Charles Spencer, chief drama critic of The Telegraph added to the scorn when he wrote: "Hideous is too gentle a word to describe it. [...] The idea is quite witty [...] but the representation of Wilde is loathsome. He looks even worse than the picture of Dorian Gray in the attic, sporting Medusa-like snakes of hair and a vile, degenerate grin. Even Wilde, the master of the aphorism, might have been stumped for words to describe it". It was left to committee member Jeremy Isaacs to highlight the fact that the sculpture "already evokes more favourable response from the public than any other statue I know in London, with the possible exception of Peter Pan".

Granite - Adelaide Street, London

The Oscar Wilde Temple (2017)

Artist: McDermott and McGough

Working in painting, film, photography and sculpture, David McDermott and Peter McGough, have explored such themes as religion, medicine, fashion and sexual behaviour throughout their partnership. For many years, they dressed as Victorian gentlemen, living in a townhouse lit only by candlelight, creating a historical fantasy where they could live and work. Initially transforming the Russell Chapel in the Church of the Village in New York, their immersive installation, The Oscar Wilde Temple took 20 years to create, setting out to transport visitors back to Wilde's visit to America between 1882-83. The artists created a complete, Aesthetic movement interior with fabric wall coverings, architectural and decorative details and furnishings. The Temple's centerpiece was an altar built around a 4'3" wooden statue of Wilde, poised in a devotional style. On the pedestal below is carved C33, Wilde's prison number at Reading Gaol. Framing each side of the statue were eight "stations": paintings tracing the journey of Wilde - depicted as a divine being - from arrest through imprisonment and his hard labor. "Commemorating Oscar Wilde as a martyr", wrote art critic Leon Craig, "subverts traditional Christian teachings on bodily purity and homosexuality, while pointing out the homoeroticism in many medieval and early modern representations of male martyrs". A second altar honored people who have died, or are suffering, from AIDS. It was complemented with portraits of other contemporary "martyrs" who have contributed to rising worldwide awareness of the disease. McDermott & McGough aimed to celebrate the creative process by which experience is transformed into art and reality abstracted into revelation. Critic Rosemary Waugh wrote, "The Oscar Wilde Temple is essentially a shrine, a devotional offering to all that LGBT+ people have endured, past and present. In this respect, it's intensely sad, a reminder of entirely needless suffering".

Oil on linen - Studio Voltaire, New York

Biography of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born into a family of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's preeminent ear and eye surgeon and a philanthropist and writer who published books on archaeology, peasant folklore and a biography of the satirist Jonathan Swift. Wilde's mother, Jane, a committed Irish nationalist, and recognized authority on Celtic myth, was a revolutionary poet who wrote under the pen-name "Speranza". It was Jane Wilde who can be credited with instilling in her son his love for poetry and neo-classical art.

Early Education and Training

A pupil at the Portora Royal School in Enniskillen between 1864-71, Wilde was already gaining a reputation as something of a wunderkind . He demonstrated an early prowess for humorous storytelling and excelled in reading the classics. He also took to languages, becoming fluent in French and German. Wilde went on to win awards for his translations of Greek and Latin texts, including a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin, Ireland's most prestigious university. Attending between 1871-74, Wilde became an outspoken member of Trinity's Philosophical Society. A champion of the maverick Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and the "passionately atheistic" poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, Wilde would win one of Trinity's top academic awards, the Berkely Gold Medal for Greek, while actively promoting himself as an Aesthete. Even at this early age, Wilde had started to attract attention through his unique writing style and his nonconformist lifestyle.

Between 1874 and 1878, Wilde studied classical literature at Magdalen College at Oxford University where he distinguished himself as a classical scholar, a poseur and a humourist. He was attracted by the rituals and dress of Freemasonry and attained the "Sublime Degree of Master Mason"; and though he held widely conflicting views on religion, he was deeply attracted to Catholicism, even meeting Pope Pius IX in 1877.

In his third year at Oxford, Wilde met the essayist and art critic Walter Pater who advocated the rejection of "vulgar" bourgeois virtue in favor of an art that exists without the need for justification or moral purpose. Pater argued, moreover, for an enhanced sensibility towards beauty, and a life lived with aesthetic intensity. Under Pater's influence, Wilde's devotion to art intensified while the teachings of art historian and critic John Ruskin offered the young scholar fresh perspectives on the nature of art. Wilde began to dabble in art criticism himself with his review of the opening show of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 for Dublin University Magazine . As the literary historian Anne Bruder observed, "His review exemplifies his early attitudes toward the coming of modernism, views clearly derived from Ruskin" in the way he "elevates that which represents nature most clearly to the highest position of excellence".

Following Pater's maxim "burn always with a hard gemlike flame", Wilde revelled in the idea of the aesthetic pose and immersed himself in the Aesthetic and Decadent movements. Growing his hair long and dressing flamboyantly, he decorated his rooms with objets d'art , peacock feathers, lilies and sunflowers, declaring, "Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!". Wilde won Oxford University's prestigious Newdigate Prize, an annual poetry award (won previously by Ruskin) for his poem Ravenna . By now, Wilde had started to attract a group of dedicated followers who were drawn to the Irishman's iconoclasm and his glorification of the virtues of youth.

After completing his studies at Oxford, Wilde returned to Ireland where he hoped to revive his romantic relationship with Florence Balcombe, a celebrated beauty. Florence, much to Wilde's anguish, became engaged to Bram Stoker (author of Dracula ) prompting Wilde to move to London where he boarded with the highly successful society portraitist Frank Miles. Miles, who shared Wilde's love of flowers, had purchased a house in the newly fashionable Tite Street in Chelsea; a street that counted the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler , and the illustrator Charles Rickets and his partner Charles Shannon, amongst its residence. Miles's home was decorated (as was Whistler's) with sparse furnishings and with a Japoniste colour scheme and styling.

Mature Period

In 1881 Wilde published (at his own expense) his first poetry collection, Poems . Drawing heavily on the likes of Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Keats (a little too heavily for some critics') it drew mixed notices. The satirical magazine Punch , which lampooned Aestheticism as an effeminate art form, singled out Wilde as its literary talisman: "The poet is Wilde, but his poetry's tame" it pronounced. Any objections to Poems did not dent his rising fame, however, and the names of Wilde and Miles soon spread throughout London's Society circles who flocked to Chelsea to socialize with the two aesthetes.

With the rising interest in the Aestheticism movement in America, Richard D'Oyly Carte, the theatre impresario who staged the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, sent the 27-year old Wilde on a lecture tour of North America. His role was to promote Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta Patience , which satirised the Aesthetic movement and partly parodied Wilde as the "fleshly poet" Bunthorne. The American press had been somewhat scathing of Wilde's indolence and his aesthetic attire (of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and silk stockings) but they were, nevertheless, eager to get an original quote from him. Several newspaper reporters even hired a launch boat to meet Wilde on his ship before it docked in New York. But it was on his passage through the port's customs office that Wilde offered the most famous of all his witticisms, declaring "I have nothing to declare but my genius". In an interview the following day, Wilde added that "I am here to diffuse beauty, and I have no objection to saying that".

The lecture tour, originally scheduled for four months, lasted an entire year, with Wilde giving a total of 140 lectures. At Harvard University, the students dressed as Bunthorne, paraded to their front row seats, brandishing sunflowers and lilies. Alerted of their actions in advance, Wilde confounded expectations by taking to the stage in conventional evening dress and announcing, "Caricature is the tribute that mediocrity pays to genius [...] Save me from my disciples". A highlight of Wilde's travels came at a silver mine in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. There, he read passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, the eminent 16 th century Italian silversmith. The "uncultured" miners were disappointed that Wilde had not brought Cellini with him as a guest! Informing them that Cellini was dead, one of the miners asked, "Who shot him?" Wilde also met with various distinguished writers, including Henry Longfellow, Henry James and Walt Whitman. To Whitman, Wilde wrote, "There is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honor so much". Whitman later told the press that he and Wilde had "a jolly good time".

While staying at the Long Beach Hotel on New York's Long Island, Wilde encountered the wealthy industrialist Albert Clifford Barney, his wife Alice, and their daughters Natalie and Laura. Alice listened intently to Wilde's pronouncements on the importance of developing children's artistic tastes and how to decorate one's home aesthetically. Wilde left an indelible impression on Alice, who herself went on to pursue a bohemian lifestyle and a new career in art (despite her husband's vocal protests). On one occasion, Wilde rescued Natalie from a gang of chasing schoolboys who by scooping her up onto his lap and calming her by recounting a fairy tale. From that moment, Wilde became Natalie's lifelong hero. She grew up to become one of Paris's most celebrated and notorious literary salon hostesses, and a lesbian lover of Wilde's niece Dolly.

Returning from America, Wilde embarked on a lecture tour in Britain, regaling his audiences with his impressions of the New World. In 1884, he proposed to Constance Lloyd whom he had met three years earlier. Their marital home at 16 Tite Street in London was renovated at considerable expense to match the couple's Aesthetic ideals. The couple had two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan, but after he second pregnancy, Wilde was left physically repelled by Constance. His first homosexual experience was probably with Robert "Robbie" Ross, who Wilde met in Oxford in 1886. Ross's inclinations were open and unrestrained, despite Victorian Britain's attitudes towards morality.

Between 1887-89, Wilde acted as editor for The Lady's World magazine (renaming it The Woman's World ). In addition to his views on art and literature, he contributed serious articles on parenting, culture, and politics, and even stories to be read to children. Wilde saw the magazine as "the recognized organ for the expression of women's opinions on all subjects of literature, art and modern life, and yet it should be a magazine that men could read with pleasure". While The Woman's World was not a commercial success, his involvement with the publication helped catapult Wilde to even greater fame. The Happy Prince and Other Tales was published meanwhile in 1888, revealing his talent for allegoric fairy tales (one of which carried a cutting criticism of Whistler's Impressionistic painting Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge (1887)).

Wilde produced his most important works in his later life. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray - a story about a self-destructive man who maintains eternal youth at the expense of his soul - was published in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine . It was expanded by six chapters into book form the following year. Despite the cautionary tale that was the hero's self-destruction, the novel came under fire for its decadence and homosexual allusions with The Daily Chronicle describing it as "unclean", "poisonous", and "heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction". Wilde vigorously defended himself in letters to the press, but later revised the book, removing the passages of overt homo-eroticism, and adding a preface of 22 epigrams on the purpose of art.

In 1891, Wilde published a collection of essays on aestheticism in Intentions (1891), an anthology influenced by the ideas of the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire , and the American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler (with whom he endured a most fractious relationship). Wilde expounded his aesthetic ideals through essays such as "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue". The essay, written in Socratic dialogue, presents its ideas through the conversation between the two characters Vivian and Cyril. Vivian tells Cyril of an article he has been writing called "The Decay Of Lying: A Protest" which espouses the values of Aestheticism and the "art for art's sake" maxim. It has not been lost on historians such as Bruder, however, that Wilde's philosophy on art was "decidedly fickle" in the way it fluctuated between the Ruskin's view that the role of the art critic was indispensable to establishing the true value of art, and the Whistler's position that true art was (or should be) able to speak for itself.

Nevertheless, Wilde travelled to Paris where he was celebrated as a respected writer at renowned literary salons. It was through his conversations in social settings that Wilde truly thrived. Writer Frances Winwar described how, before "a group of listeners, especially if they were young and handsome and titled, he outdid himself. In the spark of their admiration his mind quickened. Epigram followed epigram, one more dazzling, more preposterous than the other, yet always, like the incandescent core of the firework, with the burning truth at the heart".

Wilde had first met William Morris in 1881. Following that meeting, Morris wrote that though Wilde was "certainly clever" he thought of him as "an ass". The two men did, however, become friends and their political views were close enough that ten years on Morris's essay "The Socialist Ideal" appeared together in a pamphlet with Wilde's "Soul of Man under Socialism" (also published in The Fortnightly Review in February 1891). Wilde's essay has confused scholars who have queried his motivations. As historian Xavier Giudicelli observed, the essay is "a surprising and slippery text, whose nature and value is difficult to ascertain". He suggests that "One possible way of solving the problem [...] is to dismiss it as a mere playful variation upon such notions as socialism, individualism or democracy and to regard it as a flippant response to contemporary debates in late Victorian Britain". But both Morris and Wilde backed the socialist principle that the worker's "moral character" was only improved if there was a creative aspect to manual labor. Wilde wrote: "A great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is morally and mentally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such".

Later in 1891 Wilde was back on more familiar territory with the publication of two volumes of stories and fairy tales: Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates . The publication of the latter confirmed Wilde's friendship with Charles Rickets whose graphic work was inspired by the dreamy maidens of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (he would also illustrate Wilde's The Sphinx in 1894, and painted the hero of Wilde's short story, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. , which was used as the frontispiece of the book). The men formed a close and lasting relationship with Rickets, who described Wilde as "the most remarkable man he had met", even publishing a personal memoir, Recollections of Oscar Wilde in 1932. (shortly before Rickets's death). (The memoir was written through the narrative device of an imagined conversation between Rickets and a fictitious French writer he named Jean Paul Raymond (a decision which would have no doubt met with Wilde's approval).

Later Period

It was, however, for Wilde's society stage comedies, executed in the strict style of drama known as the pièce bien faite ("well made play") that he would become best known. His first stage success was the comedy of manners, Lady Windermere's Fan , first performed in 1892. Set in London, the play involves a jealous wife whose husband's becomes closely acquainted with a mysterious and beautiful older woman, Mrs. Erlynne. It transpires that Mrs. Erlynne is Lady Windermere's divorced mother who had disappeared from her daughter's life when she was just a baby. Mrs. Erlynne and the well intentioned and proper Lord Windermere are not engaged in an illicit affair at all but, rather, Mrs. Erlynne is hatching a plot to be reunited with her estranged daughter. Taking to the stage after its first performance (in February), Wilde announced, "The actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself". The play duly toured Britain, earning Wilde £7,000 (around £800,000 in todays money) in its first year.

After becoming captivated by the New Testament story of the beheading of John the Baptist, Wilde interpreted, firstly in French, the macabre story of Salomé as a one-act play. The story had been a popular subject for Christian art since the Renaissance (well-known examples include Masolino de Panicale's 1435 fresco, Salome Bringing the Head of the Baptist to Herodias and French Symbolist Gustave Moreau's 1876 painting, The Apparition ( Dance of Salome )). Wilde's Salomé was published in 1893, and in English the following year, promoted with the help of designer Aubrey Beardsley 's controversial illustration. It was not performed until 1896, however, because of Britain's ban on the representation of biblical characters on stage. When it finally reached the West End stage, a critic for The Times said of Salomé , "It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred". Salomé was quickly followed by three society comedies, bringing their author significant financial rewards.

The first was A Woman of No Importance (1893), a comedy of manners (the name given to a type of play that satirizes the behaviour in a particular social group) targeting English upper-class mores and hypocrisy, and a protest against gender inequalities. The critic William Archer said of the play it "must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama". An Ideal Husband and, by almost unanimous agreement, his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest both followed in 1895. An Ideal Husband is a scandalous social satire about a political blackmail plot that embroils a lively cast including an idle philanderer, young lovers, an imperious father, society doyennes and a fearsome femme fatale. The play opened at the Haymarket Theatre in London in January 1895 to popular acclaim, and exceeded 100 performances. His final play, The Importance of Being Earnest (subtitled A Trivial Comedy for Serious People ) proved his greatest legacy to the stage as he took the conventions of farce and transformed them, in three acts, through a series of satiric epigrams that ridiculed Victorian hypocrisies.

A comedy of overlapping mistaken identities (two philanderers, Jack and Algernon, adopt the same pseudonym (Earnest)), The Importance of Being Earnest opened at George Alexander's St. James Theatre in London's West End on Valentine's Day 1895. It was said that on its opening night, as a mark of recognition for Wilde's aestheticism, many women dressed in lily corsages, while many men wore lilies of the valley in their lapels. Wilde himself arrived in typically flamboyant dress. It was widely reported in the press that he wore a black coat with a velvet collar, a white waistcoat, a black moiré ribbon watch chain, white gloves, a green scarab ring, and lilies of the valley in his lapel. It was not lost on Wilde devotees, either, that the West End was the red light district; a place where married men could abandon their true identity and indulge in the reckless pursuit of pleasure. Indeed, most of Wilde's works operated around the themes of sin, indiscretion and their destructive consequences. Indeed, his maxim that "life imitates art" (as opposed to "art imitates life") was proving to be most prescient as he himself was beginning to feel the destructive consequences of his own pursuit of unbridled pleasure.

In 1891 Wilde had been introduced to the 21-year-old Lord Alfred Douglas, who was studying at Oxford. They embarked on an indiscreet and tempestuous affair, with the infatuated Wilde indulging the spoilt Douglas's every whim. Douglas introduced Wilde into the world of gay prostitution, and illicit meetings with working-class boys. Their relationship exacerbated Douglas's already rocky relationship with his father, the Marquess of Queensberry. On February 18 th , 1895, four days after the opening of Earnest , the Marquess left a calling card for Wilde inscribed, "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]". Urged on by Douglas, but against the advice of close friends, Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel.

Queensberry had to demonstrate that his accusation was true and hired private detectives to uncover evidence of Wilde's sexual deviance. Details of Wilde's private life began to appear in the press, and when a number of male prostitutes agreed to testify against him, Wilde dropped the prosecution. On leaving court, Wilde, who had ignored advice from his friends to flee to France, was immediately arrested for "gross indecency". During his first trial, Wilde dazzled the court with his witty repartee, and the jury was unable to reach a verdict. At the re-trial, Wilde was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour. His initial incarceration at Pentonville Prison consisted of many gruelling hours on a treadmill and the mundane task of separating out fibres from old rope. Subsequently, at Wandsworth Prison, he collapsed from illness and hunger, rupturing his right ear drum in the fall. He was later transferred to Reading Gaol where he was addressed and identified only by his prison number: C33. Rickets visited his good friend in Reading (and publicly reproached the "social reformer" William Morris for not doing so) but according to Wilde the visit was not a success.

Between January and March 1897, Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, tracing his spiritual journey of redemption and fulfilment. He was barred from sending the letter, but was permitted to take it with him when released from prison in the May of that year. In the letter, published posthumously in 1905 as De Profundis , Wilde reflected upon his life and career, as one who "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age". The dramatically cut De Profundis was filled with recriminations against Douglas for encouraging him into debauchery and for distracting him from his life's work though the two lovers would be briefly reunited.

On the day of his release, a bankrupt and broken Wilde, headed for France, never to return to Britain. He spent the last three years of his life in exile, living under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. His only further published work was a long poem called "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898), an eloquent plea for prison reform. His wife Constance refused to meet him or allow him to see their sons, although she did provide him with monies. Wilde and Douglas lived together near Naples for a few months before they were effectively separated by both families under the threat of cutting off all further funds.

In 1898 the English painters Augustus John and William Rothenstein met Wilde in Paris. John, "appreciative of him as a great man", described Wilde as a "distinguished reprobate [...] a big and good-natured fellow with an enormous sense of fun, impeccable bad taste [and] a deeply religious apprehension of the Devil". Wilde was similarly taken with John, describing him as a "charming Celtish poet in colour". George Bernard Shaw, meanwhile, noted that despite his numerous woes, Wilde maintained "an unconquerable gaiety of soul" and he was also visited by loyal friends, the caricaturist and wit Max Beerbohm, and his future literary executor Robert Ross. By November 25 th 1900 Wilde had developed cerebral meningitis and died five days later at the age of 46, having been finally received into the Roman Catholic Church. Wilde had proved true to his word when he had predicted that he "could never outlive the [nineteenth] century as the English people would not stand it".

The Legacy of Oscar Wilde

Although Wilde did not contribute directly to the plastic arts, stylistically, Aubrey Beardsley's illustration for Wilde's play Salomé helped promote the florid decoration of Art Nouveau and the illustrations of artists such as William Rothenstein. Indeed, Wilde was a giant presence within the Aesthetic movement, promoting its values through his writing, and his seemingly single-handed invention of the "cult of personality". He offered as much as anyone in defining the alternative culture of Victorian London. As the living personification of his art, he pre-empted a trait amongst contemporary artists, that reached a new apex in Britain in the mid-1990s with the Young British Artists movement , for hedonistic self-publicity.

In more enlightened times, Wilde (despite being personally conflicted over his sexual drives) has been cast by the LGBTQ activists as a martyr to their cause and was commemorated with a stained-glass window at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1995. In 2014, he was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk in San Francisco's Castro neighbourhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields".

Writer, director and thespian, Rupert Everett wrote, directed, and starred as Wilde in The Happy Prince (2018), the latest in a long line of filmed adaptations of Wilde's life. Everett stated, "for me he is an integral character in that [...] he really is, in modern times, the first "out" gay man and I think for all of us [gay men] that's quite important in the sense that homosexuality up until him was something nobody ever talked about [...] The road to liberation I think started with him [...] he's my Christ figure really".

Influences and Connections

Useful Resources on Oscar Wilde

• Oscar Wilde By Richard Ellmann
• Oscar - A Life By Matthew Sturgis
• Making Oscar Wilde By Michele Mendelssohn
• Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years By Nicholas Frankel
• The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography By Neil McKenna
• Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions By Frank Harris
• Son of Oscar Wilde By Vyvyan Holland
• The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde By Merlin Holland
• Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity By David M. Friedman
• Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde By Thomas Wright
• The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde By Joseph Pearce
• The Soul of Man under Socialism and Selected Critical Prose By Oscar Wilde
• The Decay of Lying: An Observation By Oscar Wilde
• The Critic as Artist By Oscar Wilde
• The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde By Oscar Wilde
• Oscar Wilde - The Official Website of Oscar Wilde
• Oscar Wilde Online
• The Oscar Wilde Society
• Memorial for Oscar Wilde's grave in Paris - archive, 1912 By James Bone / The Guardian / February 12, 1912
• Constructing Artist and Critic Between J. M. Whistler and Oscar Wilde: "In the best days of art there were no art-critics" By Anne Bruder / English Literature in Translation: Volume 47, Number 2, 2004
• Rupert Everett interview The Graham Norton Show, BBC Radio 2 / November 21, 2020
• Aesthetics and Politics: The Afterlives of Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) By Xavier Giudicelli / OpenEdition Journal / February 13, 2016
• The Yellow Book British Library Books Collection
• Art and the Handycraftsman By Oscar Wilde
• The English Renaissance By Oscar Wilde
• House Decoration By Oscar Wilde
• Lecture to Art Students By Oscar Wilde
• London Models By Oscar Wilde
• Omnibus - 'Oscar Wilde' In this BBC documentary, writer Michael Bracewell portrays Oscar Wilde as an inspiration to generations of rockers and artists. Contributors include Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys, playwright Tom Stoppard and actor Stephen Fry.
• Oscar Wilde 2001 Biography channel/History Television documentary
• Reputations: Oscar Wilde himself Biography channel documentary
• Wilde (1997) British biopic starring Stephen Fry and Jude Law
• The Happy Prince (2018) Rupert Everett stars as Wilde during his final, tragic days
• The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) Peter Finch plays Wilde in this account of his criminal cases
• Oscar Wilde (1960) Low-budget biopic starring Robert Morley
• Wilde Salomé (2011) Docu-drama starring, and written and directed by, Al Pacino

Content compiled and written by Robert Weinberg

Edited and published by The Art Story Contributors

Mirrors of the Soul: Art and Aesthetics in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

This essay about “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde explores the intricate relationship between art, aesthetics, and morality. It examines how the pursuit of beauty and pleasure shapes the characters, particularly Dorian Gray, whose life is mirrored by his portrait that ages and corrupts as he indulges in hedonistic pursuits. The essay discusses the transformative power of art and its ability to reflect inner beauty or moral decay, using the contrasting characters of Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton to highlight different attitudes towards aesthetics. Wilde’s critique of Victorian society’s obsession with appearances and the consequences of valuing aesthetic beauty over ethical integrity are central themes. The novel is presented as both a cautionary tale and a commentary on the duality of human nature, suggesting that the pursuit of aesthetic pleasure at the expense of morality can lead to spiritual desolation. Through “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” Wilde invites reflection on the true value of beauty and the moral implications of our actions and artistic expressions.

How it works

Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” offers a captivating expedition into the realms of art, aesthetics, and their profound implications on the human psyche. Through the narrative lens of Dorian Gray’s existence and the eerie portrayal mirroring his ethical degradation, Wilde delves into the transformative influence of the pursuit of beauty, youth, and hedonistic gratification on one’s conduct and interpersonal connections. This narrative intricately intertwines the tapestry of artistry and aesthetics with the labyrinthine corridors of moral and ethical dilemmas, presenting art not merely as a vessel for capturing beauty but also as a reflective surface laying bare the depths of one’s inner essence.

Central to the fabric of the novel lies the dynamic interplay between Dorian Gray and the canvas crafted by Basil Hallward. Initially, this painting encapsulates Dorian’s physical allure and innocence, epitomizing the zenith of aesthetic perfection. However, as Dorian descends into the abyss of vanity and surrenders to the allure of sensual indulgence, the canvas metamorphoses into a grotesque tableau mirroring his moral decay. Wilde employs this metamorphic allegory to castigate the Victorian era’s fixation on superficial appearances and to underscore the perilous repercussions of prioritizing aesthetic allure over ethical rectitude.

The characters’ perceptions of beauty and art serve as pivotal determinants shaping their destinies. Dorian’s insatiable yearning for perpetual youth and physical allure ensnares him in a vortex of moral degradation, serving as a testament to Wilde’s contention that the relentless pursuit of aesthetic gratification can culminate in the forfeiture of one’s moral compass. Lord Henry Wotton, with his nihilistic and hedonistic ethos, acts as the catalyst for Dorian’s metamorphosis, advocating a worldview that exalts aesthetic gratification as the ultimate raison d’être. In stark contrast, Basil Hallward embodies the archetype of the unadulterated artist, perceiving in Dorian the potential for transcendent beauty but ultimately succumbing to the vicissitudes of his own creation.

The significance of art in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” transcends the confines of the canvas, emerging as a treatise on the dichotomy of human nature and the labyrinthine corridors of morality. Wilde challenges the conventional paradigm dictating that art must serve a moral imperative, championing instead the ethos of appreciating art for its intrinsic merit. Nevertheless, the novel itself serves as a moral fable, sounding a clarion call against the perils of succumbing to the seductive allure of aestheticism and the erosion of ethical moorings in the quest for eternal beauty and sensory gratification.

In denouement, “The Picture of Dorian Gray” presents a nuanced inquiry into the realms of art and aesthetics, unraveling their profound influence on character delineation and moral decision-making. Wilde adeptly elucidates the transformative power of art to both reflect and mold reality, intimating that beauty, when divorced from ethical considerations, engenders a life bereft of substance and meaning. Through the tragic saga of Dorian Gray, Wilde beckons readers to contemplate the intrinsic value of beauty and the exorbitant toll exacted by sacrificing moral rectitude at the altar of sensual pleasure. The novel endures as an enduring meditation on the intersecting domains of artistry, morality, and the human spirit, impelling us to ponder the legacy we etch within the canvases of our existence.

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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): Aesthetics and Criticism

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What Is Art?: Oscar Wilde in the Pursuit of Beauty – Aestheticism and “The Decay of Lying”

The Victorian Era is one of the most interesting periods of time to examine when looking at art. Literature, architecture, fashion, painting, and music were blooming and having great changes from what they had been before. Many artists from that period had a large impact, and they remain prevalent and influential today. It could be affirmed that many of them have also grown to be icons in multiple subcultures and fields. Oscar Wilde is probably one of the most recognized figures in literature of that time, in spite of having only published one novel throughout his lifetime. A day like today, 168 years ago, Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. Being the anniversary of his death, it is only fair to exalt the contributions that he made and continues to make in society. Throughout his life, and after his life, he has stood out from the norm and challenged many of the views, standards, and roles both in his art and in his personal life. This has positioned him as a prominent inspirational model for transformation and non-conformism in society. From the year 1860 to 1900, the Aestheticism Movement was flourishing in Great Britain among many artists. Unsurprisingly, Oscar Wilde was one of the main representatives of this movement which essentially took place all throughout his lifetime. Oscar Wilde’s behaviors, thoughts, and presentation were unconventional for his time, and thus, it made him a suitable personality for a movement that denied the ideals of this period. Aestheticism appeared from the rejection of Victorian society’s industrialization, materialism, and conservative views: “The Aesthetic Movement was an artistic expression of ‘art for art’s sake.’ Disavowing notions of literature’s societal necessity.” (Allit). Artists who pertained to this movement opposed the belief that art needed to have a purpose or a sense of morality, which was the main current of thought then: “Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new æsthetics; and it is this, more than that vital connection between form and substance (…)” (Wilde 20). This didn’t mean that art didn’t have a purpose, but rather that that did not define it.

Aestheticism attempted to give a new answer to the good old question: What is art? People have been trying to define art since its beginning. Wilde himself contributed with his answers to this questions through his writing: “The Aesthetic Movement in fin-de-siècle England, as interpreted by Oscar Wilde, revolved around the ideal that the utility of one’s actions should be to create the maximal amount of beauty and pleasure in one’s life, and nothing more.” (Duggan 67). The pursuit of beauty appears to be one of the main components in which Wilde was interested in. His only novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray , impulses a conversation around the themes that were often being discussed in this movement. This text, just as most of his pieces, dismantled, questioned, and deconstructed the idea of art and beauty, and what it serves. In his essay “The Decay of Lying”, Oscar Wilde submerges himself fully into the topic of art, its meaning, and its purpose. Through the conversation of two characters–Cyril and Vivian–, he displays his conception of art. A clear emphasis on expression, beauty, pleasure, and creativeness can be found in his writing. For Wilde, art should reject realism, restrictions, and moral expectations: “The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any lofty passion, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.” (Wilde 20). He exalts art as a separate entity from everything else in the world, even in the same plane and significance as Life itself. Art takes a protagonic role in the world as something that should be valued and viewed outside of the scope of everything else. “The Decay of Lying” expresses that people experience life the way that they do because of art and not the other way around. In fact, he was the first person to point out the popular notion that says that life mirrors art: “(…) it is none the less true that Life imitates Art far more than Art Imitates Life.” (Wilde 14). These were core sentiments found in aestheticism. The personification of art as a separate entity–almost as a living creature–was a distinct and innovative form of understanding the idea behind “art for art’s sake.” Oscar Wilde permitted art to be just art:

‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forests know of, birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the “forms more real than living man,” and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. (Wilde 13)

Oscar Wilde’s appreciation for art went beyond the current of thought of his time and did not conform to the rules that had been previously established. His unconventionality, non-conformism, and rebellion were incredibly impactful for the society of his time and today. Wilde did not just represent aestheticism in his art but in his life as a whole. He lived his life challenging the norms, purpose, and expectations in the pursuit of beauty–just like art: Wilde for Wilde’s sake.

References Allit, Patrick. Oscar Wilde’s Role in Literature’s “Aesthetic Movement”. Wondrium Daily, 2019, https://www.wondriumdaily.com/oscar-wildes-role-in-literatures-aesthetic-movement Duggan, Patrick. The Conflict Between Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Boston University Arts & Sciences Writing Program. https://www.bu.edu/writingprogram/journal/past-issues/issue-1/duggan/#:~:text=The%20Aesthetic%20Movement%20in%20fin,one%27s%20life%2C%20and%20nothing%20more .  The Art Story. The Aesthetic Movement.  https://www.theartstory.org/movement/aesthetic-art/   Wilde, Oscar. The Decay of Lying – An Observation. 1891, 1-24.

Sofia Ruiz Vega

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Ruskin, Wilde, Satire, and the Birth of Aestheticism

Ryan wong '10, english 1510s, pre-raphaelites, aesthetes, and decadents, brown university, 2008.

[ Victorian Web Home —> Authors —> John Ruskin —> Oscar Wilde —> Aesthetes and Decadents ]

"In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential." -Oscar Wilde, in The Chameleon

Looking past the often hyperbolic and flippant tone of Oscar Wilde's aesthetic theories in "The Decay of Lying" ( text ), one finds that many of them copy or closely resemble those of John Ruskin . This similarity presents a peculiar challenge: how could Ruskin, so closely associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and concerned with society's relation to art, influence an aesthetic movement that attempted to divorce art from anything but itself? Looking purely at the content of Wilde's aesthetic theories, one cannot find any practical departure from Ruskin. But if one measures Wilde's "The Decay of Lying" by its form and technique, Wilde indeed presents a "new aestheticism": the virtue of his wit and style trump concerns over the originality of his ideas. Examining Ruskin, Wilde and aestheticism in terms of the sincerity of their dialogue poses important implications for discussions of the artists associated with each thinker. The Pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood associated with Ruskin reflects his sincerity in their beliefs and works. Similarly, Wilde helped to foster the self-aware pursuit of shock and escape from bourgeois standards that characterized so many Aesthetes and Decadents.

Thus although the themes and techniques used by each group shared many similarities, the great chasm of sincerity lay between them, informing their goals and the products of their art. Aestheticism was not an artistic conviction in the same sense that the Pre-Raphaelitism was, but rather functioned as a mode of viewing art which might be picked up and later dropped on whim. Wilde himself held strong socialist beliefs, as evidenced in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" published two years after "Decay." In "The Soul of Man" and other essays, Wilde puts forth theories that seem to directly contradict those of his "new aestheticism," which leads many to criticize him for not having a consistent body of aesthetic criticism. But in fact those seemingly contradictory statements merely clarify the ideas beneath the surface of "The Decay" and often bring him ever closer to Ruskin. It is precisely this tension between the exaggerated ideas of Wilde's Aestheticism and the sober ones he puts forth elsewhere that defines Aestheticism.

"The Decay of Lying" and Ruskin's Aesthetic Theories

In his 1889 mock-dialogue "The Decay of Lying," Wilde speaks of four major points in his "new aesthetics," a sort of manifesto for the aesthetic movement. Wilde not only states the principles of the "new aestheticism" in the "The Decay of Lying," but uses the form of the work itself as a demonstration of the principles of such an aestheticism. The importance of form stems from Theophile Gautier, who proposed "Une belle forme est une belle idée." For Gautier, art produced by spontaneity would not stand up over time. He compared poetry to the work of a sculptor, where the ideal poem should be a concrete, chiseled product. Wilde's essay lives up to this standard quite well with its carefully measured words. The originality of Wilde's form makes the piece an important one, not the originality of his ideas, which are in fact mostly borrowed.

The piece takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, Vivian and Cyril, named after Wilde's children. The conversational form riffs on the Platonic dialogue. Wilde presents Vivian as the much more at ease, witty and eloquent of the two; we may assume that Vivian serves as a mouthpiece for Wilde's Aesthetic theories. Cyril acts as a foil, responding with appropriate Victorian shock to all of Vivian's statements, and in one place actually interrupts Vivian mid-sentence. Wilde's choice to have the character of Vivian speak for him adds yet another layer, in addition to the hyperbole and humor of the piece, to the difficulty in parsing out his actual opinions. The use of Vivian guarantees that Wilde could deflect any criticisms towards the character rather than himself. Wilde could have chosen to present his ideas in standard essay form, or to insert himself in Vivian's place. Wilde's use of his children's names suggests, though, that he in a sense "gave birth" to the characters and the ideas that they toss about.

Wilde uses hyperbole and a humorous tone to dilute the appearance of validity in his aesthetic theories and increase their radical appearance. Indeed, at first glance, the four points he offers seem little more than decadent solipsism:

Art never expresses anything but itself

All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals

Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life; the same for Nature

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Arti

Perhaps the most confusing statement of the four is the idea that "art never expresses anything but itself," a paraphrase of the idea of Gautier's "l'art pour l'art.". What Vivian probably means by this statement comes from Gautier: "Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless, everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory."

Wilde's Vivian echoes Gautier quite closely: "As lying as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art." More succinctly, in his famous preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , he states that "all Art is quite useless." Instead of art, one must look to the architecture or music of an age to understand it; this idea seems to come from Ruskin's work in The Stones of Venice where he attempts to measure the health of civilizations by their architecture.

Wilde himself cannot possibly believe that art should not affect us in any way, as that would negate any desire to create or view art. Wilde allows Cyril a rare rebuttal against Vivian, in which he points out that no one would re-read any unmoving book. Vivian's statement exaggerates Wilde's belief that the public influences artists and thus dilutes their creations. He states in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism" that "the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them they leave them alone." Wilde compares art to the practice of science and philosophy, where it would be ridiculous to suggest that the public should hold any sway over the methods of experts.

Furthermore, Wilde would say in his essay on "Art and the Handicraftsman":

People often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is always an expression of the use you put a thing to and the value placed on it.

Clearly, Wilde does not indeed believe that use and beauty are mutually exclusive. Rather, he argues against measuring art by its external usefulness, and in this, follows Ruskin's thought. Ruskin vehemently criticized the equation of art and usefulness upheld for much of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Adam Smith, David Hume and Henry Fuseli all advanced theories supporting the idea of usefulness as an aesthetic quality. Hume offers the example of the horse, believing horses beautiful to man because of their usefulness. Ruskin stands by the argument already established by Edmund Burke to the contrary. Burke offers the counterexample of the pig's snout: though each fold, hair, and nostril of the snout somehow contributes to its function, no one considers the pig beautiful.

By "Art never expresses anything but itself," Wilde in truth wishes to emphasize the importance of beauty as a goal. As George P. Landow points out in " Aesthetes, Decadents, and the Idea of Art for Art's Sake ," "Ruskin, whom most commentators take to be the bête noir of the movement, turns out to have advanced a complex theological argument for Art for Art's Sake before mid-century!" Before Ruskin experienced a loss of faith, he had developed a theory that art justifies its own existence through beauty; beauty is an end in itself and the ultimate goal of great art. Ruskin states: ""Ideas of beauty are among the noblest which can be presented to the human mind, invariably exalting and purifying it according to their degree; and it would appear that we are intended by the Deity to be constantly under their influence...v" Because God infuses all things in nature with himself, which are disproportionately more beautiful than deformed, any experience of beauty relates to God.

The obvious difference between Wilde and the early Ruskin lies in Ruskin's reliance on God as a justification for beauty. But even considering the difference in underlying justification, the practical goal remains the same: beauty is its own end.

The second point on life and Nature will be left until after discussing the others, as it is there that a rift between Wilde and Ruskin might exist.

The statement "Life imitates art" again disguises a Ruskinian idea under grand hyperbole. Wilde does subscribe to completely solipsistic view of things here, nor does he suggest that paintings and essays somehow alter the physical world around us. Ruskin, too, fought against the notion that nothing exists in the world except in our minds, as that would negate the actual existence of anything in the world. By "Life imitates art," Wilde in fact means that art instructs us on how to see the outside world. This resembles very closely Ruskin's theory of seeing in Modern Painters , and the relation of the mind to the external world:

The first great mistake that people make in the matter, is the supposition that they must see a thing if it be before their eyes...unless the minds of men are particularly directed to the impressions of sight, objects pass perpetually before the eyes without conveying any impression to the brain at all; and so pass actually unseen, not merely unnoticed, but in the full clear sense of the word unseen. [ Modern Painters . Vol. 1, Part 2, Sec. 1, Chap. 2]

The argument that Ruskin presents here, and that Wilde restates in his idiosyncratic way, simply states that seeing is not an act in itself, but relies on the interpretation of visual information. [Modern research into neuro-aesthetics seems to support this claim.] The more cultivated the individual who processes that information, according to Ruskin, the more they may actually see the world around them. He compares the function of the eyes to the ears: ears grow accustomed to a certain level of quiet, and only truly function when aroused by a sounds. Eyes, though constantly provided with stimuli, similarly grow accustomed to a state of seeing and any number of things may pass within our vision without actually being "seen."

Art, according to Ruskin, links humans to the truths of the world. The condition of humans — limited by time and space —means that they "rarely encounter any truth not too great for their capacities, so that almost all truths of the spirit appear to man in the form of grotesques" (Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theories , ch. 5 ). In this way, poets and artists become prophets, interpreting divine truths for the rest of humanity. Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites would adopt the idea of artist-as-prophet in their attempt to communicate their visions through art.

Wilde's uses the word "lying" in a manner quite apart from the usual negative connotations it carries. He selects a word that will deliberately unsettle the reader in order to surprise him or her into either rejecting the statement with repulsion or embracing it for the repulsion it generates in others. But again, an examination of his explanation of the statement reveals little change from the theories of Ruskin. Also in Modern Painters , Ruskin refutes the idea that truth is beauty and vice versa. For Ruskin, "to make such an equation is to confuse a quality of statements with a quality of matter" (Landow, Aesthetic and Critical Theories , ch. 2 ) By "lying," Wilde seems to mean the same as Ruskin's view of imagination and artist as prophet, as discussed above.

Debate over the idea of truth in art comes out perhaps most strongly in discussions of Nature. Of the aspects of modern life which Ruskin criticized, the distance of men from nature concerned him greatly. Ruskin's Typical theory of beauty clearly stands in opposition to Wilde, as Ruskin's theory depends on an unchanging standard of beauty in Nature that trumps human intervention. Vivian, in "Decay" has to say of Nature:

One touch of Nature may make the whole world kin, but two touches of Nature will destroy any work of Art. If, on the other hand, we regard Nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to Nature but to poetry. Poetry gave him 'Laodamia,' and the fine sonnets, and the great Ode, such as it is. Nature gave him 'Martha Ray' and 'Peter Bell,' and the address to Mr. Wilkinson's spade."

Wilde, though, seems to have no problem with word-painting as practiced by Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Ruskin. His own "Impression du Matin" and "Symphony in Yellow" demonstrate this. The difference is, of course, the subject matter: Wilde's poems describe the urban while Wordsworth's draws inspiration from wandering in nature. Vivian talks about how the fogs of London did not exist until the Impressionists showed them to us. In practical application, both Ruskin and Wilde believe that the artist should not be a mirror to nature, but an interpreter of it. For Ruskin, this means using ones imagination to interpret nature for the viewer. Wilde, in turn, emphasized interpreting city life for the readers of his poems.

The flippant concluding paragraph nearly parodies the rest of the piece:

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art. But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length. And now let us go out on the terrace, where "droops the milk-white peacock [56/57] like a ghost," while the evening star "washes the dusk with silver." At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets. Come! We have talked long enough.

The verbose Vivian all of a sudden tires of speaking and decides not to explain his last point further, that "Lying...is the proper aim of Art." Instead, he suggests going out into the garden quoting "Summer Night" by Alfred Tennyson. Earlier on in the piece, Vivian rejected Cyril's suggestion that the two sit on the grass outside, and it is unclear what makes him change his mind. One cannot tell if Vivian here dismisses all that he has said before as not enough to keep him indoors forever, or if he thinks he has proven himself so thoroughly that they may now venture outside, or if he simply prefers twilight to daylight and could not recall an appropriate line from Tennyson for the sunshine. Wilde seems to hint here that the reader should not take Vivian too seriously, and especially not confuse Vivian's views with his own verbatim.

From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Aesthetes

Both the differences and similarities between Ruskin and Wilde show in their respective defense of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Ruskin closely associated with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood such as Rossetti, Hunt and Burne-Jones. Wilde found in the Pre-Raphaelites excellent models for how best to shock and offend the English public. While it would be the topic of another paper to fully trace the many strains of Pre-Raphaelitism that the Aesthetes and Decadents picked up, several in particular evidence the strong relation of thought between the Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetes associated with Wilde. Wilde, though he does not name anyone outright, particularly seems to support the Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism that grew out of the early Brotherhood. But while the Pre-Raphaelites viewed their work as a vehicle with which to express their personal convictions, Aestheticism acted as mode to try on and later drop at whim. It is no coincidence that many aesthetes and decadents would later convert to catholicism or become socialists, or as in the case of Wilde, hold the two views simultaneously.

Wilde defended the Pre-Raphaelites in an essay on the "English Renaissance of Art":

Satire, always as sterile as it in shameful and as impotent as it is insolent, paid [the Pre-Raphaelites] that usual homage which mediocrity pays to genius — doing, here as always, infinite harm to the public, blinding them to what is beautiful, teaching them that irreverence which is the source of all vileness and narrowness of life, but harming the artist not at all, rather confirming him in the perfect rightness of his work and ambition. For to disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity, one of the deepest consolations in all moments of spiritual doubtx.

Wilde emphasizes the controversy that the Pre-Raphaelites brought to the artistic discourse. This fits well with his own pursuit of "épater le bourgeois" - shocking the bourgeois. He glosses over the fact that the Pre-Raphaelites  at least the early ones  genuinely wished to convey religious or moral meaning in their work rather than offend the bourgeois. True, the early Pre-Raphaelites consciously chose to rebel against academic traditions in part to test those traditions' validity, e.g. painting evenly lit pictures in which they filled the entire frame, instead of the academic standard of pyramidal compositions with a single light source. But when John Everett Millais shocked the public with Christ in the House of His Parents, it was because of the working class depiction of the family and the political connotations that went with it.

Whereas for Wilde the criticism of the public signified that the artist's "sanity," Rossetti "was morbidly afraid of criticism...and it was not until Rossetti's collected works were put on display after his death that the European and British public became widely acquainted with his painting" ("Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism") . Wilde was quite offended when he was not asked to contribute to The Yellow Book , an Aesthetic publication which was as satirized and decried as it was famous. Of course, the publishers of The Yellow Book were concerned that Wilde's sexual preferences would in fact cause the magazine too many problems.

Wilde also supports the Pre-Raphaelites in his aversion to the "modernity" of Zola and others. Wilde's use of "modernity" in this case surely does not mean the attempt at forging new artistic modes, but rather realism and depictions of contemporary life. Vivian states in "The Decay of Lying":

The early Pre-Raphaelites followed the example of Keats and Tennyson when choosing medieval themes for their images. Ruskin, too, admired the gothic age for its architecture and mode of crafting art — a time before industrialization rendered hand-made work almost obsolete. William Morris followed this idea closely in his establishment of his workshop and the creation of the Red House . Wilde echoes Ruskin and Morris in "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," which originally appeared in 1891 Fornightly Review : "I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other."

This is an instance in which Wilde's Aestheticism and his personal political convictions seem to exist in parallel worlds. In fact they are tied together; Wilde believed that "on the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself." At the same time, the public's misconception of Art "comes from the barbarous conception of authority. It comes from the natural inability of a community corrupted by authority to understand or appreciate Individualism. In a word, it comes from that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art." To Wilde, the power structure of capitalist England stifles the artistic mind so much that one must judge ones work by how much the public disdains it.

The Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelites — particularly Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones — "emphasized themes of eroticized medievalism (or medievalized eroticism) and pictorial techniques that produced a moody, often penumbral atmosphere" another clear departure point for Wilde and the Aesthetics (" Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism "). But Rossetti was closer to the Romantics in this case than to the Aesthetes in his personal aims: he sincerely believed in the role of artists to express themselves personally. His short story "Hand and Soul" speaks of a visit from an angel who instructs him to paint his soul, which takes the form of a woman. Though this vision seems aesthetic to the core in its emphasis on ones imagination over all else, it also demands that one believe in a soul and express it — something of the most personal nature. Wilde does not 'bare his soul' in "The Decay of Lying" or in his other works, but creates characters to serve as mouthpieces. The more aesthetic poems of Rossetti, though criticized by Robert Buchanan as part of "The Fleshly School of Poetry" ( text ) were not created in pursuit of sexual decadence, but because their sensuality stemmed from a merging of beauty and spirituality (discussed below). As Beckson writes, though Rossetti "held ideas somewhat similar to those of the French Aesthetes, he was convinced that subject was more important than mere form and that l'art pour l'art was a meaningless doctrine."

William Holman Hunt picked up a part Ruskin's thought that would also carry on in a different form for the aesthetes: the potential for an artist to consciously fill an image with meaning, particularly religious. Inspired by Ruskin's interpretation of Tintoretto's Annunciation , Hunt adopted a program of typological symbolism in which he painted hard-edged, realistic paintings of religious scenes heavily laden with symbols referencing scriptures. Several aesthetes, symbolists, and later decadents would also pursue the relation of text and image, but with startlingly different aims and results. Wilde commissioned Aubrey Beardsley to illustrate his play Salomé . The play itself grafts an entirely made up story onto the few original lines in the Bible, and Wilde does not miss a chance to fill it with violence and sexual perversion. Salomé turns inside out the doctrine of typological symbolism — though Wilde clearly sets his play against a biblical backdrop, he does so to unsettle and offend rather than inspire and convert.

Wilde does not forget to pay tribute to Ruskin in the play, according to Richard Ellmann, who believes that Salomé symbolizes Pater, Jokanaan (John the Baptist ), Ruskin and Herod, Wilde himselfxiv. According to Christopher Nassaar's " Wilde's Salomé and the Victorian Religious Landscape ," "Jokanaan is not only Ruskinian but is also Wilde's presentation of Christianity as a religion of sexual repression. . . Wilde sought not simply to exoticize Ruskin but also to discredit and dismiss Christianity as a prelude to presenting us with his own "religion." The fall of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and of Newman and Ruskin, in the play leaves the stage empty for Wilde to fill the void." Jokanaan's beheading in the last scene may be a violent symbol of Wilde's adoption and later defacement of Ruskin's theories.

Wilde's choice of Beardsley as the play's illustrator only furthers its blasphemous content. Beardsley fills the illustrations with offensive elements: gratuitous nudity, caricatures of Wilde, and some completely unrelated images wherein he satirized contemporary life. Taking a passage from Hunt, and comparing it to Beardsley's work demonstrates this odd connection: "When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth" (Landow, Replete with Meaning ). Replacing each religious word in this passage with another appropriately devilish one, e.g. "shock" in the place of"revelation," reveals how closely Beardsley follows Hunt's method. In The Toilette of Salomé (first version), for example, we find: familiar contemporary elements such as Baudelaire 's Les Fleurs de Mal and Zola's La Terre , exotic flowers, and oriental and modern furnishings. Each of these, of course, carries heavy decadent connotations, from Decadence's symbolist birth in Baudelaire to its love of the cultivation of exotic flowers indoors. Beardsley is at once the greatest student and worst detractor of Hunt — maximizing the effect of symbolism while corrupting its message.

The similarities between "The Decay of Lying" and Ruskin's theories present a question: does Wilde wish to parody Ruskin or to praise him? To write off Wilde's essay as a parody piece, or even a satire, would undercut the seriousness of its content and the many ways in which Ruskin's theories clearly influenced the aesthetic movement. At the same time, to call the piece a mere praise of Ruskin would also do it a disservice, as nothing would mark it a work of the "aesthetic movement" instead of a re-iteration of Ruskin. A proper explanation of the piece in context, then, seems to incorporate both of these. As Beckson states: "[Wilde's] originality...lay in his clever manipulation of other men's ideas rather than in his personal vision and voice" (xxxvii). The seeming paradox here lies in the coexistence of "originality" and "other men's ideas." The work becomes distinctly Wilde, and thus one of the aesthetic movement, when judged by the way its wit, sarcasm and hyperbole shock the reader into believing that what Vivian says truly shakes the foundations of aesthetic theory.

This split between sincerity of content and satire in form that characterizes the essay helps to explain the Aesthetes. As Wilde tells us in The Chameleon preface, "the first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered"; by this he means extols the very self-consciously artificial nature of Aestheticism. Wilde to learned from the methods of form that the Pre-Raphaelites and Ruskin forged, while perverting their earnest content. Though some of his own beliefs if resembled, if not copied, those of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, his flippant Aesthetic side was allowed an absence of any concern for moral or social meaning.

Beckson, Karl. Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890 s. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers. 1981.

Wilde, Oscar. "Art and the Handicraftsman." Essays and Lectures . London: Methuen and Co., 1908

Wilde, Oscar. "The English Renaissance of Art." Essays and Lectures . London: Methuen and Co., 1908

Last modified 18 May 2008

Oscar Wilde’s Art of Disobedience

Msn article rss.

Revisiting his critical writing, we learn a valuable lesson about the critic’s role in refusing bad taste and bad politics.

“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue,” Oscar Wilde declares in his 1891 essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”

Books in review

The critical writings of oscar wilde: an annotated selection.

“Classic Wilde,” you might think. Isn’t it like him to argue that the betterment of civilization depends upon misbehavior? Since his death in 1900, at the age of 46, the writer’s popular image as a provocateur has only strengthened, and not without cause. In Wilde’s oeuvre, contradiction is not merely a rhetorical attitude, but an implicit intellectual challenge. Yet as a critic and essayist, his commitment to insubordination is also entangled with a lifelong philosophical inquiry into the conundrum of creating art on one’s own terms, unburdened by the demands of public opinion or by a milieu’s prevailing aesthetic conventions. If yielding to authority was tantamount to degradation, as Wilde believed, beauty and art could flourish only in conditions of freedom, which by his own definition constituted a utopia of socialist hedonism. “Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt,” he writes. Rather than brute, “unintellectual” labor, human life ought to be occupied by the sorts of activities likely to draw accusations of idleness: creative pastimes of one’s choosing or absolute contemplative leisure.

His body of criticism, newly collected in The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde , cultivates an aesthetic of disobedience. Its language—sly, limber, epigrammatic—models the same rebellious individualism that it so fiercely advocates. In this annotated volume, editor Nicholas Frankel assembles a selection of Wilde’s most famous nonfiction writing, largely devoted to the matters of how an artist creates art and how others should receive it. Frankel divides this collection into four chronologized groups: reviews, essays and dialogues, letters to the press, and epigrams and paradoxes. Together, they illuminate a swaggering intellectual career that spans not just the novel, the play, and the poem but also, to a prodigious degree, the periodical.

As Frankel suggests in his introduction, “Wilde approached the writing of criticism with wit, irony, and a consummate sense of style, so much so that his critical writing is often hardly recognizable as criticism .” This flouting of rhetorical custom may itself be understood as a subtle form of defiance: a commitment to submitting language to a laboratory experiment of Wilde’s own devising. Take, for example, the argument that human progress requires disobedience, in which he invokes the latter’s “virtue,” as if the point of his writing is to yoke opposites, arousing tension through their unexpected alliance.

Wilde was no stranger to tension, or to scandal. The chutzpah of his criticism issues from his enduring friction with the cultural habits and assumptions of late Victorian England, from his resistance to complacency within a context he found sorely wanting. Yet inside that raucous rebellion, one cannot but discern a yearning impulse: that to obey, or not, could finally diminish as relevant modes of sociality; that an individual—queer, Irish, aesthetically flamboyant—could commit himself to beauty amid the peril fomented by an anxious nation scouting out transgression on every page.

By the late 19th century, Great Britain’s literary ecosystem was populated by a roster of venerated critics: Thomas Carlyle loomed large in the field, his sway unhindered by his death in 1881. Matthew Arnold’s 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”—which Wilde would take to task 25 years later—famously champions the work of critics as crucial to literature in the wake of much public disparagement. John Ruskin and Walter Pater played crucial roles in art history and aesthetics, and each was uniquely indispensable to Wilde’s own thinking. But whatever intellectual debts Wilde owed to his critical forebears, he would not compound them through stylistic mimicry. Even the most recreational readers of Wilde could not confuse him for the author of The Stones of Venice (written by Ruskin in 1851) or Studies in the History of the Renaissance (written by Pater in 1873, and often referred to by Wilde as “my golden book”). Nor did the figure of “the critic,” chiseled in the Victorian imagination as a Carlyle-like symbol of sober wisdom, appeal to Wilde’s puckishness.

While he delighted in the role of the critic, Wilde was the first to admit his own limits. A critic cannot confer truth to his readers, nor should he attempt to do so, Wilde argued. At most, a critic can propose the terms of conversation. He implies that the power of language is essentially dialogic; it draws significance through its summoning of oppositions. Frankel delineates this impulse in Wilde’s criticism, identifying it as a proto-Bakhtinian “dialectical understanding of the truth”—an understanding that renders proof and reliability as red herrings. “No artist desires to prove anything,” Wilde asserts in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray , for “even things that are true can be proved.”

To scout out the precise coordinates of Wilde’s critical inconsistencies would be to miss his greater rhetorical point. (“Who wants to be consistent?” asks Vivian in his 1889 dialogue, “The Decay of Lying: An Observation.”) Still, his mercurial tendencies were not always choreographed. Early in his career, Wilde argued that artistic self-sufficiency existed in autonomous relation to one’s milieu. “Such an expression as English art is a meaningless expression,” he told the Royal Academy’s art students in an 1883 lecture. “Nor is there any such thing as a school of art even. There are merely artists, that is all.” Like the Greek deities depicted in Wilde’s beloved Hellenistic sculpture, artistic sensibility is born unto the artist with inviolable sanctity; it is a tidy, closed system, he suggests, dependent only upon itself.

Yet within two years’ time, Wilde changed his mind and began to acknowledge, even to insist upon the significance of cultural context. “An artist is not an isolated fact,” he writes in “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” (1885), a withering review of the American painter’s lecture on aestheticism; “he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle.” Wilde had once counted James McNeil Whistler among his friends, but the affection between them soured as Wilde’s views shifted to an irreconcilably opposing position. One blistering point of contention regarded the critic’s role in artistic discourse. In his lecture, Whistler laments the scourge of criticism, condemning its practitioners as “the middleman in this matter on Art.” Criticism, in Whistler’s estimation, amounts to little more than static interference: “It has widened the gulf between the people and the painter, has brought about the most complete misunderstanding as to the aim of the picture.”

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Wilde saw the matter differently. He also knew that Whistler had long harbored a grudge against Victorian critics. In 1878, Whistler had filed a libel suit against Ruskin for a mean review. The artist won the case, although the jury conveyed its disdain for the proceedings by awarding him only a farthing in damages. Nonetheless, as Frankel writes in his introduction, the ruling in such a public case imperiled the critic’s “hitherto unquestioned authority.” The case implied the triumph of the artist over the critic, which is a constant conflict that still produces a thorny question: Why should critics possess the authority to critique art they did not create?

Wilde pokes at this question in “Mr. Whistler’s 10 O’Clock” and attempts to settle it through a shift in vocabulary: “I say that only an artist is a judge of art…. For there are not many arts, but one art merely: poem, picture and Parthenon, sonnet and statue…he who knows one knows all.” This statement foreshadows a more explicit moment of philosophical departure, in which Wilde demands criticism’s recognition as an aesthetic equivalent to other artistic forms. Even Matthew Arnold, one of criticism’s most famous defenders, had declined to make this leap: “The critical power is of lower rank than the inventive,” he admitted. Arnold’s critic does not create art but instead evaluates, assembles, organizes.

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Although an admirer of Arnold, Wilde could not abide what seemed to him a diminishing of the critic’s role. A critic was no mere lens by which to reflect a superior creation, nor a pale imitation of literary artistry. The cultural contributions made by critics warranted appreciation on their own terms. Wilde issued his own apologia in 1890 by way of his famous dialogue, “The Critic as Artist: With Some Remarks on the Importance of Doing Nothing.” Initially titled “The True Function and Value of Criticism,” it delivers a pointed refutation of Arnold’s thesis.

The conversation unfolds between Wilde’s slick, in-dialogue proxy, Gilbert, and his skeptical interlocutor, Ernest, who feeds Gilbert a handy supply of queries and protestations that incite his elaboration on the art of criticism. “You seem to me to be allowing your passion for criticism to lead you a great deal too far,” Ernest protests. “For, after all, even you must admit that it is much more difficult to do a thing than to talk about it.” Gilbert, who shares the author’s love of sly contradiction, is prepared for this moment, epigrams loaded in his quiver: “Not at all. That is a gross popular error…. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it…. [Action] is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.”

Here is a defense of criticism that refuses all prior terms and is shaped instead by Wilde’s own pleasure-centered metric. Loath to accommodate an industrializing empire’s fetish for productivity, he casts the writing of criticism in opposition to exertion of any sort. As Gilbert and Ernest debate, they gaze at the night sky, where “the moon…gleams like a lion’s eye”; Egyptian cigarettes dangle from their fingers. As Frankel notes in his introduction, “The critic is an artist, to be sure, but he is also a corporeal creature, whose thoughts and ideas are extensions of his physical life, not a repudiation of it.” In the domain of Wilde’s dialogues, his speakers are at liberty to enact the conditions that Wilde understands as central to creative work. If it is the critical instinct, not the creative one, that breeds innovation, then the critic requires the stillness afforded by “doing nothing”—by settling into one’s flesh and heeding one’s own impressions, wherever they meander.

Gilbert’s position in “The Critic as Artist” is seductive, but it courts disagreement. When I’ve read this dialogue in the past, my reactions have sometimes eked into Ernest territory. One could dispense with Arnold’s solemn distinction between critical and creative abilities without landing where Wilde does. But why would one read Wilde in pursuit of intellectual mitigations? Rather, one turns to him because the extravagance of his theories begets the most enthralling possibilities. Or as Gilbert concludes, “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.”

There are a few peculiar lines at the conclusion of Wilde’s 1885 essay, “The Truth of Masks: A Note on Illusion,” in which he offers a sly disclaimer to the argument he would make five years later:

Not that I agree with everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree. The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything.

The critic shoulders many artistic and intellectual responsibilities, but always saying precisely what one believes is not among them. As the essay’s title implies, a writerly posture—a linguistic mask—might signify more than any so-called authentic claim. Performance, Wilde knew, was a reliably tangible fact of existence; another person’s truth was a glint on the horizon, easily contested and endlessly deferred.

In April 1895, during Wilde’s failed libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, he was questioned about a line in his series of epigrams, “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young” (1894): “A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes it.” Wilde explained that according to his “philosophical definition,” truth was “something so personal…that in fact the same truth can never be apprehended by two minds.” The court could not abide such vast ideological diversity, particularly when posited by a man who, soon after, would be convicted of gross indecency for homosexuality. Wilde’s truth—and his adherence to it—yielded criminal condemnation and punishment: It signified an illicit, unpardonable refusal.

In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde also invokes the matter of necessary disobedience, although he draws on more strident language than he does in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” “What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress,” Gilbert declares. But lest the reader misinterpret the remark as equivocal, he presses the point: “Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless…. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.” Perhaps these lines comprise a kind of beatitude, uttered for those who, like Wilde, resisted impossible assimilatory demands. Or perhaps they’re a nudge to the docile reader: The only route to Utopia is illuminated by disobedience.