"The artist moves the world towards self-recognition, with at least a tinge of self-redemption"
Oscar Wilde (1988) by Richard Ellmann
....If Dorian Gray presented aestheticism in an almost negative way, his essays ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ gave it affirmation. The
first was published in July and September 1890 in the Nineteenth Century, and retouched for the volume Intentions (1891); the second in The Fortnightly Review in February 1891. To a considerable extent the first essay was a resolution of the conflict with Whistler. That difficult man had raised a fuss early in 1890, on the by-now well-worn theme of Wilde’s putative borrowings from him. The immediate cause was that Herbert Vivian, a young acquaintance of both men, had begun to publish a series of Reminiscences in the Sun. In the first, on 17 November 1889, he recounted how, after lecturing to the art students in 1883, Wilde was asked by Whistler what he had said, and had to suffer the bow of acknowledged ownership as each idea was enumerated. Vivian had also noticed that in ‘The Decay of Lying’ Wilde had thoughtlessly used Whistler’s joke, which went back to his letter to The World of 17 November 1888, that ‘Oscar has the courage of the opinion of … others.’ He had borrowed his own scalp, Whistler chortled. Wilde was extremely annoyed at Vivian, as well as at Whistler. He curtly refused Vivian’s request for his promised introduction to the Reminiscences in a book, and forbade him to use any private letters or conversation. He replied with acerbity to Whistler’s charge, though not until 9 January 1890, when his letter to Truth began: ‘It is a trouble for any gentleman to have to notice the lucubrations of so ill-bred and ignorant a person as Mr Whistler, but your publication of his insolent letter has left me no option in the matter.’ The joke which Whistler said had been stolen was too old for even Whistler to claim it. This defense was weak. Wilde was on solider ground in declaring that Whistler was ignorant of the history of criticism. The week after, on 16 January, Whistler replied that Wilde was now ‘his own “gentleman.” ’ ‘In all humility, therefore, I admit that the outcome of my “silly vanity and incompetent mediocrity” must be the incarnation—Oscar Wilde.’ Wilde’s more adroit reply was reserved for ‘The Critic as Artist,’ where he said, such accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed.
The whole essay was Wilde’s declaration of freedom from Whistler’s theories. Gautier had said in his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, ‘There was no art criticism under Julius II,’ and Whistler had embraced this view without acknowledgment. Wilde has Ernest, the straight man in his dialogue, say, ‘In the best days of art there were no art critics,’ to have Gilbert reply, ‘I seem to have heard that observation before, Ernest. It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend. On the contrary,’ he proceeds, echoing Symonds and Pater, ‘the Greeks were a nation of art critics.’ He repudiates the romantic idea of art as a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, and insists that it is a highly self-conscious process. ‘All bad poetry comes from genuine feeling,’ he says, as Auden would say after him. ‘The great poet sings because he chooses to sing,’ and sings not in his own person but in one he has assumed: ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.’ Most of Yeats’s speculations about the mask derive encouragement from this essay. Wilde finds that what keeps creation from being repetitive is the critical faculty, which generates fresh forms.
Just what criticism is, Wilde explained by direct and oblique references to his Oxford predecessors. Matthew Arnold as the Oxford Professor of Poetry had lectured in 1864 on ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’ a title which Wilde had echoed in his original title for ‘The Critic as Artist,’ which was ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism.’ Arnold memorably declared that ‘the aim of criticism is to see the object in itself as it really is.’ The definition went with his demand for ‘disinterested curiosity’ from the critic. Its effect was to put the critic on his knees before the work he was discussing. Not everyone enjoyed this position. Nine years later Pater wrote his preface to the Renaissance. Pretending to agree with Arnold’s definition of the aim of criticism, he quoted it and added, ‘the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.’ Pater’s corollary subtly altered the original proposition, shifting the center of attention from the rock of the object to the rivulets of the perception. It made the critic’s own work more important as well as more subjective. If ‘observation’ is still the word, the critic looks in on himself as often as out to the object.
Wilde outdid Pater. He proposed in ‘The Critic as Artist’ that the aim of criticism is to see the object as it really is not. This aim might seem to justify the highly personal criticism of individual works which Arnold and Pater wrote, and Wilde uses them as examples. But his contention goes beyond their practice. He wants to free critics from subordination, to grant them a larger share in the production of literature. Although he does not forbid them to explain a book, they might prefer—he says—to deepen its mystery. (The suggestion is amusing but dated: who could deepen the mystery of Finnegans Wake? ) At any rate, the critic’s context would be different from that of the artist whom he was judging. For, just as the artist claimed independence of experience (Picasso tells us that art is ‘what nature is not’), so the critic claims independence of the books he is writing about. ‘The highest criticism,’ according to Wilde, ‘is the record of one’s own soul.’ The critic must have all literature in his mind and not see particular works in isolation. So he, and we, ‘shall be able to realise, not merely our own lives, but the collective spirit of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern in the true meaning of the word modernity. To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making.’
Wilde’s essay moves smoothly from classical examples—Homer, Plato, and Aristotle—to Dante. He demonstrates the power of the modern critic to control both Greek and medieval dispensations. He also extends the innovative function of the critic by comparing it with that of the criminal. Transvaluating language in the way of Nietzsche and Genet, Wilde finds that critics grow ‘less and less interested in actual life, and will seek to gain their impressions almost entirely from what art has touched.’ Life is a failure, incapable of repeating the same emotion, and bringing us to action when beauty lies, rather, in These sentiments particularly impressed one reader, the influential editor of The Fortnightly Review, Frank Harris. He wrote to Wilde that ‘Plato might have been proud to sign pages 128–9,’ those dealing with sin and virtue. ‘I’ve done you wrong in my thoughts these many years, of course, ignorantly, but now, at last, I’ll try to atone. You’re certain, I think, to be a chef-de-file (if I may use Balzac’s coinage without offence) of the generation now growing to manhood in England.’ 33 From now on Harris was an important friend and advocate. One day he would write his biography of Wilde, which suffered from Harris’s deficiencies as a listener, and was based on improvisation rather than memory. But he published Ten, Pencil and Poison’ in his review, as well as the more subversive essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism.’ The second of these broadens and sharpens the argument in ‘The Critic as Artist,’ and where that essay dwells upon past and present, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ dwells upon the future. Wilde saw that his reconsideration of aestheticism must deal with social and political ideas in a more concerted fashion than in the earlier days, when he had discussed man to diet. To speak of the dignity of manual labor is wrong when everyone knows that manual labor is degrading.
As for the type of socialism, Wilde is opposed to authoritarianism, for that would mean the enslavement of the whole society instead of the part that is at present enslaved. He foresees with approval the annihilation of property, family life, marriage, and jealousy. His model for the artist is Christ, in the style of Blake and D. H. Lawrence, a Christ who teaches the importance of being oneself. Art is a disturbing force. Like criticism, it prevents mere repetition; people must not live one another’s lives over and over again. For the artist the best government is none at all, and here Wilde seems to be advocating anarchism rather than socialism. ‘I am something of an anarchist,’ he told an interviewer in 1894.
‘There are three kinds of despots,’ he says in a passage that impressed James Joyce. ‘There is the despot who tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the Pope. The third is called the People.’ In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus remarks, ‘I am the servant of two masters, an English and an Italian.… And a third … there is who wants me for odd jobs.’ They are, he explains, ‘the Imperial British State … and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church,’ and his compatriots, the Irish. He too would like to be rid of the three despotisms. Christ serves as Wilde’s example because he protests against them. But Christ has one limitation: he dwells upon pain. The ultimate purpose shared by life and art is joy. Such joy is to be found in the new Hellenism, in which the best of Greek culture and Christian culture can be synthesized.
Wilde is determined to find a justification for sin. Like criticism, like art, ‘What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress.’ Without it, the world would grow old and colorless. ‘By its curiosity [Arnold’s word with Wilde’s meaning] Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified individualism it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the highest ethics.’ Sin is more useful to society than martyrdom, since it is self-expressive not self-repressive. The goal is the liberation of personality. When the day of true culture comes, sin will be impossible because the soul will transform ‘into elements of richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile. Is this dangerous? Yes; it is dangerous—all ideas, as I told you, are so.’
With these essays Wilde clarified the meaning of Dorian Gray. Dorian was right to seek escape from the repetitious daily round, wrong in expressing only parts—the ungenerous parts—of his nature. Wilde balances here two ideas from his dialogues which look contradictory: one is that art is disengaged from life, the other that it is deeply incriminated with it. That art is sterile, and that art is infectious, are attitudes not beyond reconciliation. Wilde never formulated their union, but he implied something like this: by its creation of beauty, art reproaches the world, calling attention to the world’s faults by disregarding them, so the sterility of art is an affront or a parable. Art may also outrage the world by flouting its laws or by indulgently positing their violation. Or art may seduce the world by making it follow an example which seems bad but is really salutary. In these ways the artist moves the world towards self-recognition, with at least a tinge of self-redemption, as he compels himself towards the same end.
By exposing the defects of orthodox aestheticism in Dorian Gray, and the virtues of reconsidered aestheticism in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ Wilde presented the case as fully as he could. However gracefully he expresses himself, there is no doubt that he attacks Victorian assumptions about society. That that society was beginning to disintegrate did not make it more amenable to what Wilde was proposing; if anything, less so. He asked it to tolerate aberrations from the norm, such as homosexuality, to give up its hypocrisy both by recognizing social facts and by acknowledging that its principles were based upon hatred rather than love, leading to privation of personality as of art. Art is the truest individualism the world has known. The threat of Bow Street that Jeyes had made in the St James’s Gazette office was not idle, but Wilde meant what he said, and thought that not to take risks was not to live. Like Jean Genet after him, he proposed an analogy between the criminal and the artist, though for him the artist, not needing to act, occupies a superior place. § Rebelliousness and extravagance are needed if society’s molds are to be broken, as broken they must be. Art is by nature dissident.
CHAPTER XII The Age of Dorian
Oscar Wilde (1988) by Richard Ellmann
