Oscar Wilde

by Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

Let us examine Oscar Wilde's æsthetic teaching.

In one of his lectures given in America he said—

"And now I would point out to you the operation of the artistic spirit in the choice of subject. Like the philosopher of the platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world has known in the desert of Judea or in Arcadian valley, by the ruins of Troy or Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of the modern city, or by the pleasant ways of Camelot, all lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own spirit, choosing some facts and rejecting others, with the calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of beauty. It is to no avail that the muse of poetry be called even by such a clarion note as Whitman's to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard 'removed' and 'to let' on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. For art, to quote a noble passage of Mr Swinburne's, is very life itself and knows nothing of death. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of that mist of familiarity, which, as Shelley used to say, makes life obscure to us.

"Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his age, it is for us to do naught but accept his teaching. You have most of you seen probably that great masterpiece of Rubens which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant of horse and rider, arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment, when the winds are caught in crimson banner and the air is lit by the gleam of armour and the flash of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by the wounded feet of Christ; and it is for the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing.

"In the primary aspect a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives. This should be done by a certain inventive and creative handling entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, something entirely satisfying in itself, which is, as the Greeks would say, in itself an end. So the joy of poetry comes never from the subject, but from an inventive handling of rhythmical language."

And further he said that "in nations as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not accompanied by the critical, the æsthetic faculty also, it will be sure to waste its strength. It is not an increased moral sense or moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed one should never talk of a moral or immoral poem. Poems are either well written or badly written; that is all. Any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good and evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision. All good work aims at a purely artistic effect."

In "Intentions" he enunciated serious problems which seemed constantly to contradict themselves, and he causes ourselves to ask questions which only bewilder and astonish. To sum up all the æsthetic teaching of the author it amounts simply and solely to the aphorism that there must be a permanent divorce between art and morals. "All art," he says, "is immoral."

Some people have taken the view that Oscar Wilde in his philosophy of beauty was never quite sincere. He did not write for philistines with his heart in his mouth, but merely with his tongue in his cheek. I remember Mr Richard Le Gallienne once said that in "Intentions" Wilde's worship of beauty, which had made a latter-day myth of him before his time, was overlaid by his gift of comic perception, and, rightly viewed, all his flute-tone periods were written in the service of the comic muse. When he was not of malice aforethought humorous in those parts of the work where he seems to be arguing with a serious face enough, it is implied that he did so simply that he might smile behind his mask at the astonishment of a public he had from the first so delighted in shocking—that he had a passion for being called "dangerous," just as one type of man likes to be called "fast" and a "rake."

This is, of course, one point of view, but it is not one with which I am in agreement. Wilde laid such enormous stress upon the sensuous side of art, and never realised that this is but an exterior aspect which is impossible and could not exist without a spiritual interior, an informing soul.

With all his brilliancy the author of "Intentions" only saw a mere fragment of his subject. It may be that he wilfully shut his eyes to the truth. It is more likely that he was incapable of realising the truth as a whole, and that what he wrote he wrote with absolute sincerity.

It has been said that the artist sees farther than morality. This is a dangerous doctrine for the artist himself to believe, but it has some truth in it. In Oscar Wilde's case, in pursuing the ideal of beauty he may have seen "farther than morality," but blind of one eye he missed Morality upon the way and did not realise that she was ever there.

It is the fashion nowadays among a certain set of writers, who form the remainder of the band of "Æsthetes" who followed Wilde in his teachings, to decry Ruskin, though, in the beginning of Wilde's "Æsthetic" movement, Wilde was an ardent pupil of this great master of English prose. We do not now accept Ruskin's artistic criticisms as adequate to our modern needs. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the days when Ruskin wrote, and his peculiar temperament, while appreciating much that was beautiful and worthy to be appreciated, was at the same time blind to much that is beautiful and worthy to be appreciated. Ruskin's criticism on the painting of Whistler would not be substantiated by a single writer of to-day. At the same time, all Ruskin's philosophy of art—that is to say, æsthetics—is as true now as it ever was. Ruskin showed, as the experience of life and art has shown and always will show—show more poignantly and particularly in the case of Oscar Wilde than in any other—that art and morality cannot be divorced, and that if all art is immoral, then art ceases to exist. "I press to the conclusion," he said, at the end of his famous lecture on the relation of art to morals, "which I wish to leave with you, that all you can rightly do, or honourably become, depends on the government of these two instincts of order and kindness, by this great imaginative faculty, which give you inheritance of the past, grasp of the present, authority over the future. Map out the spaces of your possible lives by its help; measure the range of their possible agency! On the walls and towers of this your fair city, there is not an ornament of which the first origin may not be traced back to the thoughts of men who died two thousand years ago. Whom will you be governing by your thoughts, two thousand years hence? Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral; that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words 'good' and 'wicked,' used of men, you may almost substitute the words 'makers' and 'destroyers.' Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow. Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of every man, qui non accepit in vanitatem animan suam, endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation, in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night, there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the perfect day."