When, therefore, an Oscar Wilde goes about in ‘æsthetic costume’ among gazing Philistines, exciting either their ridicule or their wrath, it is no indication of independence of character, but rather from a purely anti-socialistic, ego-maniacal recklessness and hysterical longing to make a sensation, justified by no exalted aim; nor is it from a strong desire for beauty, but from a malevolent mania for contradiction.
Be that as it may, Wilde obtained, by his buffoon mummery, a notoriety in the whole Anglo-Saxon world that his poems and dramas would never have acquired for him. I have no reason to trouble myself about these, since they are feeble imitations of Rossetti and Swinburne, and of dreary inanity. His prose essays, on the contrary, deserve attention, because they exhibit all the features which enable us to recognise in the ‘Æsthete’ the comrade in art of the Decadent.
Like his French masters, Oscar Wilde despises Nature. ‘Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.’[303]
He is a ‘cultivator of the Ego,’ and feels deliciously indignant at the fact that Nature dares to be indifferent to his important person. ‘Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope’ (p. 5).
With regard to himself and the human species, he shares the opinion of Des Esseintes. ‘Ah! don’t say that you agree with me. When people agree with me I always feel that I must be wrong’ (p. 202).
His ideal of life is inactivity. ‘It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody rather than to do something’ (p. 65). ‘Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes.... People ... are always coming shamelessly up to one ... and saying in a loud, stentorian voice, “What are you doing?” whereas, “What are you thinking?” is the only question that any civilized being should ever be allowed to whisper to another.... Contemplation ... in the opinion of the highest culture, is the proper occupation of man.... It is to do nothing that the elect exist. Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams’ (pp. 166-168). ‘The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make one’s self useful’ (p. 175). ‘From time to time the world cries out against some charming artistic poet, because, to use its hackneyed and silly phrase, he has “nothing to say.” But if he had something to say, he would probably say it, and the result would be tedious. It is just because he has no new message that he can do beautiful work’ (p. 197).
Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime. In a very affectionate biographical treatise on Thomas Griffith Wainwright, designer, painter, and author, and the murderer of several people, he says: ‘He was a forger of no mean or ordinary capabilities, and as a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any age. This remarkable man, so powerful with “pen, pencil, and poison,”’ etc. (p. 60). ‘He sought to find expression by pen or poison’ (p. 61). ‘When a friend reproached him with the murder of Helen Abercrombie, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles”’ (p. 86). ‘His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style, a quality that his early work certainly lacked’ (p. 88). ‘There is no sin except stupidity’ (p. 210). ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all’ (p. 179).
He cultivates incidentally a slight mysticism in colours. ‘He,’ Wainwright, ‘had that curious love of green which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle, artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals’ (p. 66).
But the central idea of his tortuously disdainful prattling, pursuing as its chief aim the heckling of the Philistine, and laboriously seeking the opposite pole to sound common-sense, is the glorification of art. Wilde sets forth in the following manner the system of the ‘Æsthetes’: ‘Briefly, then, their doctrines are these: Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.... The second doctrine is this: All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium [?] it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject matter.[304] To us who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.... It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy....’[305] (pp. 52-54). The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realize that energy’ (p. 65).
On this third point—the influence of art on life—Wilde does not refer to the fact, long ago established by me, that the reciprocal relation between the work of art and the public consists in this, that the former exercises suggestion and the latter submits to it.[306] What he actually wished to say was that nature—not civilized men—develops itself in the direction of forms given it by the artist. ‘Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace, curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of Art’ (p. 40). If he simply wished to affirm that formerly fog and mist were not felt to be beautiful, and that the artistic rendering of them first drew to them the attention of the multitude, nothing could be said in contradiction; he would have propounded just a hackneyed commonplace with misplaced sententiousness. He asserts, however, that painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have painted fogs—a statement so silly as to require no refutation. It is sufficient to characterize it as artistic mysticism. Lastly, Wilde teaches the following: ‘Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong’ (pp. 210, 211).