The key thing to grasp about this essay is that, although it’s routinely touted as Wilde’s one engagement with politics, it is not really about politics at all but centred on the more familiar Wildean subject of the cultivation of individualism.
His entire worldview boils down to the need for everyone to throw off the various shackles of society and cultivate their true selves. So Wilde isn’t interested in socialism as it is usually defined – ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.’ His form of socialism means ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which enables the greatest possible development of each citizen, the fullest possible blossoming of their selves.’
Socialism = liberation from others Thus he opens the essay by saying that the chief benefit of socialism would be liberating us from ‘the sordid necessity of living for others’. Throughout history only a handful of men have been able ‘to realise the perfection of what was in him’ (in his century, Darwin, Keats, Renan) but most people are prevented from becoming their true selves by the necessity of living for others. In the nineteenth century this is because of the spectacle of ‘hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation’ which surrounds them.
Charity is harmful to giver and receiver alike Thus they embark on charity to alleviate the sufferings of the poor but this is wrong. Charity is wrong. In fact the people who set out to do the most good end up doing the most harm. They are like the ‘good’ slave owners who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the true horror of the system from being more evident and the whole thing being ended earlier.
The state of the poor He gives a paragraph on the state of England’s urban poor, ‘living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings’ and pitifully dependent on the weather i.e. whenever there’s a frost the streets are full of whining beggars and crowds queueing for entry to ‘loathsome’ shelters.
Under Socialism…each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society…
Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism.
Individualism The ideal world will be ideal because it will allow everyone to flourish and develop their own individual uniqueness. Under present conditions quite a few people are well off enough to develop a limited form of individualism.
These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.
But, of course, the majority are forced to do the work of beasts of burden, live on the brink of starvation, under the tyranny of want. All this will be abolished by socialism.
Private property At the root of inequality is the concept of private property which is why Socialism is committed to abolishing it. However, Wilde, with typical paradox and wit, points out that private property is not only ruinous for those that don’t have it (i.e. the poor) but is also very deleterious for those that do, the middle and upper classes.
The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising…It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother… and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution.
Why? Because getting it and keeping it, maintaining it and worrying about it, are all distractions from what Wilde sees as the purpose of life, which is to cultivate your individuality. All the duties which come with wealth are a burden. Abolishing private property will free not only the poor but the rich as well.
In praise of the rebellious poor Many of the poor accept high-minded charity quiescently but Wilde is on the side of the rebellious poor, who revolt against their wretched condition and recognise charity as the feeble attempts to plaster over a wicked system which they are.
The best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.
And:
Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
And:
A poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.
(You can see why after just a few pages of this the average Victorian reader would be outraged. So far he has said he wants to abolish all private property, abolish the distinctions between the classes along with the intricate hierarchy of rank, that he is against that great Victorian institution of philanthropy and in favour of the most rebellious, mutinous and violent type of proletarian protester. Radical scandalous stuff.)
The need for agitators Obviously bourgeois Victorians had a great fear of agitators who would rouse the downtrodden masses from their slumber, hence the vicious laws passed against early attempts to form trade unions, but Wilde, with a typically paradoxical flourish, says that this is precisely why they are so important.
What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.
American slavery For the second time he cites the example of slavery in America. First time was to claim that the ‘good’ slave owner only made the situation worse by glossing over the true horror of the institution. Now he cites the way slavery was abolished not by the slave owners, and certainly not by the utterly cowed slaves themselves, but by outside agitators, the Abolitionists from the North (starting in high-minded Boston) who entered the slave states from outside and often behaved illegally (he doesn’t explain how but I assume in helping to liberate slaves and transport them to freedom in the North).
Against authoritarian socialism Switching theme a bit he repeats the notion that an authoritarian socialism would defeat the object – well, what he sees as the object of such a social transformation, which is the undoing of all restrictions which prevent people from becoming their true selves.
It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him.
Unfortunately, as we discovered in the twentieth century, because so many people are opposed to a completely propertyless society the only way a socialist state can be made to work is by imposing it by force and maintaining it via surveillance, spies and prison camps… Anyway he writes this because:
Many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary.
How individualism will flourish without private property It’s true that:
A few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense advantage.
Will not we lose the lovely productions of such writers if we abolish the system of private property which produced them? No. Because with the advent of propertyless socialism all people will be freed to cultivate their personalities, it will release ‘the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally’.
How private property destroys individualism
Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false…It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.
Private property debars the great mass of the population from becoming individuals by impoverishing and starving them, but it has trammelled the middle and upper classes by persuading them to devote their lives to money, greed, property, wealth and so on. It has persuaded people that the sole purpose of life is to:
accumulate this property, and to go on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.
So abolish the entire system of private property and the relentless competition to acquire it:
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
Have we ever seen the full expression of a personality in all human history? No. Rather arbitrarily Wilde selects Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius from Roman history, the one the most successful general and statesman of his time the other widely thought to be the model of a philosopher-emperor. But both dragged down and prevented from perfection by their multitudinous cares and duties.
Making a wild and drastic leap forward to his own century, Wilde cites the cases of two poets, Byron and Shelley, more to bring out a new theme which is the opposition of brutish philistine English society to any attempt to cultivate your individuality and become a personality. His characterisation of the two men and poets is shrewd and so worth quoting at length:
Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.
What is this individualism? Since it underlies his entire worldview, it’s worth giving his definition, in its entirety:
It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
Christianity Surprisingly, Wilde invokes Christianity in his crusade to promote individualism. This raises obvious issues which I’ll address in a moment. First his argument: First of all he says that men may, or may not, invoke Christianity in their personal development. Straightaway that is denying Christianity the kind of absolute truth which its adherents (most of Victorian society) gave it.
Then he gives a lengthy summary of Christ’s teachings reinterpreted solely in terms of his own ideology of self-development and completely omitting a) any mention of God, creator of the universe and of each of us b) of a soul c) of the redemptive power of the crucifixion, resurrection and of the true believer’s faith that we, ourselves, can be reborn through true faith. In other words, Wilde omits the entire theological side of Christianity and reduces it to little more than an optional accessory in the quest for personal development.
The message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’ That is the secret of Christ…When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities…
And so completely rewrites Jesus’ doctrine, in his own terms:
What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’
What Jesus says that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, ‘You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’
To his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level.
Above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.
You’ve got to be impressed by the way Wilde has assimilated and rethought the most powerful ideology in human history in order to suit his own worldview, subtly realigning all Jesus’ sayings so as to underpin Wilde’s own concerns for personal development and individualism. You can also see how scandalous this would be to your average Victorian. As would…
The end of marriage Many communists and socialists thought of marriage and the family as coercive patriarchal institutions, established to allow the dominance of men over women and forming a kind of model for the domination of the rich over the poor (notably Friedrich Engels in his 1884 work ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’). Wilde sympathises with those who wanted to abolish marriage along with private property:
Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.
This he cites Jesus himself as rejecting family life – in the New Testament this is for the sake of following Jesus and becoming closer to God, in Wilde’s reinterpretation it is in order to cultivate the uniqueness of the self:
Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality.
And so Wilde zeroes in on this one aspect of Jesus’ preaching to underpin his own ideology:
And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.
In praise of anarchism The fundamental premise of anarchism as a political belief is that nobody should rule over others, that we all be absolutely free. It’s debatable, then, whether Wilde is really praising socialism or anarchism.
Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.
Socialism will bring the end of crime In a wildly utopian extrapolation, Wilde asserts that if you abolish authority i.e. one class or group compelling everyone else to live a certain way, then crime will disappear. This leads him to the counter-intuitive and scandalous thought that it is not crime which requires punishment, but the elaborate set of grotesque punishments which create crime.
The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.
This utopian claim is based on the notion that all crimes are crime of want and poverty and hunger:
For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat.
Therefore, create a fair society, where everyone has enough for their needs, and crime will disappear:
When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist…though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.
Crimes of passion i.e. not incited by poverty and want?
Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.
Machines will set men free Up to the present men have been the slaves of the machines they have invented:
Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.
The role of machinery must be completely rethought:
Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.
Thus:
While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.
Machines will be the new slaves For the third time he cites slavery:
The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
The role of Art
About half way through the essay it feels as though Wilde has dealt with the organisational, political aspects of the issue of the socialist transformation of society (insofar as he does) and moves onto the subject which really interests him and is the core theme of almost everything he wrote, which is the role of art, the artist and criticism. Thus:
A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.
Wilde’s concept of art and his ideology of individualism are intimately linked, two sides of the same coin.
Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.
The philistine public It is telling that Wilde has barely got going about art before he has to start attacking the philistine (English) public. What he doesn’t directly say but is so obvious from his writings is that his entire conception of art is defined in opposition to the vulgarity of the public.
Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.
The attempt:
on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art…is aggressive, offensive and brutalising.
Which arts escape the public? In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest, such as poetry which it doesn’t read. By contrast the philistine public gets very worked up about the ‘immorality’ of contemporary novels or plays (think of the outcry over the ‘immorality’ of Thomas Hardy’s novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’ which led him to abandon writing novels, or the outcry when Ibsen’s plays were staged in London). Partly this is because:
The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter.
The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
And he laments the way the general public assimilate then ossify and hollow out the so-called classics:
The acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either.
The fact is the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible, the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.
What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.
But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters…
By now you can see that he’s said far less about any particular artist or writer or work of art or literature than he has done about the philistine public. It’s excoriating their stupidity and philistinism which really gets his juices flowing and, you realise, is a vital prerequisite for his entire theory. When he returns to writing about ‘the artist’ he’s curiously thin and unimpassioned:
The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.
That, in itself, is a bit boring and anodyne and so, as if sensing it, Wilde goes on to define what he means by a passage with much more life which is, as I’ve explained, slagging the public.
The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.
Morbidity In the same vein, further passages about ‘the artist’ really derive their energy from Wilde starting off by describing how the stupid philistine public use certain boo words to try and categorise and control new art, the examples he gives being how the public describes work it doesn’t understand as ‘morbid’ or ‘unhealthy’ or ‘exotic’. As for ‘morbid’, it gives Wilde the pretext to repeat a central theme of his which is that a work of art is neither morbid nor immoral, exotic nor unhealthy, because the artist stands at one remove from his subject matter and merely deploys it to create effects:
[Morbid] is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.’
Public attacks make the artist stronger
An artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect.
Not least because they are the products of:
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.
Healthy versus unhealthy The accusation of ‘unhealthy’ is so frequently made against modern art that Wilde devotes a paragraph to very entertainingly standing the definition on its head:
What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality.
Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.
The philistine press and canting journalism As I’ve commented, for several pages Wilde has defined his ideas of individualism and art by contrasting them with the stupidity, shallowness and vulgarity of the general public which is happier in conservatism, conformity and hates anything which is new and beautiful. Now he moves onto the vehicle of their prejudices, and gives a sustained critique of journalism and the press, purveyors of ‘prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle.’ Nowadays ‘We are dominated by Journalism’ and:
In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality [as in America], is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.
The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned.
In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers.
In praise of Sir Henry Irving Wilde devotes a rare paragraph of unqualified praise, in this case to the great late-Victorian actor-manager Sir Henry Irving. At this point a dash of background from Wikipedia is necessary:
Sir Henry Irving (1838 to 1905) was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for all aspects of productions (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre. In 1895 he became the first actor to be awarded a knighthood, indicating full acceptance of the profession into the higher circles of British society.
In Wilde’s view Irving’s great achievement has been NOT to pander to the lowest common denominator but stay true to his vision as an artist and, slowly slowly, raise the public’s standards.
Had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many. He has created in the public both taste and temperament…I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realised his own.
The importance of ‘receptivity’ Why has the public accepted productions of a higher standard at Irving’s theatres than at others? It is a question of receptivity. Antone who encounters a work of art must cultivate receptivity to its qualities.
If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.
A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.
Receptivity in the theatre Of all the arts, drama is the one which requires most ‘receptivity’. By its nature a play creates mysteries and uncertainties in the first act which the audience has to wait to have resolved. If the audience started shouting at the end of the first act that they don’t understand what’s going on, they would be idiots. Even a London audience knows that it has to wait and see, and so submit to its artistic effect.
The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation the egotism that mars him – the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.
In this way drama, or art in general, is ‘elevating’ in that it exposes us to artistic influences – more complicated, subtle new and insightful than our run-of-the-mill thoughts and perceptions – and, as he’s explained earlier, these are not to be judged in terms of the ‘morality’ of the vulgar herd, as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, but purely by aesthetic criteria, of whether the style matches the subject matter, whether the subject matter is adequately elaborated and so on.
Receptivity in the novel Same with the novel:
Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal.
A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.
Interestingly, Wilde thinks the pre-eminent serious novelist working in the England of his time (essentially the 1880s) was George Meredith:
To him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is an incomparable novelist.
The decorative arts Wilde knew a thing or two about this subject having written extensively about domestic furnishing and been the editor of The Woman’s World magazine from 1887 to 1889. As you might expect, he thinks popular taste is dire. He calls the famous 1851 exhibition held in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, ‘the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity’ which led to ‘traditions…were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in.’
Despite much abuse a new generation of artists and designers has, in fact, produced much beautiful work, effecting a ‘revolution in house-decoration and furniture so that ‘it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty.’ Presumably he’s referring to the Arts and Crafts movement, most associated with William Morris but with many other designers? It’s irritating that he isn’t clearer.
And ironic that we now regard his idea of beautiful furnishings and furniture as extraordinarily dark, overwrought and cluttered. It’s all very well visiting exhibitions of Morris and Arts and Crafts ware but thank God for the Bauhaus and associated movements which led, eventually, maybe only in the 1970s and 80s, to most people decluttering and streamlining their living spaces.
What kind of government should the artist live under?
The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
Passages like this show pretty clearly that Wilde wasn’t a socialist so much as an anarchist. Not a socialist government – no government is his utopian ideal.
Three types of despotism The essay feels like it’s running out of steam when Wilde tacks on a consideration of what he considers the three types of despotism, namely despotism of the soul, of the body, and of the soul and body. Despotism of the body was exercised by princes. Some of these, particularly during the Renaissance, were immensely tasteful and commissioned great works, but were always dangerous, and imprisoned, exiled or executed as many artists as the commissioned. Despotism over the soul Wilde associates with the Papacy, where much the same applied i.e. some popes were enlightened patrons but also very dangerous, not just to artists but, via their authority over all thought, to free thinking.
It is an obvious shortcoming of this little overview that it is so limited, based on such limited examples from such a rarefied and precious period i.e. the Renaissance. Modern history ranges over the entire history of all peoples and all times and so makes Wilde’s little nostrums feel like dilettantism.
The Renaissance and Louis XIV Same goes for his other sweeping historical generalisations which are interesting for what they say about him more than for the actual periods:
The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule.
Wilde is anti-democracy The third tyranny, over body and soul, he attributes to Democracy and the People. Important to point out that Wilde despises democracy as pandering to the lowest common denominator of the vulgar herd.
High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.
And:
An Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.
And:
As for the People…their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love…
So – Wilde is profoundly anti-democratic. His idea of socialism is for it to allow a world of people like him to flourish, to create a world of Oscar Wildes.
Wilde’s view of human nature His generalisations reach their most sweeping when he reveals his fundamental view of human nature: this is that human nature is continually changing and evolving.
It is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
(After the catastrophes of the past century, I think most people would agree that, despite superficial changes in technology, underlying human nature is sadly impervious to change but born again in each generation with the same vices and weaknesses.)
More anarchic assumptions
Individualism…does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.
And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.
A lovely dream for individuals to dream. Never going to happen. As someone who bases his entire worldview on evolutionary materialism, I can’t help smiling at the fairy tale claim that ‘there is no evolution except towards Individualism.’ This obviously has nothing to do with the science of evolution, but it’s not even true in sociological terms. If the triumph of social media over the past 15 years shows anything it’s that people want to find their tribes and then conform to them, adopt their rules, manners, clothes and attitudes. People are naturally anti-individualist.
Paradoxical definition of affectation Again Wilde uses the accusations of the stupid public as the springboard for some witty inversions of conventional thinking. A man (himself, of course) is criticised for being ‘affected’ if he dresses as he wants to but, claims Wilde, he is merely doing what comes naturally i.e. pleasing himself. What is affected is going out of your way to make sure you dress exactly like everyone else, ‘dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.’
True definition of selfishness Or a man is called ‘selfish’ if he:
lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.
You can see here how Wilde’s Anglo-Saxon version of anarchism is a kind of liberalism without limits, with all the social limits and restrictions and safety guards which John Stuart Mill and his followers wrestled with, at a stroke removed. And as such, completely impractical. But his redefinitions of selfishness and unselfishness are extremely persuasive and attractive:
Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently.
More praise of individualism
Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of these words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives.
Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.
Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too.
One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.
So Wilde looks forward to a time when 1) socialism has solved the problem of poverty and 2) science has solved the problem of disease. Is this utopian? So be it.
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
Last thoughts about Christianity As the essay draws to a close Wilde tacks on a further page about individualism and Christianity. If the earlier passage was broadly sympathetic, largely because Wilde rewrote Christ’s message in his own terms, this second passage is a lot more historically accurate and a lot less sympathetic.
Wilde makes the point that ‘Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society’ and draws the questionable conclusion that ‘consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude’.
Christian solitude Taking those early Christians who chose to go and live in the desert, Wilde says that, maybe by being far from the crowd some of them may have expressed their personalities, but they were liable to be a rather ‘impoverished personality’. (This is open to the obvious criticism that these anchorites and monks and cenobites were seeking the opposite of Wilde’s self-expression, were seeking to annihilate their own personalities in order to be closer to God.)
Christian pain No, many more Christians have sought to express themselves through the path of pain. Wilde’s aim here is to draw a sharp distinction between medieval Christianity (bad for individualism) and the Renaissance (good for individualism).
The Medieval world with its obsession with gruesome suffering, with ‘its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods’, this bloody mediaevalism is the real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.
By contrast, the Renaissance dawned upon the world and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living. The result was that artists could not understand the Biblical Christ. They painted him as a harmless baby, as a boy playing.
Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth.
They painted many religious pictures – in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist at all.
No, the Renaissance couldn’t understand the true, medieval Christ, because he was a kind of epitome of pain and human suffering and the Renaissance artists were too full of Italian joie de vivre to understand.
Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his…to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.
I suppose the contradiction with his earlier passage about Christ is only apparent. It can be explain by saying that the earlier passage, which made Jesus an evangelist for self discovery and self expression, is Wilde’s interpretation of Jesus’s message – while this passage about the medieval and renaissance Jesus are about how he has been portrayed in the history of art which is, I suppose, a different thing.
Russia and pain Right at the end of the essay he extends this thought into a description of contemporary Russian art and literature. (He mentions no names but surely he is thinking of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.) Russia’s social system (i.e. the discrepancy between the tiny affluent class and the widespread serfdom and astonishing poverty of the masses) demands that its art be obsessed with pain.
Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing.
As history shows, Russia’s addiction to gargantuan suffering, largely self-inflicted, was to be amply demonstrated in the twentieth century. Has it ended yet?
Conclusion With a few deft strokes Wilde brings his essay back from this digression about pain to repeat his generalisations about the brave future, when socialism will have solved the problem of poverty and science solved the problem of pain.
the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been.
Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.
Obviously as wrong as a social prediction could possibly be.
Vision of the future perfection of man
Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.
Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.
The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.
Thoughts
The most obvious points, for me, are that 1) this essay is very, very long, 2) it is packed with ideas, brilliantly expressed and 3) that it is remarkably consistent, it is the expression of a coherent worldview worked out to some depth and in great detail, taking in a vision of human nature, of history, of different historical epochs, of social change, alongside a coherent attack on the institution of property and its distorting harmful effects on individuals and societies.
It is possible to take issue with numerous aspects of his argument but, insofar as it is not trying to be an essay about evolution or science or economics or history in the scholarly sense, but is more the expression of a particular worldview, it is astonishingly wide-ranging and persuasive. Like the works of art he talks about, there’s not much point quibbling with this or that sweeping generalisation, it’s more a case of submitting to the pace, to the tremendous fluency, and the utopian loveliness of his vision. For the duration of your reading and, therefore, of your submission, his vision of a utopian human nature is beautiful and therefore, in his own terms, as imaginatively true as any work of art.
Books & Boots 