‘The Critic as Artist’ is Oscar Wilde’s longest essay and most extensive statement of his aesthetic philosophy. It is a dialogue in two parts and was one of the four long essays included in the collection titled ‘Intentions’, published on 1 May 1891. It is a revised version of two articles that first appeared in the July and September 1890 issues of ‘The Nineteenth Century’ magazine, which were originally entitled ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’ which is, arguably, a more accurate and useful title.
When I say ‘essay’ in fact this, like the other works in ‘Intentions’, is consciously experimental in format. It is not an essay in the conventional sense but a dialogue conducted by two well-developed characters, namely Gilbert – who delivers long dogmatic statements about the nature of The Critic and Criticism – to Ernest who asks follow-up questions and generally keeps the narrative moving.
In fact the slow and leisurely opening, with chat about Dvorak and gossip and sharing cigarettes, is more like a novel than a critical essay and it has a setting described as in the stage directions for a play:
Persons: Gilbert and Ernest.
Scene: the library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.
This long essay moves through a succession of assertions about the central role played by criticism and the critical spirit in society, in culture, in art and life. It could probably be made into a set of bullet points, which it briefly crossed my mind to attempt. Instead in what follows I’m going to try and indicate the flow of the argument via brief summaries, sometimes just a sentence long, of the key points, accompanied by quotations. Wilde states his ideas infinitely better than I could.
Unless otherwise stated, the speaker of each of the quotes is Gilbert, who does the lion’s share of the talking.
Part 1
Victorian artists and critics such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Matthew Arnold made a firm distinction between fine art and criticism in which criticism played a subservient and secondary role. Arnold was maybe the first English writer to lay out a comprehensive theory of literature and criticism in the late 1860s and 70s, most notable in his book ‘Culture and Anarchy’ published in 1869.
Wilde sets out not only to question this key distinction but to turn it on its head, proposing that: 1) criticism is itself an art form every bit as valid as the others, and that 2) art in any medium cannot be created without critical intelligence.
Only the critical faculty enables any artistic creation at all.
To put it more fully:
The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art…
Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one…
And:
An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all.
Innovation It is the critical spirit which drives change and innovation in the arts:
There has never been a creative age that has not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.
The artists reproduce either themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.
The Greeks had no art critics Ernest (the pedestrian one) is made to deliver the tired old cliché that back in the good old days of the Greeks there were no literary journals and Sunday supplements full of hacks scribbling criticism and this was because the ancients created ab ovo, fresh and new, in the dawn of the world, as the inspiration took them. ‘In the best days of art there were no art-critics” and ‘Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism?’
The Greeks overflowed with art critics Gilbert replies that this is ignorant rubbish. It was the Greeks who invented the critical spirit. Their entire legacy is one of the critical mind, critically enquiring into philosophy, science, ethics and so on. He gives, as a shining example, the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle, a masterpiece of critical enquiry. And he associates it especially with the later centuries in Alexandria which was overflowing with critics of all the arts, which:
devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and [where] we find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper subject-matter for the artist.
The Greeks invented every form In literature we owe the Greeks everything:
The forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture (for which perhaps we should not forgive them) and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word.
And:
It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism. Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediævalism.
Literature is the highest art As that list of genres suggests, Wilde unambiguously considers literature the highest art:
It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I have already said, language. For the material that painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.
He asserts the superiority of literature over all the arts in a couple of pages which are, indeed, very persuasive. Painting and sculpture can only capture a moment whereas literature captures an entire action and the world of thoughts which accompany it. Which is why all the great characters are primarily literary (he gives an extended summary of the action of The Iliad and then a two-page summary of the entire plot of The Divine Comedy) and painting, sculpture and all the other arts in essence merely illustrate the depth of character which literature alone can capture.
Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.
The artist as individual Echoes of his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ which is, in fact, a very extended hymn of praise to the importance of Individualism.
There is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shaped them into song. They become his, because he made them lovely.
The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
Criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.
As a rule, the critics — I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the sixpenny papers — are far more cultured than the people whose work they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.
In order to really appreciate something you need to understand the entire history and range of the genre, plus all recent developments. True criticism is extremely demanding.
The second rate are correct to decry criticism because their work, being mediocre, doesn’t merit it.
I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They are quite right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It should not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it deserves.
Harder to talk than to do Ernest voices the received accusation against criticism, that it is harder to do – to create art – than it is to talk about art. But in a typically Wildean reversal of received opinion, Gilbert insists the opposite is the case:
More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.
Action is instinctive and stupid Flying in the face of the philistine promotion of instinctive action in, for example, the imperial discourse of the time, Wilde says any fool can act, animals are acting all the time, it is instinctive and requires no intelligence.
There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other — by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don’t talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.
Against the claims of ‘action’ he sets the aesthetic values of passivity and dream.
Action! What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
To summarise:
When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.
A defence of ‘sin’
What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
Attack on the ‘virtues’
Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars in the land.
He says the none of us know the full results of our actions and it may be that the saint’s actions lead, ultimately to catastrophe while the acts of the criminal, unexpectedly lead to good. In which case life is a kind of moral chaos.
You can imagine the reaction of the average Victorian bourgeois to seeing his system of values and morality being so comprehensively rubbished.
Criticism is an art
Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word.
Criticism is independent. It is independent because critical intelligence can be applied to any topic. The critic takes the work he’s criticising and makes something new of it in his criticism.
Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose.
In this respect, its complete freedom from being tied to subject matter as art and literature are, you could argue that criticism is the highest art:
I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.
Criticism is the quintessence of personality
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.
[The critic’s] sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.
Contra Arnold Wilde takes Matthew Arnold to task. Among Arnold’s numerous critical nostrums is the famous line that ‘the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is’. For Wilde this is 180 degrees wrong.
But this is a very serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another.
On the other hand, Arnold wrote that art is ‘a criticism of life’:
Arnold’s definition of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the critical element in all creative work.
The critic is creative In this scenario, the role of the artist or writer is merely to provide subject matter or fodder for the critic, thus giving the critic ‘a suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form’ than the original.
Ruskin and Pater Wilde gives two examples: 1) Ruskin’s sonorous critical writings about Turner which, he says, are at least as much works of art as Turner’s actual paintings. And 2) Walter Pater’s well-known paragraph describing the Mona Lisa which he calls a piece of literature more timeless and full of meaning than the painting itself.
It is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.
The work is just a trigger for the critic
The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives…
In fact it’s almost the definition of a work of art, a thing of beauty, that it provides this kind of pretext for the critic to exercise his imagination:
The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and æsthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.
To recap:
ERNEST: But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?
GILBERT: It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely.
ERNEST: The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?
GILBERT: Yes, that is my theory. 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 criticises.
Coda: criticism of Victorian painting Wilde devotes the final page of part 2 to criticising contemporary Victorian painting for its feeble attempts to match literature in telling a story. Too many Victorian paintings are merely anecdotal and so barely rises above the level of illustrations.
Pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it.
He uses it as another opportunity to elevate literature above all the other arts for its ability to capture psychology and development.
The domain of the painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.
The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology.
And:
Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious.
Wilde doesn’t say it but you can see this as part of the reason so much Victorian art is sentimental. It’s because it provides a quick hit. A sad little girl crying, or a pair of sad lovers moping, this is easy to read and respond to. They are appallingly obvious and therefore, in Wilde’s words, ‘ insufferably tedious’.
Against anecdotal Victorian painting the Critic will:
turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world.
Instead:
The æsthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final.
So that:
The critic reproduces the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art’s unity.
At which point the pair break off for dinner (I told you it opens and closes with the circumstantial details you’d expect of a novella or short story).
Part 2
After dinner Gilbert resumes his long exposition of the role of the Critic. The critic’s role is not to passively ‘explain’ the work, it is to emphasise their own interpretation of the work in order to make the work live, which he explains in unusually florid, gaseous terms.
Yet his object will not always be to explain the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike…He will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.
The role of the interpreter He gives the example of a great pianist. Their performance is, of course, of a work by Beethoven or Bach but what everyone freely admits to enjoying is their interpretation of the work, and this leads on to a paradox.
When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely — Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality.
Same with actors. If a play is a real work of art there is scope for countless interpretations, all revealing something new and ‘true’ about it.
When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His own individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation. People sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare’s but this is a fallacy… In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.
Just like the pianist and actor, in order to bring out the truth of the work, the critic must express themselves.
It is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.
The more individual the interpretation, the more ‘true’ To better understand and ‘explain’ others, you must work on yourself.
If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism.
So the stronger and more individual the criticism, the more it brings out the truths, sometimes new truths, about the work.
The necessity of scholarship But don’t think this is easy. It requires deep scholarship, for example:
He who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.
The shortcomings of life Philistines go on about the importance of life, true to life, criticism of life, derived from life, a true life story etc etc. But life is appallingly inartistic.
Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long, or not long enough.
When one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master.
Whereas ‘There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us’ and ‘are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?’
Dante And to prove it, he gives a page-long summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Art evokes sterile emotions He makes the striking claim that the reason Art is such a refuge for so many people is that it evokes sterile emotions. They aren’t like the destructive emotions of real life. They don’t cripple us. On the contrary we return to ‘King Lear’ of the ‘Divine Comedy’ over and over again for pleasure. Art may evoke emotions in us but they are, in the end, very tame.
Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter… The sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates…
All art is immoral He then goes on to make a characteristically provocative claim:
All art is immoral.
Elaborated by mention of the aesthete in his ivory tower:
Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral.
How so? Because society and its needs are the basis of ‘morality’ and society’s most elementary need is for all its members to be productive and homogeneous – whereas art requires 1) a great deal of idle time and 2) to fully understand it, you must cultivate your individuality, your difference, your separateness. Both of which society deprecates.
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and people are completely dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal…
So he doesn’t mean that art encourages people to murder and adultery: he simply means it is against the cult of business and hard work so (officially) beloved of the Victorians.
In the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
The collective life of the race Rather surprisingly, Wilde has Gilbert assert that the ‘soul’ is the accumulated experiences of the race, the ‘transmission of racial experiences’. Which is why, in the imagination, we can travel so freely to other times and places, as captured in their literature. Because our ‘souls’ contain the library of our ‘racial experiences’ and, the right encouragement i.e. art work, can reveal them to us. Which is why a piece of music, a poem opens doors in our minds to memories and feelings we didn’t even know we had.
Wilde’s definition of the soul Highly influenced by the scientific view of heredity, Wilde’s idea of the soul is wildly at odds with the conventional Victorian Christian ideal:
It is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain. One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development. It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.
Which is why we can enter into the experiences described by writers such as Leopardi, Theocritus, Pierre Vidal, of Villon and Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats.
Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply concentrated race-experience.
The race experience contained in the critic
The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?
Contemplation
ERNEST: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming — that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford.
What the age calls ‘immoral’
Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to create a mood.
England is drowning in men of action and business. It needs more ‘immoral’ dreamers who can see beyond the immediate present and its problems, ‘For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual.’ Thus, the so-called ‘immoral’ artist is the most important man in a society, in terms of moving it forwards.
How philistinism derives from conservative society
The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life…
Subjective and objective He articulates another basic Wilde premise which is that we are most subjective when striving to be at our most objective and vice versa.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
Which, of course, links to the long essay about masks in the same volume. He goes on to deliver a devastating abolition of the possibility of objective knowledge, subsuming even science and religion into his cult of the subjective:
To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one’s last mood.
Dialogue as a medium for the critic Gilbert gives an extended defence of dialogue as a format or genre, the very format this essay is cast in:
Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the creative critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.
By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance.
He repeats the notion that Literature, if this wasn’t clear already, is the greatest of the arts:
The ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that of words.
Surrendering to the work And reiterates the importance of surrendering to an art work, which had been an important theme in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
Each form of Art with which we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every other form. We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For the time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.
The ideal critic What qualities does the true critic require? Ernest suggests some characteristics of the ideal critic which Gilbert enjoys demolishing.
1. Fair? No, the ideal critic is a passionate advocate of whichever work and school he is submitting his mind to at the moment.
2. Sincere? No, ‘Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed’ and so is continually ‘insincere’.
The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own opinions.
3. Rational? No, art is, as Plato perceived 2,500 years ago, a form of madness and mania.
A dig at journalism In The Soul of Man Under Socialism Wilde made extensive attacks on contemporary journalism and here repeats his criticism.
I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. 1) By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. 2) By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. 3) By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.
The artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic ‘A temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.’ He cites the passage in Plato which describes the ideal education of Greek youth and summarises that:
The true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.
Current art Wilde approves of Finally the essay turns to positives and Wilde describes various actual beautiful things. The buildings of Oxford and Cambridge. In art, the Impressionists and a newer school he calls the Archaicistes.
The importance of form rather than ‘inspiration’
He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. 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.
Yes: Form is everything. It is the secret of life…Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be revealed to you.
Will any artist be influenced by Gilbert’s idea of criticism? Doesn’t matter.
1) The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him the culture of the century will see itself realised. You must not ask of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself. The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive.
2) The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods.
Surely an artist is the best judge of other artists? No, the reverse.
Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal.
Characteristically, he uses examples from literature to make the point, the way that Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron all disliked each other’s work and they all disliked Keats.
A truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected.
So, no, artists or writers are not the best judges of other artists or writers. By contrast, only the man who can’t do these things, can appreciate them.
Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music — his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting — that which he himself employs. The æsthetic critic, and the æsthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.
The future of criticism In Gilbert’s rather messianic view, the future belongs to criticism. He feels original creative channels are nearly exhausted (a surprisingly suburban bourgeois cliché).
I myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural an impulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.
Surprisingly, he singles out Rudyard Kipling who was, in 1891, the new kid on the block:
As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills [published 1888], one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.
Criticism guides us through the monstrous overload of published books.
Criticism can recreate fragments an entire lost culture from the past.
Only criticism can make us cosmopolitan. All kinds of schemes to achieve peace through sympathy and sentiment have failed.
Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular…Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.
Darwin Wilde mentions Darwin several times. In The Soul of Man under Socialism Darwin is selected as one of the only three or four people in the entire nineteenth century who have ‘realised the perfection of what was in him’. Here he is singled out as one of the few intellectuals who raised themselves above the squabbling of the age:
The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author of The Origin of Species had, at any rate, the philosophic temper.
Sin versus stupidity In a move similar to his reversal of the usual meaning of immorality, Wilde insists:
People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
Echoing the famous line from the preface to Dorian Gray that:
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Aesthetics higher than ethics He was playing with fire, bating such a dogmatically philistine ferociously Christian establishment. But he goes on, giving his enemies more ammunition:
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability. 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. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.
To the perfect critic sin is impossible He reaches the threshold of blasphemy and charges through it.
And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a 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.
And then he rises to a kind of Hegelian climax, invoking the ‘World Spirit’.
You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing. The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world. Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.
Wilde’s own summary
On the last page Wilde has Ernest, Gilbert’s exhausted interlocutor, give his own summary of the long night’s lecture:
ERNEST: You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert. You have told me that: 1) it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it and that 2) to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world; you have told me that 3) all Art is immoral, and 4) all thought dangerous; that 5) criticism is more creative than creation, and that 6) the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is 7) exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and 8) that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer.
Completely exhausted, the pair open the curtains of Gilbert’s flat to see that dawn is coming up and the dialogue ends with another moment of fictional colour:
Gilbert: Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple…
Thoughts
Since at least the expansion of universities and the huge growth in courses teaching literature in the 1950s and 60s, the profession of academic criticism has also exploded. There are nowadays scores of schools of criticism, not least the newcomers feminist theory, post-colonial theory and queer theory, and hundreds of thousands of applications of each critical theory to every available work of literature (and film and TV and everything else) often using the difficult or impenetrable jargon of the trade.
Way back before the great tsunami of critical theory darkened the horizon, Wilde’s essay strikes me as an extremely impressive attempt to convey an entire critical worldview. What impresses is its coherence. It sets out to overturn received opinion on just about everything and so doesn’t make a few hits in a few places, but mounts an impressive attempt to create a total worldview.
Quotable quotes
The English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
Even the work of Mr Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.
ERNEST: But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
GILBERT: Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.
We are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
And:
Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered how to live.
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