Factual background
In mid-1891 the poet Lionel Johnson introduced Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, Johnson’s cousin and an undergraduate at Oxford at the time. Friendship turned to intimacy and by 1893 Wilde was infatuated with Douglas. In 1894 Douglas and some Oxford friends founded a journal, The Chameleon.
Wilde had been introduced to these friends and had been involved in the meeting which chose the magazine’s title. To support his young lover’s venture, he contributed a set of 35 witty paradoxes and epigrams, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which he had originally intended for the Saturday Review.
Six months later, in May 1895, Wilde was involved in his two trials and this set of epigrams and his involvement in The Chameleon were brought up and used against Wilde. The Chameleon was, indeed, a magazine conceived as promoting what were called ‘Uranian’ i.e. gay themes. All but two of the thirteen items in the first issue concerned homosexuality. As well as Wilde’s (relatively harmless) epigrams, there were two poems by Douglas, including ‘Two Loves’ which contrasts heterosexual and homosexual love, and refers to gay love by the now-famous phrase ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.
The magazine also included ‘The Priest and the Acolyte’, a short story which describes the sexual affair between an 28-year-old priest and a 14-year-old boy, which ends with their discovery and joint suicide. Because all the items were anonymous, Wilde was charged, in court, with writing this clearly illegal and immoral story when, in reality, he had actually disapproved of its inclusion in the magazine.
(Wilde refers to the way his generous help and support was turned against him, in his long letter De Profundis, page 170 of the Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, 1979 OUP paperback edition.)
Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered.
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the problem of poverty.
Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.
If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness.
It is only by not paying one’s bills that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct of others.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Time is a waste of money.
One should always be a little improbable.
There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made too soon.
The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated.
To be premature is to be perfect.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right and wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the body but the body.
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.
The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything: the young know everything.
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.
Commentary
The most obvious thing about this list of smart epigrams is their similarity to the list of apothegms he added as the Preface to the book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891. Scholars point out that many of his critical essays began as collections of apothegms which he arranged into a ‘logical’ or at least rhetorical order, and then created prose to link them together. It indicates the way the epigram was the basis of his way of thinking and writing.
As to the content, the epigrams include many variations on familiar Wilde themes, namely that 1. the aim of life is to become an individualist, to be yourself, 2. the most important thing in life, more than all the Victorian shibboleths of sincerity and duty and honour and all the rest of it, is to be stylish and this involves the maximum amount of artifice.
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.
As in the Preface, some are more effective than others. For example, ‘Time is a waste of money’ strikes me as barely worth the ink, whereas ‘One should always be a little improbable’ strikes me as being sly and stylish and true.
Something like ‘Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions’ clearly addresses issues of great importance in the late nineteenth century, which not many of us care about these days. Science is clearly science and dominates 21st century society; and if people want to have religious beliefs, that’s fine. But the two no longer clash head-on as they did for so many Victorian and Edwardian social thinkers.
‘The only way to atone for being occasionally a little over-dressed is by being always absolutely over-educated’ has the polished confidence of the product of a good public school and Oxford, and the reference to exams indicates the eternal undergraduate: ‘In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.’
Wilde studied Classics at Oxford and the late-Victorian aesthetes were obsessed with their suave version of Greek mythology, so there are the usual references to classical myth: ‘It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are always with us.’
It was hardly original in 1894 to lump together industry, factories, serious work, the philistine middle class, bourgeois earnestness and oppose them to the stylishness of the aesthete and dandy. These themes had been developed, in their different ways, by Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater as long ago as the 1870s. High-minded Latin-quoting poets who despised anything which smacked of industry, hard work and earnestness had been around for decades. Wilde’s contribution was to take the attitude to its logical extreme and create an entire worldview, worked out across essays, stories, fairy tales, fiction and plays, going out of his way to mock bourgeois earnestness and turn all its values on their heads.
- Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
- Industry is the root of all ugliness.
And by contrast valuing only the utterly artificial, paradoxical, whimsical and unearnest:
- The condition of perfection is idleness.
You can see how many of these snappy sayings would appear when read out by an extremely earnest and literal-minded prosecuting lawyer in a Victorian court. Disastrous. Moreover note the second part of the title – ‘for the young‘ and published in an undergraduate magazine. Wilde could hardly have done more to play into the hands of those who accused him of consciously and deliberately setting out to corrupt the nation’s youth.
Having read them half a dozen times, I think the improbable one is my second favourite. My favourite is:
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
I think what Wilde is implying is that the only important things go on in the life of the mind i.e. the imagination, whereas the real world is ultimately trivial. I find that a sympathetic idea. But I take it at a deeper level, too: Nothing really matters. You’re going to die, I’m going to die, our children and grandchildren will die. Things matter for a bit, maybe, while anyone remembers them. But eventually all of us will be compost on an over-heated planet and all these words and the thoughts they record will have disappeared like morning dew, like grains of sand lost in the boiling desert which the earth is destined to become. For the time being, though – enjoy.
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