18. Aestheticism and the works of o. Wilde

Devoting most of his career to poetry, prose fiction, and drama, Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote the bulk of his critical work between 1885 and 1891. Along with a number of book reviews and brief articles, this corpus consists chiefly of just six major essays: ‘The Truth of Masks’ (1885), ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889), ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ (1889), ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1889), ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ (1890), and ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890).

In Britain the best representatives were Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne, both influenced by the French Symbolists, and James McNeill Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The style and these poets were satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera Patience and other works, such as F. C. Burnand's drama The Colonel, and in comic magazines such as Punch.

‘The Critic as Artist,’ also a dialogue, pursues many of these same assertions. Aestheticism’s spokesman here is Gilbert, who corrects a number of ‘gross popular error[s]’ regarding criticism’s proper relation to its aesthetic object. In typical Wildean style, Gilbert presents this hypothesis by means of counter-intuitive paradoxes that Ernest, more pugnaciously than Cyril, earnestly resists. ‘The creative faculty is higher than the critical. There is really no comparison between them,’ intones Ernest, Wilde’s voice of orthodox opinion (1020). Gilbert counters that we are wrong to consider criticism merely secondary to the work of art it interprets and never creative in its own right. He argues instead that this hierarchy is unstable, indeed ‘entirely arbitrary’ (1020). ‘Criticism is itself an art,’ and conversely genuinely ‘fine imaginative work’ is actually critical (1026, 1020). For ‘there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one’ (1020). Like poetry, criticism too involves a working with existing materials and putting them into a new form (1027). And here Gilbert insists that not only do poets work with words and generic conventions, they draw from existing works of art as well. Like Vivian, Gilbert argues that art imitates art other art more often than life: Homer retells existing myths, Keats writes poems about a translation of Homer’s retelling, and so on. The work of the critic is yet one more extension of that same process, its own retelling of what has been told before. The argument glosses Arnold’s claim that ‘the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is’ and rehearses Pater’s response to it (1028). Like Pater, Gilbert believes instead that the critic’s ‘sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions’ (1028). The critic deludes himself if he believes objectivity or ‘discovering the real intention of the artist’ is possible (1029). Gilbert’s supporting example – in which he claims ‘the work of art [is] simply . . . the starting-point for a new creation’ – subtly suggests that Pater’s much criticized, idiosyncratic reading of the Mona Lisa might be remarkable not for how willfully wrong it seems, but rather for how dramatically it demonstrates this discursive and epistemological condition (1029).