The True Artist Is Known By The Use He Makes Of What He Annexes, And He Annexes Everything.
Oscar Wilde was a Philosopher. He would deny it if he could, but he was a serious thinker. His ideas were not always new - he was influenced by the great Greeks, Plato and Aristotle, but also by Kant, Hegel, the American Transcendentalist Emerson, and contemporary critics like Pater and Ruskin. He borrowed from Théophile Gautier and Whistler in art-matters. But still we can call him an original thinker, because he had a way of giving new life to an idea once he had annexed it. When Wilde touched upon a thing, it became oscarisé. That is to say, he imposed his own personality upon an idea and made it fit in with his own view of things.
This power to give an entirely new, oscarian interpretation to ideas, is the essence of Wilde's genius. Wilde was aware of this himself, and he never had any scruples about using other people's ideas and making them his own - also in his literary writings. For this reason, he was often accused of plagiarism. Wilde snubbed at these accusations and said that they 'proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed'.
When, however, someone happened to use an idea of his, Wilde was quite unhappy about it. When Robert Ross confronted him with his own borrowings, he explained: 'My dear Robbie, when I see a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else's garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals'.
Because Wilde had his very own way of looking at life, his philosophy is at times very 'oscar-centered' - that is, what is true for his own life he makes into a general rule. For this purpose he invented what Richard Ellmann aptly calls 'his mythological gentleman'. As a result, we may read things like: 'A gentleman never looks out of the window' or 'A gentleman never takes exercise'. Somehow, that sounds more authoritative than to say ' I never take exercise'…
Any Preoccupation With What Is Right Or Wrong In Conduct Shows An Arrested Intellectual Development.
'Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue'. 'Nothing is more painful to me than to come across virtue in a person in whom I have never expected its existence'. 'Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people we personally dislike'. 'Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others'…
It is clear that Wilde was not very enthousiastic about morality, virtues and the like. His utterances on the subject are countless. It is an attitude he seems to have been brought up with - in Oxford, he told a friend that his mother had founded a Society for the Suppression of Virtue. In addition, there was the law voted in 1886 which made homosexual encounters into a criminal offence. As a result, Wilde began to think of himself as a criminal and became absolutely fascinated by crime and sin.
In the Victorian era so many things were forbidden that it became very tempting to break the rules. Wilde valued freedom highly, and he felt that the rigidity of Victorian society put serious limits to the development of his own personality. He agreed with Walter Pater on the importance of experiences, and came to the conclusion that sin and crime (or: things forbidden by society rules) are essential if you want to progress as an individual. This is what made him say things like 'No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime'.
Needless to say that ideas like these provoked the Victorians. They condemned Wilde's works as immoral - in particular The Picture of Dorian Gray. The hostile reactions to the novel urged Wilde to write the Preface. In it, he confronts society with its own hypocrisy: 'It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors'. And he claims that 'the moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium'.
Wilde adhered to the principle of Art for Art's sake. This meant that art was separated from ethics. When he writes that 'all art is quite useless', he refers to the fact that it carries no moralistic message. Art is, instead, a beautiful creation that provokes an impression in the individual, and these impressions help to develop the personality and the perception of Beauty. Ethics are replaced by Aesthetics…
A Really Well-Made Buttonhole Is The Only Link Between Art And Nature.
At first sight, this seems to be an absurd statement - but really it is not. It is an important part of Wilde's philosophy, stated here in a startling aphorism simply because Wilde loved to provoke. The theory behind it is this: Nature is inferior to Art.
To understand this, we have to consider the fact that Wilde was a radical Humanist. That is, he strongly believed in Man and his intellectual powers. His contempt for Nature and Life sprung from the fact that he considered them too 'obvious': everyone can see them, they offer no challenge to the intellect.
The Wildean Universe is characterised by a profound dualism between the Sphere of Nature and the Sphere of Art; there is a dichotomy between the world everyone can see without taking any pains and the things that can only be perceived through the use of the intellect. The world of Art is not obvious, and exists only when expressed by artists and critics.
Art, according to Wilde, does not mirror Nature - it is Nature that mirrors Art. So strong is his belief in the intellectual power of Man's mind that he states that Art moulds Life to its purpose. Nature is not creative, it merely imitates the forms which the artist has invented.
Because Nature is inferior, it should not be taken as a model. Wilde despises those authors who claim that their works give a perfect picture of reality; following his reasoning, works that reflect the Sphere of Life are no works of art at all. They are simply too obvious. 'Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance', he writes. And 'when a truth becomes a fact it loses all its intellectual value'.
As a consequence, Wilde condemns action and proclaims contemplation to be the right way of living. Action, after all, belongs to the sphere of Life and Nature, and is therefore restricted. The contemplative life is characterised by Thought and a critical attitude; it is the contemplation of Art and Beauty, which allows the individual to develop his personality without limits.
Lying And Poetry Are Arts.
'Lying' is extremely important in the Wildean Universe. The term needs some explaining. We have seen that Wilde makes a distinction between the Sphere of Life and Nature on the one hand, and the Sphere of Art on the other hand. The first can also be termed 'Reality', while the second may be called 'Imagination'. 'Lying', then, is strictly speaking everything that does not correspond to Reality. Consequently, when someone is talking about the Sphere of Art, that person is telling lies. Lying is, in Wilde's own words, 'the telling of beautiful untrue things', and it is the aim of art.
What is so important about lies is that they are not true. That sounds a bit simple, but it is really what it is all about. A lie is not obvious. It is something that has been consciously invented, and it requires imagination. It is the fact that a person has used his intellect to consciously devise a story which makes a lie valuable: it is a construction, a creation, something that did not exist until someone invented it.
Wilde stresses the fact that lying is not obvious by ranking it with poetry. He observes that both require a certain skill - there is, according to him, no such thing as a born liar or a born poet. Lying and poetry are arts.
The First Duty In Life Is To Be As Artificial As Possible.
'Self-culture is the aim of man', Oscar Wilde wrote in 1890, and this is a summary of his whole philosophy. The individual has the duty to educate himself, develop his own talents and capacities, and strengthen his personality. This he does by contemplating the world of Art and Beauty, and by cultivating a critical mode of thought. The important thing is awareness, awareness of your own intellectual and imaginative powers, and self-conscious use of these gifts.
'Artificiality', a word that appears very often in Wildean (con)texts, is precisely this self-conscious use of intellectual and imaginative power. 'Artificial' as opposed to 'natural' is everything that is created by man, and consequently a fruit of human genius.
Many contemporaries said that Oscar Wilde was 'artificial', and they objected to the fact. Indeed, he seems to have spoken English in a way no one else did, in flawless sentences and sometimes even pronouncing words in a very own way - the same thing was noted by André Gide when he spoke French. His clothes were different from those of other people, though often only subtly. He had a very particular walk. He curled his hair, and later on even dyed it (with the famous 'Koko Marikopas'). It seems that nothing about him was natural - as if he had carefully studied every aspect of his being and designed it the way he wanted it to be. And actually, when you look at his life, it shows distinct features of a perfectly constructed tragedy, complete with climax and katharsis…
On the whole, everything about Oscar Wilde - his life, his looks, his writings…- was typically Oscar Wilde. And that is exactly what he aimed at. Looking back, he could say his life was a work of art. He had put all his genius in it.
