OSCAR WILDE：the philosophy of art.docx

OSCAR WILDE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY by: Leonard Cresswell InglebyThe following essay was originally published in Oscar Wilde. Leonard Cresswell Ingleby. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1907.THE greatest claim that Oscar Wilde made for himself was that he was a high priest of aesthetics, that he had a new message concerning the relations of beauty and the worship of beauty to life and art, to life and to morals to give to the world. This claim was one in which to the last he pathetically believed. He was absolutely certain in his own mind that this was his vocation. He elaborated a sort of philosophy of beauty which not only pleased and satisfied himself, but found very many adherents, and became the dogma of a school. Even in This last work, De Profundis, written in the middle of his degradation and misery, he still believes that it is by art that he will be able to regenerate his spirit. He said that he would do such work in the future, would build beautiful things out of his sufferings, that he might cry in triumph Yes! This is just where the artistic life leads a man. We all know where the artistic life did lead Oscar Wilde upon his release from prison. It led him to an obscure quarter of Paris where he dragged out the short remainder of an unhappy life, having written nothing save The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and becoming more and more lost to finer aspirations. Yet, nevertheless, this aesthetic philosophy of Wildes forms one of the most important parts of his writings, and of his attitude towards life. It must, therefore, be carefully considered in any study of the man and his work. First of all, let us inquire, what are aesthetics? Do not let anyone who has not given his attention to the subject imagine that the aestheticism, which became known as the hallmark of a band of people led by Oscar Wilde who committed many whimsical extravagances, and who were caricatured in Mr. Gilberts Patience, has any relation whatever to the science of aesthetics. Even to Oscar Wilde aestheticism, as it has been popularly called, was only the beginning of an aesthetic philosophy which he summed up finally much later in Intentions, the Poems in Prose, and The Soul of Man under Socialism.By aesthetics is meant a theory of the beautiful as exhibited in works of art. That is to say, aesthetics considered on its objective side has to investigate, first, a function of art in general as expressing the beautiful, and then the nature of the beauty thus expressed. Secondly, the special functions of the several arts are investigated by aesthetics and the special aspects of the beautiful with which they are severally concerned. It, therefore, follows that aesthetics has to discuss such topics as the relation of art to nature and life, the distinction of art from nature, the relation of natural to artistic beauty, the conditions and nature of beauty in a work of art, and especially the distinction of beauty from truth, from utility, and from moral goodness. sthetics is, therefore, not art criticism. Art criticism deals with this or that particular work or type of art, while the aesthetic theory seeks to formulate the mere abstract and fundamental conceptions, distinctions, and principles which underlie artistic criticism, and alone make it possible. Art criticism is the link between aesthetic science and the ordinary intelligent appreciation of a work of art by an ordinary intelligence. Much more may be said in defining the functions of aesthetics, but this is sufficient before we begin to examine Wildes own aesthetic theories. His ideas were promulgated in the three works mentioned above, and also given to the world in lectures which he delivered at various times. It is true, as Mr. Arthur Symons very clearly pointed out some years ago, that Oscar Wilde wrote much that was true, new, and valuable about art and the artist. But in everything that he wrote he wrote from the outside. He said nothing which had not been said before him, or which was not the mere wilful contrary of what had been said before him. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Oscar Wilde never saw the full face of beauty. He saw it always in profile, always in a limited way. The pretence of strict logic in Wildes writing on Artistic Philosophy is only a pretence, and severe and steady thinkers recognise the fallacy. Let us examine Oscar Wildes aesthetic teaching. In one of his lectures given in America he said -And now I would point out to you the operation of the artistic spirit in the choice of subject. Like the philosopher of the platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world has known in the desert of Judea or in Arcadian valley, by the ruins of Troy or Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of the modern city, or by the pleasant ways of Camelot, all lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own spirit, choosing some facts and rejecting others, with the calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of beauty. It is to no avail that the muse of poetry be called even by such a clarion note as Whitmans to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard removed and to let on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. For art, to quote a noble passage of Mr Swinburnes, is very life itself and knows nothing of death. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of that mist of familiarity, which, as Shelley used to say, makes life obscure to us. Whatever spiritual message an artist brings to his age, it is for us to do naught but accept his teaching. You have most of you seen probably that great masterpiece of Rubens which hangs in the gallery of Brussels, that swift and wonderful pageant of horse and rider, arrested in its most exquisite and fiery moment, when the winds are caught in crimson banner and the air is lit by the gleam of armour and the flash of plume. Well, that is joy in art, though that golden hillside be trodden by the wounded feet of Christ; and it is for the death of the Son of Man that that gorgeous cavalcade is passing. In the primary aspect a painting has no more spiritual message than an exquisite fragment of Venetian glass. The channels by which all noble and imaginative work in painting should touch the soul are not those of the truths of lives. This should be done by a certain inventive and creative handling entirely independent of anything definitely poetical in the subject, something entirely satisfying in itself, which is, as the Greeks would say, in itself an end. So the joy of poetry comes never from the subject, but from an inventive handling of rhythmical language. And further he said that in nations as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it will be sure to waste its strength. It is not an increased moral sense or moral supervision that your literature needs. Indeed one should never talk of a moral or immoral poem. Poems are either well written or badly written; that is all. Any element of morals or implied reference to a standard of good and evil in art is often a sign of a certain incompleteness of vision. All good work aims at a purely artistic effect. In Intentions he enunciated serious problems which seemed constantly to contradict themselves, and he causes ourselves to ask questions which only bewilder and astonish. To sum up all the aesthetic teaching of the author it amounts simply and solely to the aphorism that there must be a permanent divorce between art and morals. All art, he says, is immoral.Some people have taken the view that Oscar Wilde in his philosophy of beauty was never quite sincere. He did not write for philistines with his heart in his mouth, but merely with his tongue in his cheek. I remember Mr. Richard Le Gallienne once said that in Intentions Wildes worship of beauty, which had made a latter-day myth of him before his time, was overlaid by his gift of comic perception, and, rightly viewed, all his flute-tone periods were written in the service of the comic muse. When he was not of malice aforethought humorous in those parts of the work where he seems to be arguing with a serious face enough, it is implied that he did so simply that he might smile behind his mask at the astonishment of a public he had from the first so delighted in shocking that he had a passion for being called dangerous, just as one type of man likes to be called fast and a rake. This is, of course, one point of view, but it is not one with which I am in agreement. Wilde laid such enormous stress upon the sensuous side of art, and never realised that this is but an exterior aspect which is impossible and could not exist without a spiritual interior, an informing soul. With all his brilliancy the author of Intentions only saw a mere fragment of his subject. It may be that he wilfully shut his eyes to the truth. It is more likely that he was incapable of realising the truth as a whole, and that what he wrote he wrote with absolute sincerity. It has been said that the artist sees farther than morality. This is a dangerous doctrine for the artist himself to believe, but it has some truth in it. In Oscar Wildes case, in pursuing the ideal of beauty he may have seen farther than morality, but blind of one eye he missed Morality upon the way and did not realise that she was ever there. It is the fashion nowadays among a certain set of writers, who form the remainder of the band of sthetes who followed Wilde in his teachings, to decry Ruskin, though, in the beginning of Wildes Esthetic movement, Wilde was an ardent pupil of this great master of English prose. We do not now accept Ruskins artistic criticisms as adequate to our modern needs. Much water has flowed under the bridge since the days when Ruskin wrote, and his peculiar temperament, while appreciating much that was beautiful and worthy to be appreciated, was at the same time blind to much that is beautiful and worthy to be appreciated. Ruskins criticism on the painting of Whistler would not be substantiated by a single writer of to-day. At the same time, all Ruskins philosophy of art-that is to say, aesthetics-is as true now as it ever was. Ruskin showed, as the experience of life and art has shown and always will show-show more poignantly and particularly in the case of Oscar Wilde than in any other-that art and morality cannot be divorced, and that if all art is immoral, then art ceases to exist. I press to the conclusion, he said, at the end of his famous lecture on the relation of art to morals, which I wish to leave with you, that all you can rightly do, or honourably become, depends on the government of these two instincts of order and kindness, by this great imaginative faculty, which give you inheritance of the past, grasp of the present, authority over the future. Map out the spaces of your possible lives by its help; measure the range of their possible agency! On the walls and towers of this your fair city, there is not an ornament of which the first origin may not be traced back to the thoughts of men who died two thousand years ago. Whom will you be governing by your thoughts, two thousand years hence? Think of it, and you will find that so far from art being immoral, little else except art is moral; that life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality: and for the words good and wicked used of men, you may almost substitute the words makers and destroyers. Far the greater part of the seeming prosperity of the world is, so far as our present knowledge extends, vain: wholly useless for any kind of good, but having assigned to it a certain inevitable sequence of destruction and of sorrow. Its stress is only the stress of wandering storm; its beauty the hectic of plague: and what is called the history of mankind is too often the record of the whirlwind, and the map of the spreading of the leprosy. But underneath all that, or in narrow spaces of dominion in the midst of it, the work of every man, qui non accepit in vanitatem animan suam, endures and prospers; a small remnant or green bud of it prevailing at last over evil. And though faint with sickness, and encumbered in ruin, the true workers redeem inch by inch the wilderness into garden ground; by the help of their joined hands the order of all things is surely sustained and vitally expanded, and although with strange vacillation, in the eyes of the watcher, the morning cometh, and also the night, there is no hour of human existence that does not draw on towards the perfect day. For our own part let us examine a little into the relation between art and morality for ourselves. When we hear it asserted that morality has nothing to do with art and that moral considerations are quite beside the mark in aesthetic criticism and judgment, such a statement is simply equivalent to saying that actual life has nothing to do with art. The main demand that we can make from art of all kinds is the demand of truth. Truth is beauty, and beauty is truth. By truth in this connection we mean that higher and more ideal truth which is inherent in the realities of things and contained by them, but which is brought out, explained, made credible, and visible by the artist in this or that sphere of art, and through the process of his art purified from the accidental obscurities which cloud it and hide it in the realm of actual life. If we are to demand truth from the artist, and let us always remember, as Keats realised so strongly, that in demanding truth we demand beauty also, we must insist that the artist must give us nothing in which a false psychology obtains, must, for example, paint no passions that do not occur in actual life. It is, therefore, equally necessary, on a logical conclusion, that when the subject of a work of art requires it, the moral should be represented as it really is that is, according to its truth and that the moral law should not be misrepresented. If we require of the artist that he should give a vivid representation of the illusions of human life, of the struggles and rivalries of men for objects and ends of imaginary value, we must equally demand of the artist that he should know and be capable of describing that which alone has true and absolute value in human life. Surely it is a truism that every drama from beginning to end contains a moral. It is a lie that art is immoral or can by its very nature ever be so. To say so, to pretend that art has a separate existence, is to say something which even the most brilliant paradox cannot prove and which immediately suggests to the mind of the thinking man an apologia or reason for licence of personal conduct. As a great German writer on aesthetics and the relation to the ethics has said, all human actions do of necessity presuppose a norm, a rule to which they conform, or from which they depart; and there is nothing which can be represented, whether as criminal or as ridiculous, or as an object of irony, otherwise than under this assumption. Hence every artist enforces some kind of morality, and morality accordingly becomes of chief moment for aesthetic judgment. Aristotle himself, from whom Oscar Wilde frequently quotes, and incidentally from whose poetics he attempts, by means of brilliant paradox, to infer an attitude which is not really there, has pointed out that art is a means of purification. If the morality of a work of art is false and wrong, if the artist is either ignorant of the subject with which he deals or deliberately misrepresents the morality of it, then his work is viewed merely as a work of art-and therefore as a thing whole and complete in itself-is a failure in art. In many respects it may have aesthetic excellence, but as a complete thing, as a work of art, it must inevitably fail. Sibbern in his sthetik tells us very sanely and wisely that art need not be limited by choice of subject, but depends for its artistic qualities upon the attitude of the artist in dealing with it. That art must not be limited by choice of subject is a great point of Oscar Wildes own philosophy, and here he is perfectly sound. But he goes further in his paradoxical view, and shows that the artist must hold no brief for either good or evil, and that the excellence of a work of art depends entirely upon the skill of presentation. The German student, on the contrary, writes: There are dramas in which the moral element is not brought into special prominence, but just hovers above the surface, and which yet have their poetic value. What must, however, be absolutely insisted on is, that the artistic treatment should never insult morality. We do not mean that art must not represent the immoral as well as the moral, for this is, on the contrary, indispensable, if art is truly to reflect life as it is. But immorality must not infect and be inherent in that view of life and those opinions which the poet desires by his work to promulgate; for then he would injure morality, and violate that moral ideal to which all human life, and therefore art itself, must be subordinated. Plays and novels which depict virtue as that mere conventionality and Philistinism which is but an object of ridicule, or which hold up to our admiration false and antinomian ideals of virtue, representing e.g., the sentimentality of a so-called good heart as sufficient to justify the most scandalous moral delinquencies or free genius as privileged to sin, which paint vice in attractive and seductive colours, portraying adultery and other transgressions as very pardonable, and, under certain circumstances, amiable weaknesses, and