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Wilde Essays (changes)

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“Art and the Handicraftsman”

False Oppositions
- No opposition between the beautiful and the useful, though people seem to think so
  - Good design proves that the handicraftsman uses his head and heart, not just his hands, in making the article
- No opposition between the beautiful and the commercial
Beauty is a requirement for humanity (“unless we are content to be less than men” 87), a necessity
Doesn’t want you to recreate old works of art, but instead “art based on all the inventions of modern civilisation, and to suit all the needs of nineteenth-century life” 88
We “reverence” machinery “when it does proper work, when it relieves men from ignoble and soulless labor”
- However, you shouldn’t use machinery for things that are only valuable when done by hand: decoration
- Thus, machinery is not an “end” in itself, but rather a “means of civilization” so it depends on the spirit in which you USE these machines that determines their goodness
- Even machinery itself can be beautiful, definitely undecorated: “the line of strength and the line of beauty being one” 88
Workers deserve beautiful surroundings, beautiful clothes: all “simple and stately”
- that way art comes alive, beauty ih life
Each city needs a school of design (local! specific!)
- Design with freedom, imagination, not imitating models but using them to see what makes things beautiful
- “Design in color”
- Design so that you can’t add anything more nor take anything out: that is good design
- Find right kind of decoration for the right kind of material, respecting the material and the use it’s intended for 90
Conditions of Art
- Clean air
- Healthy bodies
- Happy folk: “noble and beautiful life” to be expressed in art, not slavery or domination 91
- Individualism: self-[removed]which is why best art comes from a republic)
Poverty: not being able to create: “for ever man is poor who cannot create”
Work: if you want inspiration, go watch someone labor, for “never watched a man do anything useful who has not been graceful at some moment of his labor”
- Someone reaping or unloading a ship or at sport
Find beauty in “simple daily things” 92
- “What you do love are your own men and women, your own flowers and fields…and these are what your art should represent to you”
- Americans need to put deer and buffalo and turkeys in their art; use what nature gave you
He says “ours has been the first movement which has brought the handicraftsman and the artist together, for remember that by separating the one from the other you do ruin to both”
- handicraftsman needs imagination and spiritual motive
- artist needs technical ability
- Historically, great art has been inspired and watched over by handicrafts: the Parthenon by vases, Michaelangelo by the household decorator
Take inspiration from other nations, Greek, Japanese art, etc, to see the artistic spirit, but not to imitate
Homes: use peaceful colors that will last, not vibrant ones that’ll wear away
Jewelry: so commonplace nowadays, so respect the goldsmith
Art: “making eternal by your art all that is noble in your men and women, stately in your lakes and mountains, beautiful in your own flowers and natural life” (a kind of national individualism)
- art that will bring joy 94
Labor: “Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the workman” b/c of the reputation that preceded his journey to America
- So he tells the story of him at Oxford with friends, running into Ruskin, who asks them to go to his lecture
  - Some do: he spoke of life, how all the men’s energies are being wasted: “we should be working at something that would do good to other people” 96
  - What did they do about it? They made a road—these little Oxford brats—to connect two villages together, together with Ruskin…but they didn’t finish it
- But the whole incident showed him that his fellow students did have SOME spirit: so that he could “Create an artistic movement that might change, as it has changed, the face of England” 96
  - “each of you have some art to practise”
The heroic is strange; let’s destroy fashion 97
“art is the one thing which Death cannot harm” not just for the “greater artists” like Longfellow and Emerson, but his audience too

On Dorian Gray

“I am quite incapable of understanding how a work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.”
- “For if a work of art is rich, and vital, and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”
- In letters to editor of St James Gazette who panned the book
From his preface to Dorian Gray
- The artist reveals art, conceals the artist
- A true critic will also deal with the beautiful: “translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things”
- “Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.”
- There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
  - “No artist desires to prove anything. Even thing that are true can be proved.”
    - ie implies that “proof” is something BELOW the artist, and that the “true” is similarly beneath their notice
- Why does 19th c not like Realism? b/c it doesn’t want to see itself so clearly (cowardly) Why doesn’t it like Romanticism? b/c it wants to see itself (vain)
- Artists express EVERYTHING; and not be morbid
  - “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.”
“All art is at once surface and symbol.”
Critics disagreeing about a work is good, implying that the artist knew what he was doing and that the work is new and vital
“The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”
- This is the standard, the only standard, art must live up to!

The Decay of Lying

Vivian is the main speaker here in a cutely self referential work b/c Vivian is at the moment writing an article called the D of L
“the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature”
- Art reveals Nature’s “unfinished” “crudity” and “lack of design”—will put Nature in her place
- And nature is “uncomfortable” and “lumpy”
- doesn’t like mind
Indoor life and architecture are the source of egotism b/c life is pared down to human size there
Doesn’t want to be consistent; rules by Whim
The Right Lying
- “frank, fearless statements, his superb irresponsibility, his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind” 165
- hmmm are we against positivism? yes
Definition of a Lie
- “that which is its own evidence” 165
Decay of lying: even the newspapers “have degenerated. They may now be absolutely relied upon” and people “fall into careless habits of accuracy”
- What’s the effect? Bad, commonplace literature
  - “the modern novelists presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction:” Zola, Maupassant, James, Haggard, R L Stevenson, Eliot, with “their drearier vices and their even drearier virtues”
    - very Woolf!
    - such “records” are “absolutely without interest” 168 b/c we want “distinction and beauty” not the “harrowing” details of lower class life
    - they use microscopes and are seen at the British Library “Shamelessly reading up on their subjects” 166
  - they are so unimaginative that they must rely on the truth. how dull. Art will DIE, the imagination will die, “And beauty will pass away from the land” 167
How to Lie
- Like art, you must cultivate lying
- All this truth, this “modern vice,” kills imagination: habit of truth telling is “morbid and unhealthy”
- Lets you get comfortable in platitudes
“England is the home of lost ideas.” 168
“The only real people are the people who never existed” 169
- And if you have a person w/a mask on, he says the MASK is what’s interesting, not the person behind it
- And he says that human brotherhood isn’t a poetic dream, it’s a reality—but a very depressing one 170
Meredith: “he is a child of realism who is not on speaking terms with his father” and made himself a romanticist 171
Balzac had both art and science; unfortunately he couldn’t make his followers get the art half! His characters are quite alive and fiery
- Balzac he says NOT a realist b/c “created life, he did not copy it” 172
“pure modernity of form is always somewhat vulgarizing…modernity of form and modernity of subject matter are entirely and absolutely wrong” 171-2
- What does he refer to? the topics that newspapers and pamphleteers care about (social justice): “we have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.”
- modernity of form: Balzac was too interested in it
  - side note on Balzac (d. 1850): considered a founder of realism w/his fully realized characters, not totally villains or heroes, good or evil; use of types; characters recurring among the books; a living Paris that is described hugely (””the streets of Paris possess human qualities and we cannot shake off the impressions they make upon our minds.”); tons of details (“The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works”); Zola called him naturalist b/c saw through a “clear” glass whereas Romantics do through “colored” class; studied by Flaubert and Proust and Dickens and James; and Engels says, “I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists and statisticians put together.”

Wants Romance to “return to the land” to see Behemoths and Dragons and Hippogriffs 190: imagination

Art is “complex beauty,” “form of exaggeration,” “intensified…over-emphasis” 174

You don’t want to reproduce life completely: you’ll just “reproduce its vulgarity” 175 in so many details and yet DON’T manage to convey a feeling of reality; thus “As a method, realism is a complete failure”

His Aesthetics

“Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life…far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it…in no case does it reproduce its age” 191
“All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.” Anything that comes from life “must be translated into artistic convention.”
- “As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter…. The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.” 191
- If you paint your age, time passing will pass your art by; it won’t be eternal.
“Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” 192
- example: 181: story of the kind of inspiration for Becky Sharp, who ended up in real life doing exactly what Becky Sharp did
- Art is the reality: “a great artist invents a type” and then all of the sudden it’s everywhere 179
- We need to lie because that will make humanity better: you must give us a model to imitate
- b/c life’s aim is “to find expression” and art will give it that
- and thus even “external Nature imitates Art” b/c all we see of it is what we learned from art

Final Def of Lying

“the telling of beautiful untrue things”
“the proper aim of Art”
you must “love Beauty more than Truth” 190 to be true artist
- “No great artist ever sees things are they really are.” 187

Nietzsche: the rational versus intuitional man: rational man is all about safety (seeks truth honesty), whereas intuitional man (who cries out) has more access to the thing in itself…you must lie b/c words no longer have meaning (they were metaphors, but no longer has connex), so language doesn’t really communicate the truth anyway

The Critic as Artist

Why a dialogue? Says Gilbert, “To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own”
- Both Platonic dialogue and Hegelian dialectic are here, Wilde scholars have shown
  - his Hegelian growth he terms in phrases of evolutional growth
- to “grasp his idea from different points of view,” Dowling xxiv
- Says Gilbert, “that richness and roundness of effect” coming from the incidental points raised
“In every sphere of life Form is the beginning of things.” 270
Influenced by Arnold: Hellenism, “spontaneity of consciousness,” “play of thought” rather than fixity of ideas; will save us from Philistinism, the rule of money, stagnation
Critic needs to chronicle his OWN impressions, “the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind” and therefore “reveal its own secret and not the secret of another”
- Even though he goes against Arnold’s vision of criticism, he stays true to Arnold’s Hellenism, says Linda Dowling xvii intro
  - me: sounds like he just takes the Victorians’ notions to heart, taking them all the way
- More about Hellenism: part of the larger trend of Pater, Symonds, Burckhardt to use the Renaissance revival of Greek ideas as basis for a Victorian revival of them: so that every time Greek ideas resurface, there’s a “cultural revolution,” says Dowling… and we therefore should make it happen NOW, these authors suggest
Criticism doesn’t refer to anything outside of itself, really, “its own reason for existing”
What does it do? “the global change that may be wrought in individual consciousness by imaginative art” xxvi, which special consciousness is reflected by the mannerist, high falutin style of the speakers
Part of Wilde’s criticism’s attempt to transpose Plato’s metaphysics to the realm of art
Through reading, “there is no passion we cannot feel” and we can even schedule the emotions we want to feel by deciding to read something.
- Life, however, won’t give us this pleasure. Life is narrow, incoherent, has no match of “form and spirit,” and costs too much
- Art however “does not hurt us:” the emotions are not bitter: “emotion for the sake of emotion” is the purpose of art
- Only through Art do we “realize our perfection” 252 even while we “shield” ourselves from actual experience’s sordidness
  - “action is limited and relative” 253
Criticism purifies the “coarse” English mind, an alternative to the barren Public Opinion
- Criticism “makes culture possible” b/c “distills [art] to its finer essence,” without which art is a “cumbersome mass”
  - criticism thus guides you through the morass

Random

“An artist is not an isolated fact, he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can be grown from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle” 4-5, “Mr Whistler’s Ten O’clock”
- reacting to Whistler’s first public lecture where he berates public by telling them not to deal with beauty and leave it to the professionals
“Art is not to be taught in the Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to. The real schools should be the streets.” 8, “The Relation of Dress to Art”
Browning is actually a fiction writer, a wonderful creator of character, not a poet; he “stammers through a thousand mouths” 217