The Wisdom of Oscar Wilde
Page 5
The word practical is nearly always the last refuge of the uncivilised.
“Ideas upon Dress Reform”
It is not, Sir, by the mimes that the muses are to be judged.
“Puppets and Actors”
Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.
“The Decay of Lying”
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is well for our vanity that we slay the criminal, for if we suffered him to live he might show us what we had gained by his crime. It is well for his peace that the saint goes to his martyrdom. He is spared the sight of the horror of his harvest.
“The Critic as Artist”
The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.
“The Critic as Artist”
We cannot go back to the saint. There is far more to be learned from the sinner.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is only about things that do not interest one that one can give a really unbiased opinion, which is no doubt the reason why an unbiased opinion is always absolutely valueless. The man who sees both sides of a question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all.
“The Critic as Artist”
People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.
“The Critic as Artist”
If there was less sympathy in the world there would be less trouble in the world.
De Profundis
Sins of the flesh are nothing. They are maladies for physicians to cure, if they should be cured. Sins of the soul alone are shameful.
De Profundis
All great ideas are dangerous.
De Profundis
Just as there are false dawns before the dawn itself, and winter-days so full of sudden sunlight that they will cheat the wise crocus into squandering its gold before its time, and make some foolish bird call to its mate to build on barren boughs, so there were Christians before Christ. For that we should be grateful. The unfortunate thing is that there have been none since.
De Profundis
To speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.
De Profundis
It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible ...
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lord Windermere: Misfortunes one can endure—they come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one’s own faults—ah!—there is the sting of life.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Lady Windermere: Life is terrible. It rules us, we do not rule it.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
But the past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived.
“The Decay of Lying”
England is the home of lost ideas.
“The Decay of Lying”
AMERICA
America is the noisiest country that ever existed.
“Impressions of America”
“They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,” chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour’s cast-off clothes.
“Really! And where do bad Americans go when they die?” inquired the Duchess.
“They go to America,” murmured Lord Henry.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Lady Hunstanton: What are American dry goods?
Lord Illingworth: American novels.
A Woman of No Importance
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing characteristic.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I was disappointed with Niagara—most people must be disappointed with Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
“Impression of America”
Lady Caroline: There are a great many things you haven’t got in America, I am told, Miss Worsley. They say you have no ruins, and no curiosities.
Mrs. Allonby (to Lady Stutfield): What nonsense! They have their mothers and their manners.
A Woman of No Importance
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The American man marries early, and the American woman marries often; and they get on extremely well together.
“The American Man”
Lady Caroline: These American girls carry off all the good matches. Why can’t they stay in their own country? They are always telling us it is the paradise of women.
Lord Illingworth: It is, Lady Caroline. That is why, like Eve, they are so extremely anxious to get out of it.
A Woman of No Importance
Similarly in The Picture of Dorian Gray
The strange thing about American civilisation is, that the women are most charming when they are way from their own country, the men most charming when they are at home.
“The American Man”
[American women] take their dresses from Paris, and their manners from Piccadilly, and wear both charmingly. They have a quaint pertness, a delightful conceit, a native self-assertion. They insist on being paid compliments and have almost succeeded in making Englishmen eloquent.... [They] can actually tell a story without forgetting the point—an accomplishment that is extremely rare among women of other countries.... They have however one grave fault— their mothers.
“The American Invasion”
Scandals are extremely rare in America, and should one occur, so paramount in society is female influence, that it is the man who is never forgiven.
“The American Man”
They afterwards took me to a dancing saloon [in Leadville] where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was a printed notice: “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”
“Impressions of America”
MODERN TIMES
Nowadays we are all of us so hard up, that the only pleasant thing to pay are compliments. They’re the only things we can pay.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is, no one has yet discovered.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
It is only by not paying one’s bills
that one can hope to live in the memory of the commercial classes.
“Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young”
Land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven’t the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Stutfield: It must be terribly, terribly distressing to be in debt.
Lord Alfred: One must have some occupation nowadays. If I hadn’t my debts I shouldn’t have anything to think about.
A Woman of No Importance
My own business bores me to death. I always prefer other people’s.
Lady Windermere’s Fan
The only horrible thing in life is ennui.... That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
I always like to know everything about my new friends, and nothing about my old ones.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Similarly in Lady Windermere’s Fan
It seems to me we all look at Nature too much, and live with her too little.
De Profundis
I assure you that the typewriting machine, when played with expression, is not more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or a near relation.
Letter to Robert Ross, April 1, 1897
It is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age.
“The Critic as Artist”
England will never be civilised till she has added Utopia to her dominions.
“The Critic as Artist”
Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.
“The Critic as Artist”
It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of Art.
“The Critic as Artist”
Lying for the sake of a monthly salary is, of course, well known in Fleet Street, and the profession of a political leader-writer is not without its advantages.
“The Decay of Lying”
Learned conversation is either the affectation of the ignorant or the profession of the mentally unemployed.
“The Critic as Artist”
Lady Bracknell: Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people that can’t get into it do that.
The Importance of Being Earnest
The aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilized society....
“The Decay of Lying”
Nowadays we have so few mysteries left to us that we cannot afford to part with one of them.
“The Critic as Artist”
I am but too conscious of the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.
“The Critic as Artist”
We live in the age of the over-worked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
“The Critic as Artist”
In the present state of England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good....
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Vulgarity and stupidity are two very vivid facts in modern life. One regrets them, naturally. But there they are.
“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Part II
EXCERPTS
POEMS (1880s)
Hélas!
To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of god:
Is that time dead? Lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?
Requiescat
Tread light, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone.
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
Requiescat
Tread light, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone.
She is at rest.
Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life’s buried here,
Heap earth upon it.
MR. WHISTLER’S TEN O’CLOCK
Originally appeared under this title in Pall Mall Gazette,
February 21, 1885. Reprinted from Miscellanies by Oscar
Wilde (London: Methuen, 1908; reprinted London:
Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1969), pp. 63-67.
LAST night, at Prince’s Hall, Mr. Whistler made his first public appearance as a lecturer on art, and spoke for more than an hour with really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures of the kind. Mr. Whistler began his lecture with a very pretty aria on prehistoric history, describing how in earlier times hunter and warrior would go forth to chase and foray, while the artist sat at home making cup and bowl for their service. Rude imitations of nature they were first, like the gourd bottle, till the sense of beauty and form developed and, in all its exquisite proportions, the first vase was fashioned. Then came a higher civilisation of architecture and armchairs, and with exquisite design, and dainty diaper, the useful things of life were made lovely; and the hunter and the warrior lay on the couch when they were tired, and, when they were thirsty, drank from the bowl, and never cared to lose the exquisite proportion of the one, or the delightful ornament of the other; and this attitude of the primitive anthropophagous Philistine formed the text of the lecture and was the attitude which Mr. Whistler entreated his audience to adopt towards art. Remembering, no doubt, many charming invitations to wonderful private views, this fashionable assemblage seemed somewhat aghast, and not a little amused, at being told that the slightest appearance among a civilised people of any joy in beautiful things is a grave impertinence to all painters; but Mr. Whistler was relentless, and, with charming ease and much grace of manner, explained to the public that the only thing they should cultivate was ugliness, and that on their permanent stupidity rested all the hopes of art in the future.
The scene was in every way delightful; he stood there, a miniature Mephistopheles, mocking the majority! He was like a brilliant s
urgeon lecturing to a class composed of subjects destined ultimately for dissection, and solemnly assuring them how valuable to science their maladies were, and how absolutely uninteresting the slightest symptoms of health on their part would be. In fairness to the audience, however, I must say that they seemed extremely gratified at being rid of the dreadful responsibility of admiring anything, and nothing could have exceeded their enthusiasm when they were told by Mr. Whistler that no matter how vulgar their dresses were, or how hideous their surroundings at home, still it was possible that a great painter, if there was such a thing, could, by contemplating them in the twilight and half closing his eyes, see them under really picturesque conditions, and produce a picture which they were not to attempt to understand, much less dare to enjoy. Then there were some arrows, barbed and brilliant, shot off, with all the speed and splendour of fireworks, and the archaeologists, who spend their lives in verifying the birthplaces of nobodies, and estimate the value of a work of art by its date or its decay; at the art critics who always treat a picture as if it were a novel, and try and find out the plot; at dilettanti in general and amateurs in particular; and (O mea culpa!) at dress reformers most of all. ‘Did not Velasquez paint crinolines? What more do you want?’
Having thus made a holocaust of humanity, Mr. Whistler turned to nature, and in a few moments convicted her of the Crystal Palace, Bank holidays, and a general overcrowding of detail, both in omnibuses and in landscapes, and then, in a passage of singular beauty, not unlike one that occurs in Corot’s letters, spoke of the artistic value of dim dawns and dusks, when the mean facts of life are lost in exquisite and evanescent effects, when common things are touched with mystery and transfigured with beauty, when the warehouses become as palaces and the tall chimneys of the factory seem like campaniles in the silver air.
Finally, after making a strong protest against anybody but a painter judging of painting, and a pathetic appeal to the audience not to be lured by the aesthetic movement into having beautiful things about them, Mr. Whistler concluded his lecture with a pretty passage about Fusiyama on a fan, and made his bow to an audience which he had succeeded in completely fascinating by his wit, his brilliant paradoxes, and, at times, his real eloquence. Of course, with regard to the value of beautiful surroundings I differ entirely from Mr. Whistler. 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 grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle. That an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l’horrible, is now a commonplace of the schools, the argot of the atelier, but I strongly deny that charming people should be condemned to live with magenta ottomans and Albert-blue curtains in their rooms in order that some painter may observe the side-lights on the one and the values of the other. Nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting. I say that only an artist is a judge of art; there is a wide difference. As long as a painter is a painter merely, he should not be allowed to talk of anything but mediums and megilp, and on those subjects should be compelled to hold his tongue; it is only when he becomes an artist that the secret laws of artistic creation are revealed to him. For there are not many arts, but one art merely—poem, picture and Parthenon, sonnet and statue— all are in their essence the same, and he who knows one knows all. But the poet is the supreme artist, for he is the master of colour and of form, and the real musician besides, and is lord over all life and all arts; and so to the poet beyond all others are these mysteries known; to Edgar Allan Poe and to Baudelaire, not to Benjamin West and Paul Delaroche. However, I should not enjoy anybody else’s lectures unless in a few points I disagreed with them, and Mr. Whistler’s lecture last night was, like everything that he does, a masterpiece. Not merely for its clever satire and amusing jests will it be remembered, but for the pure and perfect beauty of many of its passages—passages delivered with an earnestness which seemed to amaze those who had looked on Mr. Whistler as a master of persiflage merely, and had not known him as we do, as a master of painting also. For that he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.