Oscar Wilde, His Criticism and His Critics

181 OSCAR WILDE, HIS CRITICISM AND HIS CRITICS By Bruce Bashford (SUNY at Stony Brook) If you ask colleagues to name some of the valuable treatments of Oscar Wilde's criticism, you are likely to "be told there aren't any. This response unjustly "belittles several commentators on Wilde, "but considered in relation to Wilde's achievement, the amount of useful, or at least accurate work on his criticism is rather small.1 It is difficult to say precisely why this is so, hut several reasons suggest themselves. Wilde's famous remark to Gide about putting his genius in his life and only his talent in his works has seemed a just appraisal to many scholars! accordingly they have focused on the life and treated the works as a collection of witty epigraphs for chapters in the biography. The main critical works, "The Decay of Lying" and "The Critic as Artist," hardly resist such treatment. Arch and paradoxical, they do not look like serious discussions of criticism. Furthermore , their doctrine is suspicious. Literary theory in our time has been largely concerned with procedures for analyzing "the text.itself," and so it is difficult for us to believe that someone whose avowed aim is "to see the object in itself as it really is not" can be doing anything systematic at all. In this brief paper, I will speak to this last misgiving as a way of pointing toward a general re-evaluation of Wilde's criticism . I want to show that Wilde elaborates a subjectivist perspective into a theory of criticism! he gives a coherent and in its own terms comprehensive view of what criticism is. The term "subjectivist" has many sensesi in using it to describe Wilde's critical perspective, I am referring to his belief that form in art must always be understood in relation to the individual who perceives or creates that form. Wilde holds a strong or extreme version of this doctrine ·, that is, he does not merely believe that different people see things slightly differently - a weak versions he believes that forms have no existence independent of the individuals who create or perceive them. Among the many signs of this doctrine in his work are his attitudes toward nature and public opinion. Rejecting the notion that artists copy forms in the natural world, he complains of "Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her •extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition."2 And he predicts! "Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything" (DL 316)· Forms are always someone's forms; for Wilde, the-phrase "public vision" contradicts itself. I realize that explaining the sense in which Wilde was a subjectivist critic by referring to his ideas on form might sound odd! contemporary critics are likely to assume subjectivism is incompatible with an interest in form. But Wilde is, in fact, both a subjectivist and a formalist. The "basis of life," he claims, "is simply the desire for expression, and 182 Art is always presenting various forms through which the expression can be attained" (DL 311). It is important to fix the relation between expression and form, for it is the basic principle of Wilde's criticism. His rejection of the subjective /objective distinction is helpful on the point! "those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves, not as they thought they were, but as they thought they were not, and by such thinking came in strange manner, though but for a moment, really so to be." And in the same passage! "The objective form is the most subjective in matter. Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" (CA 389). The distinction breaks down because the subjective and the objective are linked in a reciprocal, or better perhaps, reflexive relation. The artist's subjective desire for expression issues in...