Against Nature?: Science and Oscar Wilde

JOHN WILSON FOSTER Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde I Late and soon, W.B. Yeats identified science as a culprit standing in dangerous opposition to art and imagination. In 1897, in 'The Celtic Element in Literature,' he welcomed a widespread reaction 'against the rationalism of the eighteenth century' which was mingling 'with a reaction against the materialism of the nineteenth century,' a reaction he identified in literature as 'the symbolical movement." In 1900, he told Shaw in debate that Shaw belonged 'to a bygone generation - to the scientific epoch - and was now "reactionary.",2 Shaw was not amused. In 1921, the poet recalled his detestation of T.H. Huxley and the famous (Irish-born) physicist John Tyndall who had deprived him of 'the simpleminded religion' of his childhood.3 His 1934 essay, 'Louis Lambert,' put the nineteenth century's most famous scientist in the dock for 'what our instinct repudiates, Darwin's exaltation of accidental variations.'4 Given such sentiments, one detects approval in Yeats's 1936 remembrance of Lionel Johnson as a Rhymers' Club-man who asserted that 'science must be confined to the kitchen or the workshop, that it could discover nothing of importance,'s Ireland, Yeats believed, provided the most fertile and hospitable ground available for the counter-Renaissance and counter-Enlightenment. Science was particularly uncongenial as a way of engaging with Irish nature (landscape and its creatures), which is by turns magical, dreamlike, mysterious, spiritual, and symbolic, something inspiring local and national patriotism, subjective yet ancestral, most suitably expressed in poetry and art. Long after the Celtic Twilight (which promoted such an idea of Irish nature), Yeats's hostile attitude to science remained influential in Ireland. Of course, the,exclusion of science from received 'native' Irish culture antedates Yeats, but the poet and his literary movement copper-fast~ned it.6 Yeats's dislike of science, if it owed something to Matthew Arnold's notion of Celticism (which helped to sponsor the Twilight), also flourished in the midst of the aesthetic movement of the close of the century. We might, then, expect it to have owed a debt to his fellow Irishman, Oscar Wilde, whom Yeats first met at the house of the poet W.E. Henley in 1888. We can find in Richard EUmann's Eminent Domain (1967) some of Yeats's other intellectual and artistic debts to Wilde UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 63, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1993/4 SCIENCE AND OSCAR WILDE 329 eloquently tallied as borrowed ideas: the-superiority of the imagination (and 'lying') over reason and observation (and 'truth'); the inferiority of life beside art and the latter's capability of imposing its images upon the former, and life's imitation of art; the crucial significance for Western civilization of Hellenism, of 'the spirit that is Greek,' as Basil Hallward terms it in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890); the rejection of art as mere self-expression or mere fidelity to externalities.' Although we might wish to ascertain the precise extent of Yeats's reading of Wilde and keep in mind how easy it is to confuse influence with affinity (many late Victorian British writers, after all, fell under the sway of French Symbolism), we could, unsupervised,lengthen EUmann's tally. For example, Yeats was to explore in his verse dialogues, and systematize in his prose, Wilde's distinction in The Critic as Artist between the contemplative man and the man of action.8 Secondly, Wilde's elaboration of the pose became Yeats's theories of the mask and the antiself . Thirdly, if Wilde and Yeats shared the influence of Arnold, Wilde's acquaintance with the English poet's criticism predated Yeats's. It is true, of course, that by the time Wilde was endorsing Arnold's identification of the Celtic spirit in art Yeats was already steeping himself in Celticism.9 We cannot, then, claim Wilde's interest in Celticism as a fourth anticipation of Yeats - unless, that is, we broaden Celticism to include those attributes we would now regard as amounting to a damaging stereotype of the Celt as lazy, imaginative and unrealistic (and most certainly unscientific), a stereotype that Wilde toyed with and that flourished before Yeats...