Constructing Artist and Critic Between J. M. Whistler and Oscar Wilde: "In the best days of art there were no art-critics"

Constructing Artist and Critic Between J. M. Whistler and Oscar Wilde: "In the best days of art there were no art-critics" Anne Bruder University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill IN JUNE 1888 Oscar Wilde sent a copy of his recently published collection of stories The Happy Prince and Other Tales to his old teacher John Ruskin. With the collection he penned the following note of praise: It was a great pleasure to me to meet you again: the dearest memories of my Oxford days are my walks and talks with you, and from you I learned nothing but what was good. How else could it be? There is in you something of prophet, of priest, and of poet, and to you the gods gave eloquence such as they have given to none other, so that your message might come to us with the fire of passion, and the marvel of music, making the deaf to hear, and the blind to see.1 Among other tales, this collection contains "The Remarkable Rocket," Wilde's satirical tale of a personified toy rocket whose ego is so immense that he believes his "setting off" is the cause of a royal celebration, neglecting to see that instead the Prince's marriage is the cause of the communal excitement, and his use only a mere footnote to the party. When the Rocket begins an exhortation on his superiority to the other fireworks and his importance to the future of the Prince and Princess, he pathetically begins to weep, and thus destroys his ability to be ignited. His fuse wet, he gets tossed onto a trash heap where uninterested children, who do not even watch the explosion, set him off as they walk away. And while the narrator tells us, "But nobody saw him," the Rocket dies swearing, "I knew I should create a great sensation."2 The placement of this tale in Wilde's oeuvre and his gifting it to Ruskin becomes particularly relevant to this article. "The Remarkable Rocket" of 1888 was almost certainly an allegorical rendering of his former friend and famous egotist J. M. Whistler. By the time of this pub161 ELT 47 : 2 2004 lication, Wilde had detached himself from the chains of Whistler's authority, and in his gift to Ruskin he asserted his symbolic return to the master's school of thought. That Wilde remained ever uncomfortable about Whistler's influence, and tried routinely to exorcise his impact, speaks to Wilde's struggle to reconcile the artistically opposing forces in his life.3 Twenty years the senior, Whistler insisted on playing master to the young dandy Wilde, and it is in this association that we are able to understand the evolving relationship between artist and critic during modernism's—and British democracy's—nascence. At this historical moment, when the growing bourgeois public made the critic even more important in directing the art economy, Whistler and Wilde were working out the ramifications of this change in their personal relationship. Whistler resisted and resented the critic's—and the public's—role in sustaining his art. Wilde, however, proved decidedly more fickle, fluctuating between a Whistlerian and a Ruskinian philosophy of art. Indeed, the morphing dynamic between Wilde and Whistler reflects the unfolding conflict amongst critic, art, artist, and public in the Victorian period. Here we are able to refract the aesthetic moment and the theoretical clash between the artist's self-understood project and the critic's need to democratize art, to make it understood by the new mass public, through the relationship between these two men.4 ♦ ♦ ♦ Beginning this study with the Whistler versus Ruskin trial is particularly useful, for in it we best see Whistler's vociferous and antidemocratic attacks on both the critic and the public and the influence of this position on Wilde's early thinking. In April 1877, Oscar Wilde modestly initiated his career as critic when he reviewed the opening show of the Grosvenor Gallery for the Dublin University Magazine.5 His review exemplifies his early attitudes toward the coming of modernism, views clearly derived from Ruskin. Wilde elevates that which represents nature most clearly to the highest position of excellence ("It...