The Intentional Strategy in Oscar Wilde's Dialogues

11 THE INTENTIONAL STRATEGY In Oscar Wilde's Dialogues By J.D. Thomas (Rice University) Midway in the second part of "The Critic As Artist," the respondent Ernest makes a clever feint that forces Gilbert, as raisonneur, into a theoretical defense of dialogue as a medium of criticism.^ With typical paradox, Gilbert, proponent of critical impressionism, has denied Ernest's opinion that "the greatest work is objective always, objective and impersonal " (p. 189). GILBERT. The difference between objective and subjective work is one of external form merely. It is accidental, not essential. All artistic creation is absolutely subjective. . . . Nay, I would say that the more objective a creation appears to be, the more subjective it really is. . . . Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth, (pp. 189-91) Ernest's rejoinder might well have devastated a less clever dialectician than Gilbert. ERNEST. The critic, then, being limited to the subjective form, will necessarily be less able fully to express himself than the artist, who has always at his disposal the forms that are impersonal and objective, (p. 191) Gilbert meets the lunge with parry and riposte. Impressionistic criticism, he contends, is kept honest by its very relativism , its negation of the permanent or absolute: ". . .we are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent. . . . Criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing." (pp. 191-92) Positively, he goes on to argue, criticism has at its disposal the poetic, narrative, and dramatic forms of creative literature. In particular. Dialogue, certainly, . . . can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression. By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself , and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things[,] gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller 12 completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance. (PP. 193-94) Just here, with one quick thrust, Ernest comes close to deflating Gilbert's bombast: ERNEST. By its means, too, he can invent an imaginary antagonist, and convert him when he chooses by some absurdly sophistical argument, (p. 194) Ernest, however, does not follow up his advantage. Gilbert, as always, recovers with nimble footwork: GILBERT. Ah! it is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself. To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one's own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods, (p. 194) And so the very palpable hit is reduced to a confessed touch a light acknowledgment of the author's managed dialectic. Nevertheless, the shrewdness of Ernest's responses, as illustrated , show that Oscar Wilde did not cradely set up a straw interlocutor to be bowled over by "some absurdly sophistical argument" mouthed by a wooden authorial spokesman. Actually, the charge would lie with more plausibility against the shorter and slightly earlier dialogue, "The Decay of Lying,"2 though even there not with real Justice. The speakers of "The Decay of Lying" were whimsically assigned the names of Wilde's two boys, with the younger Vivian (in real life, Vyvyan Wilde, afterward Vyvyan Holland), who was three years old when the dialogue was written, cast as raisonneur ; and Cyril, the elder brother by seventeen months, as respondent. Prom these identifications arises some pleasant subterranean humor, as when Vivian accuses Cyril of being "too fond of simple pleasures" and warns him that he is "a little too old" for The Tired Hedonists, a club to which Vivian himself belongs and for whose Journal he is writing an essay entitled "The Decay of Lying." (pp. 7-8) Thus, in place of pure dialogue like "The Critic As Artist," their conversation is a...