Building a Bulwark Against Despair: "The Critic as Artist"

Building a Bulwark Against Despair "The Critic as Artist" WILLIAM E. BUCKLER New York University "YOU MUST NOT BE FRIGHTENED of words, Ernest," says Gilbert, as he rejects fairness, rationality, and sincerity as "qualities that should characterise the true critic." Fairness he equates with a lack of positive critical values, rationality with one of the two ways of disliking art, and sincerity with a critical monism that, especially in large doses, is "absolutely fatal" to criticism.1 Such a willful use of language could be maddening if one took it literally; having reduced words to something very like a quibble, the speaker pushes argument to the brink of sophistry. And yet, just how to take the protagonist—how seriously, seriously in what sense—is one of the most intriguing aspects of "The Critic as Artist," contributing largely to the imaginative elevation and critical excitement the work provides. "The Critic as Artist" was the last, the longest, and the most critically ambitious of Wilde's formal dialogues. Though a dialogic or dialectical impulse continued to monitor the manner of all his works, he did not again use the form Plato had found a necessity for the expression of his sense of how the human mind seeks enlightenment —what is called Plato's "theory of ideas."2 Wilde expressed great faith in the indispensable function of form in the creative process: as language was the parent of thought, form was the parent of artistic creation. Thus the critical student of Wilde needs to be careful to acknowledge fully the impact the form he uses has on his individual works and the difference it makes as to how one reads them. Gilbert in "The Critic as Artist," for example, is an imaginary character with his own temperament, taste, and talents placed in a certain relationship to life and to another imaginary character. Out of that place, time, and combination of personalities, there emerges a drama of attitudes that is highly entertaining and attractive to people for whom a spirited, well-focused, informed conversation on a subject requiring the subtlest kinds of discrimination is one of the most civilized and civilizing of human activities. Though the reader may reasonably conclude that Wilde is sympathetic to many of the positions Gilbert as the dominant persona takes, he is at no time justified 279 BUCKLER: Building a Bulwark Against Despair in equating the two, Wilde's chief sympathy being with Gilbert's right to reverse conventional wisdom on his subject and to have what he says considered on its intrinsic merits regardless of the unorthodox manner in which he re-writes orthodox points of view. If, as Wilde said at the end of "The Truth of Masks," "A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true,"3 it is only by such reversing and rewriting that we can have any hope of discovering even the practical truths of art. However, thus distinguishing between the author and his dramatic creation, though essential, is not enough. It supplies the distance from the author "in his own person" that allows him to be himself—the "mask" that enables him to "tell you the truth" (1045)—but it raises the subtler question of just what that truth is. Shakespeare, says Gilbert, "never speaks to us of himself in his plays," and therefore "his plays reveal him to us absolutely."4 Hamlet and Romeo came out of Shakespeare's soul and passion: "They were elements of his nature to which he gave visible form ... on that imaginative plane of art" where all things have a rich symbolic significance (1045). And as the artist puts the finest parts of himself into those characters about whom he cares most, so the highest criticism is "the record of one's own soul. ... It is the only civilised form of autobiography ," dealing as it does with "the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind" (1027). When the critic reaches his true goal of independent artistic creation, he is no mere imitator or interpreter of another artist's work. He is interested in the impression the work has made on him, certainly, but what he wants to express are the imaginative outreaches or...