Biblioklept

CYRIL.  …I want you to tell me briefly the doctrines of the new aesthetics.

VIVIAN.  Briefly, then, they are these.  Art never expresses anything but itself.  It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.  It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith.  So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.  Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps, and revives some antique form, as happened in the archaistic movement of late Greek Art, and in the pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day.  At other times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to understand, to appreciate and to enjoy.  In no case does it reproduce its age.  To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great mistake that all historians commit.

The second doctrine is this.  All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.  Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions.  The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything.  As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter.  To us, who live in the nineteenth century, any century is a suitable subject for art except our own.  The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us.  It is, to have the pleasure of quoting myself, exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are so suitable a motive for a tragedy.  Besides, it is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.  M. Zola sits down to give us a picture of the Second Empire.  Who cares for the Second Empire now?  It is out of date.  Life goes faster than Realism, but Romanticism is always in front of Life.

The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.  This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.  It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.

It follows, as a corollary from this, that external Nature also imitates Art.  The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings.  This is the secret of Nature’s charm, as well as the explanation of Nature’s weakness.

The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.  But of this I think I have spoken at sufficient length.  And now let us go out on the terrace, where ‘droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,’ while the evening star ‘washes the dusk with silver.’  At twilight nature becomes a wonderfully suggestive effect, and is not without loveliness, though perhaps its chief use is to illustrate quotations from the poets.  Come!  We have talked long enough.

From “The Decay of Lying” by Oscar Wilde.