It was Douglas’ father’s reaction to the whole affair that prompted the fateful court proceedings. Reportedly a dissolute, extravagant dandy, he was practically inseparable from Wilde until the latter’s arrest four years later. Douglas, the third son of the Marquess of Queensberry, was 16 years Wilde’s junior. It was an affair of the heart that would span years and continents, and would ultimately lead to Wilde’s very public downfall. Wilde (1854-1900) met Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas in the summer of 1891 and the two soon became lovers. His lover's father was disgusted by the liaison Three years following his release from prison, he would die, impoverished, in France. Convicted of gross indecency, he was sentenced to two years of hard labor in jail. In early 1895, the husband and father of two was at the height of his fame and success his play, Earnest, had debuted to great acclaim in February that year, making him the toast of London.īy the end of May, Wilde’s life would be turned upside down. Wilde, an Anglo-Irish playwright and bon vivant, was known for his acerbic wit and celebrated works, including Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest. The artist is a critic, for does he not also dominate nature with his subjectivity, which has already been shaped by art? 'The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind.With their heady brew of famous names, dirty secrets and Victorian moral outrage, it’s no wonder the court trials involving renowned playwright Oscar Wilde enthralled the general public during the final decade of the 19th century. For just as the great artists, from Homer to Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.' Art is secondary from the start. The critic only completes the work of repetition and combination begun by the artist: 'I would call criticism a creation within a creation. The critic, for Gilbert and Wilde (and Pater), is anything but a parasite on art. I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do now-adays, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.Īccording to Gilbert, the Greeks were in fact 'a nation of art-critics.' The critic is the one who filters art and literature through a sensibility and a prose style. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.' The ironist Gilbert, who speaks for Wilde, contradicts him: In Wilde's dialogue of 1890, 'The True Function and Value of Criticism,' the straight man Ernest contends that 'the Greeks had no art-critics': 'By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. Wilde identified the destination of Fiedler's and Hildebrand's doctrines, for once art is no longer evaluated by comparison to nature, there are no limits to the critic's power to shape the evolution of art. Wilde is deceptive: his gifts for paradox and aphorism and the absence of philosophical reference points mask the radicality of his thought. “The power of the mind over reality was expressed in a different way by Oscar Wilde, who called Pater's Studies in the Renaissance his 'golden book' and yet did not himself write poetic art criticism. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.”ĭer Sozialismus und die Seele des Menschen He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. ![]() A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. And, above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. After all, even in prison, a man can be quite free. That would be to fall to the same low level. ![]() Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them.
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