Discrediting One'w Own Best Practice: Oscar Wilde as a Critic and Critical Theorist

Abstract

Oscar Wilde is generally conceived as a dandy, a sort of court jester to the Philistine Victorian middle class he made a great pretense of despising. And his downfall is attributed to sheer folly. There is no denying that he was a heavily flawed person, that he craved attention and tried to be a permanent sensation. But there is another side of him. The book reviews he wrote in his late twenties and early thirties reveal him to be a scholar with impressive erudition, intellectual honesty, penetrating insight, judicious moral and aesthetic principles, and a thorough humanist. Contrary to what we might expect, and contrary to his later avowed critical theories, the values he looked for in authors were honesty, integrity, sincerity and a sense of social mission; from books he demanded rightness and coherence of the whole, purity and justice of touch, freedom from affectation, and harmony of form and matter. But when he later came to theorize on the nature of criticism and the job of the critic he gave critics unlimited freedom (in fact license) to use the work of art simply as a material for self-display. He was partly in jest, of course, but he was driven to uttering frenetic paradoxes under the stress of his disorderly private affairs. This paper tried to expose the contradictions between Wilde the critical practitioner and Wilde the critical theorist and to speculate on the causes that made Wilde, despite his noble instincts and genuine wish for mankind's regeneration, go back on his own high ideals and best principles and discredit his own excellent practices. He was too extreme and peculiar a case for his life to be an object lesson for all, but it would be worthwhile to note the fine criticisms he wrote and what prevented him from embodying as a writer the ideals that inspired him as a critic.