ABSTRACT
In Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Decay of Lying’, published in Nineteenth Century in January 1889, nine months before the suicide of Amy Levy, Vivian remarks,
If we take nature to mean natural simple instinct as opposed to self-conscious culture, the work produced under this influence is always old-fashioned, antiquated, and out of date. If, on the other hand, we regard nature as the collection of phenomena external to man, people only discover in her what they bring to her. She has no suggestions of her own. Wordsworth went to the lakes, but he was never a lake poet. He found in stones the sermons he had already hidden there. He went moralising about the district, but his good work was produced when he returned, not to nature but to poetry. 1
