ABSTRACT
Nothing is easier than acquiescence in Wilde’s dictum that the drama is the meeting place of art and life. And yet nowhere more clearly than in Wilde’s own plays do we find the purposed divorce of art from life. It was his fundamental distinction, in the rôle of critic as artist, to trace with admirable clarity the line of demarcation between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality. The methods of Zola and the Naturalistic school always drew his keenest critical thrusts; and the greatest heresy, in his opinion, was the doctrine that art consists in holding up the kodak to nature. He was even so reactionary as to assert that the only real people are the people who never existed. The view of Stendhal, that fiction is un miroir qui se promène sur la grande route,1 found as little favor in his eyes as the doctrine of Pinero that the dramatists are the brief and abstract chronometers of the time. The function of the artist, in his larger view, is to invent, not to chronicle; and he even went so far as to say that if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages, he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies. To the charge that the people in his stories were ‘mere catchpenny revelations of the nonexistent,’ he unblushingly retorted: ‘Life by its realism is always spoiling the subject matter of art. The supreme pleasure in literature is to realize the non-existent!’
