ABSTRACT
In his dialogue on ‘The Critic as Artist’, Mr. Oscar Wilde relates what he calls the legend of the Remorseful Academician-an expression which curiously illustrates his bent towards paradox, since the natural epithet for an Academician is clearly not ‘remorseful’ but ‘impenitent’. ‘It seems that a lady once gravely asked the remorseful Academician if his celebrated picture of “A Spring Day at Whiteley’s”, or “Waiting for the Last Omnibus”, or some subject of that kind, was all painted by hand.’ ‘And was it?’ interjects the second speaker. A similar question forces itself to out lips as we wander through Mr. Wilde’s Paradise of Dainty Paradoxes. Are they all hand-made, these quaint perversions of the obvious? Are they not turned out by machinery at so much the gross? May we not suspect them to be the result of a facile formula, a process of word-shuffling, rather than of genuine insight into the facts of art and life? M. Jules Lemaître has given an ingenious recipe-‘Every Man his own Larochefoucauld’ he might have called it-by which the veriest dullard can concoct epigrammatic maxims in any quantity. In the same way, it should not be difficult to lay down a set of rules-under the rubric ‘Every’ Arry his own Oscar’—by means of which the merest penny-aliner should be able to épater le bourgeois1 with all the sweet unreasonableness of our latter-day Sage of Chelsea. For instance you take two interlocutors, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, you make one of them enunciate a truism, such as ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ and then you set the other to prove in fifteen florid pages that fine words are the only possible butter for the parsnips of life, nay that parsnips have no right to exist save as an occasion and excuse for fine words, and that, in sum, the Artist regards the whole Universe as his Parsnip, created by the something not ourselves that makes for Art, to the single end that that Art should butter it. Of course this does not exhaust Mr. Wilde’s method. He has many other devices for the production of paradox, some of them even simpler. Indeed it is in the simplicity of his technique that his art is truly great. He has long ago recognized that, to the class of readers among whom his intellectual lot is cast, paradox is the subtlest form of flattery. Any fool can talk plain sense and understand it, but it needs a quite superior order of intelligence to disguise sense as nonsense and to see through the disguise. Take, for example, the assertion that Nature imitates Art, and that this is ‘the one thing that keeps her in touch with civilized man’—an amplification, by the way, of Mr. Whistler’s reluctant admission that ‘Nature’s creeping up’. The writer who addresses us in such terms pays us the compliment of assuming our familiarity with a coteric-speech-not to say a jargon-current only on the highest heights of culture. If we read with comprehension, we feel ourselves of the initiated; and even if our comprehension be none of the clearest, the occasional detonation of an epigrammatic paradox serves, like a fog-signal, to keep us awake and attent. But in truth Mr. Wilde’s perversities are none of them very baffling. He writes so well, that from page to page he may be called lucid, even if his carelessness of consistency prove somewhat bewildering in the long run. Whatever else it may be, his book is entertaining. He has every qualification for becoming a popular Pater.
