TERM PAPER ON
THE CRITIC AS ARTIST
BY
OSCAR WILDE
KRISHNAVENI
U
LCL051507
“Art is the only serious thing in
the world. And the artist is the only person who is never serious.” – Oscar
Wilde
In
recent years, theory and criticism have grown more prominent in literary and
cultural studies. The history of criticism and theory mostly provide the
general framework for moulding literature and culture. The issue of
interpretation is a major purpose in the field of criticism and theory. Those
who think critically has a chance to engage various theories of reading and to
formulate their own' views.
The history of theory and criticism usually begin
with the classical theorists. Their influence on its development has continued
up to the present. Ranging from the duration of a millennium, medieval theory
and criticism contain various things related to the practices of reading and
interpretation, to the theory of language, and use of literature. While
Renaissance and neoclassical literary theory and criticism show a different
interest in Greek and Latin classics, they also manifest a new concern with
vernacular languages and national literature. Romantic theory and criticism,
emphasis on the individual led to an unprecedented focus on poetry as the personal
expression of the poet.
The changing social, political, and economic conditions around encouraged many
thinkers to analyse literary and cultural history. Later many forms of
criticism came up in the field of literary criticism.
Oscar Wilde was a literary critic of the twentieth
century. He did not favour orthodoxy and social convention. He was a prominent
figure and leader of the aesthetic movement. In this paper a brief description
about Wilde and his essay “The Critic as Artist is given.
OSCAR
WILDE
(1854 – 1900)
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland. His father
was a surgeon and respected author; his mother also wrote both verse and prose.
He was educated in classics at Trinity College, Dublin. Wilde won a fellowship
to Magdalen College, Oxford University. There he was influenced by the eminent
art historian John Buskin, Walter Pater, English poets and painters. When Wilde
was young, he began to lead his life as if it were a work of art, to be crafted,
cultivated, and made to sparkle.
He defied orthodoxy and social convention. In 1881
at his own expense, Wilde
published his first book, Poems; that reflects the influence of Wilde's
reading of John Keats,
Algernon
Swinburne, Pater and the Pre-Raphaelites.Wilde
later became a leader of the
aesthetic
Movement, which rallied around the dictum" of "art for art’s sake”. In
the 1890s, Wilde wrote The Picture
of Dorian Gray which appeared
first in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890. The book revised and expanded by
six chapters, was published in 1891. It narrates the story of a handsome young
man who seems not to age but whose portrait becomes aged and ugly over time,
the sign of his own corruption.
In Intentions (1891), an important collection
of essays, Wilde presented his keen views on literature, art and criticism; and in Collected
Poems (l892), he gathered his verse. Actually Wilde thought to concentrate
his literary career in poetry, but his, greatest success was as a comic and satiric dramatist.
His plays include Lady Windemere's Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance
(1893.);
An Ideal Husband
(1895);
and, above all, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which describes
the courtships and betrothals of two
young men-about-town who are leading double lives.
Wilde also wrote the historical tragedies The
Duchess of Padua (1892) and Salome. Wilde was deeply serious and
morally earnest. He was arrested for violating the law forbidding
"Indecencies between grown-up men, in public or private." Wilde was found
guilty and sentenced to two years of imprisonment at hard labour. Wilde spent
the rest of his life as an exile in Europe, recovering enough focus as a writer
to tell of his painful prison experiences in The Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898). He died in Paris in November 1900, having remarked, “if I were to
survive into the twentieth century, it would be more than the English people
could bear..!'.
Oscar Wilde was known for his wits, dazzling skills
in conversation, and scandalous homosexual behaviour. Wilde was more than a
brilliant-and tragic-cultural personality. He was a gifted wonderful entertainer and
disquieting writer, the author of an impressive body of work that includes the
superb comedy The Importance of Being Earnest, the haunting novel
'The Picture of Dorian Gray, and sharp, suggestive critical essays.
In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray,
Wilde finds position on art and morality in a sequence of aphorisms. In Wilde’s
view authentic writers concern themselves with style and form, with the
cleverly handling of the artistic medium and the shaping of beautiful works.
Morality is not a matter of an artist's or writer's contribution, it instead
rests in how well he or she has executed an aesthetic task. Wilde revises
Arnold's statement that critics should be devoted to the best that has been
thought and said by maintaining that the best is the most beautiful, whose
nature is ultimately formal and stylistic rather than ethical. He at last makes
it a point that all art is quite useless.
THE
CRITIC AS ARTIST
The
Critic as Artist is one of the essays that is included in
Wilde’s only book Intentions (1891).
Wilde’s book of criticism is upon the ideas given by Mathew Arnold and Walter
Pater. The Critic as Artist is a
written dialogue between two friends Ernest and Gilbert divided into two parts.
Ernest asks questions to Gilbert; and he becomes Wilde’s spokesperson for his
philosophy of criticism.
The first part of the essay is subtitled as “With
some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing” and the second part is
subtitled as “With some remarks upon the importance of discussing everything.”
The essay is interested in expanding and refining the role of critic which was
put forward by Arnold.
It is a dialogue on the nature of and relationship
between, the arts and criticism. His spokesperson Gilbert celebrates criticism
in its own rights and also asserts and praises its superiority over creative or
primary literary and artistic work. All through the essay, Wilde give
importance and favours style, form and self conscious craft, in an anti
romantic way and he ignores or do not favour inspiration. He does not favour
history as well because of the constraints that it imposes on individual expression.
Emerson too has such kind of opinion on history. The details of history
according to Gilbert are always weary some. Criticism is more fascinating than
history because it is concern with oneself.
For Wilde it does not matter whether the creative
critic is faithful to the work of art: pre size statements about an aesthetic
object or artist’s intentions is infinite than the critical essays status as an
independent work of art. Wilde qualifies and complicates this stand; for
instance, in his references to Shakespeare he admits that historical study is
important after all but he continues to emphasise that the highest criticism,
being the purest form of personal impression, is, in its way, more creative
than creation.
Criticism, for Wilde, has no interest in discovering
the true intentions of the artist that is shallow endeavour; rather, Criticism
must use the work of art as a pallet upon which to read “the record of one’s
own soul”. For him work of art is not expressive but impressive and the
Criticism is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own
secret and not the secret of another. Wilde suggests that there were critical
ages that was not been creative. Wilde’s concept of beauty echoes and resembles
that of Kant. Kant says that the beautiful is a symbol of the morally good.
Wilde has same opinion as that of Kant that beauty is the symbol of symbols.
Gilbert in the first part of the dialogue says that
Greeks were in fact the best critics of all in that they embodied the “Critical
spirit” in their arts. Critical spirit that crucially innovates, it is not the
moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age. It is the critical
spirit that rewrites history showing a new way of understanding life. Critic
and what is traditionally understood as an artist are equivalent, and differ
only in material which inspires their works. For Gilbert criticism is the
highest art because critic forms a creation within a creation and so it is
removed from the problems and trap of realistic. For him music lacks the
subject matter, it can never reveal its ultimate secret.
According to Gilbert historical context is important
to piece of art but critic ought to make the work of art even more mysterious,
in order to multiply emotion. From an artistic point of view, life is a failure
because it is sordid, ugly and messy in its form. Art offers a way of
experiencing great number of exquisite emotion without the mess of life – art
can teach us how to escape from experience and realise the experience of those
who are greater than we are. According to Gilbert morals come from the
society’s code of ethics, which seems to be limited and tends to prevent human
individual from the important act of contemplation.
Gilbert rejects Ernest view that art is fair,
rational or sincere, as these are the terms of moralistic and narrow universe.
The aesthetic universe that Gilbert concerns is not one that does not care
about life or society rather it seeks to reform society through providing
critical spirit in each of its member. Art is out of the reach of morals; it
always focuses on eternal truths. Critical spirit perfects culture and through
we reach best that is known and thought in the world. Gilbert proclaims that it
is the mission of aesthetic movement to lure people to contemplate, to think
innovative and not to try to copy the world. Intellectual criticism will bind
Europe together far closer than that of sentimentalist.
Wilde cannot be considered fully as an original
thinker. The concept of “Art for art’s sake” was originally proposed by
Gautier, in the preface “Mademoiselle de Maupin” (1835) where he says: things
are beautiful in inverse proportion to their usefulness. Sometimes Wilde’s
cool, canny ironies can be felt as predictable, produced on cue and according
to formula.
Wilde’s epigrams and arguments at their best are
compelling and in recent years his life has drawn equal interest. Literary
critics and theorists and scholarly in gender gay and lesbian studies have
since the 1980s devoted countless books and essay’s to Wilde’s writings and
extraordinary and aggrieved life. Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom praised him
extravagantly; Frye portrayed Wilde as a theorist of imagination equal in
significance to the revolutionary painter. Like Blake, and later Romantics
Shelley and Emerson, Wilde contends that great writers and artists give
structure to life through the power of their Enlightenment vision. For him, the
terms and values of art themselves constitute life. The result of critical
inquiry is not truth, but an interpretation- or rather a series of his mis-
interpretations, of misreading, since we d not possess an objectively known
reality with which we could appraise and firmly decide among the conflicting
views.
Wilde lacks tone of grim intensity but his elegant articulated
ideas imply the consequences that Nietzsche and later authors have expressed.
Nietzsche in “The Will to Power” says that “It is our needs that interpret the
world; our drives and their For and Against. Every drive is a kind of lust of
rule; each one has its perspective that it would like to compel all the other
drive to accept as a norm.”
The Critic as Artist is an essay by Oscar Wilde, which has the most extensive
views of his aesthetic philosophy. A dialogue which is divided into two parts ,
which can be considered as longest one included in Wilde’s collection of essays titled Intentions published in May 1891. The Critic as Artist is a significantly revised version of
articles that first appeared in the July and September issues of the 19th
century originally titled as The True Function and Value of Criticism. Leading
voice Gilbert and Ernest of the essay suggests ideas for Gilbert to reject.
The essay makes a clear cut distinction between fine art
and criticism put forward by artist and critic such as Mathew Arnold the only critical faculty enables any
artistic creation at all, while criticism is independent of the object it
criticises and not necessarily subject to it. The essay wins contemplative life
to the life of action. Gilbert opines that, scientific principle of heredity
portrays we are not so free; never have more illusions than when we try to behave
with some conscious aim in mind. Critical contemplation is guided by conscious
aesthetic sense as well as by the soul. The soul is wiser than we are, it is
the concentrated racial experience brought to light by the imagination.
Criticism is above reason, sincerity and fairness is subjective. It is more to
criticism than to creation that future belongs as its subject matter and the
need to impose form on chaos gradually increases. It is criticism rather than
emotional sympathies, abstract ethics or commercial advantages that would make
us cosmopolitan and serve as the basis of peace.
Wilde’s theory, which
is made certain by the title itself, looks to equate the critic of a work of
art to the creator of that work of art, rendering the critic’s artistic
capabilities as important as the artist’s, sometimes even more so. Wilde’s
perspective is simple, and, in many cases, still relevant today. Wilde
displays his vast knowledge of art past and present. He refers to the
literature, poems, and philosophy with so much detail and comprehension, that
his pathos is never in question.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Habib, M.A.R. Literary
Criticism from Plato to Present An Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011. Print.
B. Leitch, Vincent. The Norton Anthology of
Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2001.
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