Readings from English Literature [antikvár]

Oscar Wilde was the foimder oí the aesthetic 1 movement in English literature. Aestheticísm was an attitűdé2 to art as well as to lile. On the whole aestheticísm was an expression of the crisis of bourgeois values, both artistic and morál. But at the same time aestheticísm was a rebeliion against the hideous3 conditions and tastes and conventional4 ait of the time. Such an attitűdé appealed greatly to Wilde, who becarne leader of the English aesthetic school. Follo-wing the French aestheticists whose strong influence he experienced, Oscar Wilde proclaimed "art for art's sale" as the motto5 of this school. The exponents6 of the aesthetic school claimed the supre-macy 7 of art over life. Wilde used to say: "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life. Literature anticipates8 life. It doesn't copy it, but moulds 9 it to its purpose." Wilde had a falsé understanding of the proper aim of art. For him beauty was the supreme pleasure of life. The only aim of art, according to Wilde, was to create beauty. So he defined art as a kind of lying (the teliing of beautiful untrue tliings) and the artist as a liar, whose purpose was "to charm, to delight, to give pleasure". Wilde failed to see that art is called to serve life, that life and life only gives birth to art. Wilde didn't believe that art should influence and improve morals. "There is no such things as a morál book or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all AlII art is quite useless," he savs in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. Thus there are many falsé points in Wrilde's aesthetic theory. But whatever he wrote about the independence of art from life, his own art as well as his theory was the product of life, of its ugly and hideous conditions. Wilde placed literature before all the other arts. Following his theory that the artist's aim is to create beauty, Wilde paid the great-est attention to style in his writing. For him words had in them-selves, and apart írom their meaning a beauty and value of their own. That is why he was so particular about his choice of words. Yet we must recognize that from the point of view of style his writing is perfect. We cannot help admiring it when we read his fairy tales. There is one interesting thing about these tales. Though Wilde tried to separate art from life, life does penetrate into them. For all Oscar Wilde's theories, his fairy tales are of ethical 10 value too. As he telis his beautiful untrue tales, we realize that he values the beauty of good sayings and doings. His heroes even give up their beauty for the sake of good doings as the happy prince or the star child do. And whenever the author wishes to honour virtue, he honours it with beauty. Thus one can see that Wilde's practice often diífers from his theory. One can trace the same inconsequence of Wilde while studying the növel The Picture of Dorian Gray. When the book appeared in 1891, press comments described it as a dangerously immoral and poisonous book. Readers found in the book something quite alien 11 to their conventional expectations, as Wilde had shifted12 the ap-proved viewpoints and even more he had turnéd them inside out. In the preíace to the book Wilde declared his aesthetic principies which he meant his book to prove. Wilde the writer, however often refutes 13 Wilde the theorist. "To reveal 14 art and to conceal 15 the artist js art's aim," Wilde says. Yet one can easily see that there is rnuch of Wilde himself .in his book, which reveals both his strength and his weak-