cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Reauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban1 seeing his
own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of
Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
2. Peacocks, associated in classical mythology icate flavor. 'Chambertin': one of the finest wines with the goddess Juno {in Greek, Hera) because of Burgundy. she is said to have set in the bird's tail the eyes of 1. The character in Shakespeare's The Tempest hundred-eyed Argus, who died in her service. who is half-human, half- monster. 3. Small birds esteemed by epicures for their del
.
1 1698 / OSCAR WILDE
The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but
the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be
proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is
an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and Virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.
From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We
can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
1891
The Importance of Being Earnest Of the four stage comedies by Wilde, his last, The Importance of Being Earnest, is generally regarded as his masterpiece. It was first staged in February 1895 and was an immediate hit. Only one critic failed to find it delightful; curiously, this was Wilde's fellow playwright from Ireland, Bernard Shaw, who, though amused, found Wilde's wit 'hateful' and 'sinister,' and thought the play exhibited 'real degeneracy.' Despite Shaw's complaints, the first London production ran for eighty-six performances; but when Wilde was sentenced to prison, production ceased for several years. Shortly before his death it was revived in London and New York, and it has subsequently become a classic.
In its original version the play was in four acts. At the request of the stage producer, Wilde reduced it to three acts?the version almost always used in performances and
therefore the version reprinted here. A few of the notes in the text cite passages from
the four-act version.
The play was first published in 1899. Earlier, in an interview, Wilde had described his overall aim in writing it: 'It has as its philosophy . . . that we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.' Just before his death he remarked that although he was pleased with the 'bright and happy' tone and temper of his play, he wished it might have had a 'higher seriousness of intent.' Later critics have found this seriousness of intent in the play's deconstruction of Victorian moral and social values. Like another Victorian masterpiece of the absurd, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), The Importance of Being Earnest empties manners and morals of their underlying sense to create a nominalist world where earnest is not a quality of character but a name, where words, to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass (1871), mean what you choose them to mean, neither more nor less.
The literary ancestry of Wilde's play has been variously identified. In its witty wordplay and worldly attitudes it has been likened to comedies of the Restoration period
.
