Mr. Wilde's Intentions

Mr. Wilde's Intentions by Agnes Repplier

"Mr. Wilde's Intentions" is an essay by Agnes Repplier offering a critical appreciation of Oscar Wilde's 1891 collection of essays titled *Intentions*, which contains four pieces: "The Decay of Lying," "The Critic as Artist," "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," and "The Truth of Masks." Repplier opens by situating Wilde against the prevailing literary climate of her day, which she characterizes as dominated by a grim, arid realism and a relentless earnestness that has drained fiction of pleasure and delight. Into this gray atmosphere, she presents Wilde as a singular and refreshing voice, languid, witty, musical, and philosophically distinct from the dominant modes of thought. She acknowledges that Wilde is not widely listened to, partly because his philosophy is alien to contemporary habits of mind and partly because his paradoxical and playful manner of expression prevents many readers from taking him seriously. Repplier herself clearly does take him seriously and sets out to demonstrate why. She dispenses quickly with the two essays she considers lesser. "The Truth of Masks," a discussion of Shakespearean stagecraft and costume, she dismisses as a somewhat trivial paper included chiefly to fill out the volume. "Pen, Pencil, and Poison," Wilde's study of the artist and poisoner Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, she finds lacking in sincerity. She notes that Wilde plays with his subject much as Wainewright himself played with crime, and detects a discordant element of vulgarity in the attempt to lend an artistic glamour to murderous conduct. She concedes that the essay contains brilliant passages and at least one memorable sentence, but she does not linger on it. The bulk of Repplier's attention and admiration is directed at the two major essays. She finds "The Decay of Lying," reprinted from *The Nineteenth Century*, the most personally satisfying piece in the collection. Structured as a Socratic dialogue, it argues that art is absolutely independent of nature and reality, that it is nourished by imagination rather than by faithful observation, and that lying, in the sense of creative fancy, is the highest of the arts. Repplier endorses this argument with enthusiasm. She shares Wilde's contempt for the doctrine that art should function as a photographic mirror of unlovely life, and she regards his defense of art's autonomy as a great truth that her age is rapidly losing sight of. She quotes at length and with evident delight his remarks on the serious virtues of the age, his lament for young men of natural gifts for exaggeration who fall into careless habits of accuracy, and his survey of history and fiction with a view to celebrating those writers who kept facts in their proper subordinate position or excluded them altogether on grounds of dullness. "The Critic as Artist," the longest and most philosophically ambitious essay in the collection, receives respectful treatment from Repplier, though she finds it affords Wilde less room for his wit and perhaps too much room for his erudition. The essay argues that criticism is itself a creative act, that the highest criticism brings to a work of art something the work does not contain, and that self-culture and contemplative discernment are more valuable to civilization than the modern mania for educating and lecturing others. Repplier agrees strongly with this latter point and takes the opportunity to lament the triumph of mediocrity she sees spreading through her own era, in which everyone is busy teaching and no one has time to learn. She finds Wilde's argument for the development of the individual as the true basis of the development of the race to be much neglected and entirely sound. Throughout, Repplier defends Wilde against the charge that his paradoxes and playfulness render him unserious. She insists that beneath the wit and the languid irony lie genuine and important ideas about art, beauty, imagination, and the life of the mind, ideas that her contemporaries are too impatient or too literal-minded to receive. Her essay is at once a critical assessment of *Intentions* and a polemic on behalf of the aesthetic values Wilde represents, written by a critic who clearly shares his distaste for the earnest, moralistic, and photographic tendencies of the fiction and criticism of their common age.

By Agnes Repplier · First published 1894 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay, Biography · 1,566 words

First lines

Ever since the first printers with misguided zeal dipped an innocent world in ink, those books have been truly popular which reflected faithfully and enthusiastically the foibles and delusions of the hour. This is what is called "keeping abreast with the spirit of the times," and we have only to look around us at present to see the principle at work. With an arid and dreary realism chilling us to the heart, and sad-voiced novelists entreating us at every turn to try to cultivate indecorous conduct and religious doubts, fiction has ceased to be a medium of delight. Even nihilism, which is the only form of relief that true earnestness permits, is capable of being overstrained, and some narrowly conservative people are beginning to ask themselves already whether this new development of "murder as a fine art" has not been sufficiently encouraged. Out of the midst of the gloom, out of the confusion and depression of conflicting forms of seriousness, rises from London a voice, clear, languid, musical, shaken with laughter, and speaking in strange, sweet tones of art and beauty, and of that finer criticism which is one with art and beauty, and claims them forever as its own. The voice comes from Mr. Oscar Wilde, and few there are who listen to him, partly because his philosophy is alien to our prevalent modes of thought, and partly because of the perverse and paradoxical fashion in which he delights to give it utterance. People are more impressed by the way a thing is said than by the thing itself. A grave arrogance of demeanor, a solemn and self-assertive method of reiterating an opinion until it grows weighty with words, are weapons more convincing than any subtlety of argument. "As I have before expressed to the still reverberating discontent of two continents"-this is the mode in which the public loves to have a statement offered to its ears, that it may gape, and wonder, and acquiesce.

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literary criticism · essay collection · Victorian literature · aestheticism · art and morality · English literature · cultural commentary · satire · humor · intellectual essays · social criticism · book criticism

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