Wanted a New Background by Oscar Wilde — Read

He who would stir us now by fiction must either give us an entirely new / background, or reveal to us the soul of man in its innermost workings. / The first is for the moment being done for us by Mr. Rudyard Kipling. As / one turns over the pages of his _Plain Tales from the Hills_, one feels / as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of / vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one's eyes. The / jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their / surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd / journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of / literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the / point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than / any one has ever known it. Dickens knew its clothes and its comedy. Mr. / Kipling knows its essence and its seriousness. He is our first authority / on the second-rate, and has seen marvellous things through keyholes, and / his backgrounds are real works of art. As for the second condition, we / have had Browning, and Meredith is with us. But there is still much to / be done in the sphere of introspection. People sometimes say that / fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has / never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the / soul, that is all.

In one single ivory cell of the brain there are / stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have / dreamed of, who, like the author of _Le Rouge et le Noir_, have sought to / track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its / dearest sins. Still, there is a limit even to the number of untried / backgrounds, and it is possible that a further development of the habit / of introspection may prove fatal to that creative faculty to which it / seeks to supply fresh material. I myself am inclined to think that / creation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural an / impulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at / the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter / of criticism increases daily. There are always new attitudes for the / mind, and new points of view. The duty of imposing form upon chaos does / not grow less as the world advances. There was never a time when / Criticism was more needed than it is now. It is only by its means that / Humanity can become conscious of the point at which it has arrived. -- _The / Critic as Artist_.