Meredith's Ridiculous Egoist

 

     Reader may wish to have a look at my piece on “Meredith’s Poetic Novel: Diana of the Crossways” at https://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2025/09/merediths-poetic-novel-diana-of.html.  Page references in parentheses refer to the Penguin English Library edition edited by George Woodcock.

 

     The fiction of George Meredith is distinguished from that of other Victorian novelists by a number of factors.  He stands practically alone in his feminism and he can be compared only to late Henry James and perhaps the George Eliot of Middlemarch in his portrayal of the gossamer threads of motive that precipitate our acts (and velleities as well).  He was a great practitioner and theoretician of comedy.  Yet surely Meredith’s most striking characteristic is his mannered style which can occasionally oblige even a seasoned reader to scan a page a second time.  He is capable of passages which are often delightfully witty, syntactically complex, and sometimes of staggering beauty in which style is clearly the governing principle guiding the content which must be content simply to tag along. 

     Oscar Wilde skewered the downside of Meredith’s remarkable prose in “The Decay of Lying.”

 

His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything, except articulate. Somebody in Shakespeare−−Touchstone, I think−− talks about a man who is always breaking his shins over his own wit, and it seems to me that this might serve as the basis for a criticism of Meredith's method. But whatever he is, he is not a realist.

 

     In his influential theoretical essay in “An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit,” Meredith argues that comedy, as opposed to humor and satire, encourages moral behavior and aims at reforming human folly.  No carnival license for him, instead “comedy is the fountain of sound sense.”  In his view “it is the first condition of sanity to believe” that “our civilization is founded in common-sense” (a term more problematic than Meredith allowed) and it is the violations of these norms in his view that gives rise to “the contrasts the Comic Spirit perceives,” which provides the comic writer the work of correcting these deviations.  (In a writer so modern in many ways, it is a bit startling to find moralism stern enough to find Restoration comedy “beyond blushing” and full of “cynical licentiousness.”) 

     But his heart seldom seems seldom centered on the censorious correction of human error.  What sustains a novel by Meredith is his talent for striking figures of speech, his playful wit, and his elegant if somewhat elaborate style.  Even on the theme of the nature of comedy, in the novel the topic is organized about Meredith’s fanciful imps that crouch about their figure of fun mocking, hardly a notion compatible with common sense.

     The witticisms of the formidable Mrs. Montstuart Jenkinson such as her characterization of Vernon as “a Phoebus Apollo turned fasting friar” or of Laetitia “here she comes with a romantic tale on her eyelashes” (like those of Meredith’s Diana) are surely to be appreciated for their cleverness alone (42).  A longer passage from the “Prelude” which generally sketches the narrative’s progress raises the author’s rhetorical standard high over everyday usage such that the exuberance of his language becomes the point far more than any strictures on proper behavior.

 

     Concerning pathos, no ship can now set sail without pathos; and we are not totally deficient of pathos; which is, I do not accurately know what, if not the ballast, reducible to moisture by patent process, on board our modern vessel; for it can hardly be the cargo, and the general water supply has other uses; and ships well charged with it seem to sail the stiffest:—there is a touch of pathos. The Egoist surely inspires pity. He who would desire to clothe himself at everybody's expense, and is of that desire condemned to strip himself stark naked, he, if pathos ever had a form, might be taken for the actual person. Only he is not allowed to rush at you, roll you over and squeeze your body for the briny drops. There is the innovation.

 

     Here Meredith opens with a ship as a metaphor for his story and water as ballast identified with pathos.  It is surely inaccurate to claim that every narrative must have pathos.  While a Chaplin movie may well include a good deal there will be none at all in with the Three Stooges.  Yet few would notice to dubious claim as the ingenious figures of speech carry the reader along like a tide.  “It can hardly be the cargo,” i. e. The Egoist is fundamentally comic rather than sentimental or melodramatic.  The image shifts then to clothing; the egoist derives his self-worth from the opinions of others, “clothing himself” at others’ expense, yet finding himself so embarrassed (“naked”) that he will serve as a personification  of pity.  Yet, as the comedy is sustained, he does not demand your tears (after the manner of Little Nell), and “there is the innovation.”

     This is all very well, if slightly elaborately stated, but the following paragraph which introduces the figure of the Egoist is even more distinctly characteristic of Meredith.  Here the reader encounters the imps of comedy, central to the book’s themes however far distant from commonsensical concepts.

 

     You may as well know him out of hand, as a gentleman of our time and country, of wealth and station; a not flexile figure, do what we may with him; the humour of whom scarcely dimples the surface and is distinguishable but by very penetrative, very wicked imps, whose fits of roaring below at some generally imperceptible stroke of his quality, have first made the mild literary angels aware of something comic in him, when they were one and all about to describe the gentleman on the heading of the records baldly (where brevity is most complimentary) as a gentleman of family and property, an idol of a decorous island that admires the concrete. Imps have their freakish wickedness in them to kindle detective vision: malignly do they love to uncover ridiculousness in imposing figures. Wherever they catch sight of Egoism they pitch their camps, they circle and squat, and forthwith they trim their lanterns, confident of the ludicrous to come. So confident that their grip of an English gentleman, in whom they have spied their game, never relaxes until he begins insensibly to frolic and antic, unknown to himself, and comes out in the native steam which is their scent of the chase. Instantly off they scour, Egoist and imps. They will, it is known of them, dog a great House for centuries, and be at the birth of all the new heirs in succession, diligently taking confirmatory notes, to join hands and chime their chorus in one of their merry rings round the tottering pillar of the House, when his turn arrives; as if they had (possibly they had) smelt of old date a doomed colossus of Egoism in that unborn, unconceived inheritor of the stuff of the family. They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait. (36-37)

 

     The imps practice a kind of “freakish wickedness,” but they also may bide their time, conceding their object’s prestigious social role and importance under feudalism.  Yet it is the very artificiality of his aristocratic standing that guarantees he will prove by the late nineteenth century ridiculous.  There is after all, something inherently absurd in the fact that he has always been highly regarded, purely because of the accident of his birth.  He is certain eventually therefore to fall prey to fatuous “frolic and antic,” emitting steam which attracts the imps with their “detective vision.”  Like pagan orgiasts they dance in “merry rings” about the great man, the “colossus,” who has, like Britain’s aristocracy in Victorian times, outlived his social usefulness and thus become preposterous and laughable. 

     Here the reader finds a rich stew of figures of speech.  The egoist is an “idol,” a “colossus,” while less perceptive readers who take his pose for his true nature are “angels.”  The imps, meanwhile, are like a besieging army with their camp pitched all about the egoist as he transforms into a sort of absurd engine puffing steam as the imps (and the readers) look on amused.  

     Meredith is as earnest a Victorian as Matthew Arnold, but he is far more of an aesthete.  While he maintained high-minded principles of moral behavior, social justice, and political idealism, he was fond as well of playing with words and of building ingenious verbal structures that are more obviously entertaining than they are improving.  Surely considered only as a reformer or an ethicist he would have little name by this time; it is as an imaginative and inventive storyteller who can hold the reader’s interest with his language alone that we read him today.  The reader knew Willoughby for an ass when he first appeared.  The novel would have been excruciatingly prolonged had that demonstration been the point of the story.  Instead Meredith fills more than half a thousand pages with wit, fascinating figures of speech, and rhetoric by turns stately and effervescent.  One concludes with a wistful regret in part arising from seeing Laetitia accepting a loveless marriage and in part for one’s own departure from Patterne Hall after a pleasant stay.  Though Meredith may have conceived of comedy ultimately serving the cause of the betterment of humanity, he, and we as well, will consider that we have gained something merely by having our fancy tickled. 

Rereading the Classics (Firbank)

 

drawing by Augustus John

References in parentheses indicate page numbers in the Gerald Duckworth & Co., Ltd. Edition of The Complete Ronald Firbank (1961) with a preface by Anthony Powell.  The title is not altogether accurate as The New Rythum and other pieces was published the following year by Quartet Books and The Early Firbank (also from Quartet) in 1991.  My essay, however, cites only passages from in the first of these volumes, with figures in parentheses indicating page numbers.  Those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

 

     In my first semester as a university freshman in the fall of 1963, barely seventeen years old, I chose Ronald Firbank as the subject of my research paper.  As I recall, my professor thought well of my writing, but felt constrained to note among her comments, “I fear your enthusiasm is misplaced.”  She doubtless had a point.  I believe my retelling of anecdotes of the author’s extravagant eccentricities may have occupied nearly as many words as my callow literary criticism [2], but, upon recently rereading Firbank, I find my admiration for his writing undimmed. 

     He remains one of a kind in spite of affinities to Wilde, Saki, and Norman Douglas [1].  The usual concerns of fiction-writers for character, plot, and description play little role in his works.  His characters are almost all of a piece.  None has individuality; none indeed is sufficiently complex to suggest a developed personality.  And all these strikingly similar people go about doing virtually nothing.  They spend all their time in talk, mostly in the idlest of gossip.  Firbank’s novels are scarcely narratives at all.  Action means nothing.  As one of his characters asks, “What does it matter – the plot?” (347)  The reader finds only the limpest excuse for a narrative arc, the meagerest gesture toward incident.  Though lyric lines sometimes describe nature or costume, the scene is always luminous and unreal, a fairyland no reader could mistake for lived experience. 

     The words do, however, convey themes, attitudes, and suggestions about lived experience.  Firbank’s focus is always on pose and style, and this very emphasis alone makes a definitive point about his sensibility.  Given the strains and inadequacies of everyday life that make his characters weary and languid, they can only, he seems to say, retreat into a defensive stance, ironic and clinging to humor and sex and aesthetic judgements as the only dependable elements in a generally tiresome world.  They are forever engaged in conversation (though often enough they pay little attention to each other), and thus his works are almost entirely dialogue.  Their words, laid down like a mosaic or, to be more contemporary, a bricolage, define over and over again, the same perspective, as though there were nothing whatever more to be said.

     Though some development is traceable from Odette d'Antrevernes to The Artificial Princess,  Firbank’s basic attitude, the posture he assumes, changes little.  Thus, in the following discussion no distinction is made of one work from another; all references will be to page numbers of The Complete Ronald Firbank [3] rather than to specific novels. 

     Firbank does, in a playful manner, include several self-referential passages.  He calls himself a hothouse flower, “a dingy lilac blossom of rarity untold,” beautiful, though dirty, and quite anomalous   (631).  A similar mixture of praise and criticism is suggested by the description of Vainglory, parodied as Vaindreams: “odd spelling, brilliant and vicious”(199), similarly suggesting an impressive yet somehow sinful strangeness.  Hs habitual lack of narrative, the likeness of his many characters, and their avoidance of emotional appeal are highlighted in the description: “He has such a strange, peculiar style.  His work calls to mind a frieze with figures of varying heights trotting all the same way.  If one should by chance turn about it’s usually merely to stare or to sneer or to make a grimace.  Only occasionally his figures care to beckon.  And they seldom really touch.”  (199)

     His disdain for what is natural may owe something to Oscar Wilde who declared “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.”  To Firbank captive nightingales are altogether superior to wild ones (57), and, after all, “Nature . . . can produce dew but it takes Art to make tears” (65).  Even peoples’ temperaments may be quite artificial (82).  Thus his texts tend to turn from much of observed reality, preferring references to art, to paintings, costume, coiffures, and poems. 

     The many mentions of works of art indicate how Firbank conceived his own project.  There are no less than eight references to Salomé, the theme of Wilde’s play and Beardsley’s illustrations [6].  Doubtless Firbank was drawn to the story’s combination of perverse sexuality, violence, and Christian lore.  There are references as well to the Symbolist Maeterlinck (87), to Verlaine, author of Les Poètes maudits (125), and to Sappho, including a poem based on her “Ode to Aphrodite” (81, 93).

     The first work in The Complete Ronald Firbank is subtitled A Fairy Tale for Weary People, and surely the dominant note in the Firbankian fantasyland is ennui, languor, lassitude.  (Perhaps the best single word is acedia – Firbank always relished a word off the beaten path, and he would have appreciated the notion that so serious a sin could be committed with so little effort.)  

     Firbank repeatedly uses forms of the word “weary” itself.  As their conversations maunder and they ponder how to pass their time, one lady remarks that another looks “very weary” (263).  The topic of travel suggests a volume titled Notes on the Tedium of Places – “comprising almost everywhere” (264).  But there seems to be a grace, a sort of charm, a sweetness in the Weltschmerz.   A lady is described as “beautifully weary” (110)  Alarmingly, though, the beautiful can metamorphose rapidly into weariness (69).  A character whose “weariness exceeds most things” promulgates a philosophy called Indifferentism, with the central teaching being “not to care” (273).  Firbank’s royal courts even include a noble with the title “his Weariness” (not to mention “her Gaudiness,” “her Dreaminess,” “his Naughtiness” and “Lady Listless” [95] [499-500] and [531]).  In his world even “butterflies loitered” and “flowers languished” (43).

     This terminal fatigue recalls Villiers de l'Isle-Adam’s Axel who notoriously declared “Live? Our servants will do that for us.”  It arises in the very sensitive (those afflicted with “hyperaesthesia with complications” [660]) reacting to “Life, the saddest thing of all” (556).  His characters find themselves “attached first to one thing and then another, without ever being attached to any” (535).  Each is “like a loose leaf, tossed about the world” (153).  What, then, is to be done?  “Above, a sky so blue, so clear, so luminous seemed to cry out, ‘Nothing matters!  Why worry?  Be sanguine!  Amuse yourself!  Nothing matters!’” (520)

     Though such ennui cannot, perhaps, be overcome, the sufferer may be distracted.  One lady is “glad I can drug my senses with a book” (279), while another is somewhat vaguer: “We might frivol round together some evening if you like” (726).  Very often sexuality provides a stimulation, though in Firbank such comforts are generally voyeuristic or gay or savor of sado-masochism.  He is capable of slightly shocking even his own fictional creations.  “But this Ronald Firbank I can’t take to at all.  Valmouth!  Was there ever a novel more coarse?  I assure you I hadn’t gone very far when I had to put it down” (532).

     To Firbank oblique hints of impropriety are all that appear, but they are nonetheless salacious. In his version of the Caribbean, men walk the street “with fingers intermingled” (594).  With very little excuse Mrs. O’Brookmore says “It sounds like the Incest-music for some new opera” (256).  Lady Parvula de Panzoust (one might write a monograph on the names Firbank comes up with, as expressive and unlikely as Dickens’) enjoys having “her aphrodisiac elements nicely titillated” (454).   When she goes calling, she is told “’The mistress, I presume, is with the scourge’” (401)  An altar boy lad is “witching as eros” (693)  A “cherif” is “daily expecting a cargo of very young boys from Tunis.  He had amassed vast wealth, rumour had it, in the traffic of handsome youths” (479).  The widow Ruiz includes in the objets d’art of her boudoir “a masterly marble group, depicting a pair of amorous hermaphrodites amusing themselves” (612).

     References to dominance and submission occur regularly, though they provide atmosphere and tone rather than incident.  Thus Cardinal Pirelli muses over “a liqueur-glass of brandy,” ‘Jewel-boy.  Yum-yum’” (691) and preaches on the theme of Flagellation (693).  Msgr. Parr’s aides are “entrenched at the corner of Whip-me-Whop-me Street at Mrs. Cresswell’s old Flagellite’s Club” (138).  On e can only imagine what “the bwan-wam bwam-wams are up to, as they are described only as of “blanch-faced queens, youths of a certain life”; we are told it is  “more shocking than the shocks” (625, 627).  The potential “Vice-Consul at Sodom” must be chastised with a good spanking (538).  Miss Whipsina Peters, “the most resigned of women” (336) indulges  in a ménage à trois with the confidence that “un trio n’excite pas de soupçons.” (343)

     Mixing, perhaps at first uneasily, with such sensuality is Firbank’s obsession with the church.  He in fact converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of twenty-three, but his writing betrays not the slightest spiritual ambition though it repeatedly returns to religious topics [7].  The same Cardinal Pirelli mentioned above, who is addressed at times as “my queen” (651) found himself sufficiently idle that he decided to christen a “week-old police dog” with great ceremony (641).  A certain Pope Tertius “had the head of an elderly lady’s-maid” (657).  The average curate is described as “something between a eunuch and a snigger” (534).  “From the over-elaboration of his dress [Winsome Brookes] suggested  . . . a St. Sebastian with too many arrows” (84).  Upon hearing that “the marchioness will be birched tomorrow”  Mlle. De Nazianzi thinks “Oh, the charm, the flavour of the religious world!  Where  match it for interest or variety!” (553) and considers becoming a nun: “the impulse to take the veil had been strong with her – more, perhaps, to be near one of the nuns whom she had idolized than from any more immediate vocation” (516).  As the “impotent” church bells quarrel and complain Sarah Sinquier looks at the steeples and sees a devil (319).  Sister Ecclesia a full-blown hysteric who kicks and punches and draws blood with blows of a broomstick (428).  Religious topics rarely arise without a scent of sinful sexuality wafting about the scene. 

     Apart from sex and religion, Firbank finds a certain solace in thoughts of darker races.  Among their representatives are the redoubtable Miami Mouth of Prancing Nigger (the British title was the less transgressive Sorrow in Sunlight), “the widow Embarka (who was of negro extraction)” (482), and a doll called “Topolobango, Queen of the Sunset Isles” (306).  This theme, at roughly the same time as Parisian Negrophilia, appears in such references as the “dark children of the sun” (672) who appreciate “tuberose punctuated with inebriating jasmine” (672) and many of the occasional songs, including one in which the lover is praised as “like the Congo serpent” (323).  Blacks are shamelessly appropriated for the air of the exotic and of passion they lent his mise-en-scene. 

    These interests – the largely observational sexual antics, the Catholicism of incense and vestments and masochistic penitence, the tropical and sensual Blacks -- are all at bottom aesthetic.  Firbank and his admirers may be devotees of Madame Wetme’s religion, “her cruel God was the Chic: the God Chic” (518).  They may aspire to a sort of salvation if it may be said at the end, as it was of Mrs. Shamefoot “You adorn life.  You have not lived in vain” (179).  Yet Firbank does not fool himself; he does not deign to dodge mortality.  Even the life lived for beauty must conclude in tragedy.  Mrs. Thumbler declares of an acquaintance, “Poor man, in the end he became so decorative that he died” (186).  And the remedy is sometimes unequal to the complaint, no matter how extravagantly applied.  They “were, each in their own way, ready for” what is “too ornate” as they “go about, as other fools, in quest of pleasure,” usually finding “tedium”  instead (404), living in a state of “bored magnificence” (89).

     A writer’s writer, when backed into a corner, Firbank will play with words, allowing words alone to explode pyrotechnically, distracting his characters, himself, and susceptible readers.  All writers, of course, do special effects with words, that is what constitutes the aesthetic use of language, but Firbank seems often to vault over any implied reinforcement of meaning into the pure joy of babble, something like what speech sounds like to the pre-verbal infant or what that baby’s utterances sound like to the doting parents. 

     Most of the interpolated poetry privileges sound over sense, though concept may play a role [8].  We know only the title of the “folk-song of the Paralytics” and can only imagine the “pas of the Bare-footed Nuns” (95), but these verses that are included are typical.

 

A negress with a margaret once lolled frousting in the sun

Thinking of all the little things that she had left undone . . .

With a hey, hey, hey, hey, hi, hey ho!

                                                                  (511)

 

As an adult nursery rhyme this negress bears comparison to Slim Galliard’s “Flat foot floogie with a floy, floy” or the lyrics of Walt Kelly.  Similarly, the “Belle of Benares” begins somewhat intelligibly before it dissolves into gibberish that seems to suggest the obscene.

 

My other females all yellow, fair, or black,

To thy charms shall prostrate fall,

As every kind of elephant does

To the white elephant Buitenack.

And thou alone shalt have from me,

Jimminy, Gomminy, whee, whee, whee,

The Gomminy, Jimminy, whee!

                                                                 (342)

 

     Torrents of funny names sometimes burst onto the page, among them the Duchess of Netherland, Sir Gottlieb and Lady Gretel Teuton-Haven, Zillah Bottom, Almeria Goatpath, and Thisbe Brownjohn. [9]  Slightly absurd alliteration may enter at any moment: “The plaintive pizzicato of Madame Mimosa’s Pom pup ‘Plum Bun’ . . .” (431).  Disconnected snatches of conversation recall Cole Porter’s “Did You Evah” as they fade into his soundtrack:

 

“. . . As if I were no more than the wife of an Aide-de-camp!”                                                                    

“Above social littleness.”

“Those ‘Isolde’ cocktails make one very amorous.”

“Would you mind not hurting me with your fan?”

“Oh, be careful there, Countess, of some horses’ offal.”

I hear that your wife and my wife . . . but I fancy there’s nothing in it.”

                                                                                           (70-71)

 

“. . . above-board, when one can!

“ . . . Half the profits.”

“Ce gros Monsignor Parr!’

“ . . .A day together.”

“ . . . Rabbits.”

“As tall as Iss’y.”

                                                                                            (204)

 

“Once while beagling, accidentally – “

There came a murmur of voices.

“ . . .terrifying nightmare women.”

“ . . .One of his wild oats.”

“ . . . fascinating, fiendish colours.”

“It’s unmistakably his.”

“Pish!”

                                                                                              (232)

 

     At times Firbank resorts to Wildean inversion.  Thus plainness is a distinction (69), a fiasco is better than a success (111), a play would have had a longer run were it not so exquisite (85), and scaffolding enhances the cathedral (123).  A certain lady tells the truest lies, dear, of anyone I know!” (688)

     Often, however, his verbal play is expressed in singular images, odd and fascinating like the objects in  Joseph Cornell’s boxes.  Advertisements in the buses provide a readymade montage: “Stella Starcross – The Lady from the Sea – This evening, Betty Buttermilk and Company – Rose Tournesol – Mr. and Mrs. Mary’s Season: the Carmelite – The Shop Boy – Clemenza di Tito” (330).  Often, though, the strange, glowing images arrives singly.  Towers are like “the helmets of eunuch in carnival-time” (124).  The King complains, “Whenever I go out, I get “an impression of raised hats” (503).  A peach tastes “like a dark carnation” (225).  The Baroness is “all feathers and nerves” (38).

     It remains only to explain the broader attractiveness of this singular sensibility.  It is a locus classicus of high camp and thus subculturally meaningful for gays, but it possesses considerable, if not universal, crossover appeal.  Much derives from Firbank’s consistent humor; his comedy sparkles on every page, as if Norman Douglas or  Noel Coward were boiled down until they became not only intense, but also a bit weirder.  In fact, though their roots are in fin de siècle Aestheticism, Firbank’s characters face the abyss, the early twentieth century breakdown that led to Modernism and then Existentialism.  They believe in nothing, for all the Catholic folderol, and thus there is a sort of courage in their gossiping and posing and performing and sniffing after the salacious.  Whistling in the dark, they elaborate the most fabulous symphonic exercises and while away their time in the most human of pastimes, playing with words.

 

 

 

1.  Though, strictly speaking, the same could be said of every writer, even the most imitative.  See my essay from last month: “A Unique Oeuvre.”

2.  I will abstain from these anecdotes in this account, though, like Wilde, some of Firbank’s best art may have been in the incidents of his life.  Interested readers may consult the reminiscences of his friends, for instance in Ifan Kyrle Fletcher’s Ronald Firbank: A Memoir. With Personal Reminiscences by Lord Berners, Augustus John, V.B. Holland, and Osbert Sitwell or Firbankiana : being a collection of reminiscences of Ronald Firbank, edited by Raymond Foye and Francesco Clemente.

3.  I append the table of contents from this volume so the specific novel from which each quotation comes may be easily determined. 

4.  From his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.”

5.  See pages 32, 36, 67, 98, 150, 157, 666, and 754.

6.  While Beardsley notorious pictures appeared in the 1894 English edition of Salomé, the original French edition had a vignette by the equally erotic Félicien Rops (not made specifically for the book) depicting a wild sort of female sprite who apparently has not one but two fish tails as well as legs crouching over the remains of a meal with the slogan “non hic piscis omnium” (“the fish here is not for everyone”) which became the motto of the Librairie de l’Art Indépendant.

7.  The reader may be reminded of Wilde’s embrace of Catholic spirituality in De Profundis.

8.  Other songs with nonsense elements are found on pages 245, 265, 365, 511, and elsehere.

9.  See pages 380 and 441.

 

 

 

Table of Contents of The Complete Ronald Firbank

 

Odette: A Fairy Tale for Weary People                17

The Artificial Princess                                             27

Vainglory                                                                  75

Inclinations                                                             223

Caprice                                                                     319

Valmouth - A Romantic Novel                              387

Santal                                                                       479

The Flower Beneath The Foot                              499

Prancing Nigger                                                       593

Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli 645

The Princess Zoubaroff - A Comedy                      699

The Meaning of Art for Art’s Sake

 

Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes; those in parentheses refer to page numbers or other divisions of quoted texts.

 

     The phrase “art for art’s sake” is so familiar that one may fail to notice that its accepted meaning is not explicit but rather is conveyed by indirect implication.  Art, after all, can scarcely be altogether autotelic since without human beings art can have no value or meaning whatever. [1]  It is absurd to imagine that a score of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony would serve any end at all were there no people to hear and appreciate it.  When a critical statement maintains the worth of “art for art’s sake,” it really means that art is justified, not for some abstract theoretical inherent worth, but because it provides pleasure to people. [2]  The very evasion of this direct statement looks like a kind of residual puritanical euphemism masking hedonism [3], though pleasure, of course, has many varieties, from simple entertainment through sensuality to experiences of the sublime.  The phrase implies as well a criterion for evaluating works of art that foregrounds form and style rather than content or theme. 

     The original occurrences of the expression, though, bore a rather different meaning.  Apparently, the phrase first appears in Benjamin Constant’s account of a visit with Schiller and English expatriate Henry Crabb Robinson (a student of Schelling) [4] whom he recorded as declaring directly that art could have no function or end outside itself without being deformed.  Constant specifically mentions the roots of the concept extending through Schelling to Kant.  Though pleasure does play a role in determinations of beauty, the German Idealist lineage would be unsatisfied with either pleasure alone as the raison d'être of art or the pursuit of purely abstract formal value.   Kant and Schelling would claim for art a truth, indeed a truth more profoundly true than most.  The phrase, once forged, was developed and mutated in subsequent authors.

    The phrase next appeared in print in an 1818 essay by Victor Cousin that insisted “We must have religion for religion’s sake, morality for morality’s sake, as with art for art’s sake...the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.” [5]   Cousin’s  commonsense “Eclecticism” began from a material base.  “Man is sensible to pleasure and pain: he shuns the one and seeks the other.” (lecture 12)  He declared that “art is the free reproduction of the beautiful” with no other end in mind.  “The sole object of art is the beautiful.  Art abandons itself as soon as it shuns this.” (lec. 9)   While he recognized the autonomy of aesthetics in statements like these, his philosophy continued to link the beautiful to the good, the true, and the divine, so, unsurprisingly, ulterior considerations of morality and spirituality linger in spite of his formula “l’art pour l’art.”  

     Causin emphatically denies that beauty entails desire.  For his belated neo-Platonism aesthetic the experience of beauty is not limited to pleasure (which he trivializes by calling it “the agreeable”) or indeed to sensation or to sensual imagination at all.  It is rather based in reason and indeed for him ethics are likewise aesthetic, because the good, the true, and the beautiful are, on the most sublime level, all one. (lec. 6)

     It is in the cheeky preface of Gautier to his novel Mademoiselle de Maupin that the line blossoms into its principal role as a controversialist slogan of the aesthetic party.  It is as a cri de coeur that it has survived to the present.  Its advocates have energetically opposed the traditional role of art in teaching morality (and the more subtle claims of humanists that art is uplifting or ennobling) and the complementary claims of reformers that art must subserve the goal of social justice. 

     Gautier there maintains categorically that “there is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use.” (9) With the bohemian impudence that endeared him to Pound, Gautier ridicules attention to “virtue,” calling her “a very pleasant grandmother, but a grandmother.” [10]  He would prefer to gaze with pleasure on Dorinne’s bosom (47) and in general recommends a hedonistic life devoted to the bottle, the pipe, and Pantagruel (48).  The contrast with Cousin’s discomfort around desire and pleasure could hardly be more marked.  He seeks to êpater la bourgeoisie as he cheerfully identifies himself as “the most enormously immoral individual in Europe or elsewhere.” (53)  He muses on the progress possible were a “large reward” provided for anyone who could invent a new pleasure.”  In sum, he declares, “to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth.” (83)

    Whistler’s lecture “Ten O’Clock,” for which he sent formal invitations as though for a dinner party at an unusual hour, declared his artistic notions with similar high spirits.  For him art is “selfishly occupied with her own perfection only” (4), having nothing whatever to do with a benefit of any kind (5).  He will have nothing to do with any literary or narrative reading of paintings (16) or an educational end (21).  While he does pause to ridicule Oscar Wilde as a clotheshorse (23), for him the value of art is formal.  “The painter’s poetry,” for Whistler, consists of his arranging “form and colour into such perfect harmony, that exquisiteness is the result.”  With such creativity, or “invention,” and not from profound ideas or novel insights, the artist’s work gains a “dignity” and “nobility of thought.” (17)  He maintained in “The Red Rag” (reprinted in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies) “Art should be independent of all clap-trap—should stand alone, and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear, without confounding this with emotions entirely foreign to it, as devotion, pity, love, patriotism, and the like. All these have no kind of concern with it; and that is why I insist on calling my works ‘arrangements’ and ‘harmonies.’”

     Whistler’s lecture, like Gautier’s preface is lit with high spirits and fleering if dry remarks.  He expresses discomfort at having to “appear in the role of the Preacher” (3) and imagines a scene in which “the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos was their own Eve.” (15)  Unabashedly elitist, he deplores that art has become of late “a sort of common topic for the tea-table” useful for signaling one’s “culture and refinement.” (3)  Yet he mocks art historians as well who “frequent museums and burrow in crypts,” seeking to “establish with due weight” unimportant reputations” and in the process reduce Art to statistics (18-19).  Far from hoping like William Morris to bring art to everyone, he wishes to “lift from their [the public’s] shoulders this incubus of Art.” (22) 

     In both Gautier and Whistler, the formal pleasures of art are its sole reward.  Their sassy tone is merely the seasoning indicating their dissent from the age-old formula naming delight and instruction as art’s goals.  That many thought this belief arose from an artistic milieu that not only considered immorality irrelevant to aesthetics, but was suspected of actually cultivating sin only attracted more attention to these writers.  Indeed, the poses of many among the decadents and aesthetes of the time often encouraged this view.

     So, far from being claiming that art is entirely autotelic, the phrase “art for art’s sake” was used to assert the value of the pleasure beauty inspires and the primacy of form over content.  What the expression most often signifies is that pleasure, whatever form it may take -- whether simple entertainment, inspiration, or spiritual afflatus, is the only “final cause” of art and that this value consists arises from purely abstract formal patterning.  An examination of nineteenth century uses of the phrase indicates that the line was employed as a provocation to the bourgeoisie by counter-cultural artists eager to disassociate themselves from conventional respectability.  Strong reactions condemned the notion.  For instance, an unsigned editorial in The Art World was titled “Art for Art's Sake: Its Fallacy and Viciousness.” [8]  This, of course, is precisely the reaction the artists were seeking. 

 

 

 

 

1.  Originally “l’art pour l’art,” in Stefan George “Kunst für die Kunst.”  The use of “ars gratia artis” in the MGM logo must strike the viewer as ironic in light of Hollywood cinema’s undisputed profit motives.  I ignore here a certain generic truth in the proposition in the sense that not only every creative or intellectual field, but indeed every technical skill, can be judged only by its own standards, applied by practitioners.  Thus only a carpenter may fully appreciate the skill of another carpenter and only a highly trained practicing musician can best evaluate another’s performance.

2.  In The Sense of Beauty Santayana defines beauty as “objectified pleasure.”

3.  In a seminar, with five or six other graduate students, all of whom had presumably pursued literary study because they love to read, I once ventured to suggest that pleasure was a motive for consuming art.  The professor drily responded, “Mr. Seaton, we don’t talk about our personal lives here.”

4.  Benjamin Constant, Journal intime, Jan. 1804.  “Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own.”  (‘L'art pour l'art, sans but, car tout but dénature l'art. Mais l'art atteint au but qu'il n'a pas.”)  The same sentiment is recorded in Robinson’s own journals. 

5. Du Vrai, du beau, et du bien [Sorbonne lectures, 1818] (1853) pt. 2.   These talks had originally appeared as Cours de philosophie professé à la faculté des lettres pendant l'année 1818.

6.  Mademoiselle de Maupin, translated  by C. T.Brainard (1900), p. 82.

7.  James A. McNeil Whistler, Ten O’Clock, a Lecture, 1916, p. 4.

8.  Vol. 2, No. 2 (May, 1917).

The Radical Aesthete: Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism

 

     Though only ten years have passed, some will recall already with nostalgia the iconic poster for Occupy Wall Street depicting a poised dancer, a leg raised in an arabesque atop Arturo Di Modica’s charging bull in bronze representing the fierce voracity of the capitalist class. [1]  The charm of the image arose from its play with structural oppositions: female/male, beauty/power, aesthetic/mercenary, in form sinuous/blocky, in attitude poised and elegant/aggressive and angry.  Such a dramatic contrast between art and money finds acceptance both among philistines to whom only wealth-seeking is a worthy activity and intellectuals and artists uninterested, even scornful, of economic activity.  For the former the arts at best are an optional taste and for the latter business could occupy only mediocre minds.  Friction between these attitudes periodically emerges, for instance, in the twentieth-century tensions between the Surrealists and the Communists in Europe or the Yippies and, say, Progressive Labor activists in the U. S.  

     One could scarcely imagine a more passionate advocate for the aesthetic than Oscar Wilde.  His flaunted hedonism and transgressive wit as well as his own class background and his place in society might suggest that he would be likely to be a defender of aristocratic privilege, but Wilde manages to turn this expectation, like so many others, on its head.  His “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” [2] succeeds as a novel and effective polemic for economic revolution without abandoning the characteristic epigrams and ironies familiar from his plays.  Moreover, he was able to construct a coherent argument for socialism while maintaining his provocative aestheticism. [3]  In a quite Wildean inversion, in his most important points he is on the mark when out of his field in politics, while his notions about art which he had made central to his value system, are neither reliable nor consistent.  

    He makes the essential point with appropriate broadness.  As capitalism is the source of poverty and other social ills, it must be overturned to make a real change. Wilde aims to “reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” The first principle of the new society must be socialized ownership of the means of production.  “Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community.”  This alone is crucial; all else may be settled by democratic means. 

     His motive is to beautify his country, but this requires an alteration in the economic system.  The state of the urban slums in Wilde’s time was horrific.  Reader of not only Marx but also Dickens and Mrs. Gaskell will know the desperate straits in which many ordinary people found themselves.  Even for those with employment, workers are “compelled to do the work of beasts of burden, to do work that is quite uncongenial to them, and to which they are forced by the peremptory, unreasonable, degrading Tyranny of want.”  The result of these savage conditions is a poverty-stricken class possessing “no grace of manner, or charm of speech, or civilisation, or culture, or refinement in pleasures, or joy of life.”  One can not avoid seeing such wretches, “tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging.”  To him it is nearly incredible that “a man whose life is marred and made hideous by such laws can possibly acquiesce in their continuance.”  If they do, it is surely because “misery and poverty are so absolutely degrading, and exercise such a paralysing effect over the nature of men, that no class is ever really conscious of its own suffering.”

     The affluent, on the other hand, due to their leisure, are “the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.”  Yet at the same time, the system is profoundly unsatisfying even to the ruling class.  “The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralizing.”  Among its deleterious effects is to make the rich man tiresome.  “Property not merely has duties, but has so many duties that its possession to any large extent is a bore.”  For Wilde’s posing persona, nothing could be worse.  Yet, like most of the essay, it is not in the end a joke, for who could really be interested in enriching the boss, or in the financial concerns of another at all?  Display of wealth or designs on wealth are virtually always in poor taste.   Apart from requiring the exploitation of others the pursuit of money is ultimately disappointing even when successful, as it is based on a fundamental error.  “It has made gain not growth its aim.  So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be.”

    Though quite willing to sound like a genteel snob, Wilde’s motive is in fact that of all reformers whether they consider themselves aesthetes or not, a distaste for the sheer ugliness of capitalism which is, after all, centered in a repellant selfishness.  Yet at the same time he realizes that the game is in earnest and recognizes that such progress as the end of feudalism has come only through armed struggle, going so far as to say in his consistently aesthetic rhetoric, that “The very violence of a revolution may make the public grand and splendid for a moment.”  All force is not equivalent: “To the thinker, the most tragic fact in the whole of the French Revolution is not that Marie Antoinette was killed for being a queen, but that the starved peasant of the Vendée voluntarily went out to die for the hideous cause of feudalism.”  Apart from the suggestion that revolution is likely to arrive only through armed struggle (in contrast the programmatically gradualist Fabians [4]), though, Wilde says nothing about how the change in economic system is to arrive.   

     He quite properly attacks even the most well-meaning charity for prolonging rather than ending the system that produced the suffering the philanthropist seeks to ameliorate.  To him such efforts are “ridiculously inadequate” if not “impertinent.”  Reformers who call for anything less than social ownership of the means of production are displaying self-righteous vanity.  “It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property.”  In the ringing tones of the soapbox, Wilde asks, “Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table?  They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it.”  For Wilde what is ugly is therefore “immoral” and the Victorian slums offered plenty of nastiness, both aesthetic and ethical.

     If Wilde’s militance is explicit, so is his libertarianism.  He states categorically that “No Authoritarian Socialism will do.”  He adds “Authority and compulsion are out of the question.  All association must be quite voluntary.  It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.”  (The reader notices the similarity of the use here of “fine,” with the earlier cited “grand and splendid.”)  Any authoritarian system would result, he says, in “Industrial Tyranny” as oppressive as that of the robber barons.  The twenty-first century readers may consider Wilde’s warnings well-considered, having witnessed Leninist “democratic centralism,” Stalinist and Maoist cults of personality, and even more extreme “ultra-left” manifestations such as the Khmer Rouge or the Sendero Luminoso. 

     He aligned himself with Kropotkin’s anarchism, calling the Russian "a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which seems coming out of Russia.” [5]  The keynote of the essay, the identification of individualism with socialism, while yielding insight with its provocative novelty generates weaknesses as well.  Some might worry that there is a contradiction in his definition: “The State is to be a voluntary association that will organise labour.”  This goal, so casually tossed off, ignores the tension (at best) between centralized planning and personal liberty.  Yet the reader does not notice in Wilde’s succeeding phrases, so balanced as to seem inevitable.  “The State is to make what is useful.  The individual is to make what is beautiful.”

     In general Wilde is little concerned with either the mechanisms that might bring a socialist revolution or the governing principles he would find ideal thereafter.  Much of his dreamier utopian rhetoric arises from his newfound anarchist loyalties.  It is all very well to say “Nothing should be able to rob a man at all” or “all authority is quite degrading,” but such absoluteness is elusive in practice.  It may be that best government for artists is none at all when it comes to encouragement of propaganda and discouragement of criticism, but many might find it a different matter if the issue were regulation of copyright and even outright social support of the arts as for other industries.  Wilde is surely willfully ignoring his own knowledge of human nature when he declares with confidence, “When each member of the community has sufficient for his wants, and is not interfered with by his neighbour, it will not be an object of any interest to him to interfere with anyone else.”  Perhaps having recently read Engels on The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, he tells us that “in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.”  Not just jealousy, it seems, will die out under socialism, but with it all forms of authority and of punishment.  As a part of ending coercion, “marriage in its present form must disappear” when women cease to be a commodity. 

     Wilde sounds something like an anarcho-syndicalist; he would have been sympathetic to the program of the I.W.W. which likewise envisioned a sort of voluntary organization of labor.  Considering the sensational success of his lecture to the miners in Leadville, Colorado [5], he might in fact have found a comrade in Big Bill Haywood.  Wilde’s program, however, unlike the Wobblies’, can only be workable with the assumption that unpleasant tasks can be all but eliminated by automation, a circumstance that would certainly be liberating were it possible.   Wilde claims that all “pleasureless activities” are “mentally and morally injurious to man.”  “Man,” he argues, “is made for something better than disturbing dirt.  All work of that kind should be done by a machine.” 

     Wilde maintains that the condition of the workers in the industrial age is paradoxically even worse than in times of less technology.   “As soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve.”  The root of the problem is capitalism.  “The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.”  This analysis is quite accurate; the flaw is in the expectation that automation can render labor entirely optional and allow every individual to do as he or she pleases. 

     Fanciful as it sounds, this presumption is not peculiar to Wilde.    William Morris’s News from Nowhere, which had appeared the year before Wilde’s essay, likewise envisioned an end to marriage, schools, and coercion.  He, too, thought the magic of technology could undo the condemnation to labor laid upon Adam in the third book of Genesis, and his imagined future, as beautiful as Wilde’s, exhibits a similar dubious optimism. 

     While it may be true that modern people in developed countries spend more hours in work than hunter-gatherers, these utopian hopes are not wholly unfounded.  The mere fact that at the time of the Revolution over 90% of Americans were farmers whereas today the figure is only 1.3% indicates that our basic needs are today being met by the labor of a very few.  In the present inefficient system, another 12% are industrial workers.  Many of the rest are producing nothing but rather simply manipulating symbols on computer screens. 

     Prominent economists during the twentieth century shared portions of this happy vision of the of work’s coming obsolescence.  John Maynard Keynes in the ‘thirties predicted a fifteen-hour work week [6] and in the ‘fifties John Kenneth Galbraith said that automation was likely to “eliminate toil as a required economic institution.” [7]  During the ‘sixties, no shortage of prophets proclaimed the end of work, and, in more recent years, concepts such as the guaranteed annual income suggest that it is no longer necessary for everyone to have a job at all. [8]  Still, even a sympathetic reader must be troubled by Wilde’s easy progress from acknowledging that “civilisation requires slaves” to the prediction, vague and grand, that “there will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs.”   

     If Wilde may be faulted for a failure to explain either how socialism might come to Britain or how production would then be organized, he must as well be credited with the novel insight fundamental to his essay: that socialism offers freedom and individualism in contrast to the slavish conformity required by capitalism.  Though Wilde will at times toss off whimsical throw-away paradoxes that bear little scrutiny, the equation of socialism and individualism is at once the most striking witty inversion of the essay and the heart of Wilde’s argument, the notion on which the practical value of Wilde’s ideas must stand or fall.

     This theme, announced with a bang in the first sentence which labels “living for others” as “sordid,” is repeated throughout.  “Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.”  Under capitalism the individual has “absolutely of no importance.”  The promise offered by change is as clear as the current defect: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism.”  “Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to.”  This individualism will have nothing in common with exploitation; rather, it seems to Wilde to be altogether benevolent, allowing one to “freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him,” and thus to experience the true pleasure and joy of living.”

     Wilde’s paean to evolutionary individualism, though using the new and “scientific” language of evolution, in fact betrays his enthusiasm more than it provides evidence. 

“It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation.  In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all.  It comes naturally and inevitably out of man.  It is the point to which all development tends.  It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow.  It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.  And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man.  On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him.  It does not try to force people to be good.  It knows that people are good when they are let alone.  Man will develop Individualism out of himself.  Man is now so developing Individualism.  To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical.  Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.  Where this tendency is not expressed, it is a case of artificially-arrested growth, or of disease, or of death.”

     Wilde’s strongest confirmation of this marvelous individualism is to cite artists as individualists who “have been able to realise their personality more or less completely.”  Absurdly claiming that “not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire,” he imagines that freedom from wage slavery will similarly illuminate the life of everyman, unleashing “the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.”  The process is self-enforcing, since becoming oneself will also give a person pleasure.   “It is through joy that the Individualism of the future will develop itself.”  This will entail as well a flowering of loving actions since “when man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.” 

     The reader may relish the wit of formulations like those in this passage.

 

A man is called affected, nowadays, if he dresses as he likes to dress.  But in doing that he is acting in a perfectly natural manner.  Affectation, in such matters, consists in dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid. 

 

Wilde claims that under this new order everyone will realize the greatest and most natural potential possible.  Consumerism will come to an end since “Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things.  One will live.  To live is the rarest thing in the world.”  One can hardly avoid concurring with Wilde’s regret “that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating and delightful in him. —in which, in fact, he misses”

     Wilde’s concluding line hints in a way at his willful impracticality.  “The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.”  He may have in mind such lines as these from the well-known speech of Pericles during the Peloponnesian War.

The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. [9]

     Wilde is well aware that he is propounding unlikely claims.  To his sensibility that fact simply provides evidence of his imagination.  Utopianism, far from useless fantasy, is the motive for every step forward.  “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.  And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail.  Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”

     A further defect of Wilde’s essay deforms its structure without affecting his central points.  Much of the latter half of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is devoted to a lengthy and polemical treatment of art with little relevance the socioeconomic topic under discussion.  In addition Wilde’s primary contention here, which he goes out of his way to demonstrate, is simply wrong.  Wilde characterizes art as the idiosyncratic product of a wholly individual vision, “the unique result of a unique temperament.  Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is.  It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.”  Wilde is quite emphatic on this point: “if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.” [10]  In his view readers and viewers must become more like writers and painters.  They need only be receptive.  “Now Art should never try to be popular.  The public should try to make itself artistic.”  To him popular taste is regularly lack of taste.

     His assumptions ignore the fact that art always confirms as well as criticizes presuppositions; it abides by some conventions while twisting or ignoring others.  All art is at once derivative and innovative, just as every verbal expression is based on what the speaker has heard before while not exactly reproducing the earlier utterance, even if the words are unchanged.  Yet works and genres of art vary tremendously in their place on the continuum that stretches from predictability to novelty.  Oral literature and folk materials in earlier times and works produced as commodities for a mass audience will tend toward the familiar side of the spectrum, while works of “high art,” produced for a sophisticated elite, are more likely to be transgressive in both form and content.  Wilde ignores the very real function of art to confirm and reinforce social norms, insisting that every individual vision is inherently beautiful and worthy and novel as well.  He goes further yet, finding the artist’s individualism a summum bonum, and yet condemning as “egotism” any criticism from a member of the public with little regard for the individuality of the consumer of art.  By insisting on making novelty and self-expression the criteria for excellence, he ignores the value of a good deal of human artworks and a portion of the rest.

     He is motivated in part by the appealingly decadent reputation of art for art’s sake, but also by his counter-culture instincts.  He liked to épater la bourgeoisie when that very idea was more or less fresh [11] and gamely tossed back the suggestions that some works (such as his own) were “immoral,” “morbid,” and “unhealthy.”  The essay was published five days after he was imprisoned.  Wilde’s “Sonnet to Liberty” notes that the “roar” of the masses, even their “reigns of Terror” and “great Anarchies” “mirror my wildest passions like the sea.”  For Wilde there can be little doubt that the personal was indeed unavoidably political.

     The contribution of Wilde’s essay is twofold: by a sort of rhetorical jiu-jitsu he reverses the widespread misconception that collectivism restricts freedom and he ties the pursuit of socialism which some may question to the pursuit of pleasure from which dissent is less likely.  And he is quite right.  The effete writer agrees with the Marx of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that socialism offers liberation not only from want but from alienation as well.  If liberty means anything, it requires an end to exploitation.  One cannot be happy while another is constantly picking his pocket.  Even if labor fell short of being the fulfilling joy that Wilde thinks possible, it would at least no longer be wage slavery. 

     The essay has lasting value for both philosophy and politics as well as for literature.  The fact that it is most wise when speaking of politics and most mistaken when treating art is a contradiction Wilde himself might have relished.  “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” sketches out how art and the individual could be the ally of ethics and the masses.  In the ‘sixties I liked to say that I was not agitating for the benefit of Blacks or the poor, but for my own.  I like to imagine Wilde, in all his lace and velvet, demonstrating for Black Lives Matter.  He surely would have found our recent president unspeakably vulgar.  His élan is enough to excuse his rosy hopes.  If some epigrams fall with a bit of a thud, others generate new knowledge.  Here, in particular, Wilde’s clear-sighted recognition that social ownership if the means of production is a precondition for individual liberty emerges from his inversions of his readers’ expectations.

     Wilde is an entertainer.  His writing is animated with charm and wit, ornamented with figures of speech, and gilded by a gleaming utopianism.  Let there be many socialisms, and among them the great-hearted self-interest advocated by Wilde. 

 

1.  Further tropes include a number of satiric variations of the original Adbusters image: one replaced the poster’s advice “bring tents” with “bring deodorant,” while others substituted different figures for the dancer: Bernie Sanders, an executive with an attaché case.  The trope that attracted the most attention was Kristen Visbal’s 2017 Fearless Girl bronze facing the bull, which, though it had been produced as part of an advertising campaign for an investment management firm, was considered feminist and progressive by many.

2.  The essay was published first in the Fortnightly Review for February of 1891 as “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”  When it was issued as a book in 1895 the title was simply The Soul of Man, but the longer version has been preferred in most reprintings since.

3.  Aesthetic and political concerns were combined by other Victorians.  Among the first to come to mind are John Ruskin and Bernard Shaw.  Perhaps apart from Wilde the best example is William Morris.

4.  Wilde wrote this piece shortly after hearing Shaw lecture.  Shaw reportedly reacted, commenting “it was very witty and entertaining, but had nothing whatever to do with socialism.”

5.  In De profundis.  Kropotkin expressed in return a sympathetic interest in Wilde’s work. 

6.  Leadville was a boom town at the time, full of bars, brothels, and firearms.  Wilde provides an entertaining account in Impressions of America which includes the supposed barroom sign “Please do not shoot the pianist.  He is doing his best.”  As a gag about America, this line had already been circulating in Britain at least since 1879, first described as posted by a church organist in Arkansas, but then relocated west to California but still in a church in another English paper, and in 1882 in the Washington Post it is placed in a Leadville church.  Wilde simply adaptedz the proven joke to his uses. 

7.  Keynes, ”Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) and Galbraith, The Affluent Society (1958).

8.  Among many more recent works exploring the idea are Jeremy Rifkin’s The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1995) and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams.

9.  This is Richard Crawley’s translation.

10.  The passage is really quite harsh.  “They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.”

11.  The phrase has been used by a number of authors including Dumas père (in Le père la ruine).  The earliest usage seems to be in Alexandre Privat d'Anglemont’ Paris Anecdote (1855), p. 85.  In 1854 the phrase “il faut épater le public" appeared in Aristippe Felix Bernier de Maligny’s Nouveau Manuel Théatral: Théorique et Pratique.