Oscar Wilde’s The Decay of Lying
What is Aestheticism?

3,244 words

In the late 19th century, there was a debate raging in the salons across Europe over what is the proper aim of art. You had the modernists who believed that art should try to reflect reality and then you had the aesthetes who believed that the purest art was art that was entirely the product of the imagination. There are legends about how Vincent van Gogh lost his ear, and one of them is that van Gogh lost his ear after an “Aestheticism versus Realism” debate with another artist escalated into violence.

Oscar Wilde was, if not the best known, certainly the best remembered champion of the Aestheticism side of the debate, and his 1889 The Decay of Lying was his definitive statement on the matter. The Decay of Lying is presented as a Socratic dialogue, but The Decay of Lying is also the name of an essay-within-an-essay read by Vivian to his friend Cyril who occasionally interrupts to play devil’s advocate. The fact that The Decay of Lying is a dialogue is fortunate, as dialogue was Wilde’s real forte (in my opinion, Wilde’s worst play is a more enjoyable read than his one novel The Picture of Dorian Gray). Two of Wilde’s better known quotes, “Art never expresses anything but itself,” and “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” both come from this essay.

We should start by understanding what Oscar Wilde means by “lying.” The title of the essay no doubt owes some debt to an early 1880 essay written by Mark Twain entitled On the Decay of the Art of Lying but Twain’s essay was a meditation on the morality of lying. Wilde is talking about lying in more of an artistic sense: to make something up rather than merely describe reality.

Or think of it this way. A guy recounting war stories will exaggerate details to make it a better story. That time he got chased out of a bar by a Mexican with a knife? He might change the story so instead of a knife, it was a gun and instead of one Mexican, there were three of them, and they all took shots at him as he drove away leaving a bullet hole in his back window. The story becomes less true and yet it is now a much more entertaining story, and thus, better art. This is why Wilde found realism to be poisonous to the artistic mind: it stifled the imaginative impulse. An artist should be free to just make up stuff without worrying if it is altogether realistic or not.

Wilde is being playfully provocative in his choice of “lying” rather than calling his essay The Decay of Imagination. One of Wilde’s trademarks is to make a comically counter-intuitive statement like “lying is good” and then proceed to make a sort of strange sense of it. But before Wilde gets to point, he has a lot of fun being playful with the idea of being pro-dishonesty.

VIVIAN: Many a young man starts in life with a natural gift for exaggeration which, if nurtured in congenial and sympathetic surroundings, or by the imitation of the best models, might grow into something really great and wonderful. But, as a rule, he comes to nothing. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy—

CYRIL: My dear fellow!

VIVIAN: Please don’t interrupt in the middle of a sentence. He either falls into careless habits of accuracy, or takes to frequenting the society of the aged and the well informed. Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truthtelling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so like life that no one can possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile and Beauty will pass away from the land.

At one point Wilde even blamed America’s lacklustre artistic legacy on its uniquely American culture of honesty.

The crude commercialism of America, its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to that country having adopted for its national hero a man, who according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie, and it is not too much to say that the story of George Washington and the cherry tree has done more harm, and in a shorter space of time, than any other moral tale in the whole of literature[…] I assure you it is the case, and the amusing part of the whole thing is that the story of the cherry tree is an absolute myth.

Realism’s stifling of the imagination was not Wilde’s only objection to it. Wilde did not think that reality was the ideal worth aspiring to because it’s ugly. Wilde lays this out in the opening passages when Vivian’s friend Cyril asks him to come outside and enjoy Nature.

CYRIL: (coming in through the open window from the terrace). My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass, and smoke cigarettes, and enjoy Nature.

VIVIAN: Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us; and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.

This is Oscar’s opening salvo against reality. Nature (i.e., reality) does not hold up very well as art. If your art aspires to accurately reflect reality, the end result will be ugly art because reality is ugly. However, an artist could paint a landscape more beautiful than the actual landscape by making the colors more vivid, the weather more dramatic, and add a woman coming out of the pond with a sword. Now, it’s art. However beautiful nature might be, you can make it more beautiful by deviating from reality.

Having dismissed the natural beauty of reality, Wilde starts to explain the superiority of the products of the mind to that of Nature.

CYRIL: Well, you need not look at the landscape. You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk.

VIVIAN: But Nature is so uncomfortable. Grass is hard and dumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. Why, even Morris’ poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can. Nature pales before the furniture of “the street which from Oxford has borrowed its name,” as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased it. I don’t complain. If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure. Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity’ is entirely the result of indoor life. Out of doors one becomes abstract and impersonal. One’s individuality absolutely leaves one.

This sets the stage for the Mind versus Nature. “Nature is so indifferent, so unappreciative. Whenever I am walking in the park here, I always feel that I am no more to her than the cattle that browse on the slope, or the burdock that blooms in the ditch. Nothing is more evident than that Nature hates Mind. “

Aesthetes like Wilde saw ancient times as a sort of imaginative Garden of Eden and we’ve been in artistic decline ever since. “The ancient historians gave us delightful fiction in the form of fact; the modern novelist presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction.”

Indeed, once thought of as a myth, archeologists in the 19th century found out that there really was a city of Troy and thus probably a real Trojan War. We don’t know what happened in the real Trojan War, but we know that it was not as cool as the stuff that happened in the Iliad. In the Iliad, you had indestructible warriors, tribes of all-female warriors, the gods would sometimes come down and do magic to alter the course of battle.

Rome was founded by two brothers raised by wolves. That doesn’t make sense but it’s a hell of a story. Ancient storytellers didn’t give a god damn if any of it was realistic and Wilde would say that’s how it should be.

But as mankind has progressed and become more rational and analytical, this imaginative quality has slowly began to slip from us. Wilde identifies the Renaissance period as the creative wheels started coming off.

Art begins with abstract decoration, with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. That is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering.

Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative, and mythological. Then she enlisted Life in her service, and using some of life’s external forms, she created an entirely new race of beings, whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues. To them she gave a language different from that of actual use, a language full of resonant music and sweet rhythm, made stately by solemn cadence, or made delicate by fanciful rhyme, jewelled with wonderful words, and enriched with lofty diction. She clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble tomb. A new Caesar stalked through the streets of risen Rome, and with purple sail and fluteled oars another Cleopatra passed up the river to Antioch. Old myth and legend and dream took shape and substance. History was entirely rewritten, and there was hardly one of the dramatists who did not recognize that the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty. In this they were perfectly right. Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of overemphasis.

The historical drama is another testament to Wilde’s thesis. Here, he is talking about Shakespeare’s historical dramas which are rife with creative liberties and inaccuracies, but even in our own time we can look at Oscar-winning movie Braveheart, which has been savaged over the years as the least accurate historical movie of all time. That may very well be true but that fact that it is not accurate does not diminish its value as a work of art because, as Wilde says, “Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror.” Wilde would argue that Braveheart is a better work of art because it is not accurate, it is more purely the product of imagination. The imaginative liberties taken made it a better story than if they had just filmed William Wallace’s Wikipedia entry.

Alas, even in Shakespeare’s time, modernity was starting to creep into the arts.

But Life soon shattered the perfection of the form. Even in Shakespeare we can see the beginning of the end. It shows itself by the gradual breaking up of the blank verse in the later plays, by the predominance given to prose, and by the overimportance assigned to characterisation. The passages in Shakespeare—and they are many—where the language is uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even, are entirely due to Life calling for an echo of her own voice, and rejecting the intervention of beautiful style, through which alone should Life be suffered to find expression. Shakespeare is not by any means a flawless artist. He is too fond of going directly to life, and borrowing life’s natural utterance. He forgets that when Art surrenders her imaginative medium she surrenders everything Goethe says, somewhere—In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister, ‘It is in working within limits that the master reveals himself,’ and the limitation, the very condition for of any art is style.

In the late 19th century, aesthetes saw modernism as an existential threat to art, for if ancient mythology was the aesthetic ideal, the kitchen sink drama was an abomination.

The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art. To art’s subject-matter we should be more or less indifferent.

While a novel about the everyday struggles of working-class people might be informative (you learn more about what it’s like to be a working class grunt), it will not be pretty because the everyday lives of ordinary people are not pretty. The more realism, the less room there is for style. Art that is merely informative but not stylish might be enjoyable on the first read but less enjoyable to re-read once you know all the facts. That’s not to say you cannot make a beautiful art about the working class. Charles Dickens did, but his stories took place in a fantasy version of the working class filled with larger-the-life characters with funny names and amusing eccentricities. He took the world of the working class and made it livelier and more colorful.

A contemporary comparison might be movies with a twist ending. The Usual Suspects had a twist ending that blows your mind the first time you watch it but it’s just another run-of-the-mill action movie once you know the twist. However, movies like Fight Club and Donnie Darko also have a twist endings but are stylish enough that they are infinitely rewatchable even if you know the surprise at the end. Also notable about those two movies are their complete disregard for realism. A grown man starts a terrorist organization with his imaginary friend? I mean, come on. But that is Wilde’s point. If the art is good and pleasing to watch, people don’t particularly care if it is unrealistic. They will enjoy the ride.

Another belief of aesthetes was that art should have no message and no agenda. Art should not make you think. Towards the art, “We should, at any rate, have no preferences, no prejudices, no partisan feeling of any kind.” Going back to Wilde’s ancient mythology, Wilde’s ideal, the Iliad had no message. There is no moral to the story. It’s just a cool story with a lot of memorable characters.

At the time, a lot of the people writing social commentary novels would have been radicals rubbing your face in the plight of the downtrodden underclass. One can only wonder what Wilde would have thought of fascist art movements which had a lot of overlapping themes with Aestheticism. After all, Lefties love to call fascism “the anaesthetization of politics.” Fascist art placed a supreme value on beauty. Fascist artwork presenting an idealized man is closer to the aesthete’s ideal than Norman Rockwell’s celebration of the everyman. Aesthetes sought to transcend the everyday. Hitler and Goebbels disagreed on the role of propaganda in entertainment. Hitler was a pure aesthete. He believed entertainment should be apolitical and escapist and propaganda should be limited to newsreels and documentaries. Goebbels was more open to entertainment-as-propaganda but even he considered it was more important that propaganda be good entertainment and that messaging should be subtle and unobtrusive. We can only wonder what Wilde would have thought, but it is worth noting that Wilde died a devoted socialist.

Now you have a general idea of what Aestheticism, you can see how it might apply to modern media. If you ask “Which is a better work of art: 2001: a Space Odyssey or Star Wars?,” the pretentious answer is to say “Obviously, 2001. Star Wars might be entertaining but 2001 is a deeper movie and asks big questions about the nature of our existence.”

Wilde would say 2001 sucks for the exact same reason. Star Wars is much closer to the aesthetic ideal. It has no message, it’s purely escapist, and it has a complete disregard for realism. Just as Homer would have the gods show up on the battlefield outside the walls of Troy, George Lucas had no qualms about including magic in a sci-fi movie. People rave about 2001’s realism showing what life in zero gravity might look like and presenting space as the silent vacuum that it is, but Star Wars presents a fantasy version of space where TIE-fighters make cool sounds that are audible to people in other spaceships. Could you imagine watching the Death Star blow up in silence? And does anyone really care how gravity works on the Millennium Falcon?

While the Realism versus Aestheticism debate is not something that is much discussed anymore, I consider Wilde’s Decay of Lying essential reading for anyone in the creative fields as it can inform how to approach art.