Intentions
1894
Oscar Wilde was never interested in boring you with the truth. In this dazzling collection of four essays, he makes the case that art is lying, and lying is civilization's highest achievement. "The Decay of Lying" opens as a scintillating dialogue between two friends, one defending nature, the other dismissing it in favor of the imagination. Wilde attacks the realists Henry James and Emile Zola for their "monstrous worship of facts," arguing that what makes art wonderful is precisely its indifference to reality. The barrier between life and art, he insists, should be "impenetrable." "Pen, Pencil, and Poison" is a macabre love letter to Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a gifted painter and critic who also happened to be a murderer. Wilde treats this contradiction with delighted irony. The centerpiece, "The Critic as Artist," argues with breathtaking audacity that the critic is not lesser than the artist but equal to him, perhaps even superior. Finally, "The Truth of Masks" returns to art's essential artifices. Throughout, Wilde's prose crackles with epigrams that sound like dangerous secrets. This is Wilde at his most Wildean: brilliant, contrarian, and utterly unwilling to apologize for beauty.
Editions
X-Ray
“Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. ””
— Oscar Wilde
“To know the vintage and quality of a wine one need not drink the whole cask. It must be perfectly easy in half an hour to say whether a book is worth anything or worth nothing. Ten minutes are really sufficient, if one has the instinct for form. Who wants to wade through a dull volume? One tastes it, and that is quite enough – more than enough, I should imagine.””
— Oscar Wilde
“Yes: the public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. ””
— Oscar Wilde
“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.””
— Oscar Wilde
“We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.””
— Oscar Wilde
“Egotism itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life. ””
— Oscar Wilde
“Are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?””
— Oscar Wilde
“Art and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.””
— Oscar Wilde
“Shakespeare appreciated the value of lovely costumes in adding picturesqueness to poetry, but he saw how important costume is as a means of producing certain dramatic effects.””
— Oscar Wilde
