Intentions

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.