The Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde is the fifth in Nicholas Frankel’s series of annotated editions of Wilde for Harvard University Press.¹ Some of its contents seem more like journalism than criticism properly so called, and Frankel admits in his introduction that “there may be something arbitrary” about his selection, but he rightly points out that “Wilde extended criticism into forms—the dialogue, the epigram, the personal letter—which aren’t generally associated today with critical thought.” (Unfortunately, that goes for a good deal of criticism these days too.) What unifies the selection, Frankel claims, is Wilde’s “fierce engagement with the narrow mores and conventions of Victorian Britain, whether they be the mores of fashion, politics, literature, art, gender, courtship, marriage, or even cookery.” Wilde is thus presented alongside Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater (whom he read at Oxford) as a social critic and aesthetic thinker whose suavity of manner belied his reforming zeal.

I have long maintained that the view of Wilde as an idle dilettante is a scandalous misrepresentation

I have long maintained that the view of Wilde as an idle dilettante is a scandalous misrepresentation, but I must admit that, until I compared Frankel’s selection with the relevant volumes of Oxford University Press’s Complete Works, I never fully realized what a hard-working professional he was. Oxford’s Volume IV, Criticism (2007), contains Wilde’s undergraduate dissertation “Historical Criticism”—a laborious production that didn’t win the prize for which it was entered—together with Intentions (1891) and The Soul of Man (1895). Frankel has excerpts from the last two (printing the 1891 periodical version of “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” as it was then called). Oxford’s Volumes VI and VII, Journalism (2013), contain an astonishing 187 items written for newspapers and magazines between 1877 and 1895, not counting doubtful attributions. Although the seven items grouped together by Frankel as “Reviews” include Wilde’s waspish report of James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s “Ten O’Clock” lecture, which marked the beginning of the end of the two men’s friendship, and an extract from his review of Pater’s Appreciations (1889), they give no hint of the riches disclosed by the Oxford edition. The tedious novels and inept poems unlucky enough to land on Wilde’s desk have passed into oblivion—although they have their contemporary successors—but the mischievous delight, and sanity of judgment, with which he demolishes them keep his reviews permanently fresh. Another volume of selections could easily be filled.

There have been two previous anthologies of Wilde’s criticism: Stanley Weintraub’s Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde (1968) and Richard Ellmann’s The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde (1970). Both are out of print, so a new selection is timely. Weintraub included few explanatory notes, Ellmann none at all. Frankel’s annotation is admirably full, profiting from the Oxford edition as well as from the researches of the German Wilde specialist Horst Schroeder. Two-thirds of his volume is virtually self-selecting. In addition to Intentions and “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” he could hardly have omitted the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray or “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young.” Seven of the twenty-three items also feature in Weintraub, and fifteen in Ellmann. Of the seven unique to Frankel, three are about dress; a fourth, “The Truth of Masks,” also appears in Weintraub and Ellmann. Wilde was an authority on dress, on which he lectured and wrote extensively; but four items on the subject, with space at a premium? Nor, despite what Frankel says in his introduction, can I work up much interest in a review of a cookbook, even by Wilde. (A dinner ordered by him would be another matter.)

Wilde’s writings on the theater are, of course, of great value. One of the items not to be found in Weintraub or Ellmann, “Puppets and Actors,” a letter to The Daily Telegraph (1892), discusses puppet theater in terms that interestingly foreshadow recent experiments with puppeteers by the Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare himself figures in several pieces, among them the dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” in which Vivian (one of the participants) makes adverse judgments on Shakespeare’s late style, and the aforementioned “The Truth of Masks,” surveying Shakespeare’s use of costume to reveal character (Wilde himself came to dislike the essay). Striking as these are, I wish Frankel had found room for “Hamlet at the Lyceum” (1885), included by Weintraub: in addition to giving valuable evidence of how Henry Irving and Ellen Terry acted the roles of Hamlet and Ophelia, it has some illuminating remarks about the play. Wilde’s most celebrated Shakespearean venture, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” is already in Frankel’s annotated edition of Wilde’s fiction (2020); it’s true that the piece eludes precise generic classification. Lawrence Danson’s excellent Wilde’s Intentions: The Artist in His Criticism (1997) treats it as a critical essay. Wilde revised it, after its original publication in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1889, considerably expanding the literary-critical passages, although this longer version remained unpublished until 1921 (it can be found in Ellmann).

Wilde was a serious student of Plato in Greek, as shown by his undergraduate notebooks and by the marginalia in his copy of Jowett’s translations (discussed by Thomas Wright in Oscar’s Books: A Journey Around the Library of Oscar Wilde, from 2008). Frankel reminds us that Wilde rated Plato’s Symposium highest among his dialogues, calling it “the most perfect, as it is the most poetical” and praising its “curious analogies between intellectual enthusiasm and the physical passion of love” and its vision of the possibility of an embodied ideal. It might be assumed that this is merely a covert defense of Wilde’s sexuality, but we should remember that Dorian Gray, the incarnation of the Platonic form of beauty, is shown to be an evil and destructive force. Wilde said more than once, in reply to negative reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray, that the moral of the story was that “all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.” His own life was to prove that horribly true, with Lord Alfred Douglas cast as Dorian Gray.

For Wilde as for Plato, criticism was an activity to which the dialogue form was perfectly suited. “A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true,” he writes at the conclusion of “The Truth of Masks,” claiming that only through “art-criticism” can we grasp Plato’s theory of forms or Hegel’s dialectical “system of contraries.” “Art-criticism,” as Frankel explains, doesn’t just mean criticism of the visual arts: criticism, for Wilde, was itself an art form, as we see from “The Critic as Artist” and from his review of Pater’s Appreciations—“exquisite essays” that are also “delicately wrought works of art.” Frankel’s decision to abridge the former heavily while printing the whole of “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” Wilde’s memoir of the writer, forger, and murderer Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794—1847), seems disproportionate.

“Art never expresses anything but itself.”

“Art never expresses anything but itself,” says Vivian in “The Decay of Lying,” defining “lying” as “the telling of beautiful untrue things.” For Plato, the danger of art was precisely that it was a lie, tempting the mind to take for ultimate reality what was merely an illusion. For Wilde, on the contrary, the untruth of art, its artificiality, becomes a passport to the realm of the ideal (one can see the line of descent to Yeats, whose The Wanderings of Oisin Wilde enthusiastically reviewed in 1889). The keynote of aesthetics, as Wilde formulated it in “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” is “the true harmony of all really beautiful things irrespective of age or place, of school or manner.” Wilde, like Pater, rejected Arnold’s principle of objective judgment and redefined modernism as a transhistorical awareness of cultural continuity—an awareness that would reflect the critic’s individual sensibility. This explains why Pater could find the Renaissance in widely different chronological periods, and why Wilde could rank the “imaginative reality” of Balzac above the “unimaginative realism” of Zola. The aphorism “All art is quite useless,” which concludes the preface to Dorian Gray, is meant for praise; the truths of art are non-utilitarian as well as non-material.

Wilde was conscious of both Arnold and Pater as, to an extent, rival critics. In “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), Arnold defined the aim of criticism as “to see the object as in itself it really is.” Pater, in the preface to The Renaissance (1873), substituted “to know one’s impression as it really is.” Wilde, having reworded this as “to realize one’s own impressions” in “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” offered a further variant in “The Critic as Artist”: “to see the object as in itself it really is not.” “Impression” is both a psychological and a painterly term here. Arnold’s “object,” whether belonging to the literary, visual, plastic, or musical arts, becomes for Pater and Wilde a subject for aesthetic interpretation. Frankel observes Wilde’s anticipation of such “late-twentieth-century notions” as “reality is a construction” (Frankel’s italics), apparently intending a compliment; but Wilde couldn’t have foreseen that, in our time, this stance would lead to intellectual incoherence and a collapse of standards. I don’t think he believed that a work could mean anything the critic wanted it to, although he was certainly receptive to multiple interpretations. “Diversity of opinion about a work of art,” he declared in the preface to Dorian Gray, “shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.”

An instinctive rebel, Wilde was a gadfly who challenged the Arnoldian concept of the critic as cultural legislator. In championing the role of the dandified amateur, unashamedly individual, thrillingly subversive, he was implicitly dissociating himself from causes and parties. The aim may have been commendable, but it sometimes led him into lapses of judgment. “All modes of government are failures,” he observes in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” in which he proposes to reorganize society based on the abolition of private property to promote, curiously, individualism. Frankel’s discussion of the essay in his introduction is perceptive and sympathetic, setting it in the context of late-nineteenth-century political and social thought, as represented for example by William Morris and T. H. Green, but it strikes me as the weakest of Wilde’s writings. For all his generous indignation at the condition of the poor, and his genuine detestation of government incompetence and indifference, the playful tone seems, for once, misjudged—and, of course, the next century showed how ill-founded was his faith in utopian solutions to social problems.

“On the whole,” Wilde writes in “The Soul of Man,” “an artist in England gains something by being attacked.” He himself, alas, did not. He died, broken and worn out, at forty-six. Had he lived to seventy, he could have read The Waste Land and crossed critical swords with T. S. Eliot.