350
RICHARD ELLMANN
Wilde's mildly shocking epigrams are much better than
his
strained adjectives; they are harder to come by, and they are meant
to leave the audience somewhat unconvinced, arrested by their witti–
ness more than by their credibility. That they could
be
expressed at
all is the marvel, and their very frivolity becomes almost an inde–
pendent form of art by implying that every home truth is so largely
false, and that its opposite, if not precisely true, is at least merrily
discomfiting. Yet there is another attraction of those epigrams such
as "I can resist anything but temptation," or
"It
is perfectly
monstrous the way people go about nowadays saying things against
one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true," or "To
lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks
like carelessness," or "To love oneself is the beginning of a life–
long romance," or "The Bible is a book that has done so much
harm that I despair of doing anything to equal it." We feel in them
the rhythms of reassuring platitudes, of proverbial certainties, and
cutting across them the intransigences of individual thought. We
have the pleasure of affirming the
ancien regime
and of rebelling
against it at the same time. Long live the king, we cry, as we cut
off his head. Wilde was candid enough in one of his essays, "The
Truth of Masks," where he admitted to exaggerating
his
position
deliberately so as to develop an "artistic standpoint" "with much of
which," he said, "I entirely disagree," and presumably anticipated
others would also. This was not just a debater's trick to quiet critics.
"A truth in art," he said in more profound self-justification, "is that
whose contrary is also true." The doctrine is adapted from Blake,
for whom the battle of contraries was much more deeply rooted and
ferociously felt, but
it
was pertinent enough to Wilde because art
had become for him a network of encounters between dead platitudes
and the resuscitating artist. To be always taking standpoints without
steady conviction may however become uncomfortable, and Wilde
may well have committed himself to socialism, on very much of
his own terms, in an attempt to possess more completely his own soul.
Even the exaggerations in Wilde's essays have since
his
death
come to seem more characteristic and less wilful. The doctrines of
estheticism as he formulated them are more than clever overstate–
ments of
his
school. They stem from need as well as caprice, for they
constitute an exoneration. To consider life wasteful and disorderly
