OSCAR WILDE
351
is
nothing new, but to go on to disengage the artist utterly from
life, to make him omnipotent, imperturbable, divinely free,
is
to
. evolve not an esthetic theory but an image of regeneration. Assump–
tions which are usefully comic Wilde tries to shape into a half-serious
esthetic; all that is real
is
obnoxious and ugly; insincerity improves
upon sincerity, lies upon repulsive truth; to brush aside the circum–
stances of one's life is to become pure. We put on our masks (and
Wilde was the first writer in English to dwell upon the truth of
masks) to be absolved of an unbearable burden, our lives. "In so
vulgar an age as this we all need masks," he writes in a letter of 1894.
"The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us,"
Wilde had himself say and would like himself to believe. This desire
to be insulated from real emotion, this nostalgia for aplomb, levels
life into whatever we have contempt for or anxiety about, and makes
art the place where our thin skins turn to marble.
Wilde's discovery of the mask reflected in part his uneasiness
with his private life, and it also brought into England, in portable
though misleading form, the
symboliste
doctrine that the artist ap–
proaches the real world as circuitously as a detective attempting to
piece together from inadequate evidence an almost unfathomable
crime. The doctrine reaches a subtler exposition in Wilde's younger
compatriot, Yeats, who perceived that the mask was a useful figure
for the way the mind constantly transforms its atmosphere and is
itself
altered, in a reciprocal process of conversion. In Wilde's more
simplified form, the interest does not lie in the esthetic theory,
which is perhaps no more than a taste for varied self-expression
with hieratic sanction, but rather in that for him the doctrine of
the mask
is
itself a mask. His theme is not as he supposes the
divorce of art from life, but its inescapable arraignment by experi–
ence in spite of all those witty protests he makes, in full awareness
of their futility.
Wilde's creative works almost invariably end in a ceremonial
unmasking, though in his late romantic and indulgent way the
ceremony usually is not open to the general public and takes place
before only one or two persons. The Ideal Husband admits to being
as
frail as the next man, and acknowledges that his political position
was
gained by divulging an official secret. The respectable Lady
Windermere recognizes, as she recovers her incriminating fan, that
