The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde, Page 4
Oscar Wilde
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 4
Fathers should neither be seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.
—Lord Goring, An Ideal Husband, Act 4
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable.
—The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 10
Chapter 6
WRITERS AND WRITING
The unread is always better than the unreadable.
—Letter [December 6, 1897]
He would stab his best friend for the sake of writing an epigram on his tombstone.
—Vera, Act 2
Ah! Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything except language: as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story: as an artist he is everything except articulate.
—“The Decay of Lying”
M. Zola … is determined to show that, if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull.
—“The Decay of Lying”
He is so eloquent that whatever he touches becomes unreal.
—“Mr. Swinburne’s Last Volume”
“Mallarme is a poet, a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes in French, because in that language he is incomprehensible, while in English, unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a gift, not everyone has it.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
… parody, which is the Muse with her tongue in her cheek, has always amused me; but it requires a light touch, a fanciful treatment, and, oddly enough, a love of the poet whom it caricatures. One’s disciples can parody one—nobody else.
—Letter [January 29, 1889]
“Longfellow is a great poet only for those who never read poetry.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
“I am never disappointed in literary men. I think they are perfectly charming. It is their works I find so disappointing.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
What right has a man to the title of poet when he fails to produce music in his lines, who cannot express his thoughts in simple language that the people can understand; but, on the contrary, has so imperfect a command of his mother tongue that all the efforts of a society of intellectual pickaxes cannot discover what his words really mean?
—“The Poets and the People”
The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say “mither” instead of “mother” seems to many the acme of romance.
—“Mr. Swinburne’s Last Volume”
“He has no enemies, and none of his friends like him.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation, of George Bernard Shaw [OW]
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty …
—“The Decay of Lying”
… Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks that other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life.
—Letter from prison [May 12, 1897]
When he [Dickens] tries to be serious, he only succeeds in being dull; when he aims at truth, he merely reaches platitude.
—“A New Book on Dickens”
… the fact remains that a man who was affectionate and loving to his children, generous and warm-hearted to his friends, and whose books are the very bacchanalia of benevolence, pilloried his parents to make the groundlings laugh, and this fact every biographer of Dickens should face, and if possible explain.
—“A New Book on Dickens”
“One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation on the heroine of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop[OW]
“Plots are tedious. Anyone can invent them. Life is full of them. Indeed one has to elbow one’s way through them as they crowd across one’s path.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
Anybody can write a three-volumed novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace, type, are artistically uninteresting. Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.
—Letter [June 26, 1890]
In literature mere egotism is delightful. It is what fascinates us in the letters of personalities so different as Cicero and Balzac, Flaubert and Berlioz, Byron and Madame de Sevigne. Whenever we come across it, and, strangely enough, it is rather rare, we cannot but welcome it, and do not easily forget it.
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
The opinions, the character, the achievements of the man, matter very little. He may be a skeptic like the gentle Sieur de Montaigne, or a saint like the bitter son of Monica, but when he tells us his own secrets he can always charm our ears to listening and our lips to silence.
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
A book of Sonnets, published nearly three hundred years ago, written by a dead hand and in honour of a dead youth, had suddenly explained to me the whole story of my soul’s romance.
—“The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”
The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.
—“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.
—“The Butterfly’s Boswell”
A true artist, and such Rossetti undoubtedly was, reveals himself so perfectly in his work, that unless a biographer has something more valuable to give us than idle anecdotes and unmeaning tales, his labour is misspent and his industry misdirected.
—“A Cheap Edition of a Great Man”
… as a rule, I dislike modern memoirs. They are generally written by people who have either entirely lost their memories, or have never done anything worth remembering; which, however, is, no doubt, the true explanation of their popularity, as the English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.
—Ernest, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
“To introduce real people into a novel or a play is a sign of an unimaginative mind, a coarse, untutored observation and an entire absence of style.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [AAT]
Old fashions in literature are not so pleasant as old fashions in dress. I like the costume of the age of powder better than the poetry of the age of Pope.
—“English Poetesses”
In England we have always been prone to underrate the value of tradition in literature. In our eagerness to find a new voice and a fresh mode of music we have forgotten how beautiful Echo may be.
—“English Poetesses”
“We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.”
—Lord Henry, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 8
… the material that the painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs, indeed, alone.
—Gilbert, The
Critic as Artist, Part 1
Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel. One could not escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?
—The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 2
“Of course I plagiarise. It is the privilege of the appreciative man. I never read Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine without signing my name to the end of it.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life. If I didn’t write them down I should probably forget all about them.
—Cecily, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2
Everyone should keep someone else’s diary . . .
—Letter [October 5, 1894]
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.
—Gwendolen, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 2
I have sometimes thought that the story of Homer’s blindness might be really an artistic myth, created in critical days, and serving to remind us, not merely that the great poet is always a seer, seeing less with the eyes of the body than he does with the eyes of the soul, but that he is a true singer also, building his song out of music, repeating each line over and over again to himself till he has caught the secret of its melody, chanting in darkness the words that are winged with light.
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
… writing has done much harm to writers. We must return to the voice. That must be our test …
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
Not to publish shows simply a lack of the vitality of creative interest. There is no instance I know of, in literature, of any good poet who did not publish his work. I see in the self-restraint of the supposed high standard merely the self-restraint of the impotent, and the chastity of the eunuch.
—Letter [October 14, 1897]
The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies.
—“The Decay of Lying”
… artistic work can’t be done unless one is in the mood; certainly my work can’t. Sometimes I spend months over a thing, and don’t do any good; at other times I write a thing in a fortnight.
—Letter [February 2, 1891]
“I was working on a proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. … In the afternoon? Well, I put it back again.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
I have just finished my first long story [The Picture of Dorian Gray], and am tired out. I am afraid it is rather like my own life—all conversation and no action.
—Letter [c. early 1890]
Work never seems to me a reality, but a way of getting rid of reality.
—Letter [c. February 12, 1894]
“… I am dipping. I never read from the beginning, especially with novels. It is the only way to stimulate the curiosity that books, with their regular openings, always fail to rouse. Have you ever overheard a conversation in the street, caught the fag end of it, and wished you might know more? If you overhear your books in that way, you will go back to the first chapter, and on to the last naturally, as soon as the characters bite.”
—Wilde, as quoted in conversation [OW]
… delightful as good elocution is, few things are so depressing as to hear a passionate passage recited instead of being acted.
—“Hamlet at the Lyceum”
“… I have to thank the company, not only for repeating the words I have set down for them to speak, but also for entering, as it were, into the atmosphere of the world I have endeavored to reproduce before. … I think that you have enjoyed the performance as much as I have, and I am pleased to believe that you like the piece almost as much as I do myself.”
—Wilde’s speech to the audience, as quoted by the Boston Evening Transcript, after a
performance of Lady Windermere’s Fan[March 10, 1892] [OW]
When man acts, he is a puppet. When he describes, he is a poet.
—Gilbert, The Critic as Artist, Part 1
It sometimes happens that at a premiere in London the least enjoyable part of the performance is the play. I have seen many audiences more interesting than the actors and have often heard better dialogue in the foyer than I have on the stage.
—“Hamlet at the Lyceum”
Of all the motives of dramatic curiosity used by our great playwrights, there is none more subtle or more fascinating than the ambiguity of the sexes. This idea, invented, as far as an artistic idea can be said to be invented, by Lyly, perfected and made exquisite for us by Shakespeare, seems to me to owe its origin, as it certainly owes its possibility of life-like presentation, to the circumstance that the Elizabethan stage, like the stage of the Greeks, admitted the appearance of no female performers.
—“The Portrait of Mr. W. H.”
In a play the characters should create each other: no character must be ready made …
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
To write a comedy one requires comedy merely, but to write a tragedy, tragedy is not sufficient: the strain of emotion on the audience must be lightened: they will not weep if you have not made them laugh …
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
I have selected … the style of comedy which never fails to raise laughter: the unconscious comedy of stupidity, missing the meaning of words, yet in all its solemn ignorance stumbling now and then on a real bit of truth.
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
… audiences are well-meaning but very stupid: they must have things told them clearly: they are nice children who need to have their vague emotions crystallised and expressed for them.
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
… in the last act Guido sums up intellectually for the audience their emotional sympathy. Emotion lives in terror of ridicule, and the imputation of weakness, and is never happy unless it has got hold of its big brother Intellect by the hand.
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
Poetry should be like a crystal: it should make life more beautiful and less real.
—Letter [c. early 1888]
Nature’s example of dramatic effect is the laughter of hysteria or the tears of joy.
—Letter [c. March–April, 1883]]
… suspense is the essence of situation, and surprise its climax.
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
… art should always surprise, but never be paradoxical.
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
A laugh in an audience does not destroy terror, but, by relieving it, aids it. Never be afraid that by raising a laugh you destroy tragedy. On the contrary, you intensify it.
—Letter [c. March–April, 1883]
… the essence of good dialogue is interruption. All good dialogue should give the effect of its being made by the reaction of the personages on one another.
—Letter [c. March–April, 1883]
The best work in literature is always done by those who do not depend upon it for their daily bread, and the highest form of literature, poetry, brings no wealth to the singer.
—Letter [c. 1885]
I wish I could grave my sonnets on an ivory tablet. Quill pens and notepaper are only good enough for bills of lading. A sonnet should always look well. Don’t you think so?
—Letter [January 1886]
… suspense is the essence of situation, and surprise its climax.
—Letter [March 23, 1883]
… to learn how to write English prose I have studied the prose of France. I am charmed that you recognise it: that shows I have succeeded. I am also charmed that no one else does: that shows I have succeeded also.
—Letter [c. December 188
8]
I pity that book on which critics are agreed. It must be a very obvious and shallow production.
—Letter [c. December 1888]
He may be a man of genius so sublime that the language of the common people is inadequate to clothe his thoughts, but his right to the title of poet is not so clear as that of the humblest writer of doggerel lines in the poets’ corner of a provincial newspaper, who is aiming in his own honest way to set his followers straight.
—“The Poets and the People”
[The public is] always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.
—“The Soul of Man under Socialism”
“I am too fond of reading books to care to write them … I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal.”
