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Wilde was glib, and most ages, including ours, don't like that. Today Wilde would end up in a holding cell in Guantanamo Bay pretty quickly, and I'm not sure if I would object. He was a man made for easy times, when one never had to hunker down and say "this is the truth and from this I will not budge." He was, as his hero Meredith says of someone, perhaps Moliere, a sparkling stream--playful, perfectly beautiful and yet somewhat shallow.
And for this reason he is largely ignored as a serious thinker, left for the theater-folks and other phonies to read alone. But I think that we need to take seriously his work, for he is one of the few folks who have the ability to see the honesty in the actor and the phoniness in the hero. And it is in particular his piece "The Critic as Artist" that I want to consider here. This is a didactic dialogue, with our old friend "Ernest" as the straight man. Although Wilde delights in confounding poor Ernest with cleverness, there is a deep point he is making. First, that it is easy to do, and hard to describe. Any drunken savage could carry out any of the "great" acts that are the pivotal moments in a Greek drama. What is so amazing about stabbing someone in the back? But it takes a great person to turn this into an act of heroism or of tragedy, and thus it is the artist, not the actor, who is the source of the greatness.
But the same logic applies to the critic, for he stands to the artist as the artist stands to the actor. Just as the artist re-makes the act, so the critic redefines the art. And just as there is artistic license, so there is critical license--the carte blanche to distort the works of others in the service of one's own genius. It is not simply that an esthete can "play" with others ideas like a cat with a mouse.Read more ›
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This item: The Critic as Artist (Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing and Discussing Everything)
