Why the Romantics Matter (Why X Matters Series) by Peter Gay

Author:Peter Gay [Gay, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-01-28T08:00:00+00:00

The advanced circles that backed art for art’s sake were small but enthusiastic and eloquent. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the phrase had become a favorite slogan among aesthetes, often as recognizable by their dress as by their opinions. Among their most conspicuous representatives, some of them—notably Gautier, Swinburne, Huysmans, Whistler, Baudelaire, and Wilde—often almost literally wore their aestheticism on their sleeve. But to take this fashionable service to self-display as defining Wilde, probably the most extravagant of them, is to trivialize his magnitude as a cultural icon. With all his lightheartedness, as we shall see, he ended up a martyr to the religion of art.

Wilde founded no school, nor could he have done so; there could never have been a second Oscar. “The only schools worthy of founding,” he once said, “are schools without disciples.”9 His originality faced in two directions: he surpassed his followers no less than his ancestors. When he worked within a tradition, as with his dramas, he emancipated himself at the end to produce a masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, that only he could have written. When he proclaimed, and practiced, art for art’s sake, he developed a version of the doctrine that its originators would have found extravagant; he placed the critic even higher in his hierarchy of creative spirits than the artist whose work he criticizes. William Butler Yeats, who came to know Wilde in the late 1880s, called him “a man of action, exaggerating, for the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters.”10 That is a little harsher than it need be, but it is true that for the sake of being up-to-date, Wilde, ever militant, took his persuasion beyond the dreams of Gautier or Baudelaire. He was fated to become a belated romantic who never applied this characterization to himself, with his adoration of beauty in defiance of accepted rules of literature, his partly explicit contempt for the middle classes, his defiant designs for innovation. Romanticisms had been through the years varied enough to accommodate an original like Wilde, only wittier than his ancestors.

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