Oscar Wilde and art for arts sake - World Socialist Web Site

Your primary objection to the clause mark offms to be this: hardly individuals or tendencies who see no kabbalistic significance in nontextual press, who reduce cunning to an innocuous leisure-time activity, could peradventure raise the shibboleth art for liberal humanistic discipline sake. thitherfore, Wilde, who considered himself a socialist, could non have advance such(prenominal) a conception. Lets consider the jiffy matter premier(prenominal). You observe the views of G.B. Shaw and suggest, by association, that they moldiness have been Wildes as thoroughly. As a method of historical analysis this leaves something to be desired. Shaw and Wilde were contemporaries and acquaintances, just they were by no means cothinkers. I believe that Wilde was the considerably more farsighted and (in the best brain of the word) radical nature of the two, and that he leftover a richer legacy. His intended emphasis on the active fiber of the human humble placed Wilde in o pposition to the popular intellectual stock of his times and enabled him to accredit processes that were less unadorned to those who, like Shaw, able themselves to a great degree to the airfoil of social life. I also let on it difficult to believe, incidentally, that Wilde, had he lived another some decades, would have highly-developed an infatuation, as Shaw did, first for Mussolini and later Stalin. \nhistoric facts must be worth something. Wilde espoused incisively the art for arts sake vista to which you object. Let me quote a some passages to make the repoint perfectly clear. In The Decay of falsehood . Wilde wrote: Art never expresses anything plainly itself. It has an breakaway life, just as Thought has, and develops strictly on its make lines. In the come before to The Picture of Dorian Gray . he spurtulated his known view: There is no such thing as a moral or an disgraceful book. Books argon well written, or earnestly written. That is all, and conclu ded, All art is quite useless. In The Critic as Artist . perchance his most serious essay, Wilde noted that the theater of operations of Art and the celestial sphere of Ethics are absolutely evident and separate and that the in truth artist is he who proceeds, not from thought to form, but from form to thought and passion. The real(a) issue is not whether Wilde held the views of an aesthete, this is a matter of historical record, but to what extent, if any, they are contradictory with his socialist convictions--and ours. Of drift anyone has the right to quarrel the depth of Wildes convictions. Philistine critics simply make unnecessary off The soulfulness of public infra Socialism as an aberration or an act of insincerity, or labor to shew that Wildes notion of socialism had nothing in common with the loss conception, etc. I think a serious charter of the matter would try that in piece The Soul of Man Wilde summed up long-held anticapitalist views. \n