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Literatur: Wilde
Literatur: The Fortnightly Review
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Now, I have said that the community by means of organisation of machinery will supply the useful things, and that the beautiful things will be made by the individual. This is not merely necessary, but it is the only possible way by which we can get either the one or the other. An individual who has to make things for the use of others, and with reference to their wants and their wishes, does not work with interest, and consequently cannot put into his work what is best in him. Upon the other hand, whenever a community or a powerful section of a community, or a government of any kind, attempts to dictate to the artist what he is to do, Art either entirely vanishes, or becomes stereotyped, or degenerates into a low and ignoble form of craft. A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created individualism, must take cognizance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
And it is to be noted that it is the fact that Art is this intense form of individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference. If a man of science were told that the results of his experiments, and the conclusions that he arrived at, should be of such a character that they would not upset the received popular notions on the subject, or disturb popular prejudice, or hurt the sensibilities of people who knew nothing [305] about science; if a philosopher were told that he had a perfect right to speculate in the highest spheres of thought, provided that he arrived at the same conclusions as were held by those who had never thought in any sphere at all – well, nowadays the man of science and the philosopher would be considerably amused. Yet it is really a very few years since both philosophy and science were subjected to brutal popular control, to authority in fact – the authority of either the general ignorance of the community, or the terror and greed for power of an ecclesiastical or governmental class. Of course, we have to a very great extent got rid of any attempt on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of speculative thought, but the attempt to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art still lingers. In fact, it does more than linger: it is aggressive, offensive, and brutalising.
In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. The public like to insult poets because they are individual, but once they have insulted them they leave them alone. In the case of the novel and the drama, arts in which the public does take an interest, the result of the exercise of popular authority has been absolutely ridiculous. No country produces such badly-written fiction, such tedious, common work in the novel form, such silly, vulgar plays as in England. It must necessarily be so. The popular standard is of such a character that no artist can get to it. It is at once too easy and too difficult to be a popular novelist. It is too easy, because the requirements of the public as far as plot, style, psychology, treatment of life, and treatment of literature are concerned are within the reach of the very meanest capacity and the most uncultivated mind. It is too difficult, because to meet such requirements the artist would have to do violence to his temperament, would have to write not for the artistic joy of writing, but for the amusement of half-educated people, and so would have to suppress his individualism, forget his culture, annihilate his style, and surrender everything that is valuable in him. In the case of the drama, things are a little better: the theatre-going public like the obvious, it is true, but they do not like the tedious; and burlesque and farcical comedy, the two most popular forms, are distinct forms of art. Delightful work may be produced under burlesque and farcical conditions, and in work of this kind the artist in England is allowed very great freedom. It is when one comes to the higher forms of the drama that the result of popular control is seen. The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large |306] measure on the continual extension of subject-matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine. In Art, the public accept what has been, because they cannot alter it, not because they appreciate it. They swallow their classics whole, and never taste them. They endure them as the inevitable, and as they cannot mar them, they mouth about them. Strangely enough, or not strangely, according to one's own views, this acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point
Erstdruck und Druckvorlage
The Fortnightly Review.
Bd. 49, 1891, Februar, S. 292-319.
Unser Auszug: S. 304-306.
Gezeichnet: OSCAR WILDE.
Die Textwiedergabe erfolgt nach dem ersten Druck
(Editionsrichtlinien).
The Fortnightly Review online
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008882609
URL: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006056638
URL: http://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/title/715786-1
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The Fortnightly Review inhaltsanalytische Bibliographie
The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900.
Hrsg. von Walter E. Houghton.
Bd. 2. Toronto 1972.
Zeitschriften-Repertorium
Literatur: Wilde
Brandmeyer, Rudolf: Poetiken der Lyrik: Von der Normpoetik zur Autorenpoetik.
In: Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte.
Hrsg. von Dieter Lamping.
2. Aufl. Stuttgart 2016, S. 2-15.
Bristow, Joseph u.a. (Hrsg.): Wilde Discoveries.
Traditions, Histories, Archives.
Toronto u.a. 2013.
Danson, Lawrence: Wilde's Intentions.
The Artist in his Criticism.
Oxford 1997.
Evangelista, Stefano (Hrsg.): The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe.
London 2010.
Grech, Leanne: Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic Education.
The Oxford Classical Curriculum.
Cham 2019.
Guy, Josephine M.: "The Soul of Man under Socialism": A (Con)Textual History.
In: Wilde Writings. Contextual Conditions.
Hrsg. von Joseph Bristow.
Toronto 2003, S. 59-85.
Guy, Josephine M.: Oscar Wilde and Socialism.
In: Oscar Wilde in Context.
Hrsg. von Kerry Powell u.a.
Cambridge u.a. 2013, S. 242-252.
Hänsel-Hohenhausen, Markus von: Die frühe deutschsprachige Oscar-Wilde-Rezeption (1893 - 1906).
Bibliographie.
2. Aufl. Egelsbach 1999.
Hext, Kate: Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: 'Rebels in the Name of Beauty'.
In: Victoriographies. A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790-1914
1.2 (2011), S. 202-220.
Knox, Melissa: Oscar Wilde in the 1990s.
The Critic as Creator.
Rochester, NY u.a. 2001.
Lipking, Lawrence: Poet-critics. In: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Bd. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism. Hrsg. von A. Walton Litz.
Cambridge u.a. 2000, S. 439-467.
Martino, Pierpaolo: WILDE NOW.
Performance, Celebrity and Intermediality in Oscar Wilde.
Cham 2023.
Mendelssohn, Michèle: Making Oscar Wilde.
Oxford 2018.
Warner, Eric / Hough, Graham (Hrsg.): Strangeness and Beauty.
An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840–1910.
2 Bde. Cambridge u.a. 2009.
Literatur: The Fortnightly Review
Brake, Laurel: The "Wicked Westminster", "The Fortnightly" and Walter Pater's "Renaissance".
In: Literature in the Marketplace.
Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices.
Hrsg. von John O'Jordan u. Robert L. Patten.
Cambridge 1995, S. 289-305.
Freedman, Linda: Prophecy, Poetry, and Democracy:
Teaching through the International Lens of the Fortnightly Review
In: Teaching Transatlanticism.
Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture.
Hrsg. von Linda K. Hughes u.a.
Edinburgh 2015, S. 195-208.
King, Andrew / Plunkett, Andrew (Hrsg.): Victorian Print Media.
A Reader.
Oxford 2005.
King, Andrew u.a. (Hrsg.): The Routledge Handbook
to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers.
London u. New York 2019.
Small, Helen: Liberal Editing in the Fortnightly Review and the Nineteenth Century.
In: Authorship in Context. From the Theoretical to the Material.
Hrsg. von Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay.
Basingstoke u.a. 2007, S. 56-71.
Morrisson, Mark S.: The Public Face of Modernism.
Little Magazines, Audiences, and Reception, 1905-1920.
Madison, Wis. u.a. 2001.
Kap 1: The Myth of the Whole and Ford's English Review:
Edwardian Monthlies, the Mercure de France, and Early British Modernism (S. 17-53);
hier: S. 39-48: The Edwardian Reviews: The English Review and the Fortnightly Review.
Palmegiano, E. M.: Perceptions of the Press
in Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals.
A Bibliography. London u.a. 2012.
Stead, Évanghélia / Védrine, Hélène (Hrsg.): L'Europe des revues II (1860-1930).
Réseaux et circulations des modèles.
Paris 2018.
Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer