The Decay of Lying by Oscar Wilde: An Overview

Speaking on the Kantian and Coleridgian line of thought, Wilde remarks that art does not copy life, and nature rather constitutes its own world/reality independent of them taking its material from them and reordering and refashioning it into a new and perfect form. Wilde widely believes that it is not art that imitates life but that it is the life that imitates art.


Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

He proves it to be so because people at first were not aware of the mist over London city. When an artist painted that sort of art, people felt that in their experience, and they realized the truth. Therefore, art is not a banal copy of nature rather it is the creative force of humanity. Wilde remarks:

“Arts begins with abstract decoration, with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then life becomes fascinated with this new wonder….. Art takes life as part of her rough material, recreates it, and refashions it in fresh forms, is absolutely indifferent to fact, invents, imagines, dreams, and keeps between herself and reality the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style, of decorative or ideal treatment. The third stage is when life gets the upper hand, and drives art out into the wilderness.” (662)

Wilde claims “Art never expresses anything but itself” (667). It does not express any imitation stuffs from life and nature. Art has its own substance form and made of expression. It is perfect within. Wilde states:

“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror. She has flowers that no forest knows of birds that no woodland possesses. She makes and unmakes many worlds, and can draw the moon from heaven with a scarlet thread. Hers are the forms more real than living man and hers the great archetypes of which things that have existence are but unfinished copies. Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monster from the deeps they come …. She has hawk-faced gods that worship her, and the centaurs gallop at her side.” (664)

Art therefore, does not transform its material more marvelous and beauteous than the real. In this sense, art breaks Wilde’s maxim that claims, “The only real people are the people who never existed” with realism. To break with realism is to be in possession of falsity. Therefore, for Wilde, lies the future of American society which is too realistic and incapable of telling a lie.” Art is “the cultured and fascinating liar” (664) because as Wilde holds our civilization rest on lying. Lying is civilization act. In lying, we build a world, which is more beauteous, more joyous and more fascination than realism presents. To lie is our primitive impulse and primitive art is the most marvelous form of art because the ancient artist falsified the truth. The modern artist lost the power of lying and embraces accuracy and realism, which are decadence i.e. decay of lying. Wilde laments on the decay of falsifying power of modern people. He valorizes the one who lies. He says:

“Whatever was his name or race, he certainly was the true founder of social intercourse. For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the basis of civilized society…….. . Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that truth is entirely and absolutely matter of style; while life-poor, probable, uninteresting human life … (664)

Life seeing the perfection in art feels lack within and thus tries to copy it in an endeavor to reach to the stat of perfection. Life tries to reproduce the perfection that art depicts in itself. Life liberates itself from particularity to the universal that art renders. Wilde states:

“Personal experience is a most vicious limited circle. All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life . . . Life holds; the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realizes in fact what has been dream in fiction . . . Young men have committed suicide because Rolla did so, have died by their own hand because by his own hand Werther died.” (666)

As life does, nature too imitates art. Wilde says, "nature, no less than life, is an imitation of art" (666). He goes on showing now nature takes various effects from the landscape painter:

“The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to this particular school of art . . . For what is nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depend on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence. At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare to say they were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till art had invented them.” (667)

Then Wilde comes to propose the principle of his "new aesthetics." Wilde's new aesthetics treats art as self-sufficient entity, which exists remove from reality from reality with its own intrinsic properties (body) and its own spirit. His new aesthetics proposes his doctrine as follows:

“Art never expresses anything but itself. This is the principle of my new aesthetics . . . Remote from reality, and with her eyes turned away from the shadows of the cave, art reveals her own perfection, and the wondering crowd that watches the opening of the marvelous, many-petaled rose fancies that it is its own history that is being told to it, its own spirit that is finding expression in a new form. But it is not so. The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit, and gains more from a new medium or a fresh material than she does from any enthusiasm for art, or from any great awakening of the human consciousness. She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.” (667)

Thus, art has self- sufficient life and grown in its own ways. It is neither close to life nor to spirit/nature. It has its own history of its progress. Only the lower grade of art imitates life and nature, "and elevating them into ideals." But Wilde does not mean that art should not borrow materials from life and nature at all. He means that life and nature "must be translated into artistic conventions" (670).

Oscar Wilde Study Center

Biography of Oscar Wilde

Mimetic Theory: Introduction

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