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| Oscar Wilde Aestheticism |
Oscar Wilde promoted the aestheticism movement impressively at the end of the 19th century. Algernon Charles Swinburne and Edgar Allan Poe were Oscar Wilde's influence. Wilde's aestheticism concentrated more on individual than the Industrialism all this happened with the help of Walter Pater.
Oscar Wilde defended freedom from honorable self discipline and the limitations of society.
A volume titled Intentions is the most important of Wilde's critical works and his contribution is Aestheticism, it consists of four essays: "The Decay of Lying," "Pen, Pencil and Poison," "The Critic as Artist," and "The Truth of Masks."
"The Decay of Lying" was called by Oscar Wilde a "trumpet against the gate of dullness" in a letter to Kate Terry Lewis. It takes place in the library of a country house in Nottinghamshire. The actors are Cyril and Vivian. Vivian defends one of the principles of Oscar Wilde's Aestheticism: Art is superior to Nature. Nature has goals but can't carry them out. Nature is awkward ,boring, and without design when compared to Art.
"Pen, Pencil and Poison" is a biographical essay on the glaring writer, murderer, and pretender Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who used the pen name "Janus Weathercock."
Oscar Wilde's way is that Wainewright's criminal activities show the spirit of a real artist.As creative acts, there is no significant difference between art and murder. Life itself is an art, and the true artist presents his life as his finest work. Wilde, who attempted to make this difference in his own life by his trials to re-create himself, this includes the theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
"The Critic as Artist," is his longest essay. It is given considered to be a response to Matthew Arnold's essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time"Arnold's position is that the creative faculty is higher than the critical.
The setting of the dialogue is a library in a house in London's Piccadilly area, and the principal characters are Gilbert and Ernest.
Along with the central theme of the importance of the critic, Gilbert approves the acceptation of the individual. The man makes the times; the times do not make the man. He defends "Sin is an important element of advance." Sin helps affirm individuality and avoid the dullness of willingness .
The best criticism must cast off ordinary guidelines, especially those of Realism, and accept the aesthetics of Impressionism — what a reader feels when reading a work of literature rather than what a reader thinks, or reasons, while reading. The critic must transcend literal events and consider the "imaginative passions of the mind." The critic should not seek to explain a work of art but should seek to deepen its mystery.
More important within the context of Intentions, Wilde himself always put great emphasis on appearance and the masks, or costumes, with which the artist or individual confronts the world.
Oscar Wilde says in art there is no such thing as an complete truth: "A Truth is that whose adverse is also true." This effect recalls Wilde's amazing respect for the mind of Walt Whitman.
It's not hard to see that Oscar Wilde loved to shock, he wouldn't want to be accused of genuineness, he was certainly devoted to Aestheticism in his life and art.
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