6 - Wilde as critic and theorist

Summary

Good critics clarify the meaning of a work of art by helping us see what its maker intended; they provide historical facts; and they sincerely express their unbiased opinions. To which Oscar Wilde responds that the best critic, rather than explaining the work of art, 'may seek rather to deepen its mystery'; that 'The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it'; and that 'the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational'. According to Wilde, 'the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there'. Such criticism 'treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation'; it 'is itself an art', and of all the arts it is 'the purest form of personal expression'. As pure creation and personal expression, criticism's responsibility 'is to see the object as in itself it really is not'. Inaccurate and insincere, yet perfectly expressing the critic's moods, 'Criticism ... makes culture possible.' Therefore, 'It is to criticism that the future belongs': it 'will annihilate race-prejudices' and 'give us the peace that springs from understanding'.

Such, at least, are the opinions of Wilde's spokesman in his dialogue 'The Critic as Artist', published in Intentions (1891), the book on which Wilde's claims as a critic chiefly lie. Criticism of a more conventional sort - reasonable, factual and often fair - Wilde had done in reviews by the score, from the mid-i88os, when he left the lecture platform, until 1890, when he looked to the West End stage for his earnings. But with Intentions he destabilises the very category 'criticism', obliterating boundaries, for instance between the critic and the thing criticised, which ordinarily define it.