There are few things as pervasive, and as dangerous, as a memory. People tend not to remember great stretches of time, relationships over years, or internships that last too long - everything is squeezed into moments. While there are memories, they can never be as potent as a memory. It is human nature, as massive changes in the environment are what capture our attention, and not the retinue of continued practice. The whole becomes the fragment, and it is in fragments, beautiful fragments, that one can experience the world. But, as one interprets memories, one must remember; it is not reality.

Oscar Wilde was one of the foremost minds of his generation and, despite his detractors, was always lauded for his wit. And wit by itself is no mean feat; it belongs to some and is poor in others. His fiendish mind spun stories and poems that are still read today, from The Picture of Dorian Grey to The Ballad of Reading Goal.

His fever-pitch lyricism shone across every corner of his life, from the highs of Victorian gentlemanly glory to the lows of exiled paupery. Despite his hardships, that almost need no retelling, his passion for his work encompassed his entire life. His mantra, and those of his ideological peers, was simple: art for art’s sake.

Despite Wilde’s connections and fearlessly communicative voice, he did not inspire much praise from his contemporaries, as is the fate of many artists that received adulation today. It is easy to see how his position was one of other tread-upon greats, like van Gogh or Rembrandt. But the zenith of his work, as alluded to in the windswept passages of Dorian Grey or eloquent witticisms of Earnest.

His was the evolution of the movement detailed on 19:14 previously, birthed in the minds of those who rose to prominence following the destitution of post-Napoleonic Europe. Romanticism had become morphed and scattered as authors and artists had their own interpretations of what the Shelleys, Keats, Wordsworth and Goya had begun to demonstrate. As such artistic movements flourished, like the offspring of a new stallion upon the prairie, its brood diversified. Some fled to where the stream met the lake, others to the prickly forests, while Wilde, who had found friction wherever he went, preferred the rolling hills. From romanticism was birthed aestheticism. It would belong to Wilde a few peers who marched towards the 19th century’s end: aestheticism as a major movement would live and die within their lifetimes. But why?

“To understand the art, one must come to understand the artist.” 

Even this is not universal, as there is an ulterior theory penned in Death of the Author that says otherwise. But there is always truth to be revealed, and there is always more to discuss, even if it is discussion bar discussion. C.S. Elliot put it well when talking, in his incendiary tone, of what it means to be an author:

The purpose of beauty, and of art itself, is one that ponders the question of the relation to art and beauty. A windswept orchard is beautiful, but not artistic – a painting of the same orchard, burned and defaced, is not nearly as beautiful, if at all, but is deeply artistic.

Edgar Allen Poe spoke about his poetic passion:
“Thus, although in a very cursory and imperfect manner, I have endeavored to convey to you my conception of the Poetic Principle. It has been my purpose to suggest that, while this Principle itself is, strictly and simply, the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty, the manifestation of the Principle is always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul — quite independent of that passion which is the intoxication of the Heart — or of that Truth which is the satisfaction of the Reason.”

But Wilde also had wisdom to impart on the relationship between the creation and the creator; ‘to reveal art and to conceal the artist is art’s aim.’ By stepping closer to the genesis of the creation, readers and critics alike stretch closer to dismantling the hierarchy of art itself, in Wilde’s perception. Art is, in this way, a despotic arrangement between the invisible god and the visible creation, where nothing can be undone and anything, anything at all, can exist in the realm of the invisible. For this, one could state that the Poetic Edda was written as a tribunal for the author’s hatred of Catholicism, or his hatred of paganism, and be equally correct, and both be as equally useful as the other for understanding the art – that is, not useful at all. 

For all the lessons, seminars and essays on the importance of context, likewise within 19:14, Wilde posits that the artist is as shrouded, infallible, and as poor a tool of critique as anything else. It should be noted that the century-and-change since Wilde’s style erupted across the landscape, literary observers have castrated, euthanised, dissected his body of work, professional and personal. There is something prophetic in the magnitude of Wilde’s persona and how it almost dwarfs his work – some might say that his actions spoke otherwise of his beliefs, in how he demanded attention and thrived under it, but that would divorce the man from the artist. Wilde as the vessel for so-called ‘genius,’ both hedonist and artist, discounts the reality that much of his art was far less revelatory as it was revelled in.

The continued strength of Wilde’s character in the public image may not just exist as hypocrisy of his own derision of the artist as a vehicle of criticism, but its most ignoble punishment for the critic. Even in the face of his witticisms, legendary affairs, harrowing ostracisms, Wilde would still insist upon his mission to ‘conceal the artist.’ 

Just because he failed did not mean it was not what he believed, and just because he was unable to stop his work’s dissection post his deceasement it does not mean we are inclined to do so without caution and diligence. It must be noted that following this line of advice from the artist would be, in its own way, bowing to the creator’s credit beyond his own work. This, in itself, could be construed as revealing the artist, as the critic has only shrouded the artist from the artist’s own wishes.

The truth of the matter must come from within, from the reader’s own sensibilities, in earnest. And for Oscar Wilde, who knew how to love and turn fury into art in equal measure, it is not for the reader to acquire every detail of his life to understand his work. 

But what are the implications for Wilde’s wit to somehow have overtaken his own art? These aphorisms were no stranger to Wilde, who embedded them in The Picture of Dorian Grey to understand the role of the artist. The answer may be simple: wit is a marker of intelligence, while art is a marker for heartfulness.

To make the difference between the heart and mind clear, when science and art often go hand-in-hand (take Leonardo da Vinci, for example, and the very idea of a ‘renaissance man’), is difficult. The idea of there being regions of the brain more dominant than the other was cited for some time, but is no longer psychologically relevant — minds are too complex in their ideation to separate what one thinks as ‘heartful’ from ‘thoughtful,’ even if it seems obvious there is a difference. Logic and love, reason and passion, carefulness and kindness, exist as a duality that is not clear where one begins and one ends.

Wilde certainly advocated for the latter rather than the former, as his works were far less academic as they were experiential. But it is not to say there is nothing cerebral about Wilde’s art — his words take a great deal of care to articulate and dissect. The difference may never be clear, as a banker may love the theatre and a sculptor may enjoy arithmetic. People are always more nuanced than values and concepts. Attempts to categorise pleasures and pains, like in utilitarianism or virtue ethics, usually end up with a tyranny of categorisation — that is, a self-imposed arbitration that desecrates the reality of experience itself. Even with their failure, the question of where the mind controls, and what the heart wants, exists in the imagination of every writer and, indeed, every person.

. The mind-body dilemma rears its head once more, as one considers the difference between the mindful and the kind, the bright and the passionate. It is an ever-blurry line that is more metaphorical, and therefore passionate, with the increased understanding of psychology and the purposes of the regions of the brain. A man with rebar through his frontal cortex lived and became a bitter, malfused person; the heartful and the mindful are not as different as it may seem. But, when it comes to the passage of ideas, or the Dawkinsian idea of memetics, wit grows rapidly. It requires very little energy to acquire, simply being passed from one person to another, and even less energy to propagate. Quotes burn fast.

But for Wilde’s art, to sit and watch Earnest at its most optimal location, the theatre, may be unattainable for the business-strained person. Dorian Grey may just be too long of a read, or not gripping enough, for the ever-entertained. But for the aphorisms, the piecemeal chunks of a greater work, they can take a life of their own. This he-said-he-knew situation allows those who enjoy the art to spread its contents to those who would otherwise not see it, just as much as the gravity of the work is nonetheless respected. But the order of things cannot be confused: aphorisms, like rabbits or mice, grow rapidly, but always burrow underneath the mountain of art and completed works of grandeur. The mountain can exist barren, but the rabbits must always have a place to rest.

Art, throughout the Hellenic world, and the later Christian world, existed as an extension of scripture. The Sistine Chapel, the Last Supper and David were all created using funds from the Catholic church, levied on the poor, and thus served the purpose of moral and spiritual bettering. Few could look at the works and not be inspired by awe, and therefore, awe at God and the church that represented himself. This art was transparently purposeful. In the Islamic world, art withdrew responsibility for the physical regions of holiness, instead depicting the mathematical and scientific complexity, and beauty, of nature: this is why the Islamic world is covered in complex murals, muqarnas and minarets. In more modern times, art often fulfils a political role, from Punch’s comic strips to Picasso’s Guernica to modern works that comment on psychological decay, like DementiaUK’s push for using the arts to help dementia sufferers. All these arts, tactically or otherwise, serve a purpose.

The decadence movement that Wilde endorsed and embraced espoused the opposite. For every Guernica there is a piece of art ignored for its intangibility, even if it meant something deeply to its creator. For every commentary on society that fulfils some political purpose, there may be another work that does so far more deftly, but without its political affiliation - is it worse art for it? And, moreso, if art should better society, and uphold some moral standards, as many are convinced today, they would be in better company with the Victorian gentry who derided Dorian Grey for its ‘immorality.’ Wilde did not just disagree with Victorian society on its verdict of his art, he disagreed on principle.

The very system that judged whether one piece of art is moral or not is a system that inevitably persecutes outsiders and innovators; the same that persecuted Wilde. While even the most moralistic of modern art critics would be hazard to ban Dorian Grey today, the freedom to be artful, to experiment, is always under threat from a new generation of authoritarians – both in government and literary circles – that would deign what should be, and what can’t be. Decadence is the belief of ‘pointless’, hedonistic art, and because of this transparent selfishness, it became less popular, as it became more and more noble for the artist to become responsible for society – state funds, the Poet Laureate, lottery support, opera sponsorship, has given rise to more art for more people, but placed a label on what should be its purpose. This top-down approach has constrained art while also expanding it.

However important aestheticism was for Wilde, Dorian Grey ended up a much poorer man for his obsession with beauty – even so, this beauty was far from his flaw, but his only redeeming quality, as it did not purport any good beneath it. Wilde did not abandon morality for art; he separated it. 

The discretion of the reader is often tested by different authors: some operate via committee, and others by committee in all but name! Test audiences exist for cinema, but beta readers and coffee-shop audiences are still pivotal to the burgeoning author. Lehrer writes in How Creativity Works: 

This is one of the central challenges of writing. A writer has to read his sentences again and again. (Such are the inefficiencies of editing.) The problem with this process is that he very quickly loses the ability to see his prose as a reader and not as the writer. He knows exactly what he is trying to say, but that’s because he’s the one saying it. In order to construct a clear sentence or a coherent narrative, he needs to edit as if he knows nothing, as if he’s never seen these words before.This is an outsider problem—the writer must become an outsider to his own work. When he escapes from the privileged position of author, he can suddenly see all those imprecise clauses and unnecessary flourishes; he can feel the weak parts of the story and the slow spots in the prose. That’s why the novelist Zadie Smith, in an essay on the craft of writing, stresses the importance of putting aside one’s prose and allowing the passage of time to work its amnesiac magic.

‘Amnesiac magic’ is the life-blood of the writer, and it is what prevents many from achieving the goal of synthesisng work in a vacuum, in a study, in their minds. It is the friction and the struggle throughout one’s life that creates the energy for creativity. It can be imagined like a match striking fire, to then burn, until it is exhausted. Wilde was no shut in; he travelled the world, and the mindscapes of those that he adored, and it is no coincidence that those that succeed most in creating great fiction often exist in such great opposition with their environment, as the man’s affairs and frivolous lifestyle left him with many enemies. 

“An excellent man; he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him,” and the other “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much,” were the marks of a man who frequently knew, and climbed, the summit of conflict.

Advice comes from without, while creation comes from within. Wilde knew this well: his friends were multitudinous, and as anyone who has seen Earnest, multifaceted. His inspiration came as much from society as it did himself, although his craft leaned heavily towards the vacuous: art for art’s sake. However, his work was never without social commentary – the kind that hid like medicine in sugar - and through this criticism, one would expect a judgement to be made upon society. Wilde was certainly an outsider, but he belonged in the banquets and ceremonial pulpits of gentlemen’s England; it was within it that he thrived, and it was the spell of fatherhood, marriage and dutifully ‘settling down’ that proved anathema to the writer. While no one can comment on the man as he was known, even with the need to view his deeds in modern eyes, there exists a hierarchy to how we view his, and all, art.

Art is not a democracy. The hierarchy posits that art, itself, is liminal. Like osmosis, meaning and subjectivity pass from one object to the other, that an ‘energy transference’ is the mechanism of art, between subject, object and creator, and the object is the membrane. The creator should be, physically, a stranger to the subject. It should be noted that the cult of personality and celebrity comes another dynamic that irrevocably alters the hierarchy, even if there is no physical interaction. The three members of the hierarchy meet through the subject, which is in most common descriptions the ‘essence’ of art.

What the order is of the hierarchy has always changed with the times, the format, the medium, and importantly, the person. 19:14 shall look into the historical relationship of the hierarchy — like the geologist in his own garden, one can hardly make sense of the times that they themselves live in.

Technology and globalisation have, in relation to the hierarchy, allowed personality to overwrite objectivity – objects often have less precedence than personhood, as when the latter is bestowed on the former, like an urn or ship, it is heart-warming, but when a person is objectified, it is inhumane. This, curiously, has led to the diffusion of complex personified objects, the vessels of art, in favour of complex personified ideas and concepts, which are diffused through social media, the equivalent of vlogs and showreels. Such as when the subject acquires the object, it may have already lost much of its power, even if the creator themselves have gained following and prestige through the aforementioned diffusion of ideas and concepts. This may be positive or negative for art as whole, but this would require further deliberation that the hierarchy does not provide; instead, it demonstrates the status quo per the pre-globalised world.

The object-subject-creator is not set in stone, but an interpretation of the hierarchy’s needs. There must be three ‘ideas’ in the chain, at the very least, as any myth demonstrates a middling passage from genesis to synthesis, e.g. Moses received the decalogue from God, that he passes to his followers, thus establishing the creator as the head of the hiearchy, and the subjects at the bottom of this hypothetical mountain. The creator-object-subject order is the Judeo-Christian hegemony of art, that the creator blesses something inanimate with ideation, and that is then bestowed upon the subjects for contemplation. It does, however, place the greatest weight on the creator, not the object itself, as if the decalogue were to be destroyed, it would be the Jewish God’s followers that look to the creator, not the object, for its value. It is, inherently, divine; even in the matter of the mortal author, there is a ‘genius’ (the creator is possessed by a genius in its original usage) that helps create the object. All power, as is stated in scriptures and religions across the world, lies with the creator.

However, this line becomes more difficult to justify in the world of printing press publishing, where the clergy and intelligentsia became able to spread their art across the land – the Bible became translated, and treaties and books became more accessible than ever before. Some people read The Prince or Inferno without knowing very much at all about their respective authors, and through that metamorphosis in precedent, came a looser hierarchy.

Divine Comedy, although it harkened back to the entrenched classics of Plato and Aristotle, became a subject of itself that intellectuals throughout the Renaissance world read and digested. For the first time, the subject became more powerful than the creator, even if Dante wrote about the afterlife and creation in his work. In this way, it was the subject that was the origin of the art, and this object-subject-creator hierarchy placed Dante as a genius, but one that was only important insofar as having made great art. Art was no longer divine in the same way it once was: it belonged to Dante as much as God.

With the rise of the middle class, the liberalisation of printing laws, the reformation, and globalisation, art became far more attainable to the average person and, through technology, consumable. 19th century literature became less concerned about divinity and more about the transformation of the soul, from immoral to moral, or vice versa - Dracula, Dr Jekyll, and Sartor Restartus became concerned on personhood, both moral or maligned, and for the first time, took precedence of the object itself. Power seemed to come from those that read and read well. For the 19th century bookreader, who could chew through classic after classic, while partaking in a society of intense performative morality, the subject-object-creator hierarchy emerged. But it was not a victory for the artist; the commodification of art and the unquenched hunger of capitalism gave rise to more objects, but fewer powerfully voiced creators. Objects became more important than people, during the Pax Britannica, as they represented a more perspicacious future.

Today, with the rise of effortless on-line communication, the object itself seems to have lost almost all of its power – this transitory mesh that many interact with denies weight, physicality, responsibility. Personalities stretch across nations. Millions know a person’s breakfast habits like they would a spouse’s, and this is the eventuality of the moralism, and romanticism, of the 19th century; personhood precedence; the rights of the consumer.; This subject-creator-object hierarchy that emerged in the 20th century, and continues today, may one day transform itself once more, if consumer rights and attitudes on power backslide. The creator-subject-object hierarchy could return once more, and reduce art to a spiritual and proselytical place.

But, for now, the subject is the highest member of the hierarchy, as it is commonly believed that art originates from the beholder’s eye. The old adage proves useful, ‘if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?’ What is richer in art: an opulent library of a dying man’s unread books, or the well-kept picture-book of a young child? Does art only become art when it is witnessed and understood, and if that is the case, is the greatest art waiting to be discovered?

Wilde’s belief that art should conceal the artist still rings true today, even in an age of ever-accessible celebrity.

One of the most beautiful moments as an artist is to see one’s work connect with a stranger — a stranger who, somehow, has found the artist’s words as a friend would. When a mysterious book grips the heart, the author can be a friend, an enemy, a pariah, some sort of intangible Schrodinger’s Cat of mystery. The allure to know the artist, to understand their machinations, to ‘touch’ genius, is almost too much. It is human nature. But why must they be known? What true good does it do, if the object is all there can ever be of art? Or is all art a mimic, or membrane, from one person to another?

It is not hard to say where Wilde would have placed himself on this hierarchy, or on this particular conundrum of whether art is transitory or self-evident. He always believed ‘L‘art pour l’art’ and for the triumph of the human soul out of passion and kindness through art. The artist created objects of power and significance, through which subjects explore and understand life, and their soul, without the restrictions of dogma and moralism.

“To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was not the basis of his creed. When he says, ‘Forgive your enemies,’ it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate.”

Wilde did not wait upon his deathbed in the hope that, when he awoke once more, he would be subject to a raucous applause from the largest theatre on earth - he was not the vessel of his art. He may have untold secrets that would paralyse his critics, or even his followers; what is not known cannot be weighted in this way. Instead, he may have wanted peace, pain, the hand of his dearest man, and the quiet world that was forced upon him to end. It will not be written his deepest pains, his greatest pleasures, his favourite creation.

***

Responsibly, all that can be written is the desire he had for the world made resplendent once more – that in a world of industry, a suave man from Dublin could believe in magic, and how he electrified it.