The Decay of Lying: Wilde claims from Oscar and other frustrated lines of thinking

I forgot to post this draft! -- good grief, this blogging is still so new!.... I wrote it last week in regard to the whatsit exercise...

Oscar Wilde wrote some interesting essay-type things in the form of dialogues (Platonic, I might say, but they're always smoking cigarettes and laying about divans and such), one of which is the Decay of Lying. In it he complains about the growth of the tendency towards realism in the literature of his time. It was published in 1891. In it he also sings the praises of artifice as opposed to the "pleasures of nature":

My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

If Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture, and I prefer houses to the open air. In a house we all feel of the proper proportions. Everything is subordinated to us, fashioned for our use and our pleasure.

Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction suggests (if I remember correctly) that the changes made to the nature of Art by photography were underway even before photography was invented, or made much of an impression -- which makes sense if you realism as a movement predated teh invention of photography. [I withdrew from my art history class as an undergrad (though that didn't stop the prof from including the grade I had at the time I withdrew with the "W": "W-F"), so I'm not really sure, but my impression is that the movement from Romanticism to Modernism included some overlapping of realism on both sides...]

In any case I find Wilde's sophistry quite intoxicating and persuasive. In the same volume in which "The Decay of Lying" was published (Intentions) is another piece called "The Critic as Artist, with some remarks on the importance of doing nothing." In it he contradicts "the gross popular error" that it is easier to talk about a thing than to do it:

It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it....