Wilde: Notes, outline
Apr. 9th, 2006 01:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jhameiaTopic: The formation of morality through aesthetics in Oscar Wilde's writings
in particular, the Happy Prince, the Devoted Friend, Picture of Dorian Gray.
Critic as Artist (parts I and II) and De Profoundis
Critic as Artist I
253 Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name.
All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate.
257
Ernest: You think, then, that in the sphere of action a sconsious aim is a delusion?
Gilbert: It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that those who call themelves good would be sickened with a dull remorse and those whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilizations, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the slaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has been no mterial improvement that has not spiritualized the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stangage or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiousity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
Critic as Artist II
269 ... Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people.
274 Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
275 But someone should teachm them that that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
277 ... the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not *doing* but *being*, and not *being* merely, but *becoming - that is what the critica spirit can give us.
280 ... self-culture is the true ideal of man. ... The Greeks saw it, and have left us... the conception of the contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone can that be truly realized.
285 But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builts out of them a world more real than reality if loftier and more noble importhall set limits to him?
286 You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surrondings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Inseisible, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and cham and loveliness.
290 Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.
294 It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.
295 The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
De Profoundis
39 Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely.
40 an artist... requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude.
68 ... there is no room for both passions [Love and Hate] in the same soul. ... Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed Love. But anything will do for Hate.
73 Hate, you have yet to learn, is, intellectually considered, the Eternal Negation.
93 The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of Love in it. With people of our rank it is different. With us prison makes a man a pariah.
94 I must say ... nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.
98 But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.
99 But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form.
100 To reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul.
101 Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself: that is to say it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.
Thesis statement (tentative): The practice of morality is developed by the [responsible] individual through both contemplation and aesthetics.
Individual:
agency of self to realize moral behaviour, become conscious / sensitive to others, reflect on own contemplation and aesthetic senses, realization that both qualities are universal (cosmopolitan).
De Profoundis
Critic as Artist
Happy Prince
Contemplation: morality sense is developed through meditating actions and behaviour.
Dorian Gray: Dorian and Harry are unable to contemplate on the effects of their words and experiences on others. As a result, Dorian's sense of morality deteriorates, and Harry loses his wife.
Devoted Friend: Water-rat would be considered immoral because his refuses to consider how actions of the Miller adversely affect Little Hans.
De Profoundis: Onus on Douglas for shallowness, not considering actions.
Aesthetics:
Through a love for the beautiful, the individual should strive to be a kind of person that causes goodness, so as to keep being surrounded by beauty. Ugliness in the world can rarely be avoided so the individual should try to make beauty a reality rather than leave the world as it is.
Happy Prince
The points need work, but it's a start. I have more notes, from Cosmopolitan Criticism, and I might try the Poetics of Ambiguity before actually embarking on the writing, but it should be at least halfway done by tomorrow night. Cross yer fingers for me, it's due 4pm Monday and it's 1am Sunday right now.
in particular, the Happy Prince, the Devoted Friend, Picture of Dorian Gray.
Critic as Artist (parts I and II) and De Profoundis
Critic as Artist I
253 Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name.
All fine imaginative work is self-conscious and deliberate.
257
Ernest: You think, then, that in the sphere of action a sconsious aim is a delusion?
Gilbert: It is worse than a delusion. If we lived long enough to see the results of our actions it may be that those who call themelves good would be sickened with a dull remorse and those whom the world calls evil stirred by a noble joy. Each little thing that we do passes into the great machine of life which may grind our virtues to powder and make them worthless, or transform our sins into elements of a new civilizations, more marvellous and more splendid than any that has gone before. But men are the slaves of words. They rage against Materialism, as they call it, forgetting that there has been no mterial improvement that has not spiritualized the world, and that there have been few, if any, spiritual awakenings that have not wasted the world's faculties in barren hopes, and fruitless aspirations, and empty or trammelling creeds. What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stangage or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiousity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.
Critic as Artist II
269 ... Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people.
274 Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
275 But someone should teachm them that that while, in the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.
277 ... the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not *doing* but *being*, and not *being* merely, but *becoming - that is what the critica spirit can give us.
280 ... self-culture is the true ideal of man. ... The Greeks saw it, and have left us... the conception of the contemplative life as well as the critical method by which alone can that be truly realized.
285 But the artist, who accepts the facts of life, and yet transforms them into shapes of beauty, and makes them vehicles of pity or of awe, and shows their colour-element, and their wonder, and their true ethical import also, and builts out of them a world more real than reality if loftier and more noble importhall set limits to him?
286 You remember that lovely passage in which Plato describes how a young Greek should be educated, and with what insistence he dwells upon the importance of surrondings, telling us how the lad is to be brought up in the midst of fair sights and sounds, so that the beauty of material things may prepare his soul for the reception of the beauty that is spiritual. Inseisible, and without knowing the reason why, he is to develop that real love of beauty which, as Plato is never weary of reminding us, is the true aim of education. By slow degrees there is to be engendered in him such a temperament as will lead him naturally and simply to choose the good in preference to the bad, and, rejecting what is vulgar and discordant, to follow by fine instinctive taste all that possesses grace and cham and loveliness.
290 Art does not address herself to the specialist. Her claim is that she is universal, and that in all her manifestations she is one.
294 It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan.
295 The artistic critic, like the mystic, is an antinomian always. To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.
De Profoundis
39 Ah! you had no motives in life. You had appetites merely.
40 an artist... requires for the development of his art the companionship of ideas, and intellectual atmosphere, quiet, peace, and solitude.
68 ... there is no room for both passions [Love and Hate] in the same soul. ... Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole: by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations. Only what is fine, and finely conceived can feed Love. But anything will do for Hate.
73 Hate, you have yet to learn, is, intellectually considered, the Eternal Negation.
93 The poor are wiser, more charitable, more kind, more sensitive than we are. In their eyes prison is a tragedy in a man's life, a misfortune, a casualty, something that calls for sympathy in others. They speak of one who is in prison as of one who is 'in trouble' simply. It is the phrase they always use, and the expression has the perfect wisdom of Love in it. With people of our rank it is different. With us prison makes a man a pariah.
94 I must say ... nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand.
98 But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes.
99 But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form.
100 To reject one's own experiences is to arrest one's own development. To deny one's own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one's own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul.
101 Society takes upon itself the right to inflict appalling punishments on the individual, but it also has the supreme vice of shallowness, and fails to realise what it has done. When the man's punishment is over, it leaves him to himself: that is to say it abandons him at the very moment when its highest duty towards him begins.
Thesis statement (tentative): The practice of morality is developed by the [responsible] individual through both contemplation and aesthetics.
Individual:
agency of self to realize moral behaviour, become conscious / sensitive to others, reflect on own contemplation and aesthetic senses, realization that both qualities are universal (cosmopolitan).
De Profoundis
Critic as Artist
Happy Prince
Contemplation: morality sense is developed through meditating actions and behaviour.
Dorian Gray: Dorian and Harry are unable to contemplate on the effects of their words and experiences on others. As a result, Dorian's sense of morality deteriorates, and Harry loses his wife.
Devoted Friend: Water-rat would be considered immoral because his refuses to consider how actions of the Miller adversely affect Little Hans.
De Profoundis: Onus on Douglas for shallowness, not considering actions.
Aesthetics:
Through a love for the beautiful, the individual should strive to be a kind of person that causes goodness, so as to keep being surrounded by beauty. Ugliness in the world can rarely be avoided so the individual should try to make beauty a reality rather than leave the world as it is.
Happy Prince
The points need work, but it's a start. I have more notes, from Cosmopolitan Criticism, and I might try the Poetics of Ambiguity before actually embarking on the writing, but it should be at least halfway done by tomorrow night. Cross yer fingers for me, it's due 4pm Monday and it's 1am Sunday right now.