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The essay, Twain notes, was "offered for the thirty-dollar prize," but it The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays not take the prize. My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying. No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted. In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this theme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel. It would not become me to criticize you, gentlemen, who are nearly all my elders--and my superiors, in this thing--and so, if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than of fault-finding; indeed if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this Club has devoted to it, I should not need to utter this lament, or shed a single tear. I do not The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays this to flatter: I The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition. No virtue can reach its highest usefulness without careful and diligent cultivation, -- therefore, it goes without saying, that this one ought to be taught in the public schools -- at the fireside -- even in the newspapers. What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I against Mr. Per against a lawyer? Judicious lying is The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays the world needs. The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays sometimes think it were even better and safer not to lie at all than to lie injudiciously. An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth. Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain--adults and wise persons never speak it. Parkman, the historian, says, "The principle of truth may itself be carried into an absurdity. None of us could The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays with an habitual truth-teller; but thank goodness none of us has to. An habitual truth-teller is simply an impossible creature; he does not exist; he never has existed. Of course there are people who think they never lie, but it is not so,--and this ignorance is one of the very things that shame our so-called civilization. Everybody lies--every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning; if he keeps his tongue still, his hands, his foes, his eyes, his attitude, will convey deception--and purposely. Even in sermons--but that is a platitude. Now their pretence of wanting to see the fourteen--and the other two whom they had been less lucky with--was that commonest and mildest form of lying which is sufficiently described as The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays deflection from the truth. Is it justifiable? Most certainly. It is beautiful, it The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays noble; for its object is, not to reap profit, but to convey a pleasure to the sixteen. The iron-souled truth-monger would plainly manifest, or even utter the fact that he didn't want to see those people,--and he would be an ass, and inflict a totally unnecessary pain. And next, those ladies in that far country --but never mind, they had a thousand pleasant ways of lying, that grew out of gentle impulses, and The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays a credit to their intelligence and an honor to their hearts. Let the particulars go. Their mere howdy-do The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays a lie, because they didn't care how you did, except they were undertakers. To the ordinary inquirer you lied in return; for you made no conscientious diagnosis of your case, but answered at random, and usually missed The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays considerably. You lied to the undertaker, and said your health was failing--a wholly commendable lie, since it cost you nothing and pleased the other man. If a stranger called and interrupted you, you said with The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays hearty tongue, "I'm glad to see you," and said with your heartier soul, "I wish you were with the cannibals and it was dinner time. Continued on page two. Continued from page one 6 I think that all this courteous lying is a sweet and loving art, and should be cultivated. The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying. Let us do what we can to eradicate it. An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. The man who tells a lie to help a poor devil out of trouble, is one of whom the angels doubtless say, "Lo, here is an heroic soul who casts his own welfare into jeopardy to succor his neighbor's; let us exalt this magnanimous liar. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all. In that far country where I once lived, there was a lovely spirit, a lady whose impulses were always high and pure, and whose character answered to them. One day I was there at dinner, and remarked, in a general way, that we are all liars. She was amazed, and said, "Not all? But as soon as the young people were out of the way, the lady came warmly back to the matter and said, "I have made it the rule of my life to never tell a lie; and I have never departed from it in a single instance. It has caused me a good deal of pain, because I am not used to it. So I said This blank asks all manner of questions as to the conduct of that sick-nurse: 'Did she ever sleep on her watch? Did she ever forget to give the medicine? You are warned to be very careful and explicit in your answers, for the welfare of the service requires that the nurses be promptly fined or otherwise punished for derelictions. You told me you were perfectly delighted with that nurse--that she had a thousand perfections and only one fault: you found you never could depend on her wrapping Johnny up half sufficiently while he waited in a chilly chair for her to rearrange the warm bed. You filled up the duplicate of this paper, and sent it back to the hospital by the hand of the nurse. How did you answer this question,--'Was the nurse at any time guilty of a negligence which was likely to result in the patient's taking cold? And how could I mention her one single fault, and she so good? Now observe the result of this inexpert deflection of yours. You know Mr. Jones's Willie is lying very low with scarlet fever; well, your recommendation was so enthusiastic that that girl is there nursing him, and the worn-out family have all been trustingly sound asleep for the last fourteen hours, leaving their darling with full confidence in those fatal hands, because you, like young George Washington, have a reputa-- However, if you are not going to have anything to do, I will come around tomorrow and we'll attend the funeral together, for of course you'll naturally feel a peculiar interest in Willie's case,--as personal a one, in fact, as the undertaker. Concluded on page three. Continued from page two 11 But that was all lost. Before I was halfway through she was in a carriage and making thirty miles an hour toward the Jones mansion to save what was left of Willie and tell all she knew about the deadly nurse. All of which was unnecessary, as Willie wasn't sick; I had been lying myself. But that same day, all the same, she sent a line to the hospital which filled up the neglected blank, and stated the facts, too, in the squarest possible manner. She should have told the truth, there, and made it up to the nurse with a fraudulent compliment further along in the paper. She could have said, "In one respect this sick-nurse is perfection,--then she is on watch, she never snores. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather. Then-- But I am but a new and feeble student in this gracious art; I cannot The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays this Club. Share Flipboard Email. Richard Nordquist. English and Rhetoric Professor. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. Updated March 20, ThoughtCo uses cookies to provide you with a great user experience. By using ThoughtCo, you accept our. (DOC) Art as Artifice: Deploying Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying" | Kayode Faniyi -

To browse Academia. Skip to main content. Log In Sign Up. Download Free DOC. Download Free PDF. Kayode Faniyi. Faniyi 1 Kayode Faniyi Dr. The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy. Where pathos rules, where pathos is finally derived, a character has fought a battle he could not possibly have won. And so the point must be made. Self-knowledge is the vital ingredient Miller bemoans is missing from his Death of a Salesman, from The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays Willy Loman, the lack of which he admits puts the tragic status of his protagonist up for debate Bigsby xix. The Importance of Being Earnest still remains wild fun. Wilde mostly shunned serious philosophies, but in terms of philosophical importance, this tragic quality of his life is the abiding take-away. Wilde is cynical enough, The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays Cyril—his device—is cynical in too many instances, so that we should harbour some manner of suspicion that Wilde perhaps did not take this essay as seriously as the history of literary criticism has. In fact, aestheticism was a fierier, more extreme reaction, to the current of realism and naturalism, which were the methods of representation the ascendant bourgeois culture appeared to privilege, owing perhaps to their utilitarian imperative. This flaw has its advantages, claims Wilde. Characteristically, Wilde subverts both these critical standpoints. For him, The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays has no external referent. Art is self-referential. Here, a stirring of reception theory. If Art is self-referential, the question of imitation, up till this point universally agreed-upon, becomes moot. Art is creative, imaginative, and its purpose consists in charm, delight and pleasure, not truth. Never truth. The subversions continue to pile up. Wilde rereads the history of drama as a tale of degradation, and not an improvement. Art begins with abstract decoration with purely imaginative and pleasurable work dealing with what is unreal and non-existent. This is the first stage. Then Life becomes fascinated with this new wonder, and asks to be admitted into the charmed circle. The third stage is when life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. This is the true decadence, and it is from this that we are now suffering. Or rather, Life imitates Art much more than Art imitates Life here, at least, the subversive admits some affinity with the subverted. Through Art, we encounter the beauty in Nature. Art takes Life, infuses it with imagination, and transforms it into an exaggeration 7, 16something beyond itself. In a very important passage, Wilde applies his subversive reading of the history of drama to the particular instance of English drama. Take the case of the English drama. At first in the hands of the monks Dramatic Art was abstract, decorative, and mythological. She clothed her children in strange raiment and gave them masks, and at her bidding the antique world rose from its marble tomb. Art, if not entirely imaginative, is at least Life exaggerated beyond itself. Art is not concerned with truth. The purpose of Art is simply to delight its audience. Nothing more. Do these doctrines maintain their integrity in the face of practice? First of all, theories of anything are by necessity limited in scope. No theory—especially theories pushing philosophies of literary production—can, or has been able to, account for the entirety of practice. It helps that Wilde both theorized and practiced literature drama, if we are being true to our scope. It is one of the most well-known English plays never mind that Wilde is of Irish descent. Therefore, we will examine Earnest, and in addition to that, another play in the comic mould. Faniyi 7 Plays—i. The common denominator in this assertion is imitation, whatever may be doing the imitation. Even the most way-out instances of dramatic practice cannot but employ characteristics unique to humans, dialogue, gestures etc. We will be examining the plays we have taken for models on the bases of plot, situations and the elements The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays in them: characters, action, dialogue. The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays plot which Aristotle termed the mythos in a dramatic or narrative work is constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and ordered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional effects. It The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself… The distinction between the comic and the satiric, however, is sharp only at its extremes. I am a Liberal Unionist. They dine with us. Or come in the evening, at any rate. Now to minor matters. The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays your parents living? It is another thing however for the whole thing to be satiric. Again, satire occurs as an incidental element within many works whose overall mode is not satiric—in a certain character or situation, or in an interpolated passage of ironic commentary on some aspect of the human condition or of contemporary society. Going by the foregone, is the central effect of our models satiric? It is of course important to mention that the people most convinced about the social potential of satire are understandably satirists themselves. As the subtitle suggests, Earnest is a trivial comedy for serious people. In essence, a farce. Jack Worthing Ernest in town and Algernon Moncrieff are well-off gentlemen who live in the country and the town respectively. These inventions arm them with an occasional route for escape from their normal lives. The inventions also allow them lead double lives duplicity is a major theme in the play, and in the hands of Wilde, is an immensely effective comic device. The enthrallment blossoms into full-blown love, and they become engaged, in fact. Miss Prism and Chasuble fall in love. Gwendolen finds out about Cecily, and the both of them will fluctuate between The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays and dislike for the other owing to a misunderstanding over Ernest. Meanwhile, Jack and Algernon scheme to be re- christened as Ernest. At last, the plot is tied up neatly: everything ends well for all the prospective couples. Faniyi 10 The plot, as we see, is entirely comic, and due to the sheer amount of improbability and incredulity it consumes, farcical. The Trials of Brother Jero? It may The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays controversial, but Brother Jero is most certainly not a satire. In any case, a paper on Oscar Wilde should itself present a healthy amount of the kind of controversy he always seemed to inspire. The argument is wont to emerge, that what the play signifies is astonishment at a society that allows such a man as Jero thrive. Again, this characterization—a mischaracterization really—arises from replacing the totality of a play by its incidentals, in this case, principally the character of Jero. Jero is a satire on society. Brother Jero is most certainly not a satire. Brother Jero is a farce. Pranks abound. No one takes any responsibility. At this point, we will employ our earlier method to exemplify the point. Brother Jero is a duplicitous beach divine who has outmanoeuvred Old Prophet, his old boss, and now boasts of his own patch of beach. Is this how you repay the long years of training I have given you? To drive me, your old Tutor, off my piece of land… telling me I have lived beyond my time. May you be rewarded in the same The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays. I curse you with the curse of the Daughters of Discord. May they be your downfall. May the Daughters of Eve bring ruin down on your head! Jero, hidden from The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays, observes and wills Chume on as his new-found, aggressive assertiveness confounds an incorrigibly brash Amope. Brother Jero is not quite the full-blown comedy that Earnest is; not even Soyinka has the comic power of Wilde. But it becomes quite clear then that the organizing principle is artificiality, laughter, and laughter as end in itself. Life is its raw material, but Soyinka has exaggerated Life and transmuted it into artistic conventions for the purpose of laughter. Which is telling. Works Cited Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Mirror and the Lamp. By Abrams. The Decay of Lying: A Close Reading of Oscar Wilde by Natasha Randhawa

See what's new with book lending at the Internet Archive. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. The poet lives his life, you say, and that is one matter ; the poem lives its life, and that is quite another matter. Between the writer and his writings the discriminating must observe di- vorce. Then, directly contradicting, is the theory of the goodly who are touched with the taint of Puritanism. Every written line, these hold, is the intimate expression of self. The sinner cannot write other than sinful things. The farther you fare, if you would reach dogma on this point, the deeper will you mire. The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays alone rules. And rules nowhere so supremely as in the case of Oscar Wilde. Inextricably mingled are his living and his writing; yet to consider his prose, his plays, his poetry, only by the light of his prison and its aftermath, were as stupid as to imagine that one may ever quite read any page of his without finding there some echo of a personality. No man whose energy, whose delight in a personal pose, and whose paradoxic infatuation with art could make such an impress on the time and the land he lived in can be erased by any act of his own, or by our volition, from the world's chronicle. The mood of the triumphant dandy we have in his earlier, that of the self-pitying suf- ferer, in his later writings. In life, as in letters, he was always the man of his mood, the artist in attitudes. One must take him, if one can, at the particular mood that best pleases one. Just as all his living was a paradox, so the relation between that living and his writing must ever remain one. A month after Wilde's death, when Puritan ears were to all intents closed against his name, I pub- lished an argument seeking to disestablish the con- nection between his noble artistic achievement and the cloud under which his name still lay. That was, of course, special pleading. Now, barely five years later, Time has nobly fulfilled all I then fore- cast. The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays con- tinental Europe no play is more frequently per- formed at this writing than Wilde's Salome ; his books and his plays are everywhere conspicuous. Colder critical perspective of Time and Comparison has not diminished the regard for his The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays. The posthumous publication of certain prison letters of his called De Profundis tended, but the other day, to darken counsel somewhat. Here, again, was the gaping wound laid open, the tor- tured soul writhing to find itself The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays its countless attitudes. Here what had been arrogance was turned to pity, and to a pagan, yet piteous, inter- pretation of the Christ ; yet here, still, was the pose, the attitude, the unquenchable artist in attitudes. Nothing, in the case before us, can be thrown away. It is as The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays to consider the life alone as the letters alone. All was of a piece. Yet the happy mean, the discriminating way, is, having in mind the art his life assumed, to consider as dis- tinctly as possible the art he put on paper. The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays life was as complete a work of art, with heights and depths, triumphs and tragedies, as was ever composed. There, then, is The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays Magnum Opus. Paradox and moods, it is always these in the case of Wilde. And never more so than in the case of his essays. His fairy tales, his poetry, notably The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his exquisite plays — living still not only in themselves, but as models to later playwrights — have my full meed of appreciation, yet it is in his essays that I find him at his best. Here the wisdom under his paradox is most dis- coverable. Here, forgetting his life, one may most clearly discern his most characteristic attitude toward life. Here, in Intentions, are the most precious utterances of this amateur in art and life. Jewels of wit and paradox are in these pages scattered so profusely, that if once one start to pick them up, one may not stop, save for sheer weari- ness. Truly one may declare, as William Watson does of Lowell, that the brilliance " is so great and so ubiquitous that it pays the not inconsiderable penalty of diverting our attention from The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays real soundness that underlies it all. So dazzling is the flash, and at The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays so sharp the report, that we scarcely notice the straightness of the aim. Yet of essayists who have done memorable things, critically, in our own time, there are at least three : Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, and George Moore. All have said trenchant things memorably. Often impertinent, yet never negli- gible. Intentions is magnificent with impertinences, but also with truths. It constantly makes ridiculous the petty formulas of petty dog- matists. Observe Richard Burton, not of New Arabian Nights, but of New England, declaring that " in the essay an author stands self-revealed ; he may mask behind some other forms, in some mea- sure; but commonplaceness, vulgarity, thinness of nature, are in this kind instantly uncovered. The essay is for this reason a severe test. We are in a land of masks and moods. It is the record of a mood. It is the impress, writ in wax, of some mask we wore at sorr e moment. It is a quantity of conflicting things. It is revelation, and it is masquerade. What- ever it is, literature is something of which the essays in Intentions must ever be accounted typss : irritati ng, i nsincere, paradoxic, but— indubi- tably literature. Epigram jostles contradiction;, The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays elbows the fantastic; paradox plays through every interval; yet these essays remain arrestingly entertaining, eminently readable. T his style was t he man ; -you can, if you will, r ead him in every line of it. Here are all the triumphant moods of his triumphant, arrogant years, expressed in glittering epigram and luminous diction; just as in the style of The The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays of Reading Gaol you may mark the prison bars, and in that of De Profundis you may hear the cry of a soul desperately attempting to achieve sincerity through a chastened body. Every one of the essays in Intentions marks a happypose. The reader here has Oscar Wildein-his gayest moods. There are, in this book, four essays, the chief of them, The Critic as Artist, being in two parts. Every page of them is readable. This is mannered matter, fron a mannered man. But man and matter hold you to the end. The author's panoply of paradox guards him against the commonplace. Never is the reader safe in assuming that the brilliant manner has nothing behind it. Let me instance the much-dis- cussed theory about art imitating lifeso adroit ly The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays forth. Our newspapers and our ob- servation continually confirm the theory, at first so seemingly far-fetched. The American journalist, Julian Ralph, once recounted the incident of a model in a New York art school who absolutely, yet unconsciously, rehearsed the action of Du Maurier's heroine in suddenly refusing to pose for the altogether. Robert Hichens afterwards used the green carnation as the name of a satiric novelette, aimed at Wilde, and in. The temptation to quote is hardly countered as one reads and rereads these essays. Excepting certain impudent but amusing passages in The Confessions of a Young Man, no phrases upon contemporaries are so memorable as some that Wilde here sets down. Henry James, we are here The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays, " writes fiction as if it were a painful duty " ; Mr. Hall Caine writes " at the top of his voice. The only man that can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith. Meredith is a prose The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays, and so is Browning. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. Wh en. This chap- ter on Thomas Griffiths Wainewright is one of the subtlest, uncanniest bits of appreciative writing in the history of letters. In every line of it one may read, recalling Wilde's subsequent career, the phrases of prophecy and unconscious self- revelation. It is as if he had, years before the event, given us a docu- ment that might serve as an apology or explanation. There is no argument that a pleader for Wilde could use that Wilde had not himself used here for Waine- wright, who was an artist, poet, dilettante, forger, and The Decay of Lying: and Other Essays. Now, when one has the later documents, the Ballad and the letters from prison, such passages as these, from Pen, Pencil, and Poison, ring doubly poignant : " The sentence now passed on him was, to a man of his culture, a form of death. His crimes seem to have had an important effect upon his art. They gave a strong personality to his style. One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin. The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art. There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. Had we before us nothing save the essay on Waine- wright, there would be evidence enough for calling Wilde a brilliant creative critic. This is biography, this is art. I must point you to those fascinating pages themselves, conscious that each line of mine has but delayed your coming to the feast itself. It is possible that this new edition of Intentions for which I make this introduction may reach some who have never yet read Wilde in the essay-form.