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Notes on Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist.”
Wilde’s prose “describes” things in an ornate way. In this piece, he offers an early version of the idea that “all reading is allegory.” One might say it’s the record of the critic’s impressions, or better yet of the movements of the critic’s soul under the influence of a work of art.
“What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.” Doing things links us with nature. Wilde asserts the primacy of creative imagination. We more than “half-create” what we perceive, to adapt a line form Wordsworth. We must rise above necessity and stress utopian direction.
“Those who live in marble or on painted panel know of life but a single exquisite instant . . . . Those whom the poet makes live have their myriad emotions of joy and terror, of courage and despair, of pleasure and of suffering.” Note the Hegelian aesthetics here: the lower arts are limited by their materiality. Wilde adds the notion that life is actually fuller in art. Life itself is characterized as very limited and material.
When it comes to the opposition between criticism and art, Wilde glibly overturns the traditional hierarchy. The purpose of criticism is not to explain the work. What criticism takes for its object is the movements of the critic’s soul, of his or her impression-taking powers. This is what it registers (in Pater, “scientifically”) and then records and transmits. The best criticism is the record of the critic’s soul. Why should we care what the critic says? Truth is a matter of style.
Let’s also remember that it’s important to distinguish impressionism from Romantic expressive theory. The individual’s interiority is reconfigured by impressionism: the point is not to connect us to some alleged (and perfectly boring) universal human nature, but rather to give us an heroic model, one with indirect affinities to Nietzschean affirmation.
“There is nothing that has not in it suggestion or challenge.” Nature is incomplete. So is art, but in a better way. To be premature is to be perfect. Imagination needs creative forms to work with, for soul to realize its own perfection. “Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.”
This notion resembles Pater’s doctrine, as Wilde describes it or at least alludes to it: the impressionist’s point is to see the object as in itself it really is not.
“The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic . . . will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence . . . .” So the critic, like great art itself, can make order without shutting down infinite suggestiveness. This is why art and criticism are both “disturbing and disintegrating forces”: they break up stale fixities and definites, to borrow from Coleridge, and make things new.
“For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.” Wilde, like Pater before him, rejects expressive theory boldly, just as much as he rejects objectivist criticism—on this page he refers to Arnold’s dictum about seeing “the object as in itself it really is” as “a very serious error.”
Further, he says, “Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? . . . . Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of?” Like mimetic, art, explicative or objectivist criticism ties a work or a person to a definite set of social values. As Pope writes, “Whatever is, is right.” (More recently, Walter Benjamin refers to the older, unique work of art as “auratic”: the term refers to the distancing effect and the respect generated by the known history of a painting and by its status as a precious object behind the glass.)
Criticism’s purpose—and the service it performs—is not to show Caliban (the bourgeois reader or viewer) his face in a glass and enrage him thereby. Criticism shouldn’t worry about Caliban at all. (In that, Wilde and Arnold might agree.) The point is instead to engage with art as infinitely suggestive, as providing new forms for an active imagination. It is this dynamic encounter that criticism “records.” As in Sappho and other classical authors, the psyche or soul must be open to experience, must be prepared to be shaken and yet survive and grow stronger.
A critic should never explain: the best criticism “treats the work of art simply as a starting point for a new creation.” Further, “the meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it.” The critic liberates the work, leads it to its own independent life. Wilde’s seeming arrogance is actually humility, we might say. “For when the work is finished it has, as it were, an independent life of its own . . . .” Following the artist’s intention limits the work unnecessarily. Wilde would say the same thing of literary works, not just of the plastic arts.
Ernest sums up Gilbert’s doctrine admirably: “The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe”? It’s sometimes said that Gilbert’s view and personality are dominant. But sometimes Ernest’s flippant tone bespeaks the eiron’s or ironic dialogic partner’s “well, I’ve already heard that” tone.
Once Gilbert lays out his ultra-impressionist doctrines, Ernest has no trouble understanding them. He hardly seems like a wide-eyed acolyte but instead seems almost cynical. Wilde is well aware that a fair number of people are acquainted with such ideas, but that the problem lies in social and economic conditions working against their accepting them.
“It is through its very incompleteness that Art becomes complete in beauty, and so addresses itself, not to the faculty of recognition nor to the faculty of reason, but to the aesthetic sense alone.” Beauty needs incompleteness to address the aesthetic sense. “[T]he aesthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver . . . and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final.
Again, the purpose of interpretation has nothing to do with explication, i.e. with explaining the text as an object with a fixed meaning. “[S]o the critic . . . is never imitative . . . and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art’s unity.”
All art, therefore, aspires to the condition of literature. It’s usually said that music is the ideal art form because it retains all its mysteriousness and because form and content cannot be distinguished in a sequence of notes. Music, that is, seems most free from the limitations of materiality—that’s why Hegel places romantic music highest in the ranks of art. Wilde says that the critic’s words become the guardian of art’s mystery, its suggestiveness. This view favors indeterminacy, language as liberating the work.
Notes on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
This play is a fine comedy of manners that borrows something from Shakespeare’s emphasis on the relationship between the town and country in that the play begins with the characters in the city, moves them toward the countryside to straighten out the mess they’ve got themselves into, and points them toward city life again by the play’s end. As usual in comedy, events turn upon the attempts of the play’s lovers (there are two main couples in this one) to get together and on the many obstacles they must first overcome. So the structure of Wilde’s play is traditional.
As for the play’s subject matter and dialogue, they certainly meet Meyer H. Abrams’s criteria for comedies of manners: IBE takes for its most basic subject “the relations and intrigues of men and women living in a sophisticated upper-class society.” Indeed, Lady Bracknell calls the late Victorian Era “an age of surfaces.”
The dialogue also fits the comedy of manners bill: the play is full of “wit and sparkle,” and it has its fair share of what Abrams would call repartee: “a witty conversational give-and-take which constitutes a kind of verbal fencing match.” Many of the characters box their way through the play with quick linguistic jabs, some of them much like the sharp, opportunistic remarks that made Wilde himself London’s social lion until his downfall in 1895.
Structurally, the play is traditional in yet another sense in that it follows Terentian drama:
A. First comes the protasis, in which the basic characters and situation are established: in IBE, we meet Jack and Algernon, Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell.
B. Then comes the epitasis, in which events and characters are interwoven and complicated: in IBE, the characters’ competing erotic and class interests involve them in a tangle of deceptions and schemes.
C. Next comes the catastasis, in which the plot reaches a seeming climax. In IBE, all problems seem to have been resolved amongst Jack and Gwendolen and Algernon and Cecily, but then Lady Bracknell arrives in the countryside and new difficulties arise.
D. Last comes the real climax, the catastrophe: in IBE, Jack discovers that he was always “Ernest” after all, and the marriages may proceed.
Act 1 Synopsis: Jack Worthing, a young justice of the peace in rural Woolton, is an upper-class character of no immediately discernible background. When “Jack in the country” wants to go out on the town, he uses his alternate self, a troublesome invented brother named Ernest, as a dodge. Algernon and all the big-city folk, therefore, know him as Ernest Worthing. This Jack/Ernest is in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, daughter of Lady Bracknell. Gwendolen, a perfect product of the best fashion magazines, is just as much in love with the name “Ernest” as Jack is with her.
If Jack wants to embody the Victorian “age of ideals” for Gwendolen, however, he must overcome a few obstacles. Firstly, his name is not Ernest, at least so far as he knows, which isn’t much.
Jack’s second problem in Act 1 is Lady Bracknell and her strict requirements for any man who will marry her daughter: Does he smoke? Is he sufficiently ignorant? Is he sufficiently rich? Does he have a townhouse in the fashionable quarter of London? These are formidable demands, but Jack meets them all; he smokes and is indeed ignorant and rich. As for the townhouse in the unfashionable quarter, either the townhouse or the quarter, or both, can be altered to suit Lady Bracknell’s liking.
In spite of all these qualifications, however, Jack suffers from one flaw that keeps him off Lady Bracknell’s list of eligible bachelors. He was discovered, and for all intents born, in an ordinary handbag, stashed in the cloakroom, on the Brighton railroad line. This is inexcusable. If Jack has no better origin than this, he had better go out and find one, says Lady Bracknell.
Compared to this hostility, the mild razzing Jack undergoes from Algernon is pleasant chatter. Algernon has apparently found his friend’s cigarette case, inscribed with a message from Cecily Cardew to “Uncle Jack.” Jack tries to lie his way out of the embarrassing situation by evoking the picture of a nice plump aunt, but Algernon easily infers that Aunt Cecily is some attractive young woman in the countryside.
In a sense, that is true—since Jack was discovered by Mr. Thomas Cardew, it was only proper that the old man should make him the guardian over his granddaughter’s morals. The need to escape from this serious responsibility was instrumental in Jack’s invention of the great escape hatch Ernest. The first act ends with Algernon scheming to visit the country address he has copied from the cigarette case.
Further Comments on Act 1: We know that comedy has to do with the renewal and transmission of an older generation’s values to a younger generation that will eventually “fit in” but also carve out its own happiness. Wilde is having fun at the expense of his fellow Victorians’ beliefs and behavior since, of course, the values on display in IBE are absurd and in fact seem to be manufactured on the spot, as the occasion demands. They are purely nominal, starting with and most particularly that great mid-Victorian imperative of earnestness, which ordinarily means sincerity and moral purpose, even if Jack’s alleged brother is a bit rough around the edges.
In this play, Wilde serves as a Victorian Stephen Colbert, mocking late-Victorian “truthiness”—i.e. just believing whatever is pleasantly convenient and then positing it as an absolute truth upholding the moral universe.
Thus the delightful scene in the first act wherein Gwendolen pronounces the Victorian Era an “age of ideals,” but makes it hilariously clear (to us, if not to herself) just how fashion-magazine-silly those ideals actually are. “Ernest/Earnest” is nothing but a man’s name, and in following her attraction to the handsome young Mr. Worthing, Gwendolen will be an upstanding Victorian lady.
Gwendolen is sincere in everything she says, and everything she says is preposterous. But then, there’s nothing radical or topsy-turvy about Wilde’s comedy of manners since, after all, it’s the law of all comedy that individual desire be ratified and not seen as a force too threatening to social harmony, and the rhyme or reason of it all seldom matters much.
Gwendolen’s mother Lady Bracknell is the “Queen Victoria” of the play, and Jack is probably right to worry that London’s delightful Gwendolens eventually grow up to be imperious, unopposable Lady Bracknells. The eligibility interview that goes so disastrously for Jack is a great example of the “ginned-up-on-the-fly” quality that moral values have in IBE.
What the imposing Lady Bracknell stands for, of course, is simply aristocratic privilege and wealth, which she glosses as respectability. What one does makes no difference, and in fact it’s much better that one does nothing and knows nothing: change is not something Lady Bracknell is likely to find acceptable if it isn’t of her own making since her world view is essentially static. At least, it’s fixed now that the great Lady has made it into this glittering society.
That’s why Jack’s unfortunate origin in a handbag stowed in a railroad car is unspeakably inappropriate. What could more effectively signify change, or mobility, than the English railroad system that transformed Great Britain into a modern industrial nation beginning in the 1830s? That the line was the upscale Brighton going towards Worthing—and not the sketchy line run by the LC & D Railway going east—doesn’t sufficiently impress Lady Bracknell. She inhabits a society of “shiny, happy people holding hands,” so forgetting anything inconvenient is a social and rank-based imperative.
What matters is to maintain the glittering social order, not to acknowledge how drastically England has changed in the course of the nineteenth century.
Much else in the first act is taken up with a contention between Jack and Algernon regarding the important matter of one Cecily Cardew, Jack’s pretty ward in the countryside. Here we find a difference that actually matters in the play—in fact, we might even accord it a certain “vital importance” like the one that will end this comedy.
Both Jack and Algernon say the most preposterous things, and they both know they’re perpetuating a scam with their respective alternative identities (Earnest in town and Algernon’s invalid friend Bunbury), but there’s quite a difference in how the two men approach this fact. While Jack seems sincere in his insincerity, Algernon is delightfully self-conscious of his caddishness, and even self-conscious of his self-consciousness.
Perhaps this is what distinguishes an Oscar Wilde from any other respectable, if clever, Victorian gentleman, too: it’s the basis of Wilde’s comic approach to being a Victorian, and it’s what gives the edge to his satirical impulse. The conclusion of the first act captures this distinction between Jack and Algernon best: Jack says, “Algy, you never talk anything but nonsense,” and Algy replies, “Nobody ever does.”
Act Two Synopsis: The second act opens with Miss Prism instructing Cecily on sentimental novels (one of which, ominously, she mislaid a long time ago), German, Geography, and political economy. Miss Prism also engages in flirtatious metaphor-slinging with Canon Chasuble.
Cecily soon grows tired of her lessons, but the servant Merriman enters with notice of “Ernest’s” arrival. One might call Algernon the impostor responsible for this intrusion into Jack’s country retreat, but then, “Ernest” never existed in the first place. Whatever Algernon’s status may be, Cecily decides that in spite of his alleged wickedness, the man looks like any other of his class.
Soon, Jack makes his entrance in deep mourning clothes, if not a sad spirit, only to be confronted by the all-too-living Algernon/Ernest. Jack wants him to leave at once, but Algernon, who has taken a fancy to Cecily, has no intention of leaving soon. This intransigence is only confirmed when he finds out that unbeknownst to him, he and Cecily have been courting each other for some time. All the “action” has taken place in her diary. Cecily’s one stipulation for a husband is the same as Gwendolen’s—she will marry no one but an Ernest.
As luck would have it, this talk of marriage is followed by the unexpected arrival of Gwendolen, and the fireworks begin. When Cecily declares that she plans to wed “Ernest” (Algernon), Gwendolen is infuriated—she mistakes this Ernest for her own, the man we know as Jack Worthing in the country, and Ernest in town.
When Jack returns and is cornered into admitting his real name, the mix-up is cleared, but now the two men have a problem: neither of them is named Ernest. Gwendolen and Cecily march off together in a huff. The only thing the men can do for the remainder of the act is struggle over muffins and rechristening rights. Algernon wins the muffin contest and refuses to leave.
Further Comments on Act Two: Cecily is a delightful character, and the entire act both affirms and undermines the comic/romance convention that the countryside is a “green world” of transformation and healing while the city space is corrupt and unhealthy. It’s true that in Wilde’s play, it’s hard to see how city versus countryside can be glossed as the traditional struggle between artificial and deceptive versus natural and sincere, but on the whole the traditional comic city versus country opposition holds up.
Perhaps, as in the previous act, the difference consists in the attitude taken up by key characters towards deception and artifice. Cecily’s attitude is sweet and sincere, even as she deadpans views that ought to make Gwendolen blush: the notion, for example, that a young girl’s private diary ought to be “intended for publication.” Perhaps that’s no shock to us today in the era of Facebook, Tik-Tok, and YouTube influencers. Is anything private in the twenty-first century?
In any case, for Cecily marrying an Ernest is a romantic dream, while for Gwendolen it’s high fashion, but either way it comes to the same thing.
All the good stuff seems to happen at Jack’s country estate. It is here that the comic knots are tied tightly in the second act and then, in the third act, loosened by those magical properties “130,000 in the funds,” a timely revelation from Cecily’s tutor Miss Prism, and a few intended impromptu rechristenings. There’s magic in the countryside after all; that’s what shows us that the locus of Jack’s fine manor house works in the traditionally transformative, “green-world” way.
Act Three Synopsis: Cecily and Gwendolen take Jack and Algernon’s muffin binging as a sign of repentance, and are willing to be reconciled to their prospective mates so long as they are suitably rechristened. Just when it looks as if everything will go swimmingly, Lady Bracknell bursts onto the scene with all the force of Queen Victoria.
Upon hearing that her nephew Algernon wants to marry the unknown Cecily, Lady Bracknell puts her qualifications to the test. Even though satisfied that the girl’s social status is not so mobile as Jack’s Brighton line, she balks at Cecily’s “incident”-crowded life and is about to depart when the phrase “hundred and thirty thousand pounds in the funds” strikes her ears. That is a presentable sum in this Aage of Surfaces, so Lady Bracknell bestows her blessing on the newly charming Cecily.
Unfortunately for Lady Bracknell, however, Jack won’t allow his ward to marry Algernon unless he gets permission to marry Gwendolen. Jack explains that according to the terms of her grandfather’s will, Cecily will not come of legal age until she is thirty-five, but Lady Bracknell will make no concessions and seems prepared to wait seventeen years for such a profitable match. The Lady’s wrath is even visited upon Algernon, who is forbidden to get himself rechristened “Ernest.”
With things at a standstill, in rushes Miss Prism, who is promptly recognized as the very nurse who lost an infant attached to Lord Bracknell’s house some twenty-eight years ago. “Prism! Where is that baby?” demands Lady Bracknell. Miss Prism’s answer is that she accidentally placed her three-volume novel in the perambulator meant to accommodate the baby, and the baby itself, logically enough, wound up in the handbag that should have been used to hold the manuscript.
This gives Jack an idea; he hurries out and comes back in with the handbag, which Miss Prism identifies as the same one she lost at the railroad station all those years ago. She has missed it bitterly.
Miss Prism’s recognition of the handbag leads Jack to his true origin as the son of Lady Bracknell’s own sister, Mrs. Moncrieff. It turns out, then, that Jack has had a younger brother all along: Algernon Moncrieff.
Only the name Jack now stands in Jack’s way, but that is cleared up when the Army Lists reveal that General Moncrieff’s first name was Ernest. Jack was always Ernest after all, and he now realizes “the vital Importance of Being Earnest.” Algernon will doubtless overcome Lady Bracknell’s thin scruples about rechristening and cash in on beautiful Cecily’s fortune.
Further Comments on Act Three: In this final act, Lady Bracknell is appropriately enticed and trapped by her interest in a wealth-enhancing match between nephew Algy and the lovely Cecily Cardew, and Jack has the law on his side since he is Cecily’s legal guardian. Still, we arrive at an impasse, a point of catastasis in the traditional terms of New Comedy: as Jack says, everything seemed to have been worked out, but for now only “a passionate celibacy” seems to be everyone’s reward. Then Canon Chasuble mentions Miss Prism, who helps the other characters arrive at the play’s glorious comic resolution.
Miss Prism reveals the secret of Jack’s identity, and from that point he is able with a little initiative to discover that the General his father was in fact named Ernest John Moncrieff. So as it turns out, Jack will satisfy the Victorian ideal of Earnestness in the most earnest way possible (at least in Wilde’s universe) while Algernon, we may presume, will satisfy it in his typically insincere way: by having himself rechristened Ernest.
The handbag-foundling Jack turns out to have been a prince all along, and everybody’s shining, everybody’s happy, everybody’s holding hands. The kind of society Wilde is describing is much like a work of art as Wilde himself sometimes describes art: a beautiful thing in a realm that provides forms for the imagination to inhabit and move in.
That isn’t the only way Wilde talks about art, we should remember: not all places in Great Britain are like this aristocratic utopia where all aristocratic wishes seem to come true; one function of art is to serve as a “disturbing and disintegrating force” against the dehumanization that comes from complacency and moral imbecility in the face of suffering.
In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” a critical essay in which Wilde lambastes British capitalism, he writes as follows about the demise of that order: “Individualism will also be unselfish and unaffected. It has been pointed out that one of the results of the extraordinary tyranny of authority is that words are absolutely distorted from their proper and simple meaning, and are used to express the obverse of their right signification. What is true about Art is true about Life.”
But if there’s comic overturning in The Importance of Being Earnest, it certainly isn’t condemnation or harsh satire. The characters in the play are as shallow and happiness-driven, for the most part, as the usual run of characters in any good comic play.
IBE suggests by way of social critique something that much of Wilde’s own audience would have known already, which is that the name Ernest (derived from Old German ernst, meaning “sincere”) is long since due to be replaced with a symbolic term more suitable to the complex, changeable times in which Wilde and his audience lived. Many Victorians used the term to approve of prudery and priggishness rather than honesty and authenticity, which is all the word should mean.
Copyright © 2026 Alfred J. Drake