Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being clear.
Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it.
Anyone can write history. Only a great man can make it.
The English have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
The English have nothing in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned. It is only the old-fashioned that ever becomes modern.
If we had to stop here our verdict on Wilde would be quite severe: the very incarnation of the dandy (though Lord Brummel and even Wilde’s own beloved Des Esseintes got there first), he does not bother distinguishing paradoxes, those bearers of outrageous truths, from aphorisms, which contain acceptable truths, or from reversible aphorisms, which are mere jeux d’esprit that are indifferent to the truth. And in any case, Wilde’s ideas on art would appear to authorize his behavior, seeing that no aphorism ought to aim at either utility, truth, or morality, but only beauty and elegance of style.
However, this pursuit of aesthetic and stylistic provocation would not be enough to absolve Wilde, since he did not manage to distinguish between paradoxical provocation and mere fatuousness. As we know, to be true to his own principles he should have been sent to prison not for having loved Lord Douglas but for having sent him letters with lines like this: “It is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses”—and not only for this, but also for having maintained during his trial that the letter was a stylistic exercise and a kind of sonnet in prose.
The Picture of Dorian Gray was condemned by the London judges for thoroughly stupid reasons, but from the point of view of literary originality, despite its undoubted charm, it is merely an imitation of Balzac’s Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin) and broadly copies (even though this was admitted indirectly) Huysmans’ A rebours. Mario Praz noted that Dorian Gray also owes very much to Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas, and even one of Wilde the aesthete’s fundamental maxims (“No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity itself is a crime”) is a version of Baudelaire’s “A dandy can never be a vulgar man: if he commits a crime, he would lose none of his reputation, but if this crime were caused by a trivial motive, the damage done to his honor would be irreparable.”
Nevertheless, as Alex Falzon commented in the Italian edition of Wilde’s aphorisms cited above, it is difficult to collect aphorisms by an author who has never written a book of aphorisms—so that what we consider aphorisms were created not to shine alone, devoid of any context, but in a narrative or theatrical work, and therefore said by someone in a particular context. For instance, can one consider an aphorism weak if the author puts it in the mouth of a ludicrous character? Is what Lady Bracknell says in The Importance of Being Earnest an aphorism: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness”? Hence the legitimate suspicion that Wilde did not believe in any of the aphorisms he pronounced, nor even in the best of his paradoxes: he was only interested in putting on stage a society capable of appreciating them.
In places he actually says as much. Consider this dialogue from The Importance of Being Earnest.
ALGERNON: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
JACK: Is that clever?
ALGERNON: It is perfectly phrased! And quite as true as any observation in civilised life should be.
Thus Wilde should be seen not as an immoral creator of aphorisms but, rather, as a satirical author, a critic of society’s morals. The fact that he lived within that society’s set of morals is a different matter, for that was his misfortune.
Let us reread The Picture of Dorian Gray. With just one or two exceptions, the most memorable aphorisms are voiced by ludicrous characters like Lord Wotton. Wilde does not offer them to us as aphorisms for life, which he himself could guarantee.
Lord Wotton pronounces, albeit wittily, an endless series of commonplaces about the society of his time (and precisely for this reason Wilde’s readers enjoyed his false paradoxes): A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it. The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties (though later Lord Wotton will say that the real drawback of marriage is that it makes one unselfish).
I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless but cannot. I don’t want money: it is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine. I do not desire to change anything in England, except the weather. To get back one’s youth, one has merely to repeat one’s follies. Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. Women are wonderfully practical, much more practical than we are: we often forget to say anything about marriage and they always remind us. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial (who knows if Wotton had read The Communist Manifesto, where he would have discovered that the poor have nothing to lose but their chains?). To adore is better than being adored: being adored is a nuisance. For every effect we produce we make an enemy, so to be popular we have to be mediocre. Anybody can be good in the country; there are no temptations there. Married life is nothing but habit. Crime is the exclusive preserve of the lower classes: crime is for them what art is for us, a way out of the ordinary sensations. Murder is always a mistake: one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner….
Alongside this series of banalities, which become brilliant only because he fires them out one after the other (just as in lists where the most trite words can astonish us through the incongruous relationship they set up with other equally trite words), Lord Wotton shows a particular genius for identifying commonplaces that would not be worthy even of being used in wrapping papers for chocolates, and then making them interesting by reversing them:
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
What I want is information: not useful information, of course, but useless information. ‘I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans.’ ‘How dreadful!’ I can sympathize with everything except suffering.
Nowadays most people … discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.
I don’t think I am likely to marry. I am too much in love [but this is Dorian, infected by his master].
My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people.
There is always something infinitely mean about other people’s tragedies.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest of motives.* Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
It is better to be beautiful than to be good.† Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues.
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself.
Only shallow people do not judge by appearances.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go around, nowadays, saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.
The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
One cannot deny that Lord Wotton invents some effective paradoxes however, such as:
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
I like Wagners music better than anybody’s. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one’s self and one always ends by deceiving others.
A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
Women inspire us with the desire to create masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
But Lord Wotton’s paradoxes are more commonly reversible aphorisms (the reversals are, of course, my own):
Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.
Virtue is the only real colour element left in modern life.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh,
