Wilde’s Wisdom
or why Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is of relevance today
Letters from Vienna #100
Wilde’s Wisdom
(or why Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is of relevance today)
Indolent but a Genius
“My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment.” W.B. Yeats once wrote “I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour yet all spontaneous…I noticed too, that the impression of artificiality that I think all Wilde’s listeners have recorded came from the perfect rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible. That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: “Give me “The Winter’s Tale”, “Daffodils that come before the swallow dares”, but not “King Lear”. What is “King Lear” but poor life staggering in the fog?” and the slow, carefully modulated cadence sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter Pater’s “Studies in the History of the Renaissance”: “It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of decadence: the last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was written.” “But”, said the dull man, “would you not have given us time to read it?” “Oh no,” was the retort, “there would have been plenty of time afterwards – in either world.””
“I think he seemed to us, baffled as we were by youth, or by infirmity, a triumphant figure, and to some of us a figure from another age, an audacious Italian fifteenth-century figure. A few weeks before I had heard one of my father’s friends, an official in a publishing firm that had employed both Wilde and Henley as editors, blaming Henley, who was “no use except under control”, and praising Wilde, “so indolent but such a genius”; and now the firm became the topic of our talk. “How often do you go to the office?” said Henley. “I used to go three times a week,” said Wilde, “for an hour a day, but I have since struck off one of the days.” “My God,” said Henley, “I went five times a week for five hours a day and when I wanted to strike off a day they had a special committee meeting.” “Furthermore,” was Wilde’s answer, “I never answered their letters. I have known men come to London full of bright prospects and seen them complete wrecks in a few months through a habit of answering letters.”[1]
What is Needed is Individualism
Wilde is still pertinent today: “What is needed is Individualism,” he wrote in 1891. “If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first. At present, in consequence of the existence of private property, a great many people are enabled to develop a certain very limited amount of individualism. They are either under no necessity to work for their living or are enabled to choose the sphere of activity that is really congenial to them and gives them pleasure. These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.”[2]
“It is clear, then, that no Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all. It is regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him. If there is, the work will not be good for him, will not be good in itself, and will not be good for others. And by work I simply mean activity of any kind.”[3]
This is the exact opposite of what the WEF and its backers have in mind for us. As Bruce Cain ably writes: “We should be opposing many things: vaccine passports, forced vaccination, digital idea schemes etc. What I am really saying is that, for those that want to preserve our inalienable rights, a digital currency — which is being pushed forward in the US and many other countries — will be the final nail in the coffin.”[4]
Those who advocate Communism or even Socialism are, often unwittingly, advocating slavery; for one very simple reason: the state itself can never be trusted. Social justice, equality and fairness can be achieved (the “Plandemic” showed how much money can actually be spent if need be) but the greatest threats to humanity are the profoundly corrupt Deep State, the state and the “superstate” (the EU, the WHO, the UN etc.), all of which have maliciously infringed upon our inalienable rights; this is what the last two years have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt.
“The Green New Deal” is merely a different variation of the same theme. The implementation of slavery has taken the guise of “protecting the environment”. This is regardless of the fact that there’s no such thing as “man-made global warming”[5] while the “Green New Deal” is decidedly environmentally unfriendly[6]. This is not to say, obviously, that the crimes against the environment being perpetrated (e.g. by the EU) needn’t be stopped; they do.
How can one write Songs of Hatred without Hating?
Wilde also showed us how war can be prevented: “The Manchester school tried to make men realise the brotherhood of humanity, by pointing out the commercial advantages of peace. It sought to degrade the wonderful world into a common market-place for the buyer and the seller. It addressed itself to the lowest instincts, and it failed. War followed upon war, and the tradesman’s creed did not prevent France and Germany from clashing together in blood-stained battle. There are others of our own day who seek to appeal to mere emotional sympathies, or to the shallow dogmas of some vague system of abstract ethics.”
“They have their Peace Societies, so dear to the sentimentalists, and their proposals for unarmed International Arbitration, so popular among those who have never read history. But mere emotional sympathy will not do. It is too variable, and too closely connected with the passions; and a board of arbitrators who, for the general welfare of the race, are to be deprived of the power of putting their decisions into execution, will not be of much avail. There is only one thing worse than Injustice, and that is Justice without her sword in her hand. When Right is not Might, it is Evil.”
“No: the emotions will not make us cosmopolitan, any more than the greed for gain could do so. It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race-prejudices. Goethe — you will not misunderstand what I say — was a German of the Germans. He loved his country — no man more so. Its people were dear to him; and he led them. Yet, when the iron hoof of Napoleon trampled upon vineyard and cornfield, his lips were silent. “How can one write songs of hatred without hating?” he said to Eckermann, “and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?” This note, sounded in the modern world by Goethe first, will become, I think, the starting point for the cosmopolitanism of the future. Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms.”
“If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”[7]
Those who love Russian literature cannot possibly contemplate war with Russia. Likewise: those who love the Ukraine and its rich traditions cannot support its destruction at the hands of Globalists. It is preferable to love Literature, the Humanities and Humanity itself than to fawn on financial institutions, arms manufacturers or the Military Industrial Complex.
Oscar Wilde’s Humour
Yet for all his pearls of wisdom Oscar Wilde remains funny, and this is the real reason why he’s adored today. In his “Personal Impressions of America”, for example, he recounted:
“From Salt Lake City one travels over the great plains of Colorado and up the Rocky Mountains, on the top of which is Leadville, the richest city in the world. It has also got the reputation of being the roughest, and every man carries a revolver. I was told that if I went there they would be sure to shoot me or my travelling manager. I wrote and told them that nothing that they could do to my travelling manager would intimidate me.”
“They are miners – men working in metals, so I lectured to them on the Ethics of Art. I read them passages from the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and they seemed much delighted. I was reproved by my hearers for not having brought him with me. I explained that he had been dead for some little time which elicited the enquiry “Who shot him?”. They afterwards took me to a dancing-saloon where I saw the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across. Over the piano was printed a notice:
PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT THE PIANIST.
HE IS DOING HIS BEST.”
[1] pp.130-131 Autobiographies, W.B. Yeats
[2] p.25 The Soul of Man Under Socialism, The Illustrated Oscar Wilde, edited by Roy Gasson
[3] p.27 Ibid
[7] pp. 5-6 Ibid
Brilliant and beyond, Michael. Big big fan here of Oscar Wilde, and now that you have illuminate what is usually not known about him, even more so. No wonder they put him in jail.
They put him in jail on account of his politics. Byron was persecuted for much the same reason.