Abstract
Oscar Wilde’s wariness of formal education would surface time and again in his published work—for instance, in An Ideal Husband when the profligate Mrs. Cheveley remarks: “I have forgotten all about my schooldays. I have a vague impression that they were detestable” (Wilde. An Ideal Husband. In The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray, 389–476. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). While at times seeming to share in this conviction, Wilde’s attitude toward his education was complicated. Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde initially planned to pursue a career in education. Although Wilde was not successful in this undertaking, his published and unpublished work from this time forward evinces a preoccupation with the methods and outcomes of good teaching. This chapter provides an intellectual backdrop for the chapters that follow by tracking Wilde’s experiences at Portora Royal School, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Oxford. Taking seriously the pedagogical models he encountered in books and in life, this chapter charts Wilde’s evolving view of education as a process that resists utility, certitude, or intellectual stasis.
Education is an admirable thing,
but it is well to remember from time to time
that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist ”
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- 1.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 123–206, 136.
- 2.
The original quip was coined by George Bernard Shaw: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.” “Maxims for Revolutionists,” in Man and Superman (New York: Brentano’s, 1922): 227–44, 230.
- 3.
Oscar Wilde, Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), 45.
- 4.
Charles Ricketts, Oscar Wilde: Recollections (London: Pallas Athene, 1932), 35.
- 5.
Iain Ross has impressively tracked Wilde’s lifelong engagement with Hellenism in Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
- 6.
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband, in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 389–476, 394.
- 7.
Iain Ross, “Oscar Wilde in Greece: Topography and the Hellenist Imagination,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 16.2 (June 2009): 176–96, 178.
- 8.
An excellent discussion of this transitional moment appears in M.L. Clarke’s Classical Education in Britain, 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). See also Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
- 9.
Wilde once referred to his Oxford days in a letter to Louis Wilkinson as “the most flower-like time” in his life (Complete Letters, 1113).
- 10.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 87.
- 11.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 264.
- 12.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 280.
- 13.
Notable exceptions to this rule include Peter Bailey, “Aestheticism and the Erotics of Pedagogy” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, Department of English, 2009) and the insightful essay by William Shuter, “Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of ‘Greats,’” English Literature in Transition 46, no. 3 (2003): 250–78. See also Kimberly J. Stern, “‘At Wits’ End’: Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Pedagogy,” Nineteenth Century Studies 28 (2018): 127–45. Brief passages from this chapter appeared previously in the latter piece and are reproduced here courtesy of Nineteenth Century Studies.
- 14.
Matthew Arnold, Report of the Committee of Council on Education (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1883), 229, 258.
- 15.
“Oscar Wilde,” The Biograph and Review 4 (1880): 130–35, 131.
- 16.
The Poets of Ireland: A Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of Irish Writers of English Verse (Dublin: H. Figgis, 1912), 87.
- 17.
Reports documenting Wilde’s life at Portora (such those offered by Frank Harris and Robert Sherard) are not unassailable, since they often document utterances and conversations years and even decades after they may have taken place. As Iain Ross points out, “there is no way to verify them,” though they often confirm more direct and authoritative accounts of Wilde’s life (Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 19). I have attempted to indicate in the text where I am drawing on these texts and, for the most part, have turned to them to complement rather than to replace more authoritative primary documents.
- 18.
See, for example, Thomas Arnold, “Discipline of Public Schools,” Miscellaneous Works (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1846).
- 19.
Qtd. in Davis Coakley, Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House and Country House, 1994), 79.
- 20.
Qtd. in Coakley 80. Such recollections of Steele might well remind readers of Doctor Strong in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield: “[…] the Doctor himself was the idol of the whole school; and it must have been a badly composed school if he had been anything else, for he was the kindest of men, with a simple faith in him that might have touched the stone hearts of the very urns upon the wall.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989), 243.
- 21.
Heather White, “Forgotten Schooldays”: Oscar Wilde at Portora Royal School (Gortnaree: Principia Press, 2001), 93–4. Like so many nineteenth-century educational reformers, Steele’s emphasis on the process of knowledge acquisition takes its cue from John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast Store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of Man has painted on it, with an almost endeless [sic] Variety? Whence has it all the Materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one Word, from Experience: In that, all our Knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives itself.” John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: R. Griffin and Co., 1836), 51.
- 22.
Charles Northend, Teacher’s Assistant, or Hints and Methods in School Discipline and Instruction (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1859), 43–4.
- 23.
Northend , 43–4. The idea was reinforced by thinkers like William Ross, who maintained that the schoolmaster should be an “autocrat” and yet “studiously endeavor to avoid rather than to create occasions for the exhibition of his power,” behaving always “in a friendly, open, and straightforward manner” in order to command the confidence of his pupils. William Ross, The Teacher’s Manual of Method; or, general principles of teaching and schoolkeeping (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1858), 140.
- 24.
Cathy Shuman has ably demonstrated the relationship between the university examination and the formation of social (especially economic) identity in Pedagogical Economies: The Examination and the Victorian Literary Man (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000).
- 25.
Iain Ross, Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 20.
- 26.
Steele notes: “as proof of the high importance I attach to this matter, I may add that I have been in the habit of expending upwards of £70 a year on Prizes and Examination Papers” (qtd. in White 41).
- 27.
Qtd. in White, 92.
- 28.
Qtd. in White, 96.
- 29.
Herbert Fry, Our Schools and Colleges. Containing the principal particulars respecting endowed Grammar Schools (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1868), 99.
- 30.
“Ireland,” Journal of Education (1 November 1886): 468–9, 469.
- 31.
Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York, 1916), 28.
- 32.
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 54.
- 33.
Robert Sherard, The Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Mitchell Kennerly, 1906), 110.
- 34.
Harris, 29.
- 35.
As Richard Ellmann puts it, “What distinguished him was his excitement over the literary qualities of Greek and Latin texts, and his disinclination to enter into textual minutiae” (55). Having already cultivated a taste for historical study through his father, an amateur archaeologist who published multiple volumes on the subject, Wilde seems to have been captivated by the Classics at Portora. Although J.P. Mahaffy would later fuel his interest in the Greeks at Trinity College, it was at Portora that Wilde began to study Greek literature in a serious way. Sir Edward Sullivan reports that “the classics absorbed almost his whole attention in his later school days, and the flowing beauty of his oral translations in class, whether of Thucydides, Plato or Virgil, was a thing not easily to be forgotten” (Harris, 28).
- 36.
Harris, 32. As Iain Ross observes, “[f]or Wilde, the ancient world was a resource for play, not work. The classical texts were absorbed constituents of his developing self rather than instruments of academic advancement, though if advancement might be accomplished through performance—play—there could be no objection to the bonus” (Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 21).
- 37.
Sherard, 117.
- 38.
Harris, 28.
- 39.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 192. Vacation was a principal part of the Oxford experience. Montagu Burrows notes that although the greater part of the year was taken up by vacation, it was hardly a time of idle luxury: “It must then be taken as a postulate that this, the greater portion of the year, must on no account be treated as Vacation by the reading man. Each of course must judge for himself how much he really requires for relaxation. The student proper will probably take only a small portion of the Long Vacation, say the beginning and the end; he will take by no means all of the shorter ones. The rest he will find absolutely necessary for his private reading, and for working up the many subjects which in the short and hurried period of Term he has been obliged to put aside.” Montagu Burrows, Pass and Class: An Oxford Guidebook (Oxford: Parker, 1860), 33.
- 40.
Oscar Wilde, “Primavera,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 249–52, 249.
- 41.
For further information regarding the work of Pestalozzi, see Daniel Tröhler, Pestalozzi and the Educationalization of the World (New York: Palgrave, 2013); and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Letters of Pestalozzi on the Education of Infancy [1827] (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1830).
- 42.
Jeremy Bentham, “Principles of Education,” in vol. 3 of The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), 10:71.
- 43.
John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. Jack Stillinger (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), 81.
- 44.
Oscar Wilde, Commonplace Book, in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making, ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael Helfand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): 107–52, 120 [61]. For all references to Wilde’s Notebook Kept at Oxford and Commonplace Book, I have included the pagination from Smith and Helfand’s edition, followed by the manuscript pagination in brackets (as shown).
- 45.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 115 [40].
- 46.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 115 [40].
- 47.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 145[185]. Wilde quotes here, with slight deviations from the original, from Plato’s Republic 558B and 403C.
- 48.
Plato, The Republic, in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Oxford University, 1892): 1–338, 298 [585e].
- 49.
Plato, The Republic, 300 [586e].
- 50.
Plato, The Republic, 298 [586a].
- 51.
In The Symposium, the female philosopher Diotima presents the highest form of love as love of wisdom: “For wisdom is a most beautiful thing, and Love is of the beautiful.” Plato, “The Symposium,” in vol. 1 of The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Scribner, 1874): 449–514, 496 [204b].
- 52.
Wilde classifies Aristotle as a “mystic” who “wd. [would] have defined philosophy as a ‘knowledge of being or of essence’” (Commonplace Book, 127 [100]).
- 53.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 149 [201].
- 54.
Wilde, Commonplace Book, 145 [189].
- 55.
Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Lesley Brown (New York: Oxford, 2009), 137 [1152b].
- 56.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 191.
- 57.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 191.
- 58.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist” 191.
- 59.
Oscar Wilde, “House Decoration,” Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 279–90, 290.
- 60.
“The Theories of a Poet,” New York Tribune (8 January 1882): 7. Wilde echoes this idea in another interview: “My theory is that you cannot teach anybody what is really beautiful. The true spirit of a painting or a poem cannot by any method be taught—it must be gradually revealed. A schoolboy, for instance, can arrive at an understanding of a scientific truth under a competent teacher, but the only way in which anybody can come to a knowledge of the beautiful is by being thrown among beautiful surroundings. I think if you desire a cultured society, you must put the youth of the land into beautiful homes and let them gradually come to feel a necessity for such surroundings. A young man reared among such surroundings has not got to make a distinct effort to appreciate the beautiful. He will, if reading, come at once into sympathy with his author in his description of the true and the beautiful.” “The Science of the Beautiful,” New York World (8 January 1882), 2.
- 61.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 127n.1.
- 62.
J.P. Mahaffy, Old Greek Education (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882), 58.
- 63.
Mahaffy, Old Greek Education, 60.
- 64.
J.P. Mahaffy, Social Life in Greece (London: Macmillan, 1874), viii. Mahaffy’s study is largely descriptive, with brief interjections suggesting that education is not quite what it used to be. Although Wilde left no record indicating how he responded to this volume, we do know that he regarded Mahaffy’s other attempt at politicizing the Hellenic past—his 1887 volume Greek Life and Thought—as heavy-handed and polemical. “He might,” Wilde said of this work, “have made his book a work of solid and enduring interest, but he has chosen to give it a merely ephemeral value, and to substitute for the scientific temper of the true historian the prejudice, the flippancy, and the violence of the platform partisan.” Oscar Wilde, “Mr. Mahaffy’s New Book,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 7 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 12–14, 12.
- 65.
Wilde, “Mr. Mahaffy’s New Book,” 12.
- 66.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 135.
- 67.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 182.
- 68.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 196.
- 69.
William Gordon, The Discipline of the Physical and Intellectual Powers (London: Charles H. Law, 1847), 26.
- 70.
Gordon, 27.
- 71.
Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 2.
- 72.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 142.
- 73.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 201.
- 74.
Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 196.
- 75.
Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 136.
- 76.
Wilde, “Critic as Artist,” 196.
- 77.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 562.
- 78.
Qtd. in Harris, 41. Harris’s account is, admittedly, suspect in many respects and relies extensively on anecdotal evidence. Still, the record of Wilde’s regard for Mahaffy’s approach to conversation is buttressed by Wilde’s published account of his mentor in “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” in which he lauds Mahaffy’s conversational technique, while deploring his turn to pedantry.
- 79.
Wilde also broke with Mahaffy on political grounds, noting his former mentor’s tendency to read Greek history through the lens of Unionism (“Mr Mahaffy’s New Book,” 12–14). Mahaffy’s biographers, William Stanford and Robert McDowell, speculate that Wilde’s critique of Mahaffy may been motivated by his mentor’s failure to secure him the post of HMI, though their argument is based strictly on the timing of the review’s publication. There remains no evidence suggesting that Mahaffy either did or did not attempt to assist Wilde in securing the position. See Stanford and McDowell, Mahaffy: Biography of an Anglo-Irishman (New York: Routledge, 1971), 79–83.
- 80.
Oscar Wilde, “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” in Journalism 2, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 35–37, 35.
- 81.
Wilde, “Aristotle at Afternoon Tea,” 35. See also J. P. Mahaffy, The Principles of the Art of Conversation (London: Macmillan, 1887). It is worth noting that, as in the case of Mahaffy, Wilde critiqued Aristotle’s style while remaining deeply impressed by the philosopher’s approach to knowledge. In his Commonplace Book, Wilde remarked that “in Aristotle the philosopher’s life is the contemplative life: he expressly disavows any philanthropic aim to Sophia.” He continues: “[I]t is good says Aristotle for it’s [sic] own sake because it is an ‘[arete] of the soul’: the fact of its existence is the reason of its existence” (Commonplace Book, 145 [189]).
- 82.
Qtd. in Harris, Oscar Wilde, 41.
- 83.
Qtd. in Harris, Oscar Wilde, 48.
- 84.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 349.
- 85.
As previous scholars have demonstrated, much of Wilde’s work can be understood as an attempt to revise Platonic idealism. See, for instance, Edward A. Watson, “Wilde’s Iconoclastic Classicism: ‘The Critic as Artist,’” English Literature in Transition 27, no. 3 (1984): 225–35; Kelly Comfort, “The Critic as Artist and Liar: The Reuse and Abuse of Plato and Aristotle by Wilde,” Wildean 32 (January 2008): 57–70; and Eva Thienpont, “‘To Play Gracefully with Ideas’: Oscar Wilde’s Personal Platonism in Poetics,” Wildean 20 (January 2002): 37–48.
- 86.
Although the pages of Theaetetus remained uncut in Wilde’s copy of Jowett’s Dialogues of Plato, he quotes from Jowett’s introduction to Theaetetus in his Commonplace Book. See Wilde, Commonplace Book, 133 [133].
- 87.
Plato, Theaetetus, in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, ed. and trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Oxford University Press, 1871), 301–420, 354. Cornford’s translation conveys the point even more powerfully: “[S]o the ignorant world describes me in other terms as an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity.” Theaetetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1961): 845–919, 854.
- 88.
Plato, Theaetetus, in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, 350.
- 89.
Victorino Tejera suggests that the treatment of Plato’s dialogues as treatises was an historical development and does not reflect the original design of the works. He notes that the “doctrinal interpretations of the dialogues are antidialogical misreadings that have avoided being called misreadings by the tacit denial-in-practice that what they are misreading are not only dialogues but works of literary art.” “The Hellenistic Obliteration of Plato’s Dialogism,” Plato’s Dialogues: New Studies and Interpretations, ed. Gerald A. Press (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1993): 129–44, 137.
- 90.
Plato, The Apology, in vol. 1 of The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Scribner, 1874): 303–40, 331.
- 91.
Plato, Theaetetus, in vol. 3 of The Dialogues of Plato, 350.
- 92.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 181.
- 93.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 181.
- 94.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), in The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. Joseph Bristow, vol. 3 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 204.
- 95.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), 111; (1891), 281. In the same chapter, Lord Henry’s zeal for the “New Hedonism,” which is to value “experience itself, and not the fruits of experience” (109), echoes Walter Pater’s insistence on the value of sensory experience in Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). Since Lord Henry neglects to provide a larger philosophical context for this argument, however, such an epicurean worldview becomes ethically suspect. As Pater himself noted in his review of the novel: “Clever always, this book, however, seems intended to set forth anything but a homely philosophy of life for the middle-class—a kind of dainty Epicurean theory, rather—yet fails, to some degree, in this; and one can see why. A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde’s hero—his heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development.” Walter Pater, “A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde,” The Bookman (November 1891): 59–60, 59.
- 96.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 201.
- 97.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 192.
- 98.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 184.
- 99.
Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2011), 248, 249.
- 100.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 48, 219.
- 101.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 48, 219.
- 102.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 105, 276. As Matthew Potolsky observes in his discussion of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean (1885), “literary pedagogy becomes a dangerous stunt, the teacher a circus master who seduces his students and promptly vanishes from the scene, leaving them to find their footing alone. So decisive is the teacher’s force that he need not even be present for his ideas to have an effect.” Matthew Potolsky, “Fear of Falling: Walter Pater’s Marius the Epicurean as a Dangerous Influence,” English Literary History 65, no. 3 [1998]: 701–29, 702.
- 103.
For instance, whereas Jonathan Freedman and Joseph Bristow have written eloquently on Lord Henry’s rhetorical and “verbal seduction” of Dorian, Esther Rathkin suggests “Lord Henry does not influence Dorian or instill in him any despicable proclivities or wishes.” Esther Rathkin, Unspeakable Secrets and the Psychoanalysis of Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 166. See, however, Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 44; and Joseph Bristow, “Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Gross Indecency,” in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (New York: Routledge, 1992), 44–63.
- 104.
Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 33, 35.
- 105.
Burrows, Pass and Class, 53.
- 106.
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Criticism, ed. Josephine M. Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 72–103, 74. Wilde alludes to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” (1841), in which Emerson writes: “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Self-Reliance, the Over-Soul, and Other Essays (Claremont, CA: Canyon Coyote Press, 2010): 19–40, 22.
- 107.
Wilde would undoubtedly have attended Pater’s Oxford lectures on Plato, which stressed that, despite the importance of process to the Platonic dialogue, Plato seems to have regarded change and mobility as something to be resisted. There was, in short, a clear distinction between Plato’s theory of how thought works and nineteenth-century responses to that theory on the part of aesthetes such as Pater and Wilde. Pater notes, in an essay based on these lectures: “It is something in this way that, for Plato, motion and the philosophy of motion identify themselves with the vicious tendency in things and thought. […] Change, he protests, through the power of a true philosophy, shall not be the law of our being; and it is curious to note the way in which, consciously or unconsciously, that philosophic purpose shapes his treatment, even in minute detail, of education, of art, of daily life, his very vocabulary, in which such pleasant or innocent words, as ‘manifold,’ ‘embroidered,’ ‘changeful,’ become the synonymes [sic] of what is evil.” Walter Pater, “A Chapter on Plato,” Macmillan’s Magazine 66 (May 1892): 31–38, 38.
- 108.
Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” 76–77.
- 109.
As Shuter astutely observes, “what Wilde’s critical dialogues actually display is the ‘Oxford temper,’ which Wilde defined as the ability and willingness ‘to play gracefully with ideas’” in a manner specifically crafted after the model of Greats (“Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of ‘Greats,’” 261).
- 110.
As Iain Ross suggests, for Wilde “the Forms or Archetypes or Ideas that in Plato’s philosophy exist beyond the sensible world might be located instead in the psuchê, ‘soul,’ of the artist, thus rescuing art from Plato’s charge of an uncomprehending mimicry of shadows” (Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece, 150).
- 111.
John T. Flanagan, “Oscar Wilde’s Twin City Appearances,” Minnesota Historical Society (March 1936): 38–48, 41.
- 112.
“The Apotheosis of Snobbery,” Columbus Sunday Morning News, 7 May 1882, 1.
- 113.
Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 137.
- 114.
Following his lecture tour, Wilde took lessons in “elocution and gesture” from Hermann Vezin, an actor and drama critic who had worked with such noted actors as Charles Kean, John Hare, William Hunter Kendal, and Dame Madge Kendal. Wilde remarked: “With Mr. Vezin, grace of gesture is an unconscious result—not a conscious effort. It has become nature, because it was once art.” “Helena in Troas,” Journalism 1, ed. John Stokes and Mark Turner, vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 78–80. Like Wilde’s earlier mentors, Vezin seems to have privileged a pedagogy that embraces process above the attainment of a definitive end (Sherard, 239).
- 115.
Oscar Wilde, “The Relation of Dress to Art,” in vol. 6 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 36–38, 37.
- 116.
Oscar Wilde, “The Decorative Arts,” in Kevin O’Brien, Oscar Wilde in Canada: An Apostle for the Arts (Toronto, Ont.: Personal Library, 1982): 151–64, 157.
- 117.
“Oscar Wilde,” Montgomery Daily Advertiser, 30 June 1882, 4.
- 118.
Oscar Wilde, interview by Salt Lake Herald, 12 April 1882, in Oscar Wilde in America: The Interviews, ed. Michael Hofer (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013): 128–29, 129.
- 119.
“Freshmen at Oscar Wilde’s Lecture,” Harvard Crimson, 1 February 1882, 4.
- 120.
Oscar Wilde, “Art and the Handicraftsman,” in Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 291–308, 307.
- 121.
For a comprehensive account of the public responses to Wilde’s lecture tour, see Oscar Wilde in America; and Roy Morris Jr., Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
- 122.
Wilde, “House Decoration,” 289.
- 123.
Wilde, “The Decorative Arts,” 163.
- 124.
Charles Leland, Practical Education (London: Whittaker, 1888), 128–29. To be sure, Leland was more ambivalent about such exhortations to live by art. He takes great pains to differentiate his “practical education” in the arts from the efforts of the British Aesthetes, which he refers to as “‘aesthetic trifling,’ ‘sunflower nonsense,’ and ‘playing at art’” (20). Yet he also seems to defend the Aesthetes as the harbingers of a modern age in which aesthetic knowledge would prove absolutely vital to success in practical life: “Those who talk about the sunflower mania and ‘art craze’ as something temporary, and who mistake the aesthetes for the main army yet to come, are like the ambassadors sent by an African king to visit London, and who at the first small Arab village thought themselves at the end of their journey” (90).
- 125.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 192.
- 126.
“The English Renaissance of Art,” in Miscellanies, ed. Robert Ross (London: Methuen and Company, 1908): 241–77, 275.
- 127.
Wilde, “The English Renaissance of Art,” 275.
- 128.
Shuter rightly observes that Wilde’s fascination with the movement of thought may, in addition, have been informed by his reading of Friedrich Hegel, who insisted that “‘[t]ruth lies in a movement or process: not in isolation and rest’” (262–63). See Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel, trans. William Wallace (New York: Clarendon Press, 1874), cxxxv.
- 129.
John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, 3rd ed. (London: Basil Montagu Pickering, 1873), 113 (discourse 5, sect. 6).
- 130.
Newman, The Idea of a University, 112 (discourse 5, sect. 6).
- 131.
Newman, Idea of a University, 103 (discourse 5, sect. 2; emphasis added).
- 132.
Newman defends his argument against being labeled a “paradox” multiple times throughout The Idea of a University. The frequency of these qualifications would seem to indicate some rhetorical anxiety on Newman’s part about espousing paradox as the foundation for his argument. See The Idea of a University, 103 (discourse 5, sect. 2); 111 (discourse 5, sect. 5); 145 (discourse 6, sect. 9); 390 (“A Form of Infidelity of the Day: Its Sentiments,” sect. 4); and 474 (“Christianity and Scientific Investigation,” sect. 7).
- 133.
Leonard Nelson, Politics and Education, trans. W. Lansdell (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1928), 195.
- 134.
Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Kate Flint (New York: Penguin, 1995), 10.
- 135.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), 195.
- 136.
To my knowledge, Wilde’s letter to Newman accompanying “Rome Unvisited” does not survive but is mentioned in both primary and secondary accounts of Wilde’s life. See Sherard, 146 and Ellmann, 57. In a letter to William Ward on 26 July 1876, Wilde mentioned having “bought a lot of [Newman’s] books before leaving Oxford” (Complete Letters, 25). The following year, Wilde expressed a wish to visit Newman, although there is no evidence that this encounter ever took place (Complete Letters, 41). Newman’s works appear on a list of books Wilde requested during his prison term and, following his release, Arthur Clifton observed to Carlos Blacker on 8 October 1895: “He has been reading Pater and Newman lately, one book a week” (Complete Letters, 665n).
- 137.
Newman, The Idea of a University, 276.
- 138.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 102–3.
- 139.
Dodgson was a distant cousin of Charles Dodgson, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; hence, Wilde alludes to Wonderland in the following passage.
- 140.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 547.
- 141.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 556.
- 142.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 555.
- 143.
Wilde, Complete Letters, 868.
- 144.
Thus, Wilde seems to reject what Burrows calls “[t]he old school-boy adage, ‘Work while you work and play while you play.’” Burrows continues: “The general rule seems to be that the mind should be thoroughly unbent during the periods of recreation. If some of the usual amusements are not preferred, at least as much as possible of the free open air of heaven should be drunk in; long walks rather than short ones; out of the city rather than in it: but better still, if used in subordination to the rules for time already laid down, the river, the gymnasium, the rifle-ground, the racket-court, and the cricket-field. If any one of these (or other recreations of the same sort) is found on experience to interfere with such rules, it will be well to give it up at once and take to one that does not, rather than drive off the evening’s work to late hours” (40).
- 145.
Oscar Wilde, “A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated,” in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 570–71, 570.
- 146.
Oscar Wilde, “Phrases and Philosophies for Use by the Young,” in The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000): 572–73, 573.
- 147.
Wilde, An Ideal Husband, 423.
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Stern, K.J. (2019). The Teacher. In: Oscar Wilde. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24604-4_2
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