Nurture Making Nature: Oscar Wilde's Art of Lying

It’s hard for me to see Oscar Wilde as anything but witticisms and aphorisms; though he was one of the most wildly intelligent writers of the Victorian (or perhaps any) Era, my experiences with his writing, mostly because of having read The Importance of Being Earnest about three dozen times, have led me to believe the comedy-of-manners sort of writing to be his forte. I would never have anticipated Wilde to have written such beautiful poetry, or the Platonic-style dialogue as is the excerpt from The Decay of Lying. However, even in this short except, Wilde’s persistent prose style of pithy observations and witty remarks remains, and I think the style of Platonic dialogue very much suits him.

Wilde’s inimitable style comes through even with Vivian’s first lines: “Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty” (832). Such a seemingly nonsensical and flippant statement, characteristic of much of Wilde’s writing, often comes immediately prior to an interesting description or criticism of the world. Indeed, Vivian does not disappoint, next remarking that “[p]eople tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before; that it reveals her secrets to us . . . My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature” (832). Vivian goes on to claim that Art merely shows Nature’s own imperfections, which runs expressly contrary to Plato’s assertion that art is merely a shadow of nature (footnote 1, p. 831). Plato believed that all art came from nature, and that it therefore could never be as good as nature. It is out of this tradition that Wilde can claim that the art of lying is a lost art that ought to be revived.

Vivian believes that “Nature follows the landscape painter then, and takes her effects from him,” instead of the other way around (840). He references the Impressionistic painters, who glorified such mundane subjects as bridges and dank, murky London streets as artistic objects. Instead of Nature being some “great mother who has borne us,” she is “our creation . . . Things are because we see them, and how we see it, depend son the Arts that have influenced us” (840). Therefore, though a painter or poet may be inspired by a beautiful scene, an even more beautiful description, whether in words or some other artistic medium, will make the original scene even more beautiful. William Wordsworth taught us to appreciate daffodils, Monet water-lilies. Without these men, we would not have the beauty of Nature that we have, claims Wilde. Fog is the example that he uses, since they were artistically in fashion: “people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects” (841). Indeed, Nature itself occasionally falls out of fashion, persisting in showing sunsets when everyone knows that “[s]unsets are quite old-fashioned” (841).

Wilde gives a great deal of respect (though much of it is somewhat tongue-in-cheek) to what man has produced. In his more famous works, like his plays as well as his only novel, he focuses on very trivial things, like the famous passages in The Importance of Being Earnest that legislate rules for casual flirting, or the eating of cucumber sandwiches. Wilde seemed to find his passion in the seemingly trivial: those elements of Nature, art, or culture that seemed unimportant to the rest of the world, but truly speak volumes about the nature of people. By having Nature imitate Art instead of the other way around, Wilde sets his readership up to make his art—his ridiculous and hilarious interpretations of high-society people—be the truth, leading (hopefully!) to a radical rethinking of actual society.