The Decay of Lying

One of Vivian’s key tenets of his “new aesthetics” (16) is that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” (17); that is, art is an inventive force, and the way people perceive life and themselves is based on artistic conventions. As such, art creates the images that we model ourselves and our perceptions on.

Wilde supplies a number of examples to illustrate that art is an inventive force, as well as counterexamples of pieces that are imitative and therefore cannot achieve the same sophistication or beauty. As noted, Wilde is critical of the fixation on nature as a subject and source of inspiration, and he describes work inspired by nature as “old fashioned, antiquated, and out-of-touch” (6). This is because nature is “the collection of phenomena external to man,” and therefore people bring meaning to nature where there arguably is none (6). He uses the poetry of William Wordsworth to note how the poet’s work based on nature is derivative, unlike his work based on artistic convention and imagination.

The inventive nature of art is related to Wilde’s defense of lying because it is by creating what does not exist that art attains true beauty. Art is a means of imposing perfection on an imperfect world. Indeed, Wilde writes that “Art […] is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than a mirror” (9). Through style and imagination, art can create visions of a reality that go beyond the limits of what we actually experience. The creation of such visions or “types” then trains people to recognize or “copy” these types in their own lives. Wilde lists a range of examples in art and literature that incited trends in people’s behaviors and perceptions of the world, ranging from “the pessimism that characterises modern thought” that “Hamlet invented” (10) to a story of a friend named Mr. Hyde who inadvertently recreated the opening of the famous 19th-century novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 

One of the writers Wilde commends for his vision and characterization is Balzac, a 19th-century French writer. Balzac is often considered a prominent representative of the realist movement, and Wilde responds to this idea directly to explain his stance defending Balzac and his work as an inventive force rather than simple imitation. Cyril asks Vivian whether Balzac and another important figure of the Realism movement, George Meredith, are realists. Vivian answers by enumerating the qualities of the writers’ works that distinguish them from the pitfalls of realism and its reliance on imitation, asserting, “The difference between such a book as M. Zola’s L’Assommoir and Balzac’s Illusions Perdues is the difference between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality” (5). For Wilde, this is one of art’s gifts to people because it encourages them to seek the beauty found in art within their own lives.