In an essay published in this magazine on the 8 June 2024 entitled ‘Art for Heart’s Sake’, A. A. Sagar offered a view of the rallying call of the decadent Aesthetics Movement, ‘L’art pour l’art’, which I consider seriously misrepresents the slogan and its context.
Sagar’s thesis is that the phrase is but a mere cover designed to “protect our provocative art with a preface” and cites such a preface as the one in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. They thus assume that the actual novel is provocative, and that the phrase was successfully designed to conceal this true, inner nature from the censoriousness of Victorian Britain.
This is a largely inaccurate view of the phrase and its relation to the novel. First, when the novel was first published, it did not pass without scrutiny and widespread condemnation: It was described by the Daily Chronicle as “poisonous” and “unclean”, it was brought up by the prosecution in Wilde’s trial as a “sodomitical [sic] book” and indeed the book itself was pulled from sale by W. H. Smith. If the phrase was a cover, it did not work very well, especially since the phrase itself was a powerful shibboleth for the Aesthetics Movement, a movement that exalted the values of hedonism and beauty, as opposed to the strict morality of the Victorian era. Thus, including such a powerful exposition of its beauty-worshipping is far from a genuine attempt to conceal the true nature of Wilde’s work.
Sagar describes the saying as a “gun” originating “from the enemy” which can be turned against them. If it was a gun, it misfired. If it originated from the enemy, why did they so detest it? If it was a deliberate tactic against them, who on Earth would have adopted such a strategy?
Furthermore, there is a single-minded doggedness in Sagar’s essay, which is often the good mark of a thoughtful polemicist but only when applied judiciously and originally.
Unsurprising for a socialistic piece, there is a distinct tone of class struggle: “the conqueror’s pointed gun neutering our political, personal, and powerful art into the plebeian’s low art.” Or, more broadly, of the oppressed against the oppressor. In reading this, and indeed his whole piece, one cannot but call to mind the Marx passage, from the Communist Manifesto, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Sagar treats ‘l’art pour l’art’ in a similar fashion, as a means of struggle against oppression, of ‘High’ culture versus ‘Low’ culture.
This is, up to a very small point, true. While it was a stance against Victorian moralism, it was not a truly revolutionary “plebeian” struggle; it had more the character of élite dissension than proletariat revolution.
Indeed, the fact the slogan which was rendered in the English “art for art” was always used in the French ‘l’art pour l’art’ and was thus completely unintelligible to the “plebeian”. The Aesthetics Movement was firmly based around the privileged and educated intelligentsia and was coded as such. Thus, its slogan reflects this class status, and in its linguistic exclusivity was quite firmly not ‘of the people’ as Sagar implies it was.
Thus, trying to portray Wilde as a struggler against the class establishment only has credence up until a certain point. He did suffer at hands of it, but such a myopic view does not consider the fact that he was a scion of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, his dalliance was with Lord Alfred Douglas or that for many years, he was the darling enfant terrible of polite society. He was a member of the establishment by birth, profession and choice.
Furthermore, if Wilde did attempt to dismantle, or at the very least challenge, the class order, why did he write the entirety of his play Salome in French, a language only the upper classes could understand? Why did so much of his literature focus on the exclusive world of the British upper classes? Wilde seems not so much focused on oppression as on cleverness and its interface with morality.
I say all of this not merely as a mid-wit ‘um actually…’ reduction—reduction is necessary in polemics—but because the reduction Sagar undertakes simply does not work.
Likewise, Sagar’s superficial view of the book that it is merely provocative does not grasp its true brilliance. It is true to say that the work did provoke, but to stop there is to ignore the very plot of the novel; It recounts the descent of a profligate hedonist into sin, and the inevitability of moral stain.
In fact, I would suggest that although it is a criticism of the established order, The Picture of Dorian Gray is a far more insightful criticism of Wilde himself and of the Aesthetics Movement. Dorian Gray is not some exemplar of Victorian moralism, he is a hedonist whose artful hedonism, inevitably comes with distinct moral baggage. And it is this moral weight, which unavoidably crushes and kills Dorian. In this way the novel bears far more resemblances with the Slough of Despond from Pilgrim’s Progress or Don Giovanni than with any modern work of queer liberation. At its core, it is a story of sin, not of struggle. It is a thoughtful consideration, even criticism, of ‘L’art pour l’art.’
Sometimes we create distinctions in history—moral categories under which we file personages, institutions and whole nations and sometimes our heroes end up on the wrong side. Rather than attempting to defend dogmatism with ineffective reductions, such an occurrence ought to prompt us to have some inkling of the crucial self-reflection Wilde so often showed and realise that history is often more complex than simple black-and-white distinctions.