Wild Victorian and modernised Wild was born in 1854 and died in nineteen hundred right at the end of the century, just a year before Queen Victoria, and there are many ways in which he kind of spans that area that we now know is the fantasy. That's where he has all his major works are published from the first works published in the 80s. His poems, his essays, Journalism very early plays through two major works in the nineteen nineties.
So in that sense, he really bridges the gap between Victorian, the modernist and in many ways in rather than just seeing him as a Victorian east where the Victorian era kind of closes around nineteen hundred, it's much more helpful to think of him as part of a period that's now often recognised within literary studies, which is more 1880 to 1920, the way in which the 1881 1890 set up a lot of the experimentalism innovation and so on of early modernism.
And at the time he was absolutely taken to typify fantasy at the end of the century and everything it meant decadence, decay, corruption, exhaustion, degeneration, or conversely, questioning, innovation, liberation, expansion, experimentation, exoticism, a huge number of different artistic schools from in some ways going all the way back to the Brotherhood and the so-called fleshly school of poetry all the way through to French symbolism,
aestheticism, decadence, the kind of new drama that follows Ibsen and so on, while the epitome amidst this period, both for his admirers and for his detractors. So an enormously useful text for kind of illuminating his detractors, those who saw him while the great danger and a different kind of decadence, really useful text is the German max, no doubt, and Tottenham and Tartan being translated as the generation was written in 1892, translated into English in 1895.
It went through eight editions in the first three years after its publication in 1895 in English. So it's hugely influential and hugely popular. And what Max no doubt offers in degeneration is a condemnation of all new movements in art as and new movements in society as symptoms of a social and indeed racial degeneration. And that's racial degeneration, as in a generation of the human species, the whole human race and particular kind of Western civilised human rights.
So this is very much post Darwin and the idea of the evolution of species. But what he's saying is the danger of a degeneration and evolution that is not some kind of spin Syrian version of endless improvement and perfecting of the human race, but rather becoming cruder. And, you know, it's seen in things like the masculinisation of women, the new woman, the feminising of men in the forms of the kind of aestheticism and so on.
And what you've got within and Tufton within the generation is wild offered as a sort of type of this, a perfect classic example of it. So no doubt inveighs against this genetically transmitted Dekay and physical degeneration and moral degeneration, which he sees as equally identifiable in the criminal and the artist in the so-called mentally defective and in the genius, they're all unnatural deviations from a healthy norm. So Max Nordahl defines the fantasy ekler.
It means a practical emancipation from traditional discipline, which theoretically is still in force to the voluptuary. This means unbridled lewdness, the unchaining of the beast in man to the withered heart of the egoist disdain of all consideration for his fellow men, the trampling on the foot of all barriers which enclose the brute greed of Loukia and lust of pleasure to the timber of the world.
It means the shameless ascendancy of base impulses and motives which were, if not virtuously suppressed, at least hypocritically hidden. To the believer. It means the repudiation of dogma, the negation of the supersensitive world, the descent into flat phenomena. Listen to the sensitive nature yearning for aesthetic thrills. It means the vanishing of ideals in art and no more pardners accepted forms to arouse emotion and to all.
It means the end of an established order which for thousands of years has satisfied logic, foetid depravity and in every art matured something of. Beauty, so this is no doubt saying this is what's happening in every way to Western civilisation, and as within that book, he attacks all sorts of modern movements in art.
So Zola's naturalism, Varner's music and operas, the open air painting of the impressionists, the poetry of symbolist, all of these are kind of degeneration of traditional artistic forms. And the example he offers of healthy art is wonderfully musical melodies, slapdash farces. And when it comes to fine art paintings depicting Munich beer houses, these are an example of healthy art, very much popular art.
And what he's most interested in is this idea that underlying this is a deep seated belief in the benevolent force of tradition and the importance, the healthy importance of the norm of the average of orthodoxy, the idea that it's actually within the norm, within the average, that the health of the race lies. So tradition and being conventional and conforming becomes enormously important.
And any deviation from this type can spell disaster, whether it's deviation towards the genius or towards the criminal or towards the idiot. All of those are pulling the race out into these unhealthy extremes, which will become exaggerated.
And it's also fixed in this idea that what you're transmitting from generation to generation is not just genetic, but within behaviour, that the the genes will be altered by behaviour and then it will move further and further to extremes up until the human individual becomes incapable of fulfilling their function in the world.
So some kind of sterility lies at the end of this, both from deviating from proper femininity and proper masculinity, but also if you do too much innovating and individualism.
As you can tell, Wald's doctrine of individualism stands absolutely counter to this, and that's the use of no doubt explains the ways in which Wild's doctrine of individualism is actually very closely in conversation with very, very central ideologies of the times and how dangerous in many ways it was so old doctrine of individualism.
It's absolutely about rejecting the standards of one's age, about thinking for yourself, about cultivating your own essential self, and in that sense, diametrically opposed to no doubts beliefs. So in degeneration, no doubt devotes almost an entire chapter to world. And he also types him so that a lot of degeneration is set up as one of those absolutely classic end of the 19th century texts where everything is put into a kind of genus and species.
It's all categorised. And Nordahl can stand alongside people like Cezar Lombroso, who in his very influential book, Criminal Man, does all the different categories of criminal, all of whom can be recognised and typed, including by the shape of their earlobes or the size of their craniums. So there's very much this idea that you can identify the type and categorise them so wild is filed on the ego maniac and part of the way in which this is manifested,
the way in which it's dying. He's diagnosed as part of this group by Nordahl is by his desire to dress unlike other people, which is a sign of a kind of pathological madness, that kind of egotism, lack of self-control, gone mad, indubitable proof of his central moral perversion and really important, the date at which and Tartine was written in 1892. It's three years before the world trials. So in that sense, what Max no doubt was responding to and world is very much the doctrine's.
It's not the idea that while there's some kind of version of sexual degeneracy because he can identify his homosexuality, it's very much about everything else, about world, certainly the way in which Wilde is challenging all sorts of very specific gender divides. But it's not a specific sexual attack. That's not what's being seen specifically as dangerous about wild.
So in this sense, it's very clearly the very fact that no doubt will spend some 20 pages on the subject of wild and how he dresses and what he does with his art and what he argues in his essays and so on shows how far Wilde epitomised what was threatening and new at this point,
the challenge of the new to orthodoxy. It's also interesting if you think about the kind of typing that Nadal's doing, this categorising of individuals and artists, importantly, think about the ways in which Willes, with his idea of the performance self, with his idea of the mutability of the self and so on, everything I was saying about what he thought of performing within.
And so last week, there are many ways in which a lot of wild doctrine of individualism, but also his challenge to the idea of any simple division between self and mask, between truth and lies and so on, all this resistance to catagories is, again, absolutely contrary to that kind of late 19th century obsession with typology and so on.
So my aim in this lecture is to place wild, not on both backwards within 19th century discourses, but also forwards within 20th century development of ideas and artistic movements. So pretty much all of world works are very, very closely located, very much in conversation with 19th century literary genres.
So, for example, his poems actually faced huge number of accusations of plagiarism because they were so closely tied in in style and subject matter to works of the late romantic's works also works by Swinburne, by Keats, by Rossetti and so on. But if you come to his place, for example, each of them are in conversation with different contemporary dramatic genres.
So, for example, of women's importance and Lady Windermere's Fan within the fallen woman genre, the one that's about the woman's sexual past being discovered in the question of how she should be expelled from society or judged or punished. In the case of importance of being earnest, it's very much in conversation with Victorian farce, so very close to a place like Filberts Engaged or sweetheart to Pioneros parties like magistrates and so on.
There are heavy elements of melodrama within these plays and in conversation with Victorian melodrama in that sense, and even these really early plays, the Duchess of Padua, which in one sense a sort of four to five act. This drama is looking back to works by people like Tennyson and Browning and so on, and also people like Victor Hugo and his drama and so on. Also the role of the Nicolelis, another of his early plays.
There was actually a whole genre of Russian Nicolas plays that were hugely popular at the beginning of the 80s. So in that sense, each of his plays can be kind of located within sort of dramatic genre, but not so much located in it as in conversation with it, in conversation with its conventions and audience expectations within that genre.
In the same way, think about Dorian Grey, how far it's within that genre of late Victorian Gothic, but also it's the idea of doubles and what so many of those works are doing with doubles right the way back to Frankenstein, but going through to things like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. And also remember, it was first published in Lippincott, which was where Sherlock Holmes,
the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories were first published. So the sign of fall comes out in an issue right next to picture of Dorian Grey. Think about that conversation and what that does to the novel, just as I also think about what it does with the idea of selling your soul, the pact over the soul, going back to Dr Faustus, also going through things like Meld with the Wanderer and so on.
There are a whole load of text that it's in conversation. And that sense his short stories or do you call them children's stories? All sorts of questions about their obviously in conversation with Irish folk tales, with the growth in specifically for children stories written at the end of the 19th century with fairy stories, but also with biblical parable, a kind of mixed in there, all sorts of different genres.
The question of which one you fix them in massively affects how you read them and how you're understanding them. His essays collected together later on, his literary essays Collected Since Intention's is the title, a wonderfully difficult, sort of tempting title, which in itself references Walter Peters collection of essays, appreciations. So the very title indicates a kind of conversation with genre.
They themselves part of the periodical press engaging with a huge number of contemporary debates. As I go through now this idea, I think it's one of the keys to studying world and looking at what Wild's doing is to put his works in conversation with other contemporary works, to see them as part of a long running debates. And that comes right down both the macro of what he's doing as a whole with his works, but also the micro down to the small detail of how he uses language.
So one of the things that world's best known for are phrases like divorces are made in heaven during sorry work. It's the curse of the drinking class's disobedience is man's original virtue. Now, the fact that these look like to lots of the kind of critics who were not admiring of what they look like, cheap tricks, all you do is take a well-known phrase or cliche and turn it on its head.
And they complain that you could turn these out by the dozen is terribly, terribly easy or these critics complain. And it gets cold, wet, and actually we could all do it. I really like Bernard Shaw's response to this complaint that it's terribly easy to do where he says in his review of an ideal husband, Mr. Oscar Wilde. New play at the Haymarket is a dangerous subject because he has the property of making his critics dull.
They laugh angrily at his epigrams like a child who has been coaxed into being amused in the very act of setting up a yell of rage in agony. They protest that the trick is obvious and that such epigrams could be turned out by the score by anyone light minded enough to condescend to such frivolity. As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will.
The fact that his plays, though apparently lucrative, remain unique under these circumstances says much for the self-denial of our critics. In other words, it's not that easy because if it were, you'd all be doing it because it makes lots of money. Now, when Wilde turns those phrases on their heads, he's not just therefore playing a cheap trick. It's not just a case of playing. Let's reverse every cliche. Those sayings, things like divorces are made in heaven.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. Each of those reversals, the fact is the same. His work turned upside down. Reverse them and they still make sense. But they're always the the fact that you're aware of them is a reversal of a more familiar phrase means they're constantly in tension with it. They're in conversation with the original, but also they're showing up the assumptions that underlie the original.
So work is the curse of the drinking glasses is an obvious reversal of drink is the curse of the working classes. Flip it around and it reveals how much the phrase working classes is. They're not functioning as a descriptor, as a kind of neutral term to describe something. It's actually reducing that to their function. So a whole load of people that function becomes to work and drink is like the kind of, you know, grit in the machine that stopping it working properly while reverse is it.
And you get a sense of the people's own perspective, what their lives might be about. Do you see what I mean? So it's sort of in that flip. It's in conversation with it. But it also reveals a whole set of assumptions and ways of thinking, just as divorces are made in heaven. Now, it's an obvious one about how far divorce laws loosened up and made available in nineteenth century, but also for those who are desperate for divorce.
Actually, it's not a case of marriage being sacred and God given necessarily through the nineteenth century. There's a sense in which perhaps divorce is, too, and then things like disobedience as man's original virtue. It's an obvious flip of, you know, the idea that obedience is man's original virtue. But it's also a crystallisation of all of wild arguments in essays like Solomon and Socialism about the importance of protest, the importance of challenging sceptred morality.
Think about disobedience. It's man's original virtue in relation to civil disobedience and things like the campaign for the suffrage and things like in the 1960s, civil rights protests in the nineteenth and so on, those kind of thing, their disobedience. But they're also a challenge to establish morality. And a lot of what Wild's looking at there is the idea that progress is this sort of process of challenging established morality to establish a new and hopefully better morality.
So in that sense, the idea that disobedience is man's ritual virtue makes perfect sense within a different kind of moral system.
Yeah, so it's that thing. Look for Wild's doing in microcosm. Now, all of those are kind of dependent on the idea that this idea that in macro what Walt's writing is so often the real sense of it lies in contemporary debates, how far his works are engagement's in those debates, and that new layers of meaning and understanding and power come out of them once you insert them into those debates.
And you can understand what Walt engaging with and arguing with. Now, give an example of this, the soul of man under socialism. I think it's a really wonderful essay by Walt, first published in the fortnightly review in in February 1891. Within the Solomon and Socialism. He advocates socialism as the only true way to individualism.
So he argues that under the current capitalist system, late nineteenth century capitalist system, the ills of the capitalist system lead not only to extreme poverty for many and enslavement and the heavy drudgery of long hours degrading work where the few live off the products of that work. He argues further that the enslavement, the lack of individualism in that society goes all the way through to the.
So those who are well-off still get their lives marred by the sight of poverty around them and within that society worshipping wealth and belongings, people have lost sight of being of, in one sense, more spiritual values, in another sense, whichever values they wish to go for, this sense in which the whole system, the imposition of power, corrupts those who impose the power as much as those it's imposed upon.
So he's arguing that this is what you get through a system of control and capitalist control and violence and all the rest of it and possession money and the commerce and so on. And he argues instead not for state socialism or communism, but for a form of anarchism. So one in which there are no laws whatsoever in which you disperse all forms of authority. So you get rid of the legal system in the penal system, but you also get rid of the family.
You also get rid of private property completely. And it's a very wild. And so, again, this kind of quoting and reversing things, Prud'homme had declared that property is theft while declares that property is simply a nuisance. So, again, it's that kind of being in dialogue with another state and that wild within the essay he does actually advocate. So getting rid of all forms of authority, all notions of duty and so on.
He wonderfully, he says, know not a case of state socialism because that again imposes authority upon everybody and enslaves in another way. But he does wonderfully, airily say everybody should have everything they need. The state should sort of produce things and everybody will get what they want. Don't know how it'll happen. And he goes on to say he absolutely recognises this is entirely utopian saying is this utopian a map of the world that does not include utopia.
It's not even worth glancing at for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And when humanity lands there, it looks out and seeing a better country set sail. Progress is the realisation of utopias. And if it looks as if it were practical, that would mean it was practical because it fitted in with the way society is now. And the whole value of it is it doesn't know.
It's very easy from that to kind of dismiss the essay is therefore visionary, impractical, whimsical, maybe a kind of sheer display, which actually many of the reviews did at the time. So you'll find reviews at the time that said, well, if you meant seriously, oh my God, it be dreadful. But it's just a joke. Actually, that very which the point now you can look at it and dismiss it as simply a fairly visionary and utopian. Actually, that whole discourse of utopian versions.
The future was a very, very strong political discourse at that time. Utopian anarchy was a strong influence on late 19th century politics and Wald's essays, you can absolutely see as a very informed engagement with a lot of the principles that are being debated and a lot of political writing at the time. So you can see a debt within the soul of man and socialism to William Morris and his utopian vision needs from nowhere.
You can see the influence of Mikhail Bakunin and Prince Paul Kropotkin in there. As I said, you can see references to Prud'homme. You can look at there's also a line of the Daoism of Changsu, whose work he reviewed is very ancient Chinese sage Dagworth Sage, who while reviews his writings and that's another influence sort of running through the soul of man and socialism. It's a vision very close to William Morris's political vision.
And very few people dismiss Morrises, therefore unimportant and so on, because the utopianism within it and it's also got a lot of very practical and of the moment revolutionary politics within it. So there's overt support throughout the essay, quite direct support for the Russian Nicolelis.
So there's a revolution in protest against Tsarist rule in Russia. Now, if you look at contemporary newspaper reports in Britain at that time, there's some sympathy for the suffering of the Russian people under Tsarist rule, oppressive totalitarian rule. But there's absolute fear of the Russian Nilus. Any kind of revolution is something that scares the pants off the British public at that point to the British establishment.
You get it all the way through to Lady Bracknell. The wonderful thing about to be born anyway sort of have to be that this happened to be born or any bred in a handbag seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decency, the family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And we all know what that movement led to and instead to its sort of wobble, much as they might have done that brilliant film of it.
And that sense that our world is doing that is mocking that fear of revolution itself, because he's actually allying himself absolutely clearly with armed insurrection behind the Russian nihilists. And in that sense, the essay is absolutely part of a kind of totally serious in many ways an important, intellectually valid, politically engaged discourse at the time and debate.
The essay is not just Victorian politics. It's obviously Victorian, as well as being part of that popular periodical press.
As I said last week, Wilders expert as his engagement with that popular press and the whole medium of publicising and self publicising and so on, everything from his lectures, his touring with D'Oyly Carte, his journalism, huge amounts of journalism and a whole range of periodicals through the 80s, even editing the women's world, having his photographs taken by Sironi and so on. Now he's also very canny.
This is one of the things that I think has become a kind of issue amongst world scholars and about the last sort of 10 years, which is the way in which there's lots and lots of detail now available through great scholarship by Josephine Guyand in small on Wyles negotiation about his contract, how to get copyright on his works, but also how to get the maximum money out of what he's writing.
And for some people, this equals he's therefore not politically engaged because he's very good at making money.
Therefore, that's what he must be. Now, nobody says that of George Bernard Shaw, who's famous is one of the most engaged, politically engaged writers at that time who similarly is trying to work out just as well did how to get a percentage of box office returns for the place, he writes, and enormously involved in the establishment of the society of authors and trying to get maximal royalties and the best possible copyright on their work.
So one of the interesting things is where money and the individualism of the artist, the freedom of the artist, come together. So the question about how to resist a marketplace that would like to dictate what you can write at the same time as exploiting a marketplace to make enough money to give you some kind of independence. So there's an interesting and complex negotiation going on there. And different critics have ended up not necessarily simplistically saying he's trying to make money.
Therefore, that's all he's interested in. But how far he ends up falling into playing back to the marketplace what they want rather than challenging it. So that whole question about how he's working with genre, how far he's how he's working to a popular readership, but not necessarily giving them what they expect. It's quite a complex and subtle relationship. And it's one that importantly, you want to think about the way that aestheticism relates to that.
So aestheticism as a protest against utilitarianism, market value and so on. So exactly what's expressed in the preface to Dorian Grey, there is no. No such thing as a moral or an immoral book, books are well written or badly written. That is all the moral life of man forms, part of the subject matter of the artist. But the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies and ethical sympathy, and an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything thought and language, art of the artist, instruments of an art vice and virtue art to the artist, materials for an art. All art is quite useless. Now, time and time again, I've had students take these as though they are dictates, as though they are absolute statements. All art is quite useless.
At which point said students then argue back that actually this this art happens to serve this purpose and therefore it's not useless. So the three volume novel can form a very good doorstop. You could light a fire with a sonnet. You can I mean, no art can manage to be. Obviously, there are logical flaws in that. It's very hard to dictate your art shall be useless. What Wilde is not doing is offering these as instructions, as dictators, absolute statements.
What those statements do is defy you reject any other other way of valuing art. So to say all art is useless is a way. Its way of rebutting art is to be judged by its usefulness. OK, it's a rebuttal of utilitarianism. It's a rebuttal. All of that. Put those two together. Look at the preface to Dorian Grey. And it's a rebuttal of the idea that art is to be valued by its commercial value, its market value, by its educative function.
But the idea that it makes you better, people buy the idea that it enlarges your sympathies or the idea that it's the function of cementing together civilisations of any of the things, for example, that Nordahl believes art ought to be doing OK. Art is to be judged by aesthetic criteria alone. OK, that's what Wilde is offering. So aestheticism as art for art's sake, like Dandyism with its emphasis on style and not usefulness.
And so it's a way of responding to that heavily commercialised marketplace. It's a way of responding to a demand for art to be morally good and improving. And all the rest of it ought to be functionally useful. It's one that clears space for art to be valued for itself in a different way, not as a soapbox, not as a moral vehicle. And that fits in with world constant throughout his work, sort of mockery of the idea of art as a simple educative model.
This idea of the idea of sort of moral improvement through art, through things like poetic justice, the good ends happily, the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means. It reduces the whole of poetic justice. The idea that that teaches you about good and bad to one kind of wonderfully compressed, ludicrous phrase from prison, just as Miss Prisons response to the news of Ernest death. What a lesson. I trust he will profit by it.
That whole kind of the sense in which that kind of morality is also incredibly vicious in its own way and completely ludicrous is a way of improving people or mocking Victorian sentimentality. So Wilde's response to the news of the death of Little Nell, it would take a man with a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell. He's always kind of pushing back against those kind of models of literature. And in that sense, look at the last section of the Solomon Islands socialism.
It's a whole, in a sense, manifesto devoted to attacking public opinion as a valid force over art. So, again, absolutely opposite to where no doubt locating art and its value. The artist instead in world opinion is the supreme individualist. Any association, he asserts, between the work of art and the artist is invalid. You cannot judge the artist by the work of art that's produced instead.
And any kind of criticism of the work of art in moral or health terms as things like morbid, unhealthy, exotic, all of those kind of terms, common critical terms. At that point, moral disapproval are all invalid and are seen as wild as simply expressing fear of the new fear of innovation, fear of moving beyond established guidelines and traditions. And in that sense, there's a way in which you can read the Solomon and Socialism as basically a manifesto for modernism. Listen to this.
The one thing that the public dislike is novelty, any attempt to extend the subject matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public. And yet the vitality and progress of art depend in large measure on the continual extension of subject matter. The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mood of individualism and obsession on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject matter and treats it as he chooses.
The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of beauty in new forms.
They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter, why he does not paint like someone else. Quite oblivious to the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind, he would cease to be an artist. And that they think about the response to the impressionist at the post-Impressionist Cubism, the works of Picasso, Matisse, and some think of the music of Bogner, Stravinsky, Kandinsky.
I mean, there are so many of these ones and that kind of response of fear and discussant anger that greeted a lot of their work. That's what wild arguing for the freedom to innovate and to move away from classical established forms. Now, the work of worlds most clearly bridges this sort of gap, conceptual gap in many ways, artistic gap between the Victorian era in the modern era, between what we see as Victorian art and work and modernist art and work is probably his place.
Salomé, it's one very, very clearly has a foot in both camps. It was inspired by literary movements and works of the 80s and 90s, and it massively inspired a whole host of experimental, innovative works going into the 19th into the 20th century. Salemi was first written in French in 1891 with a biblical subject matter, and it's highly stylised. It was refused a licence on that basis of the biblical subject matter. It was refused a licence for public performance in nineteen ninety three.
So there was a performance plan, a production plant with Sara Banhart in the lead role of Salome, but it was refused a public licence for performance.
It's written as a symbolist work strongly inspired by the work of Baudelaire, LeFleur Dimel with its atmosphere of exoticism, sinister beauty, its challenges to conventional morality, and also the ideas of correspondence of the correspondence between smells, colours, sounds, sights, music and the rhythms of poetry and images and the idea that they all of these can not just converge and merge,
but actually have equivalencies between them. That's a huge those theories were huge of synaesthesia and correspondance were a huge influence on, for example, the opera and works of Bachner and the painting of Kandinski. So Wild's absolutely joining in with some of the fundamental artistic theories and some that lie behind early and late modernism.
The work is also hugely influenced by the theatre of Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian playwright who wrote Le Princess, Malen Pelleas, Emeli Sande, Lantus, Lederberg, their kind of minimalist, very highly stylised language, poetic works, which are huge influence in lots and lots of later theatre through singing and all the way through to Beckett.
There's a great book on that, The Irish Drama of Europe by Catherine Werth that looks at the way in which Maeterlinck kind of helped shape 20th Century Theatre.
Other influences on Salemi reaching back into the 19th century flowerbeds A.D.s one of his two account, three tales that were collected, which is a sort of short story, very jewelled, exotic, full of archaism and different ways, and a huge emphasis on style for its own sake, a kind of intensity of language that's almost emotionally detached from its subject matter. That's a huge it becomes enormously important on lots and lots of later writing.
And Wald's kind of clearly paying homage to that as he is to Malamud's poem, Diat, which is another very clear influence, especially in the kind of characterising of Salomé within the poem. And Walt himself address Malama as share. Metcher Dear Master. So that's very kind of clear homage going on there.
And the other thing that the play's rooted in is a thought systems of thought behind French symbolism, a lot of which were about the primacy of imagination over reality, of a physical reality, the importance of the life of the imagination and the mind, the importance of subjectivity, illusion.
Projection, the internal life of passion is being more important than the external life of physical fact and the style of the French symbols, obscurity, language which becomes opaque, not translucent, where description is transformation rather than a neutral delivery. And that's something I want to give to give you a sense of what I'm talking about. And let's hope it works. Supposedly, I just have to play. Is it going to work?
Just listen to this excerpt, if you can hit the lights at the back, that probably really help. Thank you. I believe else hit the snooze button. I not. This looks like the mountains of data and down into the. And the with green of the I know white. Number is on the screen right now. You know. We. John. The man on the. And she might. Brassed. There is nothing in the.
Let me. My woman came into the world speaking out to me, I would not listen to me, I listened to the voice of the Lord God, I love that it was that. It is time now to go with my friend and grow. School kids that made their nests so. I could possibly have some things desirable, my body, it is the horrible. The. I am an. Is that. And the of mass graves like these in the land of the Aevermann. I. This is a. Like. The case of the. The decision to deny. And for the brothers who attacked this day.
You know, that night. I would say. Star. And not so. Some. It was on the floor. It's not so. There is nothing in the world. Lynette. The. But don't touch me, notes Griffin Temple of the Lord God. Of. It is lexigram. Not public servants privately run by net. No, no. It just by design and. There you get the message, if you have the lights again at the back, that would be brilliant. Thank you. You see what I mean about a language that's not translucent.
It's a language that's transformative. That's kind of an object in itself. If you see it to me, it's duelled. It's encrusted solid. It's about itself. It's about the act of seeing and transforming. It's not illustration or representation. It's language itself in that form. And also see that in conversation with all sorts of issues with modernism about the possibility of language being representation, the whole fundamental challenge to realism that's contained in modernism.
And that sense, French symbolism is one of the major stepping stones towards modernism, one of the major contributors to the development of a lot of modernist theories. And you get that idea, that obscurity, the transformative gaze and so on. It's all there. It's part of French symbolist theatre and it's there in world's own directions for how the play should be produced. So he's got a whole load of ideas. He talks about about how it should be done.
One is that all the characters should be in different forms of yellow from pale yellow to orange. Another is that the different characters and play should be a different kind of representative colours. So, for example, Salame should be dressing green like a poisonous green lizard. And one of my favourites is the idea that for each emotion in the play, there should be braises of perfume down at the front, which will release the different perfume for each emotion.
Now this wonderful, extravagant design concepts absolutely fit with cutting edge avant garde theatre at that time. So and pull Ford's Theatre, there was a production of the Padar in 1891. There was production of the song of songs and you can hear the echo of the song of songs just in that excerpt there in the language and in that production, it was an experiment in synaesthesia.
So there were different letters, different colours, different sounds projected simultaneously together with different scents. But you can work out the fundamental problem in the whole Brayshaw perfume thing. You can imagine if we were if there were an emitting for each different, I don't know, paragraph subjects in this lecture, I let out a different smell from my braziers of perfumes.
They would mingle extremely efficiently in the lack of air conditioning and this lecture theatre and you end up with one mulch was exactly what happened in the dark. There is a certain problem to using perfume as a part of your production concept. Now, the legacy of salumi, the production history. Salimi absolutely fits with this kind of experimentalism.
So think through some of the most famous images connected with the place, which are the illustrations done by Obree Beardslee and that kind of minimalist art. Look at the illustrations both for the idea of the figure of wild that you see in the moon in there and you see as the master of ceremonies within Beardsley's illustrations. There's a lot there about that idea of the self-consciousness of the art form, the conversation about where the author's located in relation to it.
Also the ways that between representation design in those illustrations, it's pretty much impossible to separate the two just as the post-impressionist start moving to this kind of blending of representation and design and a challenge to any kind of differentiation between them and then performances of the play in 1896 with the first performance, I mean, even the very earliest, the 1893 performance that was planned was very clearly no naturaliste in lots,
where Sara Banhart was 49 when she was meant to be playing. So it's obviously about the transformative gaze in lots of ways when you've got her as the Young Princess 1896, the first performance was put on in Paris by Loonier Po and the delivery. And again, it's one of the absolute cutting edge avant garde theatres of Paris. In nineteen eighty eight, there was a Russian production of Salomé at the Komisarjevsky Theatre in St Petersburg with a stage set resembling a vast vagina in 1995.
You have Richard Strauss's opera Salome based on the play 1917. There was a production at the Kermani Theatre in Moscow with cubist designs and costumes. Again, absolutely cutting edge. One of my favourites nineteen eighteen Maud Allen. It was a huge sensation in London with her modernist freeform dance, The Dance of Salomé, which she did in the kind of pearl jewelled bra and so on, and a sign of how far the sexuality the play continued to be troubling.
A guy called Pemberton billing an MP called Pemberton Billing inveighed against the sort of sexual display that was included in Saloma and argue this is 1918, that it was part of a kind of German Fifth Column attempt to undermine the morals of English society and kind of thereby win the war. And he wrote this this article in the. About the idea that more Allen was part of this sort of German fifth column under the title cult, The Clitoris.
She brought a prosecution for libel and part of his defence. What was the idea that saying he'd libel said by calling her a lesbian and all the rest of it? The defence was that if she knew what a clitoris was, then she must be a lesbian. The whole thing is fantastic. And just as the icing on the cake, Lord Alfred Douglas was part of an billing's defence. So the whole thing is just too good to be true. In 1977, there was the Lindsay camp's famous all male production of the play.
And this one, what you've got. What I was showing you is 1988 Stephen Burkhoff production, the play in which pretty much everything is mined. So it was all played at half speed, as you can tell, with that very jewelled language, but also everything from Saloma Dance as a kind of mime striptease in which no clothes are revealed through to her holding the head where you can absolutely see the head,
but it's just her hands held out. So it becomes about the imagination of the audience, your projection into that space as much as anything else. And in that sense, Sellami absolutely crosses this divide supposed divide.
And that's true of all of Wilde's essays, The Critic as artist, although the critic is artist, the decay of lying, pen, pencil, the poison, the truth of Moss, all gathered together in this collection called Intention's, a wonderful collection of essays in which it is impossible to determine what their intentions are.
Impossible. They're written so many of them, either in a paradoxical form or dialogue form, in a way that discovering what they're meant to mean, where to locate authorial view becomes pretty much impossible. All sorts of deceptive things are happening or complicated things that in that sense are about engaging with contemporary dialogues, but also in dialogue with you, the reader. So one of the things you're having to do is negotiate the form.
Now, just as an example of one way in which those essays are engaging with contemporary debates and absolutely right down to the kind of references and quotations and words and so on get into them. I just want to give you one example, which is the critic is artist, first titled The True Function and Value of Criticism A Dialogue. Now, that essay advocates criticism as an expression of the critics personality as more creative than creation as is bewildered.
So it's argued. But when I say the essay argues, what I mean is Gilbert within the essay argues and Earnest responds to. So be very, very careful of taking it that Gilbert is wild in that sense and that the essay argues that. So the essay stages an argument that whether the essay itself is arguing, it is a simplifying of that process and the form that it's taking. So the bewildered Ernest sums up his friend Gilbert's argument.
You have told me many strange things tonight, Gilbert. You have told me that it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it, and that to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world. You have told me that all art is immoral and all thought dangerous.
That criticism is more creative than creation and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of art what the artist had not put there, that it is exactly because the man cannot do a thing that is the proper judge of it and that the true critic is unfair, insincere and not rational.
Now, while here is engaging with Matthew Arnold's essay, the function of criticism at the present time, Arnold had said in that essay, Arnold argues for the importance of the critic being disinterested, being fair, being unbiased, being precise, being a subjective as being objective.
So in a phrase which Wilde quotes later, in effect, Matthew Arnold argued first in on translating Homer and then repeats it in his essay on the function of criticism that the primary purpose of criticism is, quote, to see the object as in itself. It really is a novel and refers with confidence throughout this essay to universities at the university, recognisable absolute values of truth, excellent wisdom. The best that is there is in thought and art often capitalised as well.
Now this is taken up by Walter Pater. So Walter Pater, in his work studies in the history of the Renaissance, often just known as the Renaissance, refers back. He again theorises what it is to be a critic. And instead of arguing for objectivity and impersonality, he offers a different version of what it is to respond to the world around him.
So he says, experience already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voices ever pierced us on its way to us or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without every one of those impressions.
This the impression of an individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner and his own dream of a world, and he concludes, therefore, because you're imprisoned in itself and this wall of personality, that the closest you can get to knowing the object is to know one's own impression, as it really is now, while deliberately references that debate.
So what you've got is one critic answering another critic. Wald's reference response to that is the idea of, as I sum it up, have a look at the the quote is to sum up the critics job as not to attempt objectivity despite this wall of personality, but rather to see the object as in itself, it really is not. So he's read. So to me, that's a quote that's like disobedience as man's original virtue.
It's a quotation. That's a quotation that misquotation distortion, a quotation, a statement that's in tension with other statements that in dialogue with it, just as the essay is in dialogue form itself.
And so he talks about the fact that to see the object and that in itself, it really is as this as Matthew Arnold, he references in a wonderfully kind of florid way as having trodden the to fields and so has misunderstood what criticism is about, which is in its essence, purely subjective and seeks to reveal its own most seek its own secret and not the secret of the other for the highest criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive,
purely, not bit, and only being more creative and creative and to see the objects then it's really it's not. But also that the work, the crux of the critic, the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises. The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes and see in it whatever one chooses to see.
And the beauty that gives to creation is universal. An aesthetic element makes the critic creator in his turn and whispers a thousand different things that were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel. Think about this. What this does, it's a celebration of individualism and individualism at the absolute heart of modernism. Each mind is a different world. Think of George Orwell's A Hanging.
Think of the celebration of multiple points of view that's there in Joyce's Ulysses and Wolves to the Lighthouse in Conradin, Nostromo, all of those and comrades, we live as we dream alone, which is a kind of slightly pessimistic rewrite to Peter.
And that sense, many look at the look at the decay of lying as a challenge to realism, a challenge to realism, where he critiques things like soulless naturalism and so on, is a reduction of imagination to facts, is doing what literature is not meant to be doing, not in a kind of conservative reactionary back to the idea that that shouldn't be dealing with the drunken and the poor and all the sordid aspects of life.
Well, always argues that everything is a subject matter, for there is nothing that art is not allowed to describe, but rather the idea that this whole project of realism is fundamentally flawed.
It's there and that we transform the world. We look at that life imitates art more than art imitates life, in other words, that it's art that actually conditions the way we see the world and how wonderfully exaggerates back to the idea that sun and myths and all the rest of it never occurred until the Impressionists painted them and so on.
So it's a wonderful kind of [INAUDIBLE] always take his ideas to the point of absurdity, which is where you as a reader have to actively start thinking you cannot be a passive reader of what he works on, a kind of dialectical method all the way through with the reader, not just in the dialogue between them. Wonderful statements. And Solomon on socialism are one duty to history is to rewrite it. Think about the statement. So it's perfect.
It's absolutely perfect description of the method that's there in T.S. Eliot tradition and the individual talent. It's there in Virginia Woolf's kind of subversive pageant of history. At the end of between the acts it's there in Ulysses is rewriting of Irish myth and history. It's there in so many of the modernist sense that they can rewrite the past as much as refiguring it through the vision of the present.
In that sense, what I'd argue with Wald's essays is that what you have there is wild as a kind of midwifed modernism is absolutely about preparing, offering, validating so many of the ideas that are absolutely central to all of the most important artistic movements of the 20th century. It's waled as casting off the shackles of the Victorian era and opening it out to the iconoclasm, the intellectual freedom, the innovation and the individuality that's at the heart of modernism. And you.