Intentions: The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison, The Critic as Artist, The Truth of MasksA collection of four essays by Oscar Wilde. |
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absolutely admirable æsthetic archæology Aristotle art-criticism art-critics beauty become called century certainly Charles Lamb charm colour costume create creation creative CRITIC AS ARTIST culture curious Cyril dear DECAY OF LYING delightful dramatic dress effect emotion England Ernest essay everything exquisite eyes fact faculty fancy fascinated feel fiction George Meredith Gilbert Giorgione give Goethe Greek green carnation Hamlet ideal imaginative imitative instinct intellectual invented L'Assommoir literature live look Lucien de Rubempré marvellous mask matter mean ment merely method mode modern mood moral Nature never Oscar Wilde painted painter pass passion perfect Plato play pleasure poet poetry poison prose purely realism realize Robert Elsmere secret seems Shakespeare simply soul sphere stage strange style subtle talk tells temperament things Thomas Griffiths Wainewright thought tion tragedy true truth Vivian vulgar Wainewright weary Wilde Wilde's wonderful word write
Popular passages
Page 224 - When your head did but ache, I knit my handkerchief about your brows, (The best I had, a princess wrought it me,) And I did never ask it you again : And with my hand at midnight held your head, And, like the watchful minutes to the hour, Still and anon cheer'd up the heavy time, Saying, What lack you ? and, Where lies your grief?
Page 140 - ... the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.
Page 225 - If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. You all do know this mantle: I remember The first time ever Caesar put it on; 'Twas on a summer's evening, in his tent, That day he overcame the Nervii: Look, in this place ran Cassius...
Page 188 - It is too splendid to be sane. Those of whose lives it forms the dominant note will always seem to the world to be pure visionaries. Ernest. Well, at least the critic will be sincere. OUbert. A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.
Page 41 - At present, people see fogs, not because ther.e are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist until Art had invented them.
Page 168 - 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...
Page 5 - Thinking is the most unhealthy thing in the world, and people die of it just as they die of any other disease. Fortunately, in England, at any rate, thought is not catching. Our splendid physique as a people is entirely due to our national stupidity. I only hope...
Page 210 - and how could I, to whom culture and barbarism are alone of importance, hate a nation which is among the most cultivated of the earth, and to which I owe so great a part of my own cultivation?
Page 151 - The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought.
Page 63 - But he was young — only twenty-five years of age — and he soon passed out of the ' dead black waters,' as he called them, into the larger air of humanistic culture. As he was recovering from the illness that had led him almost to the gates of death, he conceived the idea of taking up literature as an art. ' I said with John Woodvill,' he cries, ' it were a life of gods to dwell in such an element...