Summary of Foreign Literature and Art Aesthetics·Character·Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) was a British writer and an advocate of aestheticism at the end of the nineteenth century. His representative works include the fairy tale "The Happy Prince", the novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray", the play "Salome", and the poem "Collected Poems". His critical works include essay collections "Collection of Hearts" and "Critics Are Artists", etc.

The core of Oscar Wilde’s artistic aesthetics is “art for art’s sake” and advocates the supremacy of art. He completely reversed the dependence of art on nature, believing that it is not that art imitates life, but that life imitates art. Life is full of ugliness, only art is eternal beauty. It is art that creates life, not life that creates art. Those arts that are close to nature and care about morality are "decadent" art, the "decline of lies", that is, the death of art. "The root of all bad art is to return to life and nature." A great artist never sees the true face of things. If he does, he is not a great artist. He criticized Shakespeare for being too direct to life. The only beautiful things are things that have nothing to do with people. Art expresses unrealistic and non-existent things. He once gave an example to illustrate this wrong view, saying that the fog in London never existed. Only when painters like Turner created artistic fog did people feel the existence of fog. This philosophical view is the same as the idealism of "nothing outside the mind" promoted by Wang Yangming and others in ancient my country. So what is art? In Wilde's view, "Form is everything. It is the mystery of life." All aestheticists are often typical formalists. They regard life as a second-rate art because the form in life is too poor. "The real artist does not go from his feelings to form, but from form to thought and passion." "Form becomes the beginning of all kinds of things." In this way, Wilde reversed the relationship between thought and form. We do not deny the important status of formal beauty, but it is obviously absurd to one-sidedly exaggerate the dominant role of form as Wilde did.

Wilde opposed beauty to truth and goodness, and advocated the creation of pure beauty. The purpose of art is to express oneself. It does not express anything else but itself. It does not express real things. Beauty is something that has nothing to do with us. Beauty has nothing to do with truth, utilitarianism, or morality. Realism is a failure and outdated because it is influenced by modernity in theme and form. Romanticism has a fantasy that transcends reality, like a dream. Only the beauty of form is above all else. Art equals "lie" and equals beauty. Wilde's aesthetic thoughts are the same as Gautier's views, and they are also repeating Kant's theory that beauty has nothing to do with the sense of self-interest. At the end of the 19th century, Western bourgeois decadent writers escaped from reality and indulged in their personal subjective world to seek relief, and Oscar Wilde was no exception. When socialist ideas spread in Britain, he wrote "The Human Mind under the Socialist System" and continued to promote the idea of ??"art for art's sake" under the guise of "socialism". Wilde's aestheticism and formalism had a great influence on Western aesthetic art, and also had a certain influence on China's thirty-year literary and artistic movement.