A friend recently presented me with a copy of a certain American magazine called Current Literature, and drew my attention to a somewhat extraordinary statement purporting to emanate from that high authority on aestheticism—Mr. Oscar Wilde. The latest manoeuvre of this gentleman, in the way of an eccentric scene—a theatrical audience, cigarette in hand, and his display of a new (and artificial) product of the vegetable kingdom—are, of course, matters of public comment. These little fads, which please those who mistake pinchbeck and cheap notoriety for legitimate fame, sensible persons can afford to ignore, to pity, or even to laugh at; but when Mr. Oscar Wilde takes to patronising Nature as the mere slave of Art, I think it is high time to protest against the absolute rant and foolishness which pass muster with a certain section of society as the expression of highly aesthetic thought.

The passage attributed to Mr. Oscar Wilde runs as follows. Being in violent admiration of the cover of his latest book, A House of Pomegranates, he declares that: “The artistic beauty of the cover of my book resides in the delicate tracing of arabesques, and the massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory, the colour-effect culminating in certain high gilt notes, and being made still more pleasurable by an overlapping band of moss-green cloth that holds the book together.” If this is a piece of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s humour, it is uncommonly well done; if it is reality, then affectation has reached a deeper depth of fatuity than most people may have believed possible of attainment. We have not yet finished, however. “Then,” says the American magazine, “he delivers this dictum (there is nothing like being emphatic): ‘A thing in Nature becomes much lovelier if it reminds us of a thing in Art; but a thing in Art gains no real beauty through reminding us of a thing in Nature.’” But it is too condescending; nay, more, it is very good of Mr. Oscar Wilde to patronise poor effete Nature from the standpoint of Art (with a capital A), although it is not certain that students of Nature, or genuine students of the art which seeks to portray Nature exactly and lovingly, will feel thankful for his patronage.

This latest “dictum” is a piece of egregious and, to the scientific mind, revolting nonsense. If it means anything, it implies that the beauty of the flower and leaf, or the delicate tints on the inside of a shell, are not to be loved and admired for themselves alone. They can only become “much lovelier” when they remind us each of “a thing in Art”—say, some aesthetic daub executed by Mr. Oscar Wilde or by one of his artistic friends. Again, when I look at a landscape with the purple hills and the heather, or when I revel in a Thames meadow with its willows, bright and peaceful in the noonday sun, I am to think it much lovelier if it reminds me of “a thing in Art”—what thing precisely, Mr. Oscar Wilde may find it somewhat beyond his powers to explain. The real fact is that persons who rant and rave in this fashion are superior to everything in Nature and Art alike; yet they forget that “the massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory,” if it gives any pleasure at all to the senses, must have derived its origin in some anterior phase or effect which could only have come from Nature, the despised. When all is said and done, aesthetic cranks conveniently forget that it is to Nature they owe alike all their being and whatever sense of beauty they possess. Even “moss-green cloth,” I take it, derives its very being from Nature. Are we to suppose Mr. Oscar Wilde and his compeers labour under the delusion that they invented either the colour or the plant?