Oscar Wilde's critical writings make for a delightful and infuriating read: delightful because his effervescent, epigrammatic style sweeps you along, and infuriating because so much of what he says is total crap.

Take "The Decay of Lying." This is a Platonic dialogue in which Wilde's spokesperson, Vivian, tries to liberate Romance and Imagination in literature from the "prison-house of realism" that has confined 19th-c. literature, and especially fiction, to a dreary representation of dreary reality: we have "sold our birthright for a mess of facts." Vivian is quite entertaining and insightful when he is skewering the great realists of the 19th-c., including Dickens, Zola ("if he has not got genius, he can at least be dull") and James ("James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty"). As long as Wilde is exploring the limitations of realist fiction, he is on firm ground, but once he moves to a larger, abstract theory of art his pronouncements become increasingly hollow and superficial. His argument that, as English drama became more life-like, all the life drained out of it, has the ring of truth; but when he attempts to ground this anti-realist aesthetic in Euripides, of all people ("It is exactly because Hecuba is nothing to us that her sorrows are such an admirable motive for tragedy"), one realizes one is being duped. As almost everybody knows, Euripides was the most Dickensian of Greek tragic dramatists, frequently maligned for his sentimentality, social commentary, and depiction of Homeric heroes as ordinary men and women; indeed, the two extant Greek tragedies in which Hecuba appears, Hecuba and The Trojan Women), are plays by Euripides in which the dramatist used Homeric myth to comment upon the Peloponnesian War.

As this example suggests, it takes only a moment's reflection to discover the fallacies just beneath the epigrammatic surface brilliance of Vivian's argument, which explains why the epigrammatic surface brilliance is so utterly necessary for this essay to "work." Vivian is a lot like Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray, spewing clever epigrams that are sometimes astute, sometimes glib; but while Dorian is a great masterpiece because it invites us to test Henry's pronouncements against the unfolding of the narrative, here we are, I think, invited to surrender before Vivian's barrage of wit.

The ultimate aim of the dialogue is to lay the groundwork for a formalist theory of literature in which the literary work is an autonomous, self-sufficient, quasi-sacred object: "Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of herself" and so forth. The New Critics would approve. But when he reaches for examples they don't add up. Life imitates art rather than the reverse, says Vivian; the human race has grown melancholy because we are all copying "a puppet" named Hamlet. It could not be that in Hamlet Shakespeare was creating a literary representation of a sensitive and intelligent person responding to the post-Copernican decay of established belief systems that we, also, must find a way to live with. Moreover, when Vivian says that Robespierre was an imitation of Rousseau, he fails to account for the fact that Rousseau is not only a literary artist but also a political theorist: putting a political theory into practice is somewhat different from life imitating art.

As the dialogue continues, Vivian's assertions become increasingly naive and absurd. One of his most provocative claims is to suggest that even Nature imitates Art insofar as Nature only exists for humans as it is perceived: "external Nature...imitates Art. The only effects that she can show us are effects that we have already seen through poetry, or in paintings." I find this an exciting and broadly persuasive suggestion, but he backs it up with an absurd example: "There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them. . .They did not exist till Art had invented them." Perhaps; or, perhaps, the London peasouper did not exist until it was invented by industrial pollution. And then there is the litany of obviously spurious anecdotes about life imitating art that, I suppose, are intended to illustrate the art of lying.

Then there are outright contradictions. Greek art, he says, does not imitate life. How do we know? Because the depictions of men and women in Greek sculpture do not resemble what we find in "an authority, like Aristophanes." Isn't Aristophanes also a Greek artist? Yet here he is treated as a reliable reporter of mundane reality against which the imaginative richness of Greek plastic art can be measured.

Throughout, Wilde's (or Vivian's) aesthetic theory rests upon a somewhat annoying dichotomy between the lovely refinement of the cultured class and the sordid lives of the bestial poor, a dichotomy that Wilde considers an unfortunate effect of 19th-c. capitalism but which he nevertheless presents as a social fact rather than a broad categorical generalization. While gritting my teeth through these Arnoldian stereotypes of the "lower orders," I could not help but think of the post-Earnest Wilde, flush with cash, spending it on destitute male prostitutes in London's slums. Wilde's elitism is even more central to The Soul of Man under Socialism, a libertarian-socialist tract about which I will write a few words at a later time. . . ( )