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Essays and lectures.

• Art and the Handicraftsman » An essay on art - There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly. (9 pages)
• De Profundis » A very long, intensely emotional letter written from prison at Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas – Bosie. (28 pages)
• House Decoration » A lecture on house decoration: What is the meaning of beautiful decoration which we call art? (5 pages)
• Impressions of America » Thoughts and impressions after lecture touring the United States in 1882. (4 pages)
• Lecture to Art Students » Lecture about art and beauty: Nothing is more dangerous to the young artist than any conception of ideal beauty. (6 pages)
• London Models » An essay on art models: Professional models are a purely modern invention. (5 pages)
• Miscellaneous Aphorisms » A vast collection of Wilde's aphorisms and witty one-liners. (31 pages)
• Pen, Pencil, And Poison » Essay about Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794 1847), English artist and serial poisoner. (14 pages)
• Poems in Prose » Six prose poems published in The Fortnightly Review magazine in 1894. (6 pages)
• Reviews » A collection of reviews written before Wilde's fame. (304 pages)
• Selected Prose » A collection prose writings, with a preface by Robert Ross, a Canadian journalist and art critic. (57 pages)
• Shorter Prose Pieces » Short prose collection on various topics and issues. (21 pages)
• Some Cruelties Of Prison Life » Protest letter to The Daily Chronicle, criticism of the prison system. (7 pages)
• The Critic As Artist » An essay on art written in the form of a philosophical dialogue. It contains Wilde's major aesthetic statements. (46 pages)
• The Decay Of Lying » A critical dialogue between two upper-class aesthetes. (21 pages)
• The English Renaissance of Art » Lecture on the English art, first delivered in New York, 1882. (17 pages)
• The Rise of Historical Criticism » Lengthy essay evaluating historical writings and the art of criticism. (40 pages)
• The Soul Of Man Under Socialism » An essay exploring socialism ideas. (24 pages)
• The Truth Of Masks » An essay focusing of dramatic theory. (17 pages)

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Oscar Wilde

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No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than that of Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his considerable contributions to English literature. His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five plays, one of which— The Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895—is a classic of comic theater. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of his notoriety. This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems early in his career as a writer. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1896). On a curious but productive tangent to his more serious work, Wilde produced two volumes of fairy tales that are delightful in themselves and provide insight into some of his serious social and artistic concerns. His significant literary contributions are rounded off by his critical essays, most notably in Intentions (1891), and his long soul-searching letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis , written in 1897 from Reading Gaol.

Imprisonment for homosexuality was a particularly tragic end for an artist who believed that style—in life as well as art—was of utmost importance. That Wilde became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising since, as H. Montgomery Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography , his mother was a poet and Irish revolutionary who published under the name “Speranza,” and his father a successful eye and ear surgeon in Dublin and “author of a work which remained the standard textbook on aural surgery for many years.” Though his background was literary and professional, it was anything but stable. His mother doted on him as a child and, according to Hyde, “insisted on dressing him in girl’s clothes.” Dr. William Wilde was a notorious philanderer, and, in an ironic foreshadowing of his son’s famous trials, suffered public condemnation when a libel case disclosed his sexual indiscretions with a young woman named Mary Travers.

Wilde was a brilliant student in college, first at Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Berkeley Gold Medal for Greek, and later at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where his poem “Ravenna” captured the prestigious Newdigate Prize in 1878. It was at Oxford that Wilde came under the influences of John Ruskin, a critic, writer, and professor, and Walter Pater, a critic and essayist whose Studies in the History of The Renaissance legitimized Wilde’s nascent ideas on art and individualism.

After earning his B.A. at Oxford, Wilde settled in London in 1879 and two years later published his first book, Poems. Most of the poems in this volume had been previously published in various Irish periodicals. The collection met with mixed reviews, less favorable in England than in America. Punch was at the vanguard of the criticism, leveling what was to become a common charge against Wilde: “Mr. Wilde may be aesthetic, but he is not original. This is a volume of echoes, it is Swinburne and water.” Hesketh Pearson recorded the words of Oliver Elton, who spoke against the acceptance of the volume as a gift to the Oxford Union, the famous debating society: “It is not that these poems are thin—and they are thin, it is not that they are this or that—they are all this or that; it is that they are for the most part not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors. They are in fact by William Shakespeare , by Philip Sidney , by John Donne , by Lord Byron , by William Morris, by Algernon Swinburne , and by sixty more.” While Elton exaggerated the case, it is clear that most of the collection’s poems are highly derivative.

Some of these early poems—“Panthea,” for example—are, as one would expect from a young aesthete, poems that extol pleasure and sensation: “to feel is better than to know.” Epifanio San Juan, in The Art of Oscar Wilde , summed up the argument of “Panthea”: “Let us live pleasurably since the gods are indifferent.” But other poems—“Helas” and “E Tenebris,” for example—strike a contrary note of moral awareness and even remorse. In “E Tenebris” the poet states, “And well I know my soul in Hell must lie / If I this night before God’s throne should stand.” As Philip Cohen noted in The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde , this moral strain is paradoxically woven throughout the fabric of Wilde’s work, despite his seemingly definitive statements to the contrary, such as in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray : “No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” This moralism and remorse receive their fullest expression in the letter from jail, De Profundis. Perhaps the best poems of the 1881 volume are those titled “Impressions,” in which “Wilde attains sharpness and total complexity in the depiction of scenes,” San Juan remarked. “Colors, tactile sensations, and a weird ‘animistic’ vibration characterize physical movements, as in ‘Impressions du Matin.’”

Among Wilde’s most famous poems is “The Sphinx.” As Hyde reported, the work was begun at Oxford, substantially composed in Paris in 1883, and repeatedly polished until its publication in 1894. This most exotic of all Wilde’s poems begins with the raven-like sphinx planted in the corner of the poet’s room and proceeds through a series of imagined scenes in which the sphinx is depicted as a goddess, a prophet, and a lover. Reviewers criticized the work for being sensational and artificial, but later critics have found some notable qualities; in San Juan’s words, “Among all Wilde’s poems, ‘The Sphinx’ alone betrays a masculine energy that enlivens gorgeous landscape, fusing religion, iconology, and historical facts within the current of meditation and monologue.”

Between the publication of Poems in 1881 and his next significant book in 1888, Wilde went on a lecture tour of America, was married to Constance Lloyd, fathered two sons, became editor of a fashionable magazine, Woman’s World , and continued to build his reputation as the most sought-after dinner guest in the British Isles. Frances Winwar, in Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties , described this social aspect of his fame: “His life from now on assumed an air of arrogance. He would do nothing in moderation—except work. But then, his real work was accomplished when he talked. Before a group of listeners, especially if they were young and handsome and titled, he outdid himself. In the spark of their admiration his mind quickened. Epigram followed epigram, one more dazzling, more preposterous than the other, yet always, like the incandescent core of the firework, with a burning truth at the heart.” In addition to his epigrams, Wilde’s table talk frequently consisted of his original fairy tales; they were later published in two volumes, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891).

That Wilde told these stories at dinner parties before they were published illustrates an unusual fact about their intended audience: they were not composed for children. A few of the stories in the first volume, particularly “The Happy Prince” and “The Selfish Giant,” continually find their way into anthologies of fairy tales for children, but most of the book’s nine tales do not appeal to young people. This is particularly true of the stories in A House of Pomegranates , which generally have more elaborate plots and a more mannered style than do those in The Happy Prince and Other Tales. When asked if the tales of the second volume were intended for children, Wilde replied in a typically flippant way: “I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I did of pleasing the British public.” The first volume received generally favorable reviews and, more importantly for Wilde, his mentor Walter Pater wrote him from Oxford to express his approval: “I am confined to my room with gout, but have been consoling myself with ‘The Happy Prince,’ and feel it would he ungrateful not to send a line to tell you how delightful I have found him and his companions. I hardly know whether to admire more the wise wit of ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ or the beauty and tenderness of ‘The Selfish Giant’: the latter is perfect in its kind.”

Wilde’s fairy tales deserve more notice than they have generally received. A few of them are minor prose masterpieces, most notably “The Happy Prince,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Fisherman and His Soul.” But they should be taken seriously for another reason as well: they embody some of the conflicts and themes that run throughout Wilde’s work. “The Happy Prince” stresses the importance of giving of oneself, even of making the ultimate sacrifice, in order to ameliorate the conditions of the poor. This message foreshadows some of Wilde’s ideas in his later work The Soul of Man under Socialism (privately printed 1895, republished 1904). “The Nightingale and the Rose” deals in a similar way with giving, but here the emphasis is on the need to sacrifice for love. Wilde’s love of beauty and his conception of its fleeting quality find expression in this story of a nightingale who sacrifices its life to produce the perfect rose. In the story’s final satirical twist the beautiful rose is rejected because it does not match the color of a young girl’s dress. In Oscar Wilde , Robert K. Miller declared that this ironic turn reveals Wilde’s “ambivalence toward love” that is “related to his ambivalence about women.” In “The Selfish Giant” the title character overcomes his selfishness toward children and thus serves as an allegory of Christian redemption. The imaginative sympathy of the giant is similar to that which Wilde ascribes to Christ in his later work, De Profundis (1905). “The Fisherman and His Soul,” from the second volume, is the most complex of Wilde’s fairy tales; it was described by John A. Quintus in Virginia Quarterly Review as “another treatment of the doppelgänger theme in which the body and the soul are separated, as they are in The Picture of Dorian Gray. ” In a reversal of the usual situation in which the body corrupts the soul, the Fisherman’s soul—which the Fisherman has dispensed with so that he can love a mermaid—tempts his body to sin and through the resultant suffering body and soul are reunited.

Both Quintus and Miller emphasized Wilde’s moral point of view in these stories. This element has already been seen in some of the early poems, and it reappears in Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Quintus was careful to point out, however, that “Wilde’s tales are not ... designed to encourage faith or advocate Christianity.” As much as they sometimes seem to be moral exempla , his tales also have their uncertainties: love is complex, and sometimes unrequited; error is not always recognized; sin, in “The Fisherman and His Soul,” is the means by which harmony is achieved—Wilde’s version of the felix culpa , the fortunate fall.

In July of 1889 Wilde gave up the editorship of Women’s World and settled down to write The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is Wilde’s only novel, a blend of French decadence and English gothicism. It is filled with genuinely witty dialogue and beautiful descriptive passages, while sometimes descending to the level of slick melodrama and ponderous theorizing. The novel details the life of a hedonistic aristocrat, Dorian Gray. When Dorian sees the portrait that Basil Hallward paints of him, he wishes he could change places with his likeness, remain always young and beautiful, and allow the portrait to bear the effects of time—and, as it turns out, the effects of sin. As in the world of the fairy tale, the wish is granted, but at a terrible price.

At the time he was writing The Picture of Dorian Gray , Wilde became friendly with Robert (“Robbie”) Ross, whom he had first met in 1886 at Oxford and who later served as Wilde’s literary executor after faithfully standing by him through Wilde’s trials and the horrors of Wilde’s two years in prison. H. Montgomery Hyde, in Oscar Wilde: A Biography , cited “strong grounds for believing that it was with [Ross] that Wilde first deliberately experimented in homosexual practices.” Ross kept Wilde apprised of all the literary gossip, and when Dorian Gray appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, Ross wrote the following to him: “Even in the precincts of the Savile nothing but praise of Dorian Gray, though of course it is said to be very dangerous. I heard a clergyman extolling it, he only regretted some of the sentiments ... as apt to lead people astray.” Most of the reviews of the novel were hostile because of the book’s supposed perversity and immorality. A particularly scathing attack in The Scots Observer made a veiled reference to Wilde’s homosexuality and suggested he take up tailoring or some other “decent” trade. For the novel’s hardcover edition, published the following year, Wilde made some changes, most important of which was the addition of six chapters and the famous epigrammatic preface. Perhaps surprisingly, the reviews this time were more favorable. Walter Pater praised the book highly, and, as Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography , Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats wrote that “ Dorian Gray , with all its faults, is a wonderful book.”

Countering charges that the novel is immoral—it is certainly replete with descriptions of a dissolute lifestyle—Wilde argued that on the contrary “there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray , a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy.” The moral allegory is perhaps too evident even to what Wilde would have called a philistine audience. Joyce Carol Oates  in Critical Inquiry described the novel as a “parable of the fall” and identified Dorian’s sin in his practice of involving others, “without any emotion, ... in his life’s drama, simply as a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.” Miller struck a similar note, stating that “Dorian’s misfortune is not that he has lived deeply and well but that he loses the capacity to feel and with it the capacity to merge his life with others. His life becomes a series of one-night stands, each encounter briefer than the last.” This view led Miller to suggest that, for Wilde, “art, like experience, is good only so long as it contributes to self-development.”

This theme of self-development is central to the book, and each character’s failure to develop illustrates the real tragedy of the novel. The painter Basil Hallward, for all his goodness, sublimates his true feelings in the beautiful portrait. Lord Henry Wotton, for all his theories about the importance of indiscriminate experience, does not act. And Dorian Gray, whose actions with others lead him only to the point of prizing things such as tapestries, jewels, and vestments, unconvincingly tries to redeem himself with the village girl Hetty, but succeeds only in ending his life in a melodramatic fashion.

“In spite of its many weaknesses,” asserted Edouard Roditi in Oscar Wilde: A Critical Guidebook , “ The Picture of Dorian Gray yet remains, in many respects, a great novel. Though hastily written and clumsily constructed, it manages to haunt many readers with vivid memories of its visionary descriptions.” Epifanio San Juan preferred to assess the book’s importance in terms of its contribution to the development of the novel: “In setting a portrait, a work of art, at the center of the action, Wilde effects the interplay of natural perception and moral judgment in the novel. From the reader’s viewpoint, the picture suggests the treatment of angle and distance—the ways of telling and showing—which make up the perennial issues of the aesthetics and criticism of fiction.”

While The Picture of Dorian Gray has an assured place as a serious work of art and a document of fin de siècle aestheticism, it did not gain for its author a reputation as a great novelist. It is rather because of his dramas that Wilde’s reputation has remained most secure. Louis Kronenberger, in The Thread of Laughter , mentioned Wilde together with the great 18th-century dramatist, Richard Brinsley Sheridan : “The brilliant stage comedy that glittered briefly in Sheridan and then remained dormant, if not dead, for over a hundred years is in some measure brought back to life with Oscar Wilde.” Wilde’s strengths were certainly suited to the theater; no medium better showcases his irrepressible wit, his penchant for paradox, and his sardonic views on manners and morals.

Though Wilde wrote nine plays in all between 1879 and 1894, his fame as a dramatist rests entirely on four comedies— Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1899), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)—and the strange and infamous Salomé. Written first, Salomé was composed in Paris in 1891 but not performed in England until 1905, after Wilde’s death. Britain’s Lord Chamberlain, responsible for licensing stage performances, banned the play on the technical grounds that it portrayed biblical characters, which was forbidden since the days of the Protestant Reformation. The play no doubt offended on other grounds as well, such as those expressed by a critic in The Times in 1893: “It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred.”

Salomé is vastly different from Wilde’s society comedies, which were rapidly to follow in the early 1890s. This exotic one-act play has more the atmosphere of the earlier poem The Sphinx in its variations on the themes of obsession, lust, incest, and violence. Salomé moves forward largely on the basis of ritualistic repetition and a unifying pattern of imagery. Richard Ellmann, in Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays , described this unity as “the extreme concentration upon a single episode which is like an image, with a synchronized moon changing color from pale to blood-red in keeping with the action, and an atmosphere of frenzy framed in exotic chill.” Salomé is Wilde’s most completely decadent work. While the play exhibits a few traces of a moral point of view—Jokanaan’s rejection of Salomé and Herod’s fearful conscience at the end—the dominant impression is one of macabre beauty, and the climax is reached when Salomé’s kisses the bitter lips of Jokanaan’s severed head. This impression was undercut for critic Alan Bird, who, in The Plays of Oscar Wilde , contended that even in this play Wilde’s wit shows through: “Yet the reader (or audience) can never escape the uncomfortable sensation that the author is actually parodying the action, the words, the characters, the whole ensemble of the drama. This suspicion of parody, however faint, produces an intentional distancing, a deliberate alienation, which far from allowing us to dismiss the drama seems to increase the total effect of decadence.”

Beginning with the society comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan , Wilde finally found his métier. This play and his last, The Importance of Being Earnest, reveal Wilde at the height of his powers, dealing in a sure way with those things he knew and did best—portraying the upper crust of society, creating characters who could mouth his brilliant epigrams and paradoxes in amusing, if conventional, plots. These plays use much of the typical material of the comedy of manners: mistaken identities, sexual indiscretions, cases of unknown parentage, and social snobbery. Lady Windermere’s Fan , A Woman of No Importance , and An Ideal Husband also deal, in varying degrees of seriousness, with Wilde’s favorite themes of the loss of innocence and the assertion of individuality.

Lady Windermere’s Fan was originally produced by the actor-manager George Alexander before a thoroughly appreciative audience. It ran for 156 performances and solidified Wilde’s position in the fashionable society he so much aspired to. He retained this exalted status for only three years before his trial for homosexuality made him a convict and a social outcast. But while his fame lasted Wilde enjoyed it with his usual flair. When the first-night audience at Lady Windermere’s Fan called him to the stage after the final curtain, he smugly offered to those present: “The actors have given us a charming rendition of a delightful play, and your appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the great success of your performance, which persuades me that you think almost as highly of the play as I do myself.” On the whole, the drama critics of the day did not agree with the audience, but their negative reviews did not deter people from flocking to subsequent performances.

Lady Windermere’s Fan is a story about a woman with a past. Mrs. Erlynne, the fallen woman who years ago left her husband and her daughter—now Lady Windermere—reappears and tries to regain a social position. Ironically it is the fallen woman who turns out to be the “good woman” of the subtitle (“A Play about a Good Woman”), and the good woman of the first act, Lady Windermere, is forced to undergo a painful realization that things are not always what they appear to be. Arthur Ganz observed in British Victorian Literature that Lady Windermere “learns that a single act is not a final indicator of character and that a sinner may be a very noble person indeed.” This recognition, growing even as it does from a rather conventional return of a relative, adds a note of seriousness to a play that probably could have succeeded on its wit alone. Lines such as “Why, I have met hundreds of good women. I never seem to meet any but good women. The world is perfectly packed with good women. To know them is a middle class education” probably flattered the upper class audience and confirmed the suspicions of the middle class that this is the way dandies spoke in their drawing rooms and clubs. Robert Keith Miller complained that the play suffers from the juxtaposition of this verbal wit with the serious nature of the plot and maintained, “The union of Mrs. Erlynne with Lord Augustus, in the last fifty lines of the play, strikes one as a rather desperate attempt to relieve the tension of the last several acts in order to end on a light note.”

While publicly Wilde was enjoying the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan , in his private life the author was beginning a homosexual relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde had been introduced to “Bosie” Douglas, the son of the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, by the poet Lionel Johnson. As Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, Douglas immediately fell under the spell of Wilde’s charming conversation. In July of 1893 Wilde moved in with Douglas at The Cottage, Goring-on-Thames, ostensibly so that they could work together.

A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband followed quickly on the success of Lady Windermere’s Fan and received similar acclaim from the audiences and similar disdain from the critics. Again in these plays Wilde presents characters with “pasts”—Lady Arbuthnot, the “Woman,” and Sir Robert Chiltern, the “Husband.” Both have their counterparts in puritanical characters that clearly resemble Lady Windermere. In both of these plays, Miller noted, “we find Wilde condemning absolutes and pleading for tolerance in a world that is apt to be harsh.” Neither of these plays is as carefully structured as Lady Windermere’s Fan. Agreeing with Speranza, Wilde’s mother, that the plays needed “more plot,” Alan Bird declared that in A Woman of No Importance “the plot is weak, and is, in fact, practically nonexistent. The incident, such as it is, of a woman meeting a former lover and being involved in a tug-of-war over their child does not offer sufficient action or opportunity for development to fill four acts.”

The culmination of Wilde’s dramatic art is The Importance of Being Earnest. Hyde reported that Allan Aynesworth, who played Algernon in the first performance, recalled many years later: “In my fifty-three years of acting I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest. The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered again.” This time the critics were highly favorable in their reviews. Superficially, at least, The Importance of Being Earnest contains many of the same elements as the earlier plays. Once again there are the question of parentage, a matter of mistaken identity, and a character who has been living a lie for years. But, as Louis Kronenberger observed, “the only difference is that here nothing can seem bogus because nothing pretends-to-be-real; nothing can offend our feelings because nothing can affect them.” What Arthur Ganz identified in the earlier plays as the conflict between the philistine world and the dandyish world no longer exists in this play, because the philistine world has been replaced by a world of almost pure farce.

The plot centers on two pairs of lovers—Jack Worthing and Gwendolen Fairfax, and Algernon Moncrieff and Cecily Cardew. Each of the men leads a double life: Jack, who lives in the country with his ward Cecily, has invented an alter ego named Ernest for his life in town; Algernon has done similarly with his imaginary invalid friend Bunbury, who lives in the country. When the audience shortly learns that each of the young women absurdly wishes to marry a man named Ernest, the stage is set for farcical twists and turns. Over almost all the action presides Lady Bracknell, a woman with wit to spare and a discerning judgment regarding the credentials requisite for the proper marriage. When Jack and Algernon turn out to be brothers in the same respectable family as Lady Bracknell, the play can end happily and absurdly with the two marriages.

George Woodcock, who in The Paradox of Oscar Wilde examined at length the social ideas in Wilde’s other comedies, found “no explicit social theme” in The Importance of Being Earnest. In Papers on Language and Literature , Dennis Spininger concurred, explaining that Wilde “uses the tools of the satirist without wanting to cure the follies and ills he criticizes.” Although Kate Matlock posited in Journal of Irish Literature that Wilde makes an affirmation at the end of the play in that it “asserts that marriage is a positive social element which reins in deceptive and potentially corrupt bachelor tendencies,” such critics as Spininger and Morris Freedman have moved away from such a conventional view of the comedy as a reassertion of order and toward a perception of the play as anticipating the drama of the absurd. Perhaps Freedman was correct when in The Moral Impulse he described the play as “an account of the search of several young persons for meaning in a society extraordinarily reluctant, even impotent, to assign importance to anything except the superficial.” However, the second part of this statement is much easier to accept than the first part, because the young people participate in this farcical society, and they live by its rules—or break them in acceptable ways. If an element of seriousness can be identified in this play, it may be what Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker called “a pseudo-irresponsible jabbing at all the great problems.”

Wilde’s dramatic career, and indeed his entire writing career, with the exception of De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol , came to an end following the enormously successful Importance of Being Earnest. This play and An Ideal Husband played concurrently in London in 1895 until Wilde’s arrest and trial. The Importance of Being Earnest subsequently ran for a month with the author’s name removed from the playbills and the program; An Ideal Husband was canceled almost immediately.

During his imprisonment Wilde continued to write as an essayist. He had been writing critical essays since 1879, when he arrived in London from Oxford and began to write on art for various London periodicals. In 1882 he lectured in America, and these lectures were published after his death by his bibliographer Stuart Mason. His most important critical essays were “The Decay of Lying,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” “The Critic as Artist,” and “The Truth of Masks,” first published in Intentions (1891); “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” which first appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1891; and De Profundis, a long letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison and published in 1905. Richard Ellman, in his introduction to The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde , placed him at the end of a clear progression of English critics from Matthew Arnold to Ruskin to Pater. Wilde clearly had Arnold in mind in “The Critic as Artist,” when he turned upside down his predecessor’s famous dictum that the function of criticism is to see the object as it really is: Wilde would have it that “the aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not.” This is no mere playing with paradox for Wilde, because this whole essay strives to show that criticism is creative, that the critic uses the work of art as a jumping-off place for his own imaginative activity. The higher the imagination soars, both from the work of art and from reality, the better the criticism. Just as the critic in this sense can be superior to the artist, so the artist is superior to the man of action. The man of action is the least imaginative because action is “a base concession to fact.”

“Imaginative freedom is the key element in Wilde’s criticism. In “The Decay of Lying” he argues that lying is a requisite of art, for without it there is nothing but a base realism. The problem with the novel in England, Wilde claims, is that writers do not lie enough; they do not have enough imagination in their works: “they find life crude, and leave it raw.” In this essay Wilde makes his seemingly outrageous statement that “life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life.” Though perhaps overstating the fact, Wilde convincingly discusses the many ways in which our perceptions of reality are affected by the art that we have experienced, an idea adapted from poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the other earlier English romantics.

The Soul of Man under Socialism , though not collected in Intentions , was published in the same year, 1891. Wilde’s society friends must have been amused at his advocacy of socialism, but the conclusions of this essay are consistent with those of the other essays—if we accept his premises about socialism. Wilde advocates a nonauthoritarian socialism under which the individual would be freed from either the burden of poverty or the burdens of greed and guilt. As Michael Helfand and Philip Smith stated in Texas Studies in Literature and Language , “Wilde formulated a nonauthoritarian socialist theory which encouraged aesthetic activity, analogous to sexual selection, and reduced competition (and thus natural selection), as the way of achieving continuous cultural and social improvement.” To Wilde’s previous emphasis on imagination he now brings an emphasis on individualism, both of which, he speculates, would flourish under socialism.

Wilde’s last important essay was written during his imprisonment. Events leading up to Wilde’s incarceration began when Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, tried unsuccessfully to end the relationship between his son and Wilde. Frustrated by his lack of success, he went to Wilde’s club and left his card, which was inscribed “To Oscar Wilde posing as a somdomite [ sic ].” Against all advice, in early 1895 Wilde decided to sue Queensberry for libel. Wilde lost the case, and as a result of the testimony against him at the trial, he was arrested and tried for homosexuality. Since the jury could not agree on a verdict, Wilde was tried a second time and ultimately convicted. The record of these trials, which was published by H. Montgomery Hyde in 1948 as Trials of Oscar Wilde , makes fascinating reading, revealing as it does the vanity of Wilde, the eccentricities of Queensbury, and exultation of the British public at the verdict. Wilde was sentenced in May 1895 to two years of hard labor, most of which was spent at Reading Gaol.

At Reading Gaol, toward the end of his term, Wilde wrote the long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that has come to be called De Profundis. A heavily edited version of this letter was published in 1905; the entire work did not appear until Rupert Hart-Davis’s complete edition of Wilde’s letters was published in 1962. As a work of art, De Profundis suffers from a divided purpose caused in part by the fact that there is more than one audience. From the beginning Wilde intended the letter to be read by more people than Douglas alone. At the end of the work he expressed its weaknesses as well as anyone later appraising De Profundis has: “How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing, uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failures to realize those aspirations shows you quite clearly.” The scorn and bitterness come early in the letter, where he excoriates Douglas for his lack of imagination and soul. Then Wilde reverses his position and accepts any blame for the outcome of events. But the vehemence of the early denunciation renders hollow a finely cried statement like the following: “To regret one’s own experience is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” Though on the whole it is beautifully written, the letter suffers from this uncertain tone and, as George Woodcock noted, presents Wilde’s sentimentality at “its most irritating depth in De Profundis. ”

Nevertheless, the work contains passages of real power, such as those in which Wilde describes life in prison and the ridicule he was subjected to during his transfer from Wandsworth to Reading. And Wilde reasserts the most important critical principles of the earlier essays: the importance of individualism, imagination, self-expression, and self-development. In De Profundis, Christ becomes the archetype of the artist, “the most supreme of individualists.”

Wilde’s last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol , was written shortly after his release from prison in 1897. Hyde recorded in The Annotated Oscar Wilde that Yeats called it “a great or almost great poem,” but the fact that he chose only 38 of the poem’s 109 stanzas for publication in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse suggests his awareness of the work’s diffuseness. The poem appeared in 1898 without Wilde’s name but with the identification “C.3.3.,” his cell number at Reading Gaol. The ballad tells a very moving story of a man condemned to death for the murder of his young wife and records the horror of his fellow prisoners as they watch him go through his last days. Though the poem has much of the realism that Wilde always abhorred, it transcends 19th-century prison life in its handling of the themes of suffering, isolation, and collective guilt (“Yet each man kills the thing he loves”). The poem is the most successful of Wilde’s non-dramatic works primarily because, as Robert Keith Miller said, Wilde himself is “no longer the center of attention.” The speaker is a prisoner, but the focus is first on the condemned man and then on all of the prisoners as a group.

Similarly, Wilde eluded attention after his prison release. He wandered Europe for three and a half years under an assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth, and died bankrupt in a Paris hotel on November 30, 1900.

“From Wilde’s death until the late 1940s, critics generally focused on his biography, choosing to discuss the man rather than his writings,” reported Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Debra Boyd. Even then, Wilde was “relegated to being a minor fixture in the Victorian pantheon of writers, one admired mainly for The Importance of Being Earnest or considered a representative of Aestheticism or the Decadent movement.” But in more recent decades, Boyd continued, the writer’s reputation has risen. “Additional biographical and textual materials have been made available,” affording critics and scholars an enhanced view of Wilde’s sense of his own works. “In addition,” said Boyd, “poststructuralist criticism and gay studies have provided scholars with varied theoretical frameworks from which to examine Wilde’s works.”

Boyd pointed to a handful of scholars, including Jonathan Dollimore and Richard Dellamora, who have subsequently placed Wilde “in the forefront of writers who examine the sexual and political dimensions of art.” Boyd argues that even in such a favorable light, scholars tend to gravitate toward the author’s plays and longer fiction like Dorian Gray , to the neglect of Wilde’s shorter pieces. “More attention must be paid to his short fiction,” she maintained. “In this age of literary theory, few writers can articulate as clearly as Wilde did for the theoretical bases for their works and then actually practice what they preach. Wilde’s stories show that he was able to merge theory and practice, creating works of art that stand up well to critical scrutiny.” The author has been the subject of many biographies, both in book and film version, notably Richard Ellmann’s 1988 work, Oscar Wilde , and the dramatic film Wilde , released in the late 1990s.

Just as Wilde the playwright and poet established his place in the literary canon, so Wilde the correspondent has been the object of critical examination as well. Several volumes of the author’s letters have been published, including The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde , coedited by Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, and published in 2000. In his introduction, Holland describes coming across the full texts of letters previously published only in fragments. In his grandson’s view, the missives show another side to Wilde, beyond the creator of social comedies and poems. With these letters, maintained Holland, readers must reinterpret the author as “a hard-working professional writer, deeply interested by the issues of his day and carrying in his intellectual baggage something that we all to frequently overlook, a quite extraordinary classical, literary and philosophical education.”

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

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Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde

• Oscar Wilde

Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde Scanned and proofed by David Price, [email protected]

Essays and Lectures

The Rise of Historical Criticism The English Renaissance of Art House Decoration Art and the Handicraftman Lecture to Art Students London Models Poems in Prose

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that complex working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains, as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by which it works.

Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is not to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms of Asia or the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the pyramids, form not history but the material for history.

The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest life of the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a freedom from invention, which is almost unparalleled in the writings of any people; but the protective spirit which is the characteristic of that people proved as fatal to their literature as to their commerce. Free criticism is as unknown as free trade. While as regards the Hindus, their acute, analytical and logical mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and philosophy than to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their imagination seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly mingled together that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth of their writings or examine their method of investigation.

It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that history proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical criticism; among that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans, whom we call by the name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well said, we owe all that moves in the world except the blind forces of nature.

For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgean shores, the characteristic of their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of historical criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklarung or illumination of the intellect which seems to have burst on the Greek race like a great flood of light about the sixth century B.C.

L’ESPRIT D’UN SIECLE NE NAIT PAS ET NE MEURT PAS E JOUR FIXE, and the first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the first man. It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its intolerance of dogmatic authority, from physical science the alluring analogies of law and order, from philosophy the conception of an essential unity underlying the complex manifestations of phenomena. It appears first rather as a changed attitude of mind than as a principle of research, and its earliest influences are to be found in the sacred writings.

For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the spirit of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development, it is not confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining whether an event happened or not, but is concerned also with the investigation into the causes of events, the general relations which phenomena of life hold to one another, and in its ultimate development passes into the wider question of the philosophy of history.

Now, while the workings of historical criticism in these two spheres of sacred and uninspired history are essentially manifestations of the same spirit, yet their methods are so different, the canons of evidence so entirely separate, and the motives in each case so unconnected, that it will be necessary for a clear estimation of the progress of Greek thought, that we should consider these two questions entirely apart from one another. I shall then in both cases take the succession of writers in their chronological order as representing the rational order – not that the succession of time is always the succession of ideas, or that dialectics moves ever in the straight line in which Hegel conceives its advance. In Greek thought, as elsewhere, there are periods of stagnation and apparent retrogression, yet their intellectual development, not merely in the question of historical criticism, but in their art, their poetry and their philosophy, seems so essentially normal, so free from all disturbing external influences, so peculiarly rational, that in following in the footsteps of time we shall really be progressing in the order sanctioned by reason.

AT an early period in their intellectual development the Greeks reached that critical point in the history of every civilised nation, when speculative invades the domain of revealed truth, when the spiritual ideas of the people can no longer be satisfied by the lower, material conceptions of their inspired writers, and when men find it impossible to pour the new wine of free thought into the old bottles of a narrow and a trammelling creed.

From their Aryan ancestors they had received the fatal legacy of a mythology stained with immoral and monstrous stories which strove to hide the rational order of nature in a chaos of miracles, and to mar by imputed wickedness the perfection of God’s nature – a very shirt of Nessos in which the Heracles of rationalism barely escaped annihilation. Now while undoubtedly the speculations of Thales, and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek mythology was chiefly open to attack.

It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the ‘two founders of Greek theology,’ we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as clearly as we see the Reformation foreshadowed in the INFERNO of Dante.

Any honest belief, then, in the plain truth of these stories soon succumbed before the destructive effects of the A PRIORI ethical criticism of this school; but the orthodox party, as is its custom, found immediately a convenient shelter under the aegis of the doctrine of metaphors and concealed meanings.

To this allegorical school the tale of the fight around the walls of Troy was a mystery, behind which, as behind a veil, were hidden certain moral and physical truths. The contest between Athena and Ares was that eternal contest between rational thought and the brute force of ignorance; the arrows which rattled in the quiver of the ‘Far Darter’ were no longer the instruments of vengeance shot from the golden bow of the child of God, but the common rays of the sun, which was itself nothing but a mere inert mass of burning metal.

Modern investigation, with the ruthlessness of Philistine analysis, has ultimately brought Helen of Troy down to a symbol of the dawn. There were Philistines among the Greeks also who saw in the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] a mere metaphor for atmospheric power.

Now while this tendency to look for metaphors and hidden meanings must be ranked as one of the germs of historical criticism, yet it was essentially unscientific. Its inherent weakness is clearly pointed out by Plato, who showed that while this theory will no doubt explain many of the current legends, yet, if it is to be appealed to at all, it must be as a universal principle; a position he is by no means prepared to admit.

Like many other great principles it suffered from its disciples, and furnished its own refutation when the web of Penelope was analysed into a metaphor of the rules of formal logic, the warp representing the premises, and the woof the conclusion.

Rejecting, then, the allegorical interpretation of the sacred writings as an essentially dangerous method, proving either too much or too little, Plato himself returns to the earlier mode of attack, and re-writes history with a didactic purpose, laying down certain ethical canons of historical criticism. God is good; God is just; God is true; God is without the common passions of men. These are the tests to which we are to bring the stories of the Greek religion.

‘God predestines no men to ruin, nor sends destruction on innocent cities; He never walks the earth in strange disguise, nor has to mourn for the death of any well-beloved son. Away with the tears for Sarpedon, the lying dream sent to Agamemnon, and the story of the broken covenant!’ (Plato, REPUBLIC, Book ii. 380; iii. 388, 391.)

Similar ethical canons are applied to the accounts of the heroes of the days of old, and by the same A PRIORI principles Achilles is rescued from the charges of avarice and insolence in a passage which may be recited as the earliest instance of that ‘whitewashing of great men,’ as it has been called, which is so popular in our own day, when Catiline and Clodius are represented as honest and far-seeing politicians, when EINE EDLE UND GUTE NATUR is claimed for Tiberius, and Nero is rescued from his heritage of infamy as an accomplished DILETTANTE whose moral aberrations are more than excused by his exquisite artistic sense and charming tenor voice.

But besides the allegorising principle of interpretation, and the ethical reconstruction of history, there was a third theory, which may be called the semi-historical, and which goes by the name of Euhemeros, though he was by no means the first to propound it.

Appealing to a fictitious monument which he declared that he had discovered in the island of Panchaia, and which purported to be a column erected by Zeus, and detailing the incidents of his reign on earth, this shallow thinker attempted to show that the gods and heroes of ancient Greece were ‘mere ordinary mortals, whose achievements had been a good deal exaggerated and misrepresented,’ and that the proper canon of historical criticism as regards the treatment of myths was to rationalise the incredible, and to present the plausible residuum as actual truth.

To him and his school, the centaurs, for instance, those mythical sons of the storm, strange links between the lives of men and animals, were merely some youths from the village of Nephele in Thessaly, distinguished for their sporting tastes; the ‘living harvest of panoplied knights,’ which sprang so mystically from the dragon’s teeth, a body of mercenary troops supported by the profits on a successful speculation in ivory; and Actaeon, an ordinary master of hounds, who, living before the days of subscription, was eaten out of house and home by the expenses of his kennel.

Now, that under the glamour of myth and legend some substratum of historical fact may lie, is a proposition rendered extremely probable by the modern investigations into the workings of the mythopoeic spirit in post-Christian times. Charlemagne and Roland, St. Francis and William Tell, are none the less real personages because their histories are filled with much that is fictitious and incredible, but in all cases what is essentially necessary is some external corroboration, such as is afforded by the mention of Roland and Roncesvalles in the chronicles of England, or (in the sphere of Greek legend) by the excavations of Hissarlik. But to rob a mythical narrative of its kernel of supernatural elements, and to present the dry husk thus obtained as historical fact, is, as has been well said, to mistake entirely the true method of investigation and to identify plausibility with truth.

And as regards the critical point urged by Palaiphatos, Strabo, and Polybius, that pure invention on Homer’s part is inconceivable, we may without scruple allow it, for myths, like constitutions, grow gradually, and are not formed in a day. But between a poet’s deliberate creation and historical accuracy there is a wide field of the mythopoeic faculty.

This Euhemeristic theory was welcomed as an essentially philosophical and critical method by the unscientific Romans, to whom it was introduced by the poet Ennius, that pioneer of cosmopolitan Hellenicism, and it continued to characterise the tone of ancient thought on the question of the treatment of mythology till the rise of Christianity, when it was turned by such writers as Augustine and Minucius Felix into a formidable weapon of attack on Paganism. It was then abandoned by all those who still bent the knee to Athena or to Zeus, and a general return, aided by the philosophic mystics of Alexandria, to the allegorising principle of interpretation took place, as the only means of saving the deities of Olympus from the Titan assaults of the new Galilean God. In what vain defence, the statue of Mary set in the heart of the Pantheon can best tell us.

Religions, however, may be absorbed, but they never are disproved, and the stories of the Greek mythology, spiritualised by the purifying influence of Christianity, reappear in many of the southern parts of Europe in our own day. The old fable that the Greek gods took service with the new religion under assumed names has more truth in it than the many care to discover.

Having now traced the progress of historical criticism in the special treatment of myth and legend, I shall proceed to investigate the form in which the same spirit manifested itself as regards what one may term secular history and secular historians. The field traversed will be found to be in some respects the same, but the mental attitude, the spirit, the motive of investigation are all changed.

There were heroes before the son of Atreus and historians before Herodotus, yet the latter is rightly hailed as the father of history, for in him we discover not merely the empirical connection of cause and effect, but that constant reference to Laws, which is the characteristic of the historian proper.

For all history must be essentially universal; not in the sense of comprising all the synchronous events of the past time, but through the universality of the principles employed. And the great conceptions which unify the work of Herodotus are such as even modern thought has not yet rejected. The immediate government of the world by God, the nemesis and punishment which sin and pride invariably bring with them, the revealing of God’s purpose to His people by signs and omens, by miracles and by prophecy; these are to Herodotus the laws which govern the phenomena of history. He is essentially the type of supernatural historian; his eyes are ever strained to discern the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters of life; he is more concerned with final than with efficient causes.

Yet we can discern in him the rise of that HISTORIC SENSE which is the rational antecedent of the science of historical criticism, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], to use the words of a Greek writer, as opposed to that which comes either [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

He has passed through the valley of faith and has caught a glimpse of the sunlit heights of Reason; but like all those who, while accepting the supernatural, yet attempt to apply the canons of rationalism, he is essentially inconsistent. For the better apprehension of the character of this historic sense in Herodotus it will be necessary to examine at some length the various forms of criticism in which it manifests itself.

Such fabulous stories as that of the Phoenix, of the goat-footed men, of the headless beings with eyes in their breasts, of the men who slept six months in the year ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]), of the wer-wolf of the Neuri, and the like, are entirely rejected by him as being opposed to the ordinary experience of life, and to those natural laws whose universal influence the early Greek physical philosophers had already made known to the world of thought. Other legends, such as the suckling of Cyrus by a bitch, or the feather-rain of northern Europe, are rationalised and explained into a woman’s name and a fall of snow. The supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of Hercules and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the more probable account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the Massagetae from Asia; and he appeals to the local names of their country as proof of the fact that the Kimmerians were the original possessors.

But in the case of Herodotus it will be more instructive to pass on from points like these to those questions of general probability, the true apprehension of which depends rather on a certain quality of mind than on any possibility of formulated rules, questions which form no unimportant part of scientific history; for it must be remembered always that the canons of historical criticism are essentially different from those of judicial evidence, for they cannot, like the latter, be made plain to every ordinary mind, but appeal to a certain historical faculty founded on the experience of life. Besides, the rules for the reception of evidence in courts of law are purely stationary, while the science of historical probability is essentially progressive, and changes with the advancing spirit of each age.

Now, of all the speculative canons of historical criticism, none is more important than that which rests on psychological probability.

Arguing from his knowledge of human nature, Herodotus rejects the presence of Helen within the walls of Troy. Had she been there, he says, Priam and his kinsmen would never have been so mad ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]) as not to give her up, when they and their children and their city were in such peril (ii. 118); and as regards the authority of Homer, some incidental passages in his poem show that he knew of Helen’s sojourn in Egypt during the siege, but selected the other story as being a more suitable motive for an epic. Similarly he does not believe that the Alcmaeonidae family, a family who had always been the haters of tyranny ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]), and to whom, even more than to Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Athens owed its liberty, would ever have been so treacherous as to hold up a shield after the battle of Marathon as a signal for the Persian host to fall on the city. A shield, he acknowledges, was held up, but it could not possibly have been done by such friends of liberty as the house of Alcmaeon; nor will he believe that a great king like Rhampsinitus would have sent his daughter [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

Elsewhere he argues from more general considerations of probability; a Greek courtesan like Rhodopis would hardly have been rich enough to build a pyramid, and, besides, on chronological grounds the story is impossible (ii. 134).

In another passage (ii. 63), after giving an account of the forcible entry of the priests of Ares into the chapel of the god’s mother, which seems to have been a sort of religious faction fight where sticks were freely used ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]), ‘I feel sure,’ he says, ‘that many of them died from getting their heads broken, notwithstanding the assertions of the Egyptian priests to the contrary.’ There is also something charmingly naive in the account he gives of the celebrated Greek swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to give his countrymen warning of the Persian advance. ‘If, however,’ he says, ‘I may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in a boat.’

There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the instances I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands on the borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note even the most minute instances of the rise of the critical and sceptical spirit of inquiry.

How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown by a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic tests to matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed, grapples with the moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek Bible; and where he rejects as incredible the marvellous achievements of Hercules in Egypt, he does so on the express grounds that he had not yet been received among the gods, and so was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal life ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]).

Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems to have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage (ii. 45) concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for having gone so far, the great rationalistic passage being, of course, that in which he rejects the mythical account of the foundation of Dodona. ‘How can a dove speak with a human voice?’ he asks, and rationalises the bird into a foreign princess.

Similarly he seems more inclined to believe that the great storm at the beginning of the Persian War ceased from ordinary atmospheric causes, and not in consequence of the incantations of the MAGIANS. He calls Melampos, whom the majority of the Greeks looked on as an inspired prophet, ‘a clever man who had acquired for himself the art of prophecy’; and as regards the miracle told of the AEginetan statues of the primeval deities of Damia and Auxesia, that they fell on their knees when the sacrilegious Athenians strove to carry them off, ‘any one may believe it,’ he says, ‘who likes, but as for myself, I place no credence in the tale.’

So much then for the rationalistic spirit of historical criticism, as far as it appears explicitly in the works of this great and philosophic writer; but for an adequate appreciation of his position we must also note how conscious he was of the value of documentary evidence, of the use of inscriptions, of the importance of the poets as throwing light on manners and customs as well as on historical incidents. No writer of any age has more vividly recognised the fact that history is a matter of evidence, and that it is as necessary for the historian to state his authority as it is to produce one’s witnesses in a court of law.

While, however, we can discern in Herodotus the rise of an historic sense, we must not blind ourselves to the large amount of instances where he receives supernatural influences as part of the ordinary forces of life. Compared to Thucydides, who succeeded him in the development of history, he appears almost like a mediaeval writer matched with a modern rationalist. For, contemporary though they were, between these two authors there is an infinite chasm of thought.

The essential difference of their methods may be best illustrated from those passages where they treat of the same subject. The execution of the Spartan heralds, Nicolaos and Aneristos, during the Peloponnesian War is regarded by Herodotus as one of the most supernatural instances of the workings of nemesis and the wrath of an outraged hero; while the lengthened siege and ultimate fall of Troy was brought about by the avenging hand of God desiring to manifest unto men the mighty penalties which always follow upon mighty sins. But Thucydides either sees not, or desires not to see, in either of these events the finger of Providence, or the punishment of wicked doers. The death of the heralds is merely an Athenian retaliation for similar outrages committed by the opposite side; the long agony of the ten years’ siege is due merely to the want of a good commissariat in the Greek army; while the fall of the city is the result of a united military attack consequent on a good supply of provisions.

Now, it is to be observed that in this latter passage, as well as elsewhere, Thucydides is in no sense of the word a sceptic as regards his attitude towards the truth of these ancient legends.

Agamemnon and Atreus, Theseus and Eurystheus, even Minos, about whom Herodotus has some doubts, are to him as real personages as Alcibiades or Gylippus. The points in his historical criticism of the past are, first, his rejection of all extra-natural interference, and, secondly, the attributing to these ancient heroes the motives and modes of thought of his own day. The present was to him the key to the explanation of the past, as it was to the prediction of the future.

Now, as regards his attitude towards the supernatural he is at one with modern science. We too know that, just as the primeval coal- beds reveal to us the traces of rain-drops and other atmospheric phenomena similar to those of our own day, so, in estimating the history of the past, the introduction of no force must be allowed whose workings we cannot observe among the phenomena around us. To lay down canons of ultra-historical credibility for the explanation of events which happen to have preceded us by a few thousand years, is as thoroughly unscientific as it is to intermingle preternatural in geological theories.

Whatever the canons of art may be, no difficulty in history is so great as to warrant the introduction of a spirit of spirit [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], in the sense of a violation of the laws of nature.

Upon the other point, however, Thucydides falls into an anachronism. To refuse to allow the workings of chivalrous and self-denying motives among the knights of the Trojan crusade, because he saw none in the faction-loving Athenian of his own day, is to show an entire ignorance of the various characteristics of human nature developing under different circumstances, and to deny to a primitive chieftain like Agamemnon that authority founded on opinion, to which we give the name of divine right, is to fall into an historical error quite as gross as attributing to Atreus the courting of the populace ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]) with a view to the Mycenean throne.

The general method of historical criticism pursued by Thucydides having been thus indicated, it remains to proceed more into detail as regards those particular points where he claims for himself a more rational method of estimating evidence than either the public or his predecessors possessed.

‘So little pains,’ he remarks, ‘do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, satisfied with their preconceived opinions,’ that the majority of the Greeks believe in a Pitanate cohort of the Spartan army and in a double vote being the prerogative of the Spartan kings, neither of which opinions has any foundation in fact. But the chief point on which he lays stress as evincing the ‘uncritical way with which men receive legends, even the legends of their own country,’ is the entire baselessness of the common Athenian tradition in which Harmodios and Aristogeiton were represented as the patriotic liberators of Athens from the Peisistratid tyranny. So far, he points out, from the love of freedom being their motive, both of them were influenced by merely personal considerations, Aristogeiton being jealous of Hipparchos’ attention to Harmodios, then a beautiful boy in the flower of Greek loveliness, while the latter’s indignation was aroused by an insult offered to his sister by the prince.

Their motives, then, were personal revenge, while the result of their conspiracy served only to rivet more tightly the chains of servitude which bound Athens to the Peisistratid house, for Hipparchos, whom they killed, was only the tyrant’s younger brother, and not the tyrant himself.

To prove his theory that Hippias was the elder, he appeals to the evidence afforded by a public inscription in which his name occurs immediately after that of his father, a point which he thinks shows that he was the eldest, and so the heir. This view he further corroborates by another inscription, on the altar of Apollo, which mentions the children of Hippias and not those of his brothers; ‘for it was natural for the eldest to be married first’; and besides this, on the score of general probability he points out that, had Hippias been the younger, he would not have so easily obtained the tyranny on the death of Hipparchos.

Now, what is important in Thucydides, as evinced in the treatment of legend generally, is not the results he arrived at, but the method by which he works. The first great rationalistic historian, he may be said to have paved the way for all those who followed after him, though it must always be remembered that, while the total absence in his pages of all the mystical paraphernalia of the supernatural theory of life is an advance in the progress of rationalism, and an era in scientific history, whose importance could never be over-estimated, yet we find along with it a total absence of any mention of those various social and economical forces which form such important factors in the evolution of the world, and to which Herodotus rightly gave great prominence in his immortal work. The history of Thucydides is essentially one-sided and incomplete. The intricate details of sieges and battles, subjects with which the historian proper has really nothing to do except so far as they may throw light on the spirit of the age, we would readily exchange for some notice of the condition of private society in Athens, or the influence and position of women.

There is an advance in the method of historical criticism; there is an advance in the conception and motive of history itself; for in Thucydides we may discern that natural reaction against the intrusion of didactic and theological considerations into the sphere of the pure intellect, the spirit of which may be found in the Euripidean treatment of tragedy and the later schools of art, as well as in the Platonic conception of science.

History, no doubt, has splendid lessons for our instruction, just as all good art comes to us as the herald of the noblest truth. But, to set before either the painter or the historian the inculcation of moral lessons as an aim to be consciously pursued, is to miss entirely the true motive and characteristic both of art and history, which is in the one case the creation of beauty, in the other the discovery of the laws of the evolution of progress: IL NE FAUT DEMANDER DE L’ART QUE L’ART, DU PASSE QUE LE PASSE.

Herodotus wrote to illustrate the wonderful ways of Providence and the nemesis that falls on sin, and his work is a good example of the truth that nothing can dispense with criticism so much as a moral aim. Thucydides has no creed to preach, no doctrine to prove. He analyses the results which follow inevitably from certain antecedents, in order that on a recurrence of the same crisis men may know how to act.

His object was to discover the laws of the past so as to serve as a light to illumine the future. We must not confuse the recognition of the utility of history with any ideas of a didactic aim. Two points more in Thucydides remain for our consideration: his treatment of the rise of Greek civilisation, and of the primitive condition of Hellas, as well as the question how far can he be said really to have recognised the existence of laws regulating the complex phenomena of life.

CHAPTER III

THE investigation into the two great problems of the origin of society and the philosophy of history occupies such an important position in the evolution of Greek thought that, to obtain any clear view of the workings of the critical spirit, it will be necessary to trace at some length their rise and scientific development as evinced not merely in the works of historians proper, but also in the philosophical treatises of Plato and Aristotle. The important position which these two great thinkers occupy in the progress of historical criticism can hardly be over- estimated. I do not mean merely as regards their treatment of the Greek Bible, and Plato’s endeavours to purge sacred history of its immorality by the application of ethical canons at the time when Aristotle was beginning to undermine the basis of miracles by his scientific conception of law, but with reference to these two wider questions of the rise of civil institutions and the philosophy of history.

And first, as regards the current theories of the primitive condition of society, there was a wide divergence of opinion in Hellenic society, just as there is now. For while the majority of the orthodox public, of whom Hesiod may be taken as the representative, looked back, as a great many of our own day still do, to a fabulous age of innocent happiness, a BELL’ ETE DELL’ AURO, where sin and death were unknown and men and women were like Gods, the foremost men of intellect such as Aristotle and Plato, AEschylus and many of the other poets (1) saw in primitive man ‘a few small sparks of humanity preserved on the tops of mountains after some deluge,’ ‘without an idea of cities, governments or legislation,’ ‘living the lives of wild beasts in sunless caves,’ ‘their only law being the survival of the fittest.’

And this, too, was the opinion of Thucydides, whose ARCHAEOLOGIA as it is contains a most valuable disquisition on the early condition of Hellas, which it will be necessary to examine at some length.

Now, as regards the means employed generally by Thucydides for the elucidation of ancient history, I have already pointed out how that, while acknowledging that ‘it is the tendency of every poet to exaggerate, as it is of every chronicler to seek to be attractive at the expense of truth; he yet assumes in the thoroughly euhemeristic way, that under the veil of myth and legend there does yet exist a rational basis of fact discoverable by the method of rejecting all supernatural interference as well as any extraordinary motives influencing the actors. It is in complete accordance with this spirit that he appeals, for instance, to the Homeric epithet of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], as applied to Corinth, as a proof of the early commercial prosperity of that city; to the fact of the generic name HELLENES not occurring in the ILIAD as a corroboration of his theory of the essentially disunited character of the primitive Greek tribes; and he argues from the line ‘O’er many islands and all Argos ruled,’ as applied to Agamemnon, that his forces must have been partially naval, ‘for Agamemnon’s was a continental power, and he could not have been master of any but the adjacent islands, and these would not be many but through the possession of a fleet.’

Anticipating in some measure the comparative method of research, he argues from the fact of the more barbarous Greek tribes, such as the AEtolians and Acarnanians, still carrying arms in his own day, that this custom was the case originally over the whole country. ‘The fact,’ he says, ‘that the people in these parts of Hellas are still living in the old way points to a time when the same mode of life was equally common to all.’ Similarly, in another passage, he shows how a corroboration of his theory of the respectable character of piracy in ancient days is afforded by ‘the honour with which some of the inhabitants of the continent still regard a successful marauder,’ as well as by the fact that the question, ‘Are you a pirate?’ is a common feature of primitive society as shown in the poets; and finally, after observing how the old Greek custom of wearing belts in gymnastic contests still survived among the more uncivilised Asiatic tribes, he observes that there are many other points in which a likeness may be shown between the life of the primitive Hellenes and that of the barbarians to-day.’

As regards the evidence afforded by ancient remains, while adducing as a proof of the insecure character of early Greek society the fact of their cities (2) being always built at some distance from the sea, yet he is careful to warn us, and the caution ought to be borne in mind by all archaeologists, that we have no right to conclude from the scanty remains of any city that its legendary greatness in primitive times was a mere exaggeration. ‘We are not justified,’ he says, ‘in rejecting the tradition of the magnitude of the Trojan armament, because Mycenae and the other towns of that age seem to us small and insignificant. For, if Lacedaemon was to become desolate, any antiquarian judging merely from its ruins would be inclined to regard the tale of the Spartan hegemony as an idle myth; for the city is a mere collection of villages after the old fashion of Hellas, and has none of those splendid public buildings and temples which characterise Athens, and whose remains, in the case of the latter city, would be so marvellous as to lead the superficial observer into an exaggerated estimate of the Athenian power.’ Nothing can be more scientific than the archaeological canons laid down, whose truth is strikingly illustrated to any one who has compared the waste fields of the Eurotas plain with the lordly monuments of the Athenian acropolis. (3)

On the other hand, Thucydides is quite conscious of the value of the positive evidence afforded by archaeological remains. He appeals, for instance, to the character of the armour found in the Delian tombs and the peculiar mode of sepulture, as corroboration of his theory of the predominance of the Carian element among the primitive islanders, and to the concentration of all the temples either in the Acropolis, or in its immediate vicinity, to the name of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] by which it was still known, and to the extraordinary sanctity of the spring of water there, as proof that the primitive city was originally confined to the citadel, and the district immediately beneath it (ii. 16). And lastly, in the very opening of his history, anticipating one of the most scientific of modern methods, he points out how in early states of civilisation immense fertility of the soil tends to favour the personal aggrandisement of individuals, and so to stop the normal progress of the country through ‘the rise of factions, that endless source of ruin’; and also by the allurements it offers to a foreign invader, to necessitate a continual change of population, one immigration following on another. He exemplifies his theory by pointing to the endless political revolutions that characterised Arcadia, Thessaly and Boeotia, the three richest spots in Greece, as well as by the negative instance of the undisturbed state in primitive time of Attica, which was always remarkable for the dryness and poverty of its soil.

Now, while undoubtedly in these passages we may recognise the first anticipation of many of the most modern principles of research, we must remember how essentially limited is the range of the ARCHAEOLOGIA, and how no theory at all is offered on the wider questions of the general conditions of the rise and progress of humanity, a problem which is first scientifically discussed in the REPUBLIC of Plato.

And at the outset it must be premised that, while the study of primitive man is an essentially inductive science, resting rather on the accumulation of evidence than on speculation, among the Greeks it was prosecuted rather on deductive principles. Thucydides did, indeed, avail himself of the opportunities afforded by the unequal development of civilisation in his own day in Greece, and in the places I have pointed out seems to have anticipated the comparative method. But we do not find later writers availing themselves of the wonderfully accurate and picturesque accounts given by Herodotus of the customs of savage tribes. To take one instance, which bears a good deal on modern questions, we find in the works of this great traveller the gradual and progressive steps in the development of the family life clearly manifested in the mere gregarious herding together of the Agathyrsi, their primitive kinsmanship through women in common, and the rise of a feeling of paternity from a state of polyandry. This tribe stood at that time on that borderland between umbilical relationship and the family which has been such a difficult point for modern anthropologists to find.

The ancient authors, however, are unanimous in insisting that the family is the ultimate unit of society, though, as I have said, an inductive study of primitive races, or even the accounts given of them by Herodotus, would have shown them that the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of a personal household, to use Plato’s expression, is really a most complex notion appearing always in a late stage of civilisation, along with recognition of private property and the rights of individualism.

Philology also, which in the hands of modern investigators has proved such a splendid instrument of research, was in ancient days studied on principles too unscientific to be of much use. Herodotus points out that the word ERIDANOS is essentially Greek in character, that consequently the river supposed to run round the world is probably a mere Greek invention. His remarks, however, on language generally, as in the case of PIROMIS and the ending of the Persian names, show on what unsound basis his knowledge of language rested.

In the BACCHAE of Euripides there is an extremely interesting passage in which the immoral stories of the Greek mythology are accounted for on the principle of that misunderstanding of words and metaphors to which modern science has given the name of a disease of language. In answer to the impious rationalism of Pentheus – a sort of modern Philistine – Teiresias, who may be termed the Max Muller of the Theban cycle, points out that the story of Dionysus being inclosed in Zeus’ thigh really arose from the linguistic confusion between [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] and [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

On the whole, however – for I have quoted these two instances only to show the unscientific character of early philology – we may say that this important instrument in recreating the history of the past was not really used by the ancients as a means of historical criticism. Nor did the ancients employ that other method, used to such advantage in our own day, by which in the symbolism and formulas of an advanced civilisation we can detect the unconscious survival of ancient customs: for, whereas in the sham capture of the bride at a marriage feast, which was common in Wales till a recent time, we can discern the lingering reminiscence of the barbarous habit of exogamy, the ancient writers saw only the deliberate commemoration of an historical event.

Aristotle does not tell us by what method he discovered that the Greeks used to buy their wives in primitive times, but, judging by his general principles, it was probably through some legend or myth on the subject which lasted to his own day, and not, as we would do, by arguing back from the marriage presents given to the bride and her relatives. (4)

The origin of the common proverb ‘worth so many beeves,’ in which we discern the unconscious survival of a purely pastoral state of society before the use of metals was known, is ascribed by Plutarch to the fact of Theseus having coined money bearing a bull’s head. Similarly, the Amathusian festival, in which a young man imitated the labours of a woman in travail, is regarded by him as a rite instituted in Ariadne’s honour, and the Carian adoration of asparagus as a simple commemoration of the adventure of the nymph Perigune. In the first of these WE discern the beginning of agnation and kinsmanship through the father, which still lingers in the ‘couvee’ of New Zealand tribes: while the second is a relic of the totem and fetish worship of plants.

Now, in entire opposition to this modern inductive principle of research stands the philosophic Plato, whose account of primitive man is entirely speculative and deductive.

The origin of society he ascribes to necessity, the mother of all inventions, and imagines that individual man began deliberately to herd together on account of the advantages of the principle of division of labour and the rendering of mutual need.

It must, however, be borne in mind that Plato’s object in this whole passage in the REPUBLIC was, perhaps, not so much to analyse the conditions of early society as to illustrate the importance of the division of labour, the shibboleth of his political economy, by showing what a powerful factor it must have been in the most primitive as well as in the most complex states of society; just as in the LAWS he almost rewrites entirely the history of the Peloponnesus in order to prove the necessity of a balance of power. He surely, I mean, must have recognised himself how essentially incomplete his theory was in taking no account of the origin of family life, the position and influence of women, and other social questions, as well as in disregarding those deeper motives of religion, which are such important factors in early civilisation, and whose influence Aristotle seems to have clearly apprehended, when he says that the aim of primitive society was not merely life but the higher life, and that in the origin of society utility is not the sole motive, but that there is something spiritual in it if, at least, ‘spiritual’ will bring out the meaning of that complex expression [Greek text which cannot be reproduced]. Otherwise, the whole account in the REPUBLIC of primitive man will always remain as a warning against the intrusion of A PRIORI speculations in the domain appropriate to induction.

Now, Aristotle’s theory of the origin of society, like his philosophy of ethics, rests ultimately on the principle of final causes, not in the theological meaning of an aim or tendency imposed from without, but in the scientific sense of function corresponding to organ. ‘Nature maketh no thing in vain’ is the text of Aristotle in this as in other inquiries. Man being the only animal possessed of the power of rational speech is, he asserts, by nature intended to be social, more so than the bee or any other gregarious animal.

He is [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], and the national tendency towards higher forms of perfection brings the ‘armed savage who used to sell his wife’ to the free independence of a free state, and to the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], which was the test of true citizenship. The stages passed through by humanity start with the family first as the ultimate unit.

The conglomeration of families forms a village ruled by that patriarchal sway which is the oldest form of government in the world, as is shown by the fact that all men count it to be the constitution of heaven, and the villages are merged into the state, and here the progression stops.

For Aristotle, like all Greek thinkers, found his ideal within the walls of the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], yet perhaps in his remark that a united Greece would rule the world we may discern some anticipation of that ‘federal union of free states into one consolidated empire’ which, more than the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], is to our eyes the ultimately perfect polity.

How far Aristotle was justified in regarding the family as the ultimate unit, with the materials afforded to him by Greek literature, I have already noticed. Besides, Aristotle, I may remark, had he reflected on the meaning of that Athenian law which, while prohibiting marriage with a uterine sister, permitted it with a sister-german, or on the common tradition in Athens that before the time of Cecrops children bore their mothers’ names, or on some of the Spartan regulations, could hardly have failed to see the universality of kinsmanship through women in early days, and the late appearance of monandry. Yet, while he missed this point, in common, it must be acknowledged, with many modern writers, such as Sir Henry Maine, it is essentially as an explorer of inductive instances that we recognise his improvement on Plato. The treatise [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], did it remain to us in its entirety, would have been one of the most valuable landmarks in the progress of historical criticism, and the first scientific treatise on the science of comparative politics.

A few fragments still remain to us, in one of which we find Aristotle appealing to the authority of an ancient inscription on the ‘Disk of Iphitus,’ one of the most celebrated Greek antiquities, to corroborate his theory of the Lycurgean revival of the Olympian festival; while his enormous research is evinced in the elaborate explanation he gives of the historical origin of proverbs such as [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], of religious songs like the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of the Botticean virgins, or the praises of love and war.

And, finally, it is to be observed how much wider than Plato’s his theory of the origin of society is. They both rest on a psychological basis, but Aristotle’s recognition of the capacity for progress and the tendency towards a higher life shows how much deeper his knowledge of human nature was.

In imitation of these two philosophers, Polybius gives an account of the origin of society in the opening to his philosophy of history. Somewhat in the spirit of Plato, he imagines that after one of the cyclic deluges which sweep off mankind at stated periods and annihilate all pre-existing civilisation, the few surviving members of humanity coalesce for mutual protection, and, as in the case with ordinary animals, the one most remarkable for physical strength is elected king. In a short time, owing to the workings of sympathy and the desire of approbation, the moral qualities begin to make their appearance, and intellectual instead of bodily excellence becomes the qualification for sovereignty.

Other points, as the rise of law and the like, are dwelt on in a somewhat modern spirit, and although Polybius seems not to have employed the inductive method of research in this question, or rather, I should say, of the hierarchical order of the rational progress of ideas in life, he is not far removed from what the laborious investigations of modern travellers have given us.

And, indeed, as regards the working of the speculative faculty in the creation of history, it is in all respects marvellous how that the most truthful accounts of the passage from barbarism to civilisation in ancient literature come from the works of poets. The elaborate researches of Mr. Tylor and Sir John Lubbock have done little more than verify the theories put forward in the PROMETHEUS BOUND and the DE NATURA RERUM; yet neither AEschylus nor Lucretias followed in the modern path, but rather attained to truth by a certain almost mystic power of creative imagination, such as we now seek to banish from science as a dangerous power, though to it science seems to owe many of its most splendid generalities. (5)

Leaving then the question of the origin of society as treated by the ancients, I shall now turn to the other and the more important question of how far they may he said to have attained to what we call the philosophy of history.

Now at the outset we must note that, while the conceptions of law and order have been universally received as the governing principles of the phenomena of nature in the sphere of physical science, yet their intrusion into the domain of history and the life of man has always been met with a strong opposition, on the ground of the incalculable nature of two great forces acting on human action, a certain causeless spontaneity which men call free will, and the extra-natural interference which they attribute as a constant attribute to God.

Now, that there is a science of the apparently variable phenomena of history is a conception which WE have perhaps only recently begun to appreciate; yet, like all other great thoughts, it seems to have come to the Greek mind spontaneously, through a certain splendour of imagination, in the morning tide of their civilisation, before inductive research had armed them with the instruments of verification. For I think it is possible to discern in some of the mystic speculations of the early Greek thinkers that desire to discover what is that ‘invariable existence of which there are variable states,’ and to incorporate it in some one formula of law which may serve to explain the different manifestations of all organic bodies, MAN INCLUDED, which is the germ of the philosophy of history; the germ indeed of an idea of which it is not too much to say that on it any kind of historical criticism, worthy of the name, must ultimately rest.

For the very first requisite for any scientific conception of history is the doctrine of uniform sequence: in other words, that certain events having happened, certain other events corresponding to them will happen also; that the past is the key of the future.

Now at the birth of this great conception science, it is true, presided, yet religion it was which at the outset clothed it in its own garb, and familiarised men with it by appealing to their hearts first and then to their intellects; knowing that at the beginning of things it is through the moral nature, and not through the intellectual, that great truths are spread.

So in Herodotus, who may be taken as a representative of the orthodox tone of thought, the idea of the uniform sequence of cause and effect appears under the theological aspect of Nemesis and Providence, which is really the scientific conception of law, only it is viewed from an ETHICAL standpoint.

Now in Thucydides the philosophy of history rests on the probability, which the uniformity of human nature affords us, that the future will in the course of human things resemble the past, if not reproduce it. He appears to contemplate a recurrence of the phenomena of history as equally certain with a return of the epidemic of the Great Plague.

Notwithstanding what German critics have written on the subject, we must beware of regarding this conception as a mere reproduction of that cyclic theory of events which sees in the world nothing but the regular rotation of Strophe and Antistrophe, in the eternal choir of life and death.

For, in his remarks on the excesses of the Corcyrean Revolution, Thucydides distinctly rests his idea of the recurrence of history on the psychological grounds of the general sameness of mankind.

‘The sufferings,’ he says, ‘which revolution entailed upon the cities were many and terrible, such as have occurred and always will occurs as long as human nature remains the same, though in a severer or milder form, and varying in their symptoms according to the variety of the particular cases.

‘In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments, because they are not confronted with imperious necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of men’s wants, and so proves a hard taskmaster, which brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.’

IT is evident that here Thucydides is ready to admit the variety of manifestations which external causes bring about in their workings on the uniform character of the nature of man. Yet, after all is said, these are perhaps but very general statements: the ordinary effects of peace and war are dwelt on, but there is no real analysis of the immediate causes and general laws of the phenomena of life, nor does Thucydides seem to recognise the truth that if humanity proceeds in circles, the circles are always widening.

Perhaps we may say that with him the philosophy of history is partly in the metaphysical stage, and see, in the progress of this idea from Herodotus to Polybius, the exemplification of the Comtian Law of the three stages of thought, the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific: for truly out of the vagueness of theological mysticism this conception which we call the Philosophy of History was raised to a scientific principle, according to which the past was explained and the future predicted by reference to general laws.

Now, just as the earliest account of the nature of the progress of humanity is to be found in Plato, so in him we find the first explicit attempt to found a universal philosophy of history upon wide rational grounds. Having created an ideally perfect state, the philosopher proceeds to give an elaborate theory of the complex causes which produce revolutions, of the moral effects of various forms of government and education, of the rise of the criminal classes and their connection with pauperism, and, in a word, to create history by the deductive method and to proceed from A PRIORI psychological principles to discover the governing laws of the apparent chaos of political life.

There have been many attempts since Plato to deduce from a single philosophical principle all the phenomena which experience subsequently verifies for us. Fichte thought he could predict the world-plan from the idea of universal time. Hegel dreamed he had found the key to the mysteries of life in the development of freedom, and Krause in the categories of being. But the one scientific basis on which the true philosophy of history must rest is the complete knowledge of the laws of human nature in all its wants, its aspirations, its powers and its tendencies: and this great truth, which Thucydides may be said in some measure to have apprehended, was given to us first by Plato.

Now, it cannot be accurately said of this philosopher that either his philosophy or his history is entirely and simply A PRIORI. ON EST DE SON SIECLE MEME QUAND ON Y PROTESTE, and so we find in him continual references to the Spartan mode of life, the Pythagorean system, the general characteristics of Greek tyrannies and Greek democracies. For while, in his account of the method of forming an ideal state, he says that the political artist is indeed to fix his gaze on the sun of abstract truth in the heavens of the pure reason, but is sometimes to turn to the realisation of the ideals on earth: yet, after all, the general character of the Platonic method, which is what we are specially concerned with, is essentially deductive and A PRIORI. And he himself, in the building up of his Nephelococcygia, certainly starts with a [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], making a clean sweep of all history and all experience; and it was essentially as an A PRIORI theorist that he is criticised by Aristotle, as we shall see later.

To proceed to closer details regarding the actual scheme of the laws of political revolutions as drawn out by Plato, we must first note that the primary cause of the decay of the ideal state is the general principle, common to the vegetable and animal worlds as well as to the world of history, that all created things are fated to decay – a principle which, though expressed in the terms of a mere metaphysical abstraction, is yet perhaps in its essence scientific. For we too must hold that a continuous redistribution of matter and motion is the inevitable result of the nominal persistence of Force, and that perfect equilibrium is as impossible in politics as it certainly is in physics.

The secondary causes which mar the perfection of the Platonic ‘city of the sun’ are to be found in the intellectual decay of the race consequent on injudicious marriages and in the Philistine elevation of physical achievements over mental culture; while the hierarchical succession of Timocracy and Oligarchy, Democracy and Tyranny, is dwelt on at great length and its causes analysed in a very dramatic and psychological manner, if not in that sanctioned by the actual order of history.

And indeed it is apparent at first sight that the Platonic succession of states represents rather the succession of ideas in the philosophic mind than any historical succession of time.

Aristotle meets the whole simply by an appeal to facts. If the theory of the periodic decay of all created things, he urges, be scientific, it must be universal, and so true of all the other states as well as of the ideal. Besides, a state usually changes into its contrary and not to the form next to it; so the ideal state would not change into Timocracy; while Oligarchy, more often than Tyranny, succeeds Democracy. Plato, besides, says nothing of what a Tyranny would change to. According to the cycle theory it ought to pass into the ideal state again, but as a fact one Tyranny is changed into another as at Sicyon, or into a Democracy as at Syracuse, or into an Aristocracy as at Carthage. The example of Sicily, too, shows that an Oligarchy is often followed by a Tyranny, as at Leontini and Gela. Besides, it is absurd to represent greed as the chief motive of decay, or to talk of avarice as the root of Oligarchy, when in nearly all true oligarchies money-making is forbidden by law. And finally the Platonic theory neglects the different kinds of democracies and of tyrannies.

Now nothing can be more important than this passage in Aristotle’s POLITICS (v. 12.), which may he said to mark an era in the evolution of historical criticism. For there is nothing on which Aristotle insists so strongly as that the generalisations from facts ought to be added to the data of the A PRIORI method – a principle which we know to be true not merely of deductive speculative politics but of physics also: for are not the residual phenomena of chemists a valuable source of improvement in theory?

His own method is essentially historical though by no means empirical. On the contrary, this far-seeing thinker, rightly styled IL MAESTRO DI COLOR CHE SANNO, may be said to have apprehended clearly that the true method is neither exclusively empirical nor exclusively speculative, but rather a union of both in the process called Analysis or the Interpretation of Facts, which has been defined as the application to facts of such general conceptions as may fix the important characteristics of the phenomena, and present them permanently in their true relations. He too was the first to point out, what even in our own day is incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that inconsistency and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they are in the physical world, and that where the superficial observer thinks he sees a revolution the philosophical critic discerns merely the gradual and rational evolution of the inevitable results of certain antecedents.

And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man, to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as in his natural powers, must be studied from below in the hierarchical progression of higher function from the lower forms of life. The important maxim, that to obtain a clear conception of anything we must ‘study it in its growth from the very beginning,’ is formally set down in the opening of the POLITICS, where, indeed, we shall find the other characteristic features of the modern Evolutionary theory, such as the ‘Differentiation of Function’ and the ‘Survival of the Fittest’ explicitly set forth.

What a valuable step this was in the improvement of the method of historical criticism it is needless to point out. By it, one may say, the true thread was given to guide one’s steps through the bewildering labyrinth of facts. For history (to use terms with which Aristotle has made us familiar) may be looked at from two essentially different standpoints; either as a work of art whose [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] or final cause is external to it and imposed on it from without; or as an organism containing the law of its own development in itself, and working out its perfection merely by the fact of being what it is. Now, if we adopt the former, which we may style the theological view, we shall be in continual danger of tripping into the pitfall of some A PRIORI conclusion – that bourne from which, it has been truly said, no traveller ever returns.

The latter is the only scientific theory and was apprehended in its fulness by Aristotle, whose application of the inductive method to history, and whose employment of the evolutionary theory of humanity, show that he was conscious that the philosophy of history is nothing separate from the facts of history but is contained in them, and that the rational law of the complex phenomena of life, like the ideal in the world of thought, is to be reached through the facts, not superimposed on them – [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

And finally, in estimating the enormous debt which the science of historical criticism owes to Aristotle, we must not pass over his attitude towards those two great difficulties in the formation of a philosophy of history on which I have touched above. I mean the assertion of extra-natural interference with the normal development of the world and of the incalculable influence exercised by the power of free will.

Now, as regards the former, he may be said to have neglected it entirely. The special acts of providence proceeding from God’s immediate government of the world, which Herodotus saw as mighty landmarks in history, would have been to him essentially disturbing elements in that universal reign of law, the extent of whose limitless empire he of all the great thinkers of antiquity was the first explicitly to recognise.

Standing aloof from the popular religion as well as from the deeper conceptions of Herodotus and the Tragic School, he no longer thought of God as of one with fair limbs and treacherous face haunting wood and glade, nor would he see in him a jealous judge continually interfering in the world’s history to bring the wicked to punishment and the proud to a fall. God to him was the incarnation of the pure Intellect, a being whose activity was the contemplation of his own perfection, one whom Philosophy might imitate but whom prayers could never move, to the sublime indifference of whose passionless wisdom what were the sons of men, their desires or their sins? While, as regards the other difficulty and the formation of a philosophy of history, the conflict of free will with general laws appears first in Greek thought in the usual theological form in which all great ideas seem to be cradled at their birth.

It was such legends as those of OEdipus and Adrastus, exemplifying the struggles of individual humanity against the overpowering force of circumstances and necessity, which gave to the early Greeks those same lessons which we of modern days draw, in somewhat less artistic fashion, from the study of statistics and the laws of physiology.

In Aristotle, of course, there is no trace of supernatural influence. The Furies, which drive their victim into sin first and then punishment, are no longer ‘viper-tressed goddesses with eyes and mouth aflame,’ but those evil thoughts which harbour within the impure soul. In this, as in all other points, to arrive at Aristotle is to reach the pure atmosphere of scientific and modern thought.

But while he rejected pure necessitarianism in its crude form as essentially a REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM of life, he was fully conscious of the fact that the will is not a mysterious and ultimate unit of force beyond which we cannot go and whose special characteristic is inconsistency, but a certain creative attitude of the mind which is, from the first, continually influenced by habits, education and circumstance; so absolutely modifiable, in a word, that the good and the bad man alike seem to lose the power of free will; for the one is morally unable to sin, the other physically incapacitated for reformation.

And of the influence of climate and temperature in forming the nature of man (a conception perhaps pressed too far in modern days when the ‘race theory’ is supposed to be a sufficient explanation of the Hindoo, and the latitude and longitude of a country the best guide to its morals(6)) Aristotle is completely unaware. I do not allude to such smaller points as the oligarchical tendencies of a horse-breeding country and the democratic influence of the proximity of the sea (important though they are for the consideration of Greek history), but rather to those wider views in the seventh book of his POLITICS, where he attributes the happy union in the Greek character of intellectual attainments with the spirit of progress to the temperate climate they enjoyed, and points out how the extreme cold of the north dulls the mental faculties of its inhabitants and renders them incapable of social organisation or extended empire; while to the enervating heat of eastern countries was due that want of spirit and bravery which then, as now, was the characteristic of the population in that quarter of the globe.

Thucydides has shown the causal connection between political revolutions and the fertility of the soil, but goes a step farther and points out the psychological influences on a people’s character exercised by the various extremes of climate – in both cases the first appearance of a most valuable form of historical criticism.

To the development of Dialectic, as to God, intervals of time are of no account. From Plato and Aristotle we pass direct to Polybius.

The progress of thought from the philosopher of the Academe to the Arcadian historian may be best illustrated by a comparison of the method by which each of the three writers, whom I have selected as the highest expression of the rationalism of his respective age, attained to his ideal state: for the latter conception may be in a measure regarded as representing the most spiritual principle which they could discern in history.

Now, Plato created his on A PRIORI principles; Aristotle formed his by an analysis of existing constitutions; Polybius found his realised for him in the actual world of fact. Aristotle criticised the deductive speculations of Plato by means of inductive negative instances, but Polybius will not take the ‘Cloud City’ of the REPUBLIC into account at all. He compares it to an athlete who has never run on ‘Constitution Hill,’ to a statue so beautiful that it is entirely removed from the ordinary conditions of humanity, and consequently from the canons of criticism.

The Roman state had attained in his eyes, by means of the mutual counteraction of three opposing forces, (7) that stable equilibrium in politics which was the ideal of all the theoretical writers of antiquity. And in connection with this point it will be convenient to notice here how much truth there is contained in the accusation often brought against the ancients that they knew nothing of the idea of Progress, for the meaning of many of their speculations will be hidden from us if we do not try and comprehend first what their aim was, and secondly why it was so.

Now, like all wide generalities, this statement is at least inaccurate. The prayer of Plato’s ideal City – [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], might be written as a text over the door of the last Temple to Humanity raised by the disciples of Fourier and Saint-Simon, but it is certainly true that their ideal principle was order and permanence, not indefinite progress. For, setting aside the artistic prejudices which would have led the Greeks to reject this idea of unlimited improvement, we may note that the modern conception of progress rests partly on the new enthusiasm and worship of humanity, partly on the splendid hopes of material improvements in civilisation which applied science has held out to us, two influences from which ancient Greek thought seems to have been strangely free. For the Greeks marred the perfect humanism of the great men whom they worshipped, by imputing to them divinity and its supernatural powers; while their science was eminently speculative and often almost mystic in its character, aiming at culture and not utility, at higher spirituality and more intense reverence for law, rather than at the increased facilities of locomotion and the cheap production of common things about which our modern scientific school ceases not to boast. And lastly, and perhaps chiefly, we must remember that the ‘plague spot of all Greek states,’ as one of their own writers has called it, was the terrible insecurity to life and property which resulted from the factions and revolutions which ceased not to trouble Greece at all times, raising a spirit of fanaticism such as religion raised in the middle ages of Europe.

These considerations, then, will enable us to understand first how it was that, radical and unscrupulous reformers as the Greek political theorists were, yet, their end once attained, no modern conservatives raised such outcry against the slightest innovation. Even acknowledged improvements in such things as the games of children or the modes of music were regarded by them with feelings of extreme apprehension as the herald of the DRAPEAU ROUGE of reform. And secondly, it will show us how it was that Polybius found his ideal in the commonwealth of Rome, and Aristotle, like Mr. Bright, in the middle classes. Polybius, however, is not content merely with pointing out his ideal state, but enters at considerable length into the question of those general laws whose consideration forms the chief essential of the philosophy of history.

He starts by accepting the general principle that all things are fated to decay (which I noticed in the case of Plato), and that ‘as iron produces rust and as wood breeds the animals that destroy it, so every state has in it the seeds of its own corruption.’ He is not, however, content to rest there, but proceeds to deal with the more immediate causes of revolutions, which he says are twofold in nature, either external or internal. Now, the former, depending as they do on the synchronous conjunction of other events outside the sphere of scientific estimation, are from their very character incalculable; but the latter, though assuming many forms, always result from the over-great preponderance of any single element to the detriment of the others, the rational law lying at the base of all varieties of political changes being that stability can result only from the statical equilibrium produced by the counteraction of opposing parts, since the more simple a constitution is the more it is insecure. Plato had pointed out before how the extreme liberty of a democracy always resulted in despotism, but Polybius analyses the law and shows the scientific principles on which it rests.

The doctrine of the instability of pure constitutions forms an important era in the philosophy of history. Its special applicability to the politics of our own day has been illustrated in the rise of the great Napoleon, when the French state had lost those divisions of caste and prejudice, of landed aristocracy and moneyed interest, institutions in which the vulgar see only barriers to Liberty but which are indeed the only possible defences against the coming of that periodic Sirius of politics, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced].

There is a principle which Tocqueville never wearies of explaining, and which has been subsumed by Mr. Herbert Spencer under that general law common to all organic bodies which we call the Instability of the Homogeneous. The various manifestations of this law, as shown in the normal, regular revolutions and evolutions of the different forms of government, (8) are expounded with great clearness by Polybius, who claimed for his theory, in the Thucydidean spirit, that it is a [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], not a mere [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], and that a knowledge of it will enable the impartial observer (9) to discover at any time what period of its constitutional evolution any particular state has already reached and into what form it will be next differentiated, though possibly the exact time of the changes may be more or less uncertain. (10)

Now in this necessarily incomplete account of the laws of political revolutions as expounded by Polybius enough perhaps has been said to show what is his true position in the rational development of the ‘Idea’ which I have called the Philosophy of History, because it is the unifying of history. Seen darkly as it is through the glass of religion in the pages of Herodotus, more metaphysical than scientific with Thucydides, Plato strove to seize it by the eagle- flight of speculation, to reach it with the eager grasp of a soul impatient of those slower and surer inductive methods which Aristotle, in his trenchant criticism of his greater master, showed were more brilliant than any vague theory, if the test of brilliancy is truth.

What then is the position of Polybius? Does any new method remain for him? Polybius was one of those many men who are born too late to be original. To Thucydides belongs the honour of being the first in the history of Greek thought to discern the supreme calm of law and order underlying the fitful storms of life, and Plato and Aristotle each represents a great new principle. To Polybius belongs the office – how noble an office he made it his writings show – of making more explicit the ideas which were implicit in his predecessors, of showing that they were of wider applicability and perhaps of deeper meaning than they had seemed before, of examining with more minuteness the laws which they had discovered, and finally of pointing out more clearly than any one had done the range of science and the means it offered for analysing the present and predicting what was to come. His office thus was to gather up what they had left, to give their principles new life by a wider application.

Polybius ends this great diapason of Greek thought. When the Philosophy of history appears next, as in Plutarch’s tract on ‘Why God’s anger is delayed,’ the pendulum of thought had swung back to where it began. His theory was introduced to the Romans under the cultured style of Cicero, and was welcomed by them as the philosophical panegyric of their state. The last notice of it in Latin literature is in the pages of Tacitus, who alludes to the stable polity formed out of these elements as a constitution easier to commend than to produce and in no case lasting. Yet Polybius had seen the future with no uncertain eye, and had prophesied the rise of the Empire from the unbalanced power of the ochlocracy fifty years and more before there was joy in the Julian household over the birth of that boy who, born to power as the champion of the people, died wearing the purple of a king.

No attitude of historical criticism is more important than the means by which the ancients attained to the philosophy of history. The principle of heredity can be exemplified in literature as well as in organic life: Aristotle, Plato and Polybius are the lineal ancestors of Fichte and Hegel, of Vico and Cousin, of Montesquieu and Tocqueville.

As my aim is not to give an account of historians but to point out those great thinkers whose methods have furthered the advance of this spirit of historical criticism, I shall pass over those annalists and chroniclers who intervened between Thucydides and Polybius. Yet perhaps it may serve to throw new light on the real nature of this spirit and its intimate connection with all other forms of advanced thought if I give some estimate of the character and rise of those many influences prejudicial to the scientific study of history which cause such a wide gap between these two historians.

Foremost among these is the growing influence of rhetoric and the Isocratean school, which seems to have regarded history as an arena for the display either of pathos or paradoxes, not a scientific investigation into laws.

The new age is the age of style. The same spirit of exclusive attention to form which made Euripides often, like Swinburne, prefer music to meaning and melody to morality, which gave to the later Greek statues that refined effeminacy, that overstrained gracefulness of attitude, was felt in the sphere of history. The rules laid down for historical composition are those relating to the aesthetic value of digressions, the legality of employing more than one metaphor in the same sentence, and the like; and historians are ranked not by their power of estimating evidence but by the goodness of the Greek they write.

I must note also the important influence on literature exercised by Alexander the Great; for while his travels encouraged the more accurate research of geography, the very splendour of his achievements seems to have brought history again into the sphere of romance. The appearance of all great men in the world is followed invariably by the rise of that mythopoeic spirit and that tendency to look for the marvellous, which is so fatal to true historical criticism. An Alexander, a Napoleon, a Francis of Assisi and a Mahomet are thought to be outside the limiting conditions of rational law, just as comets were supposed to be not very long ago. While the founding of that city of Alexandria, in which Western and Eastern thought met with such strange result to both, diverted the critical tendencies of the Greek spirit into questions of grammar, philology and the like, the narrow, artificial atmosphere of that University town (as we may call it) was fatal to the development of that independent and speculative spirit of research which strikes out new methods of inquiry, of which historical criticism is one.

The Alexandrines combined a great love of learning with an ignorance of the true principles of research, an enthusiastic spirit for accumulating materials with a wonderful incapacity to use them. Not among the hot sands of Egypt, or the Sophists of Athens, but from the very heart of Greece rises the man of genius on whose influence in the evolution of the philosophy of history I have a short time ago dwelt. Born in the serene and pure air of the clear uplands of Arcadia, Polybius may be said to reproduce in his work the character of the place which gave him birth. For, of all the historians – I do not say of antiquity but of all time – none is more rationalistic than he, none more free from any belief in the ‘visions and omens, the monstrous legends, the grovelling superstitions and unmanly craving for the supernatural’ ([Greek text that cannot be reproduced](11)) which he himself is compelled to notice as the characteristics of some of the historians who preceded him. Fortunate in the land which bore him, he was no less blessed in the wondrous time of his birth. For, representing in himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of his day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate ‘to comprehend,’ as has been said, ‘more clearly than the Romans themselves the historical position of Rome,’ and to discern with greater insight than all other men could those two great resultants of ancient civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven hills, and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.

Before his own day, he says, (12) the events of the world were unconnected and separate and the histories confined to particular countries. Now, for the first time the universal empire of the Romans rendered a universal history possible. (13) This, then, is the august motive of his work: to trace the gradual rise of this Italian city from the day when the first legion crossed the narrow strait of Messina and landed on the fertile fields of Sicily to the time when Corinth in the East and Carthage in the West fell before the resistless wave of empire and the eagles of Rome passed on the wings of universal victory from Calpe and the Pillars of Hercules to Syria and the Nile. At the same time he recognised that the scheme of Rome’s empire was worked out under the aegis of God’s will. (14) For, as one of the Middle Age scribes most truly says, the [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] of Polybius is that power which we Christians call God; the second aim, as one may call it, of his history is to point out the rational and human and natural causes which brought this result, distinguishing, as we should say, between God’s mediate and immediate government of the world.

With any direct intervention of God in the normal development of Man, he will have nothing to do: still less with any idea of chance as a factor in the phenomena of life. Chance and miracles, he says, are mere expressions for our ignorance of rational causes. The spirit of rationalism which we recognised in Herodotus as a vague uncertain attitude and which appears in Thucydides as a consistent attitude of mind never argued about or even explained, is by Polybius analysed and formulated as the great instrument of historical research.

Herodotus, while believing on principle in the supernatural, yet was sceptical at times. Thucydides simply ignored the supernatural. He did not discuss it, but he annihilated it by explaining history without it. Polybius enters at length into the whole question and explains its origin and the method of treating it. Herodotus would have believed in Scipio’s dream. Thucydides would have ignored it entirely. Polybius explains it. He is the culmination of the rational progression of Dialectic. ‘Nothing,’ he says, ‘shows a foolish mind more than the attempt to account for any phenomena on the principle of chance or supernatural intervention. History is a search for rational causes, and there is nothing in the world – even those phenomena which seem to us the most remote from law and improbable – which is not the logical and inevitable result of certain rational antecedents.’

Some things, of course, are to be rejected A PRIORI without entering into the subject: ‘As regards such miracles,’ he says, (15) ‘as that on a certain statue of Artemis rain or snow never falls though the statue stands in the open air, or that those who enter God’s shrine in Arcadia lose their natural shadows, I cannot really be expected to argue upon the subject. For these things are not only utterly improbable but absolutely impossible.’

‘For us to argue reasonably on an acknowledged absurdity is as vain a task as trying to catch water in a sieve; it is really to admit the possibility of the supernatural, which is the very point at issue.’

What Polybius felt was that to admit the possibility of a miracle is to annihilate the possibility of history: for just as scientific and chemical experiments would be either impossible or useless if exposed to the chance of continued interference on the part of some foreign body, so the laws and principles which govern history, the causes of phenomena, the evolution of progress, the whole science, in a word, of man’s dealings with his own race and with nature, will remain a sealed book to him who admits the possibility of extra-natural interference.

The stories of miracles, then, are to be rejected on A PRIORI rational grounds, but in the case of events which we know to have happened the scientific historian will not rest till he has discovered their natural causes which, for instance, in the case of the wonderful rise of the Roman Empire – the most marvellous thing, Polybius says, which God ever brought about (16) – are to be found in the excellence of their constitution ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]), the wisdom of their advisers, their splendid military arrangements, and their superstition ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]). For while Polybius regarded the revealed religion as, of course, objective reality of truth, (17) he laid great stress on its moral subjective influence, going, in one passage on the subject, even so far as almost to excuse the introduction of the supernatural in very small quantities into history on account of the extremely good effect it would have on pious people.

But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern history which breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of rationalism as one preserved to us in the Vatican – strange resting-place for it! – in which he treats of the terrible decay of population which had fallen on his native land in his own day, and which by the general orthodox public was regarded as a special judgment of God sending childlessness on women as a punishment for the sins of the people. For it was a disaster quite without parallel in the history of the land, and entirely unforeseen by any of its political-economy writers who, on the contrary, were always anticipating that danger would arise from an excess of population overrunning its means of subsistence, and becoming unmanageable through its size. Polybius, however, will have nothing to do with either priest or worker of miracles in this matter. He will not even seek that ‘sacred Heart of Greece,’ Delphi, Apollo’s shrine, whose inspiration even Thucydides admitted and before whose wisdom Socrates bowed. How foolish, he says, were the man who on this matter would pray to God. We must search for the rational causes, and the causes are seen to be clear, and the method of prevention also. He then proceeds to notice how all this arose from the general reluctance to marriage and to bearing the expense of educating a large family which resulted from the carelessness and avarice of the men of his day, and he explains on entirely rational principles the whole of this apparently supernatural judgment.

Now, it is to be borne in mind that while his rejection of miracles as violation of inviolable laws is entirely A PRIORI – for discussion of such a matter is, of course, impossible for a rational thinker – yet his rejection of supernatural intervention rests entirely on the scientific grounds of the necessity of looking for natural causes. And he is quite logical in maintaining his position on these principles. For, where it is either difficult or impossible to assign any rational cause for phenomena, or to discover their laws, he acquiesces reluctantly in the alternative of admitting some extra-natural interference which his essentially scientific method of treating the matter has logically forced on him, approving, for instance, of prayers for rain, on the express ground that the laws of meteorology had not yet been ascertained. He would, of course, have been the first to welcome our modern discoveries in the matter. The passage in question is in every way one of the most interesting in his whole work, not, of course, as signifying any inclination on his part to acquiesce in the supernatural, but because it shows how essentially logical and rational his method of argument was, and how candid and fair his mind.

Having now examined Polybius’s attitude towards the supernatural and the general ideas which guided his research, I will proceed to examine the method he pursued in his scientific investigation of the complex phenomena of life. For, as I have said before in the course of this essay, what is important in all great writers is not so much the results they arrive at as the methods they pursue. The increased knowledge of facts may alter any conclusion in history as in physical science, and the canons of speculative historical credibility must be acknowledged to appeal rather to that subjective attitude of mind which we call the historic sense than to any formulated objective rules. But a scientific method is a gain for all time, and the true if not the only progress of historical criticism consists in the improvement of the instruments of research.

Now first, as regards his conception of history, I have already pointed out that it was to him essentially a search for causes, a problem to be solved, not a picture to be painted, a scientific investigation into laws and tendencies, not a mere romantic account of startling incident and wondrous adventure. Thucydides, in the opening of his great work, had sounded the first note of the scientific conception of history. ‘The absence of romance in my pages,’ he says, ‘will, I fear, detract somewhat from its value, but I have written my work not to be the exploit of a passing hour but as the possession of all time.’ (18) Polybius follows with words almost entirely similar. If, he says, we banish from history the consideration of causes, methods and motives ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]), and refuse to consider how far the result of anything is its rational consequent, what is left is a mere [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], not a [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], an oratorical essay which may give pleasure for the moment, but which is entirely without any scientific value for the explanation of the future. Elsewhere he says that ‘history robbed of the exposition of its causes and laws is a profitless thing, though it may allure a fool.’ And all through his history the same point is put forward and exemplified in every fashion.

So far for the conception of history. Now for the groundwork. As regards the character of the phenomena to be selected by the scientific investigator, Aristotle had laid down the general formula that nature should be studied in her normal manifestations. Polybius, true to his character of applying explicitly the principles implicit in the work of others, follows out the doctrine of Aristotle, and lays particular stress on the rational and undisturbed character of the development of the Roman constitution as affording special facilities for the discovery of the laws of its progress. Political revolutions result from causes either external or internal. The former are mere disturbing forces which lie outside the sphere of scientific calculation. It is the latter which are important for the establishing of principles and the elucidation of the sequences of rational evolution.

He thus may be said to have anticipated one of the most important truths of the modern methods of investigation: I mean that principle which lays down that just as the study of physiology should precede the study of pathology, just as the laws of disease are best discovered by the phenomena presented in health, so the method of arriving at all great social and political truths is by the investigation of those cases where development has been normal, rational and undisturbed.

The critical canon that the more a people has been interfered with, the more difficult it becomes to generalise the laws of its progress and to analyse the separate forces of its civilisation, is one the validity of which is now generally recognised by those who pretend to a scientific treatment of all history: and while we have seen that Aristotle anticipated it in a general formula, to Polybius belongs the honour of being the first to apply it explicitly in the sphere of history.

I have shown how to this great scientific historian the motive of his work was essentially the search for causes; and true to his analytical spirit he is careful to examine what a cause really is and in what part of the antecedents of any consequent it is to be looked for. To give an illustration: As regards the origin of the war with Perseus, some assigned as causes the expulsion of Abrupolis by Perseus, the expedition of the latter to Delphi, the plot against Eumenes and the seizure of the ambassadors in Boeotia; of these incidents the two former, Polybius points out, were merely the pretexts, the two latter merely the occasions of the war. The war was really a legacy left to Perseus by his father, who was determined to fight it out with Rome. (19)

Here as elsewhere he is not originating any new idea. Thucydides had pointed out the difference between the real and the alleged cause, and the Aristotelian dictum about revolutions, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], draws the distinction between cause and occasion with the brilliancy of an epigram. But the explicit and rational investigation of the difference between [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], and [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] was reserved for Polybius. No canon of historical criticism can be said to be of more real value than that involved in this distinction, and the overlooking of it has filled our histories with the contemptible accounts of the intrigues of courtiers and of kings and the petty plottings of backstairs influence – particulars interesting, no doubt, to those who would ascribe the Reformation to Anne Boleyn’s pretty face, the Persian war to the influence of a doctor or a curtain-lecture from Atossa, or the French Revolution to Madame de Maintenon, but without any value for those who aim at any scientific treatment of history.

But the question of method, to which I am compelled always to return, is not yet exhausted. There is another aspect in which it may be regarded, and I shall now proceed to treat of it.

One of the greatest difficulties with which the modern historian has to contend is the enormous complexity of the facts which come under his notice: D’Alembert’s suggestion that at the end of every century a selection of facts should be made and the rest burned (if it was really intended seriously) could not, of course, be entertained for a moment. A problem loses all its value when it becomes simplified, and the world would be all the poorer if the Sibyl of History burned her volumes. Besides, as Gibbon pointed out, ‘a Montesquieu will detect in the most insignificant fact relations which the vulgar overlook.’

Nor can the scientific investigator of history isolate the particular elements, which he desires to examine, from disturbing and extraneous causes, as the experimental chemist can do (though sometimes, as in the case of lunatic asylums and prisons, he is enabled to observe phenomena in a certain degree of isolation). So he is compelled either to use the deductive mode of arguing from general laws or to employ the method of abstraction, which gives a fictitious isolation to phenomena never so isolated in actual existence. And this is exactly what Polybius has done as well as Thucydides. For, as has been well remarked, there is in the works of these two writers a certain plastic unity of type and motive; whatever they write is penetrated through and through with a specific quality, a singleness and concentration of purpose, which we may contrast with the more comprehensive width as manifested not merely in the modern mind, but also in Herodotus. Thucydides, regarding society as influenced entirely by political motives, took no account of forces of a different nature, and consequently his results, like those of most modern political economists, have to be modified largely (20) before they come to correspond with what we know was the actual state of fact. Similarly, Polybius will deal only with those forces which tended to bring the civilised world under the dominion of Rome (ix. 1), and in the Thucydidean spirit points out the want of picturesqueness and romance in his pages which is the result of the abstract method ([Greek text which cannot be reproduced]) being careful also to tell us that his rejection of all other forces is essentially deliberate and the result of a preconceived theory and by no means due to carelessness of any kind.

Now, of the general value of the abstract method and the legality of its employment in the sphere of history, this is perhaps not the suitable occasion for any discussion. It is, however, in all ways worthy of note that Polybius is not merely conscious of, but dwells with particular weight on, the fact which is usually urged as the strongest objection to the employment of the abstract method – I mean the conception of a society as a sort of human organism whose parts are indissolubly connected with one another and all affected when one member is in any way agitated. This conception of the organic nature of society appears first in Plato and Aristotle, who apply it to cities. Polybius, as his wont is, expands it to be a general characteristic of all history. It is an idea of the very highest importance, especially to a man like Polybius whose thoughts are continually turned towards the essential unity of history and the impossibility of isolation.

Farther, as regards the particular method of investigating that group of phenomena obtained for him by the abstract method, he will adopt, he tells us, neither the purely deductive nor the purely inductive mode but the union of both. In other words, he formally adopts that method of analysis upon the importance of which I have dwelt before.

And lastly, while, without doubt, enormous simplicity in the elements under consideration is the result of the employment of the abstract method, even within the limit thus obtained a certain selection must be made, and a selection involves a theory. For the facts of life cannot be tabulated with as great an ease as the colours of birds and insects can be tabulated. Now, Polybius points out that those phenomena particularly are to be dwelt on which may serve as a [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] or sample, and show the character of the tendencies of the age as clearly as ‘a single drop from a full cask will be enough to disclose the nature of the whole contents.’ This recognition of the importance of single facts, not in themselves but because of the spirit they represent, is extremely scientific; for we know that from the single bone, or tooth even, the anatomist can recreate entirely the skeleton of the primeval horse, and the botanist tell the character of the flora and fauna of a district from a single specimen.

Regarding truth as ‘the most divine thing in Nature,’ the very ‘eye and light of history without which it moves a blind thing,’ Polybius spared no pains in the acquisition of historical materials or in the study of the sciences of politics and war, which he considered were so essential to the training of the scientific historian, and the labour he took is mirrored in the many ways in which he criticises other authorities.

There is something, as a rule, slightly contemptible about ancient criticism. The modern idea of the critic as the interpreter, the expounder of the beauty and excellence of the work he selects, seems quite unknown. Nothing can be more captious or unfair, for instance, than the method by which Aristotle criticised the ideal state of Plato in his ethical works, and the passages quoted by Polybius from Timaeus show that the latter historian fully deserved the punning name given to him. But in Polybius there is, I think, little of that bitterness and pettiness of spirit which characterises most other writers, and an incidental story he tells of his relations with one of the historians whom he criticised shows that he was a man of great courtesy and refinement of taste – as, indeed, befitted one who had lived always in the society of those who were of great and noble birth.

Now, as regards the character of the canons by which he criticises the works of other authors, in the majority of cases he employs simply his own geographical and military knowledge, showing, for instance, the impossibility in the accounts given of Nabis’s march from Sparta simply by his acquaintance with the spots in question; or the inconsistency of those of the battle of Issus; or of the accounts given by Ephorus of the battles of Leuctra and Mantinea. In the latter case he says, if any one will take the trouble to measure out the ground of the site of the battle and then test the manoeuvres given, he will find how inaccurate the accounts are.

In other cases he appeals to public documents, the importance of which he was always foremost in recognising; showing, for instance, by a document in the public archives of Rhodes how inaccurate were the accounts given of the battle of Lade by Zeno and Antisthenes. Or he appeals to psychological probability, rejecting, for instance, the scandalous stories told of Philip of Macedon, simply from the king’s general greatness of character, and arguing that a boy so well educated and so respectably connected as Demochares (xii. 14) could never have been guilty of that of which evil rumour accused him.

But the chief object of his literary censure is Timaeus, who had been unsparing of his strictures on others. The general point which he makes against him, impugning his accuracy as a historian, is that he derived his knowledge of history not from the dangerous perils of a life of action but in the secure indolence of a narrow scholastic life. There is, indeed, no point on which he is so vehement as this. ‘A history,’ he says, ‘written in a library gives as lifeless and as inaccurate a picture of history as a painting which is copied not from a living animal but from a stuffed one.’

There is more difference, he says in another place, between the history of an eye-witness and that of one whose knowledge comes from books, than there is between the scenes of real life and the fictitious landscapes of theatrical scenery. Besides this, he enters into somewhat elaborate detailed criticism of passages where he thought Timaeus was following a wrong method and perverting truth, passages which it will be worth while to examine in detail.

Timaeus, from the fact of there being a Roman custom to shoot a war-horse on a stated day, argued back to the Trojan origin of that people. Polybius, on the other hand, points out that the inference is quite unwarrantable, because horse-sacrifices are ordinary institutions common to all barbarous tribes. Timaeus here, as was common with Greek writers, is arguing back from some custom of the present to an historical event in the past. Polybius really is employing the comparative method, showing how the custom was an ordinary step in the civilisation of every early people.

In another place, (21) he shows how illogical is the scepticism of Timaeus as regards the existence of the Bull of Phalaris simply by appealing to the statue of the Bull, which was still to be seen in Carthage; pointing out how impossible it was, on any other theory except that it belonged to Phalaris, to account for the presence in Carthage of a bull of this peculiar character with a door between his shoulders. But one of the great points which he uses against this Sicilian historian is in reference to the question of the origin of the Locrian colony. In accordance with the received tradition on the subject, Aristotle had represented the Locrian colony as founded by some Parthenidae or slaves’ children, as they were called, a statement which seems to have roused the indignation of Timaeus, who went to a good deal of trouble to confute this theory. He does so on the following grounds:-

First of all, he points out that in the ancient days the Greeks had no slaves at all, so the mention of them in the matter is an anachronism; and next he declares that he was shown in the Greek city of Locris certain ancient inscriptions in which their relation to the Italian city was expressed in terms of the position between parent and child, which showed also that mutual rights of citizenship were accorded to each city. Besides this, he appeals to various questions of improbability as regards their international relationship, on which Polybius takes diametrically opposite grounds which hardly call for discussion. And in favour of his own view he urges two points more: first, that the Lacedaemonians being allowed furlough for the purpose of seeing their wives at home, it was unlikely that the Locrians should not have had the same privilege; and next, that the Italian Locrians knew nothing of the Aristotelian version and had, on the contrary, very severe laws against adulterers, runaway slaves and the like. Now, most of these questions rest on mere probability, which is always such a subjective canon that an appeal to it is rarely conclusive. I would note, however, as regards the inscriptions which, if genuine, would of course have settled the matter, that Polybius looks on them as a mere invention on the part of Timaeus, who, he remarks, gives no details about them, though, as a rule, he is over-anxious to give chapter and verse for everything. A somewhat more interesting point is that where he attacks Timaeus for the introduction of fictitious speeches into his narrative; for on this point Polybius seems to be far in advance of the opinions held by literary men on the subject not merely in his own day, but for centuries after.

Herodotus had introduced speeches avowedly dramatic and fictitious. Thucydides states clearly that, where he was unable to find out what people really said, he put down what they ought to have said. Sallust alludes, it is true, to the fact of the speech he puts into the mouth of the tribune Memmius being essentially genuine, but the speeches given in the senate on the occasion of the Catilinarian conspiracy are very different from the same orations as they appear in Cicero. Livy makes his ancient Romans wrangle and chop logic with all the subtlety of a Hortensius or a Scaevola. And even in later days, when shorthand reporters attended the debates of the senate and a DAILY NEWS was published in Rome, we find that one of the most celebrated speeches in Tacitus (that in which the Emperor Claudius gives the Gauls their freedom) is shown, by an inscription discovered recently at Lugdunum, to be entirely fabulous.

Upon the other hand, it must be borne in mind that these speeches were not intended to deceive; they were regarded merely as a certain dramatic element which it was allowable to introduce into history for the purpose of giving more life and reality to the narration, and were to be criticised, not as we should, by arguing how in an age before shorthand was known such a report was possible or how, in the failure of written documents, tradition could bring down such an accurate verbal account, but by the higher test of their psychological probability as regards the persons in whose mouths they are placed. An ancient historian in answer to modern criticism would say, probably, that these fictitious speeches were in reality more truthful than the actual ones, just as Aristotle claimed for poetry a higher degree of truth in comparison to history. The whole point is interesting as showing how far in advance of his age Polybius may be said to have been.

The last scientific historian, it is possible to gather from his writings what he considered were the characteristics of the ideal

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Early life and education

Aestheticism, early writings, and marriage, the picture of dorian gray, plays and epigrams, relationship with lord alfred douglas and trials for gross indecency, imprisonment and de profundis, the ballad of reading gaol and death.

What is Oscar Wilde known for?

How did oscar wilde become famous .

Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde’s literary reputation rests largely on his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and on his masterful comedies of manners Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was also known for his wit, his flamboyance, and his trials and jail sentence for homosexual acts.

Oscar Wilde came from a prominent family. While studying at Oxford in the 1870s, he gained notice as a scholar, poseur, wit, and poet and for his devotion to the Aesthetic movement , which held that art should exist for its beauty alone. Wilde later established himself in London’s social and artistic circles.

How did Oscar Wilde die?

After his release from prison in 1897, Oscar Wilde lived in France in straitened circumstances. In 1900 at the age of 46, he died of meningitis following an acute ear infection.

Oscar Wilde (born October 16, 1854, Dublin , Ireland—died November 30, 1900, Paris, France) was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel , The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In his comedies he proved himself to be a master of the epigram . He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England , which advocated art for art’s sake , and he was the object of notorious civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97). Despite his fall from society’s grace at the end of his life, Wilde came to be regarded as the personification of wit and sophistication.

Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, William Wilde, was Ireland ’s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology , folklore , and the satirist Jonathan Swift . His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde (née Elgee), was a nationalist poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore who wrote under the name Speranza. Wilde was one of three children. His elder brother, Willie, became a journalist, and his younger sister, Isola, died of a fever when she was 10. As a child, Wilde was baptized a Roman Catholic at his mother’s behest , despite his family’s affiliation with the Anglican church ; presumably, this act signified his mother’s rejection of the Protestant landlord class and its values, since Wilde received no further education in the Catholic faith.

After attending Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College Dublin (1871–74) and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honors. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter’s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater’s urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d’art, resulted in his famous remark, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china !”

In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London , Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. And in their comic opera Patience , Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems (1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne , Dante Gabriel Rossetti , and John Keats . Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” Despite widespread hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhorted the Americans to love beauty and art; then he returned to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America.

In 1884 Wilde married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two sons, Cyril and Vyvyan , were born, in 1885 and 1886, respectively. Meanwhile, Wilde was a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then became editor of Woman’s World (1887–89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale .

“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.” —Oscar Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)

In the final decade of his life Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. In his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1890 and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, in 1891), Wilde combined the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French Decadent fiction. The novel tells the story of an extraordinarily beautiful young man, Dorian Gray, who is taken under the wing of an older, amoral man, Lord Henry Wotton. Entranced by Henry’s views on art and sensuality, Dorian wishes to remain as young and handsome as a portrait of himself painted by another admirer, Basil Hallward. In time, the portrait changes and becomes hideous to reflect all of Dorian’s sins and moral failings while the flesh-and-blood Dorian remains entirely unchanged in appearance. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian’s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of the novel’s apparently moral ending.

Intentions (1891), a collection of previously published essays , restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler . In the same year two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to Wilde’s extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates .

Wilde’s greatest successes were his society comedies . Within the conventions of the French “ well-made play ” (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theater . His first success, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), demonstrated that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama .

In the same year rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé , written in French and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion, were halted by the censor because of a law that prohibited plays containing biblical characters. (In the Bible , Salome is the daughter of Herodias and stepdaughter of Herod Antipas , the ruler of Galilee . At the instigation of her mother, she arranges for the execution of John the Baptist by asking for his head on a platter as a reward for her dance before Herod. In Wilde’s version Salome lusts after John the Baptist and plots his death after he spurns her. After he is killed, she kisses his severed head.) It was published in 1893, and an English translation appeared in 1894 with English artist Aubrey Beardsley ’s celebrated illustrations.

A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession, Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest , were produced early in 1895. In the latter, his greatest achievement, the conventional elements of farce are transformed into satiric epigrams —seemingly trivial but mercilessly exposing Victorian hypocrisies.

I suppose society is wonderfully delightful. To be in it is merely a bore. But to be out of it simply a tragedy. I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train. All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

“I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all.” —Oscar Wilde, from a letter to a friend, 1885

In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay “The Decay of Lying” (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure—or, as Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, characterized it, “a Faustian thirst for experience.” About the time of his son Vyvyan’s birth, Wilde began a sexual relationship with a friend, Canadian journalist and art critic Robert Ross. It was the first in a series of secret affairs that he had with other men, culminating in his close and tempestuous friendship with Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas , whom he had met in 1891 and who was 16 years younger than Wilde. Their relationship infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father, a violent-tempered man whom Douglas despised. Accused by the marquess of being a sodomite , Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued the marquess for criminal libel .

The case went to trial in April 1895. Wilde’s case collapsed within three days, however, when the evidence went against him. His writings were called into question, particularly The Picture of Dorian Gray and its homoerotic themes, and it was revealed that Wilde had solicited the services of male sex workers (albeit initially at Douglas’s urging). Wilde dropped the suit, but the evidence made him vulnerable to arrest for having violated Britain ’s Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized sex acts between men (though not between women). Urged to flee to France (where homosexuality was legal) by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial for acts of gross indecency.

Wilde testified brilliantly, drawing applause (and some hisses) after giving an eloquent speech about “the love that dare not speak its name,” an expression in Douglas’s poem “Two Loves.” Interpreting it as a coy reference to homosexuality, the prosecution demanded that Wilde explain its meaning. He characterized it, in part, as “a great affection of an elder for a younger man…such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect.” But the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labor.

“To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.” —Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis (1905)

Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis ) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work. Yet the letter also expressed Wilde’s spirituality , with elegant ruminations on suffering, repentance, and “the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist.”

To avoid scandal Constance Wilde moved to the European continent and changed the family’s surname to Holland. They corresponded often through letters, however, and she visited him once in prison after the death of his mother in 1896. She died in Genoa , Italy , in 1898, several days after a botched operation that was meant to resolve a uterine tumor. (Contemporary medical experts believe that she was misdiagnosed and in fact had multiple sclerosis .)

Wilde is one of several famous artists buried in Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris . Read about this celebrated resting ground and eight other “cemeteries to die for.”

In May 1897 Wilde was released from prison, a bankrupt , and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems, he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, “an unconquerable gaiety of soul” that sustained him, and he was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, who would become his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. Wilde died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church , which he had long admired.

In January 2017 Wilde was among 50,000 men who were posthumously pardoned under the Turing Law (named for British mathematician and logician Alan Turing , who was convicted of gross indecency in 1952). The law was introduced to exonerate individuals who had been unjustly convicted of homosexual crimes that no longer exist.

A Summary and Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Of Oscar Wilde’s various short works for children, ‘The Happy Prince’ (1888) occupies a special place as his signature tale, and is perhaps Wilde’s definitive statement about the relationship between inner and outer beauty. ‘The Happy Prince’ is a sad tale that clearly owes much to earlier fairy stories, especially the tales of Hans Christian Andersen. However, it is also a typically Wildean story.

You can read ‘The Happy Prince’ in full here . Below, we offer a shorter summary of the plot of this tale, followed by an analysis of the story’s meaning.

  ‘The Happy Prince’: summary

The Happy Prince of the story’s title refers to a statue, made of lead but painted all over with gold. The statue’s eyes are sapphires, and in the hilt of the sword he holds is a bright red ruby. The statue stands high above a city, and is admired by those who live there because he looks happy and ‘like an angel’.

One night, a Swallow flies over the city, having stayed behind in northern Europe when his friends flew south to Egypt for the winter. The Swallow had stayed behind for love: he is in love with a Reed he had met in the spring. However, he begins to tire of the Reed, because she flirts with the wind every time it blows, and when he asks her if she will come away with him, she appears to shake her head.

The Swallow flies south, stopping the following night to rest. It just so happens that he arrives at the city where the statue of the Happy Prince is located. He decides to sleep underneath the statue of the Happy Prince that night, but when the statue starts to cry on him, he strikes up a conversation with it.

It turns out the Happy Prince isn’t so happy. In life, he had been a wealthy and privileged man who had been sheltered from the misery and hardship of ordinary people in the city. Only in death, when he became this statue looking down on the city and its inhabitants, has he come to realise how many people suffer and struggle.

He tells the Swallow to take the ruby from his sword hilt and deliver it to a poor seamstress whose son is ill. The Swallow reluctantly agrees. When he returns, he tells the Happy Prince what he has done and that he feels warm, even though the air is cold. The Happy Prince tells him that he has been warmed inside because he has done a good deed.

The next day, the Swallow prepares to bid the Happy Prince farewell as he must fly to Egypt to join his friends. But the Happy Prince persuades him to take the sapphire out of one of his eye sockets and take it to the poor young man who is so poor he is freezing in his garret and cannot finish the play he is writing. Once again, the Swallow does as the statue requests – though again, he does so reluctantly, this time because he doesn’t want to rob the Happy Prince of one of his eyes.

The next day, the Swallow once again says he must leave the Happy Prince and fly to Egypt, but the Happy Prince persuades the Swallow to remove the other sapphire from his eye socket and take it to little match girl who has dropped her matches in the gutter and will be beaten if she returns home empty-handed. The Swallow doesn’t want to remove the statue’s second sapphire because it will leave the Happy Prince blind, but the Prince insists.

Finally, the Happy Prince, having heard from the Swallow that children are starving in the city streets, insists that the Swallow remove his gold leaf that covers him and take it to the children so they can buy food with it. When the Swallow returns, having done this deed, he grows colder and colder, and, after kissing the Happy Prince on the lips, he drops down dead at his feet.

The Prince dies from a broken heart. The next day, the Mayor and his Town Councillors notice the lead statue without its gold coating and its jewels, and remark how ugly it looks. They also notice the dead Swallow at the foot of the statue, but express nothing but contempt for the dead bird. They have the statue of the Happy Prince torn down and decide that the lead will be melted down to make a new statue (of one of the Councillors, naturally).

But God, watching from heaven, tells one of his Angels to bring him the two most precious things in the city. The Angel brings him the lead heart from the Happy Prince (which wouldn’t melt when the rest of the statue was melted down) and the body of the dead Swallow who loved the Happy Prince. God announces that the bird will song in heaven for evermore, and the Happy Prince will praise God in his ‘city of gold’.

‘The Happy Prince’: analysis

‘The Happy Prince’ was written several years before Oscar Wilde wrote his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), but in some ways it might be viewed as a fairy-tale version of that later Gothic narrative, but with the central conceit inverted.

Whereas Dorian Gray will remain outwardly beautiful while he commits foul and evil deeds (because his portrait, kept out of sight in the attic, turns grotesquely ugly while Dorian Gray the man remains young and handsome), the Happy Prince loses his outward beauty as he commits more and more generous and selfless acts. (We have analysed  The Picture of Dorian Gray  here .)

Indeed, the Happy Prince achieves spiritual beauty, as the last words in the story – spoken by God himself – attest. And although some critics have detected undercurrents of male love in the burgeoning friendship between the Swallow and the Happy Prince (who are both male, and share a kiss before they both die), this is a love between kindred spirits, two souls selflessly helping others.

The Swallow agrees to help the Happy Prince because he loves him, and the Happy Prince wants to give up his gold and his jewels out of compassion for the poor and downtrodden of the city.

‘The Happy Prince’ has been dramatised on many occasions, and remains one of Oscar Wilde’s best-known works – perhaps his best-loved short story. Bing Crosby and Orson Welles, those giants of Hollywood, even tried to make it into a musical extravaganza, though not with any real success.

Wilde himself once said that this and his other fairy stories were ‘an attempt to mirror modern life in a form remote from reality – to deal with modern problems in a mode that is ideal and not imitative’.

In some ways, we might regard ‘The Happy Prince’ as a combination of Hans Christian Andersen’s wistfully tragic fairy tales and Charles Dickens’s social problem novels about child poverty. But these influences find themselves combined with a peculiarly Wildean attitude to life and art: the statue must lose its outward beauty to be truly useful to society.

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5 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Happy Prince’”

The recent superb film The Happy Prince about Wilde’s latter years is titled ironically I think. Bravo to Rupert Everett ! The best Wilde on screen

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Fascinating how political attitudes appear in fairy tales. I have done it myself in my latest book, “Penny Down the Drain”where the characters try to clean up the oceans and take care of the land and will do so again when the next book comes out as it has an epidemic in it! It might be fantasy but reality intrudes.

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Biography of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland to prominent intellectuals William Wilde and Lady Jane Francesca Wilde. Though they were not aristocrats, the Wildes were well-off and provided Oscar with a fine education. Oscar was especially influenced by his mother, a brilliantly witty raconteur, and, as a child, he was frequently invited to socialize with her intellectual circle of friends.

Wilde entered Trinity College in 1871 and focused his academic studies on the classics and theories of aestheticism. In 1874, he transferred to Oxford and studied under the divergent tutorials of John Ruskin (a social theorist and Renaissance man) and Walter Pater (a proponent of the new school of aestheticism). Wilde negotiated their conflicting philosophies as his personal life developed. He also experimented with cutting-edge fashion and homosexuality.

Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde had a brief flirtation with Catholicism, but his independent orientation toward the world prevented an exclusive attachment to religion. In 1881, he published his first volume of verse ( Poems ), and he became famous enough to be satirized in a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera. He moved to Chelsea, an avant-garde neighborhood in London, but his father's death and the family's snowballing debts forced him to embark on a lecture tour of the United States in 1882. Upon arriving at customs, Wilde made his now-famous statement: "I have nothing to declare except my genius." On tour, he dressed in a characteristically flamboyant style. He advocated for the philosophy of the aesthetic: art should exist solely for art's sake, or, as he wrote elsewhere, it should be "useless." While on tour in New York, Wilde also produced his first, unsuccessful play, Vera .

In 1884, Wilde married a shy and wealthy Irishwoman named Constance Lloyd, and the two moved into a posh house in London. Wilde briefly edited Woman's World magazine while writing a collection of fairy tales and a number of essays (collected later as Intentions , 1891), which elaborated his unique approach to aestheticism, a movement with which he was rather reluctant to associate himself. While Wilde had been socially and professionally linked to confirmed aesthetes such as Max Beerbohm, Arthur Symons, and Aubrey Beardsley, he was an open critic of the kind of reductive aesthetic philosophy expressed in the famous journal The Yellow Book . Preferring to explore his own thoughts about art and politics through idiosyncratic readings of Plato, Shakespeare, and contemporary painting, Wilde had a social circle which featured a diverse cast of characters, among them poets, painters, theater personalities, intellectuals, and London "rent boys" (male prostitutes). His closest friend, however, remained the Canadian critic and artist Robert Ross, who, at times, handled Wilde's publicity and acted as Wilde's confidant in his professional and personal affairs.

Throughout the 1890s, Wilde became a household name with the publication of his masterpiece novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray , a Faustian tale about beauty and youth, as well as a string of highly successful plays, including Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), the Symbolist melodrama Salome (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1895). His last play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), is considered the original modern comedy of manners. By this time, Wilde's extravagant appearance, refined wit, and melodious speaking voice had made him one of London's most sought-after dinner-party guests.

In 1891, Wilde became infatuated with the beautiful young poet Lord Alfred Douglas (known as "Bosie"). The dynamic between Bosie and Wilde was unstable at the best of times, and the pair often split for months before agreeing to reunite. Still, the relationship consumed Wilde's personal life, to the extent that the sexual nature of their friendship had become a matter of public knowledge. In 1895, Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensbury, accused Wilde of sodomy. Wilde replied by charging Queensbury with libel. Queensbury located several of Wilde's letters to Bosie, as well as other incriminating evidence. In a second trial often referred to as "the trial of the century," the writer was found guilty of "indecent acts" and was sentenced to two years of hard labor in England's Reading Gaol.

In 1897, while in prison, Wilde wrote De Profundis , an examination of his newfound spirituality. After his release, he moved to France under an assumed name. He wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol in 1898 and published two letters on the poor conditions of prison. One of the letters helped reform a law to keep children from imprisonment. His new life in France, however, was lonely, impoverished, and humiliating.

Wilde died in 1900 in a Paris hotel room. He retained his epigrammatic wit until his last breath. He is rumored to have said of the drab establishment that, between the awful wallpaper and himself, "One of us has to go." Critical and popular attention to Wilde has recently experienced a resurgence; various directors have produced films based on his plays and life, and his writings remain a wellspring of witticisms and reflections on aestheticism, morality, and society.

Study Guides on Works by Oscar Wilde

"the sphinx without a secret" and other stories oscar wilde.

The Sphinx Without a Secret and Other Stories is a collection of stories written by Oscar Wilde. The stories are all comical and mysterious. The single tales were originally published in 1887 by a magazine called “The Court and Society Review” and...

• Study Guide

The Ballad of Reading Gaol Oscar Wilde

The Ballad of Reading Goal was among the last written works of Oscar Wilde. The poem was written after two years after Oscar Wilde was released from prison and the poem focuses on the execution of one of the prison inmate who was in the same...

The Canterville Ghost Oscar Wilde

The Canterville Ghost was first published in 1887 in The Court and Society Review. The first part was published on February 23, with the second installment following on March 2. It was accompanied by illustrations. By 1887, Wilde had achieved a...

De Profundis Oscar Wilde

An iconoclast in his time and one of the most brilliant writers of the Victorian era, Oscar Wilde had a plethora of his works published and well received. Unfortunately, he was incarcerated for “gross indecency” and had to spend a portion of his...

The Happy Prince and Other Tales Oscar Wilde

The Happy and Other Tales , a collection of fairy tales that consists of the titular piece, “The Selfish Giant,” “The Devoted Friend,” “The Young King,” “The Nightingale and the Rose,” “The Fisherman and His Soul,” “The Star-Child,” “The Remarkable...

• Lesson Plan

Hélas! Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde published a volume of verse with the simplest and most direct of all possible titles: Poems . The opening poem of that collection features a title that is anything but simple and direct. In fact, were it not for the exclamation point...

An Ideal Husband Oscar Wilde

In the summer of 1893, Oscar Wilde began writing An Ideal Husband , and he completed it later that winter. At this point in his career he was accustomed to success, and in writing An Ideal Husband he wanted to ensure himself public fame. His work...

The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest opened at the St. James's Theatre in London on February 14, 1895, only a month after Wilde's previous success, An Ideal Husband. The packed-in audience rollicked with laughter at the on-stage...

Lady Windermere's Fan Oscar Wilde

Lady Windermere's Fan is a four-act play written by Oscar Wilde. Like other plays by Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan is a play that satirizes British society.

The play was produced in 1892 and then published a year later at the insistence of Sir...

Oscar Wilde: Essays Oscar Wilde

Born in 1854, Oscar Wilde was a prolific writer whose famous work includes novels like The Picture of Dorian Gray (originally published in 1890) and a play called The Importance of Being Earnest (which premiered in 1895). However, Wilde was also a...

The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray , Oscar Wilde's first and only novel, is a faustian story of a man who trades the purity of his soul for undying youth. It was written in 1889 and first published in the literary magazine Lippincott's Monthly in July,...

The Portrait of Mr. W. H. Oscar Wilde

The Portrait of Mr. H. W. is a work of prose written by Oscar Wilde, originally published in 1889 in the Blackwood's Magazine. The text is often referred to as a story, however, it also contains elements of literary criticism and biography. The...

Requiescat Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was a Victorian iconoclast who stood at the vanguard of the aesthetic movement. His works, from his Comedy of Manners plays to his verse compositions such as "Requiescat," have changed the landscape of literature since the late 1800s....

Salome Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's one-act play, Salome , is a loose interpretation of the account of the beheading of St. John the Baptist in the 1st century A.D. as recorded in the New Testament (Gospel of Mark 6:15-29 and Gospel of Matthew 14:1-12). While Salome is...

A Woman of No Importance Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance opened in London on April 19, 1893, and proceeded to run for 113 performances. Successful revivals were mounted on his home turf in both 1907 and 1915. Broadway was first delighted by Wilde’s adeptly...

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The Essays of Oscar Wilde Paperback – December 12, 2015

• Print length 110 pages
• Language English
• Publication date December 12, 2015
• Dimensions 6 x 0.25 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 1522724214
• ISBN-13 978-1522724216
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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (December 12, 2015)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 110 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1522724214
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1522724216
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 5.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.25 x 9 inches
• #144,095 in Classic Literature & Fiction

About the author

Oscar wilde.

Oscar Fingall O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford where, a disciple of Pater, he founded an aesthetic cult. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, and his two sons were born in 1885 and 1886.

His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and social comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queesberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and his confessional letter De Profundis (1905). On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.

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Home — Essay Samples — Literature — The Picture of Dorian Gray — Monstrosity in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”

Monstrosity in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

• Categories: Literary Devices The Picture of Dorian Gray

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