Oscar Wilde.
While I’m writing the new play I’m thinking quite seriously about how it relates to my criticism and theory and again whether or not it is possible in the professional sphere of the theatre, increasingly specialized as it is, to maintain a foothold in the arenas of both criticism and what might be called “creative” dramatic endeavors. (In short, the question might be, “Is a contemporary George Bernard Shaw possible?”) In the excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Critic as Artist” below, I am reminded that the writing of both criticism and drama are creative, and especially that criticism itself is a form of aesthetic autobiography that reveals as much about the soul of the critic as it does the work he or she is writing about. If this is so, criticism is the truest form of self-expression, and dramatic writing expresses something entirely different from the self. How much of this is valid for reviewers like those of The New York Times and Time Out New York is a question I don’t have the time to ponder. (Woe betide them, perhaps, if this is true, for how much do they reveal about themselves without realizing it?) As I sit down to write Scene Five today — about a quarter of the way through the play — and find it impossible to keep entirely away from Superfluities Redux, though, it is on my mind, especially since I find reading criticism much more of a comfort when writing a play than reading plays themselves:
ERNEST. But is Criticism really a creative art?
GILBERT. Why should it not be? It works with materials, and puts them into a form that is at once new and delightful. What more can one say of poetry? Indeed, I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Aeschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added. Nay, more, I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end. Certainly, it is never trammelled by any shackles of verisimilitude. No ignoble considerations of probability, that cowardly concession to the tedious repetitions of domestic or public life, affect it ever. One may appeal from fiction unto fact. But from the soul there is no appeal.
ERNEST. From the soul?
GILBERT. Yes, from the soul. That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind. I am always amused by the silly vanity of those writers and artists of our day who seem to imagine that the primary function of the critic is to chatter about their second-rate work. The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamour of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.