Vernon Lee, Oscar Wilde, and the Dialogue of ‘New Aesthetics’

Abstract

Later versions of Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” subtitle the essay “An Observation,” but when it originally appeared in the Nineteenth Century, Wilde’s treatise on aesthetics called itself “A Dialogue.” And a dialogue it is, a conversation held by characters within the essay and, I argue here, also a conversation held by Wilde with the British aesthete whose theoretical writing about ‘art for art’s sake’ preceded his own: Vernon Lee. A few years before “The Decay of Lying” introduced the fictional Cyril, his friend Vivian, and Wilde’s “doctrines of the new aesthetics” to the reading public, Lee introduced a Cyril of her own. This Cyril, one half of yet another conversation that unfolds in Lee’s essay “A Dialogue on Poetic Morality,” proposes a set of aesthetic principles which prove to be the antecedents of Wilde’s own “doctrines.” Though Wilde strips them of the ethical implications and high moral tone that they possess for Lee, these “doctrines” serve as the fundamental tenets of Wilde’s aestheticism, ironically buttressing his philosophy of artistic hedonism with what Lee calls “a religion of good, of right.” The pair of narrative dialogues that take place in “The Decay of Lying” and “A Dialogue on Poetic Morality” thus parallel the cultural dialogue enacted by the authors themselves as they borrow, reject, and revise each other’s notions about art in their fashioning of British Aestheticism.