Saturday Rave: The brilliance of Oscar Wilde.

One could be rather brittle on the subject of Oscar Wilde:

brilliance is dazzling: it stops you seeing the truth.

How about that?

Oscar Wilde himself said 'I have put my genius into my life; all I've put into my works is my talent.' 

If that were the case then talent took him further than most people's genius, but all the same I know what he means. He's so good at being clever that mostly you don't notice the nonsense.

'A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.'

'All art is immoral.'

'It is through Art, and Art only, that we can realise our perfection; through Art, and through Art only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.'

All those lines come not from his plays or fiction - that would mean nothing - but from his 1891 essay The Critic as Artist. 

Of course he was just mucking about, but, all the same, it makes that genius/talent line ring really rather horribly true.

Poor dear Oscar.


(Photograph by Napoleon Sarony.)

Word To Use Today: brilliance. This word comes to us, delightfully, through French from the Italian word brillo, which means beryl.