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For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased [253] consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. The critic may try and trace the deferred resolutions of Beethoven 1 to some sense of the incompleteness of the modern intellectual spirit, but the artist would have answered, as one of them did afterwards, 'Let them pick out the fifths and leave us at peace.'
And so it is in poetry also: all this love of curious French metres like the Ballade, the Villanelle, the Rondel; all this increased value laid on elaborate alliterations, and on curious words and refrains, such as you will find in Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, is merely the attempt to perfect flute and viol and trumpet through which the spirit of the age and the lips of the poet may blow the music of their many messages.
And so it has been with this romantic movement of ours: it is a reaction against the empty conventional workmanship, the lax execution of previous poetry and painting, showing itself in the work of such men as Rossetti and Burne-Jones by a far greater splendour of colour, a far more intricate wonder of design than English imaginative art has shown before. In Rossetti's poetry and the poetry of Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson a perfect precision and choice of language, a style flawless and fearless, a seeking for all sweet and precious melodies and a sustaining consciousness of the musical value of each word are opposed to that value which is merely intellectual. In this respect they are one with the romantic movement of France of which [254] not the least characteristic note was struck by Théophile Gautier's advice to the young poet to read his dictionary every day, as being the only book worth a poet's reading.
While, then, the material of workmanship is being thus elaborated and discovered to have in itself incommunicable and eternal qualities of its own, qualities entirely satisfying to the poetic sense and not needing for their æsthetic effect any lofty intellectual vision, any deep criticism of life or even any passionate human emotion at all, the spirit and the method of the poet's working — what people call his inspiration — have not escaped the controlling influence of the artistic spirit. Not that the imagination has lost its wings, but we have accustomed ourselves to count their innumerable pulsations, to estimate their limitless strength, to govern their ungovernable freedom.
To the Greeks this problem of the conditions of poetic production, and the places occupied by either spontaneity or self-consciousness in any artistic work, had a peculiar fascination. We find it in the mysticism of Plato and in the rationalism of Aristotle. We find it later in the Italian Renaissance agitating the minds of such men as Leonardo da Vinci. Schiller tried to adjust the balance between form and feeling, and Goethe to estimate the position of self-consciousness in art. Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'emotion remembered in tranquillity' may be taken as an analysis of one of the stages through which all imaginative work has to pass; and in Keats's longing to be 'able to compose without this fever' (I quote from one of his letters), his desire to substitute for poetic ardour 'a more thoughtful and quiet power,' we may discern the most important moment in the [255] evolution of that artistic life. The question made an early and strange appearance in your literature too; and I need not remind you how deeply the young poets of the French romantic movement were excited and stirred by Edgar Allan Poe's analysis of the workings of his own imagination in the creating of that supreme imaginative work which we know by the name of The Raven.
In the last century, when the intellectual and didactic element had intruded to such an extent into the kingdom which belongs to poetry, it was against the claims of the understanding that an artist like Goethe had to protest. 'The more incomprehensible to the understanding a poem is the better for it,' he said once, asserting the complete supremacy of the imagination in poetry as of reason in prose. But in this century it is rather against the claims of the emotional faculties, the claims of mere sentiment and feeling, that the artist must react. The simple utterance of joy is not poetry any more than a mere personal cry of pain, and the real experiences of the artist are always those which do not find their direct expression but are gathered up and absorbed into some artistic form which seems, from such real experiences, to be the farthest removed and the most alien.
'The heart contains passion but the imagination alone contains poetry,' says Charles Baudelaire. This too was the lesson that Théophile Gautier, most subtle of all modern critics, most fascinating of all modern poets, was never tired of teaching — 'Everybody is affected by a sunrise or a sunset.' The absolute distinction of the artist is not his capacity to feel nature so much as his power of rendering it. The entire subordination of all intel[256]lectual and emotional faculties to the vital and informing poetic principle is the surest sign of the strength of our Renaissance.
[Fußnote, S. 253]
1 As an instance of the inaccuracy of published reports of this lecture, it may be
mentioned that all previous versions give this passage as The artist may trace the
depressed revolution of Bunthorne simply to the lack of technical means!
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Druckvorlage
Oscar Wilde: Miscellanies.
Boston: John W. Luce & Co o.J. [1910], S. 241-277.
Unser Auszug: S. 252-256.
PURL: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.hn3u61
Editionsnotiz (Robert Ross), S. 242:
'The English Renaissance of Art' was delivered as a lecture for the first time
in the Chickering Hall, New York, on January 9, 1882. A portion of it was reported
in the New York Tribune on the following day and in other American papers subsequently.
Since then this portion has been reprinted, more or less accurately, from time to time,
in unauthorised editions, but not more than one quarter of the lecture
has ever been published.
There are in existence no less than four copies of the lecture, the earliest of
which is entirely in the author's handwriting. The others are type-written and
contain many corrections and additions made by the author in manuscript. These
have all been collated and the text here given contains, as nearly as possible,
the lecture in its original form as delivered by the author during his tour in
the United States.
Literatur
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Bristow, Joseph u.a. (Hrsg.): Wilde Discoveries.
Traditions, Histories, Archives.
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The Artist in his Criticism.
Oxford 1997.
Di Mauro-Jackson, Moira: Breathing New Life into Legends:
Oscar Wilde and the Doctrines of the Aesthetic Movement.
In: Quintessential Wilde.
His Worldly Place, His Penetrating Philosophy and His Influential Aestheticism.
Hrsg. von Annette M. Magid.
Newcastle upon Tyne 2017, S. 256-282.
Evangelista, Stefano (Hrsg.): The Reception of Oscar Wilde in Europe.
London 2010.
Grech, Leanne: Oscar Wilde's Aesthetic Education.
The Oxford Classical Curriculum.
Cham 2019.
Hänsel-Hohenhausen, Markus von: Die frühe deutschsprachige Oscar-Wilde-Rezeption (1893 - 1906).
Bibliographie.
2. Aufl. Egelsbach 1999.
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The Critic as Creator.
Rochester, NY u.a. 2001.
Lavaud, Martine u.a. (Hrsg.): Théophile Gautier et la religion de l'art.
Paris 2018.
Leighton, Angela: On Form.
Poetry, Aestheticism, and the Legacy of a Word.
Oxford 2007.
Lipking, Lawrence: Poet-critics. In: The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism.
Bd. 7: Modernism and the New Criticism. Hrsg. von A. Walton Litz.
Cambridge u.a. 2000, S. 439-467.
Magid, Annette M.: Oscar Wilde's Wordliness: Lecturing in America.
In: Quintessential Wilde.
His Worldly Place, His Penetrating Philosophy and His Influential Aestheticism.
Hrsg. von Annette M. Magid.
Newcastle upon Tyne 2017, S. 64-78.
Martino, Pierpaolo: WILDE NOW.
Performance, Celebrity and Intermediality in Oscar Wilde.
Cham 2023.
Mendelssohn, Michèle: Making Oscar Wilde.
Oxford 2018.
Morris, Roy Jr.: Declaring His Genius.
Oscar Wilde in North America.
Cambridge, Mass. 2013.
Warner, Eric / Hough, Graham (Hrsg.): Strangeness and Beauty.
An Anthology of Aesthetic Criticism 1840–1910.
2 Bde. Cambridge u.a. 2009.
Edition
Lyriktheorie » R. Brandmeyer