Beyond the romantic imagination : Oscar Wilde's aesthetics

Oscar Wilde is best known as the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray and perhaps Salomé, but also as a nineteenth-century dandy and aesthete whose face is instantly recognizable to a twenty-first-century audience. On both sides of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century, Wilde was the epitome of art for art’s sake, and when he travelled across America he did so as a Professor of Aesthetics. Aesthetics—a word that has come to mean the philosophical study of art—had its origins in Ancient Greece, where philosophers like Plato and Aristotle questioned the links between art and knowledge, and art and truth. The word was coined in the eighteenth century by A. G. Baumgarten and is derived from the Ancient Greek aisthêsis, meaning sensation, perception, and to aisthêton: the object of perception. In the current context, though, it might be best to define aesthetics with a quote from Water Pater—a prominent voice in Victorian aesthetics and a significant “influencer” in the circles in which Wilde moved, who would write in the “Preface” to his remarkable The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873): “To define beauty, not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics” (vii).