Essays and Lectures | Page 3

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Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde Scanned and proofed by David
Price, [email protected]

Essays and Lectures

Contents
The Rise of Historical Criticism The English Renaissance of Art House
Decoration Art and the Handicraftman Lecture to Art Students London
Models Poems in Prose

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

CHAPTER I

HISTORICAL criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the
civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that complex
working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against
authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an
innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and
revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and
physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress is based not
so much on the results it attains, as on the tone of thought which it
represents, and the method by which it works.
Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is not to
be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms of Asia or
the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay cylinders of Assyria and
Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the pyramids, form not history but the
material for history.
The Chinese annals, ascending as they do to the barbarous forest life of
the nation, are marked with a soberness of judgment, a freedom from
invention, which is almost unparalleled in the writings of any people;
but the protective spirit which is the characteristic of that people proved
as fatal to their literature as to their commerce. Free criticism is as
unknown as free trade. While as regards the Hindus, their acute,
analytical and logical mind is directed rather to grammar, criticism and
philosophy than to history or chronology. Indeed, in history their
imagination seems to have run wild, legend and fact are so indissolubly
mingled together that any attempt to separate them seems vain. If we
except the identification of the Greek Sandracottus with the Indian
Chandragupta, we have really no clue by which we can test the truth of
their writings or examine their method of investigation.
It is among the Hellenic branch of the Indo-Germanic race that history
proper is to be found, as well as the spirit of historical criticism; among
that wonderful offshoot of the primitive Aryans, whom we call by the
name of Greeks and to whom, as has been well said, we owe all that
moves in the world except the blind forces of nature.

For, from the day when they left the chill table-lands of Tibet and
journeyed, a nomad people, to AEgean shores, the characteristic of
their nature has been the search for light, and the spirit of historical
criticism is part of that wonderful Aufklarung or illumination of the
intellect which seems to have burst on the Greek race like a great flood
of light about the sixth century B.C.
L'ESPRIT D'UN SIECLE NE NAIT PAS ET NE MEURT PAS E
JOUR FIXE, and the first critic is perhaps as difficult to discover as the
first man. It is from democracy that the spirit of criticism borrows its
intolerance of dogmatic authority, from physical science the alluring
analogies of law and order, from philosophy the conception of an
essential unity underlying the complex manifestations of phenomena. It
appears first rather as a changed attitude of mind than as a principle of
research, and its earliest influences are to be found in the sacred
writings.
For men begin to doubt in questions of religion first, and then in
matters of more secular interest; and as regards the nature of the spirit
of historical criticism itself in its ultimate development, it is not
confined merely to the empirical method of ascertaining whether an
event happened or not, but is concerned also with the investigation into
the causes of events, the general relations which phenomena of life
hold to one another, and