Shorter Prose Pieces

OSCAR WILDE--SHORTER PROSE PIECES

Contents:
Phrases And Philosophies for the Use of The Young
Mrs. Langtry as Hester Grazebrook
Slaves of Fashion
Woman's Dress
More Radical Ideas upon Dress Reform
Costume
The American Invasion
Sermons in Stones at Bloomsbury
L'Envoi

PHRASES AND PHILOSOPHIES FOR THE USE OF THE YOUNG

The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second
duty is no one has as yet discovered.
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the
curious attractiveness of others.
If the poor only had profiles there would be no difficulty in solving the
problem of poverty.

Those who see any difference between soul and body have neither.
A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of
dead religions.
The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Dulness is the coming of age of seriousness.
In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all
important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential.
If one tells the truth one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like
happiness.
It is only by not paying one's bills that one can hope to live in the
memory of the commercial classes.
No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime. Vulgarity is the conduct
of others.
Only the shallow know themselves.
Time is waste of money.
One should always be a little improbable.
There is a fatality about all good resolutions. They are invariably made
too soon.
The only way to atone for being occasionally a little overdressed is by
being always absolutely overeducated.

To be premature is to be perfect.
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct
shows an arrested intellectual development.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
A truth ceases to be true when more than one person believes in it.
In examinations the foolish ask questions that the wise cannot answer.
Greek dress was in its essence inartistic. Nothing should reveal the
body but the body.
One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man's deeper nature is soon
found out.
Industry is the root of all ugliness.
The ages live in history through their anachronisms.
It is only the gods who taste of death. Apollo has passed away, but
Hyacinth, whom men say he slew, lives on. Nero and Narcissus are
always with us.
The old believe everything: the middle-aged suspect everything; the
young know everything.
The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.
Only the great masters of style ever succeeded in being obscure.
There is something tragic about the enormous number of young men
there are in England at the present moment who start life with perfect
profiles, and end by adopting some useful profession.
To love oneself is the beginning of a life-long romance.

MRS. LANGTRY AS HESTER GRAZEBROOK

It is only in the best Greek gems, on the silver coins of Syracuse, or
among the marble figures of the Parthenon frieze, that one can find the
ideal representation of the marvellous beauty of that face which
laughed through the leaves last night as Hester Grazebrook.
Pure Greek it is, with the grave low forehead, the exquisitely arched
brow; the noble chiselling of the mouth, shaped as if it were the
mouthpiece of an instrument of music; the supreme and splendid curve
of the cheek; the augustly pillared throat which bears it all: it is Greek,
because the lines which compose it are so definite and so strong, and
yet so exquisitely harmonized that the effect is one of simple loveliness
purely: Greek, because its essence and its quality, as is the quality of
music and of architecture, is that of beauty based on absolutely
mathematical laws.
But while art remains dumb and immobile in its passionless serenity,
with the beauty of this face it is different: the grey eyes lighten into
blue or deepen into violet as fancy succeeds fancy; the lips become
flower-like in laughter or, tremulous as a bird's wing, mould themselves
at last into the strong and bitter moulds of pain or scorn. And then
motion comes, and the statue wakes into life. But the life is not the
ordinary life of common days; it is life with a new value given to it, the
value of art: and the charm to me of Hester Grazebrook's acting in the
first scene of the play last night was that mingling of classic grace with
absolute reality