This article began as a paper given at ACLA Conference, Princeton University, 24th March 2006, and is here published by kind permission.

In his sensational 1892 polemic, Degeneration, Max Nordau reflects broadly on the end of a century he worries might also herald the end of civilization itself. He cites an enormous array of culprits responsible for this civil, psychological, and intellectual decay – from petty criminals, to ‘hysterics’ and ‘neurasthenics,’ to painters and poets and those who appreciate their art. Though he protests throughout that he does not want them to be the focus of his treatise, Nordau extends his greatest critical attention to that final group. So-called artistic ‘degenerates’ receive overwhelming attention in this 500-page book, from its first sections on ‘Decadents and Aesthetes’ to it final screed against ‘German Plagiarists.’ Throughout his argument, Nordau maintains little distinction between those whose art he dislikes and the criminally craven or insane and; for him ‘the founding of aesthetic schools’ and ‘the banding of criminals’ represent the same phenomenon (30). We can see this remarkable conflation in the following diagnostic reading of this degenerate tendency, where he lays characteristically disproportionate blame on the artist rather than the criminal:

There is yet another phenomenon highly characteristic in some cases of degeneracy, in others of hysteria. This is the formation of close groups or schools uncompromisingly exclusive to outsiders, observable to-day in literature and art. Healthy artists or authors, in possession of minds in a condition of well-regulated equilibrium, will never think of grouping themselves into an association … If any human activity is individualistic, it is that of the artist. True talent is always personal. In its creations it reproduces itself, its own views and feelings; and not the articles of faith learnt from any aesthetic apostle; … it constructs its work in the form organically necessary to it, not in that proclaimed by a leader as demanded by the fashion of the day (29).

It is hard to read Nordau’s complaint itself, and the presumed ‘common organic basis’ on which it stands, as anything less than ‘hysterical,’ in at least two modern senses of that word. It expresses the logic Oscar Wilde so expertly skewers in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison,’ his highly ironic appreciation of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, the real-life nineteenth-century artist, forger, and murderer Wilde hails as an accomplished renaissance man. Unwittingly acting out the very dynamic by which decadent texts separate outsiders from insiders, Nordau utterly misses the joke, soberly concluding from ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ that ‘Oscar Wilde apparently admires immorality, sin and crime’ (319).

Nevertheless, I would like to take Nordau at his earnest word long enough to identify what he notices about the complicated dialectic between otherness and community in his observations on the supposed ‘degeneracy’ of the ‘aesthetic school.’ He gets Oscar Wilde wrong in absolutely every way. But paradoxically, Nordau’s observations are so precisely backwards that he ultimately serves as a weirdly useful guide to the subtle set of distinctions by which Wilde repeatedly asserts. When, in a long chapter entitled ‘Ego-Mania,’ Nordau cites one of the wilder paradoxes presented by the Socrates-like interlocutor in ‘The Decay of Lying’ to argue that Wilde himself ego-maniacally insists that artists, not nature, created the fogs of London, we can detect a lack of careful reading. When he similarly ignores the dialogic set-up of ‘The Critic as Artist,’ prefacing, unattributed, a passage in which the speaker, Gilbert, excoriates both realist and romantic poetry by crudely summarizing that ‘[l]ike his French masters, Oscar Wilde despises Nature’ (319), Nordau’s simplification achieves a practically telescopic clarity. In the same way, the so-called ‘symptoms’ of the ‘aesthetic school’ are accurately observed, if oddly diagnosed. For the assertion of a kind of communal otherness, a strange fellowship of antinomianism, is in fact a remarkably important model in aesthetic criticism, one arguably in play from Gautier and Baudelaire to W.B. Yeats. Here I will specifically focus on one provocative iteration of this model in Wilde’s critical writing, though to identify it in the singular is inaccurate: it is an iteration that reiterates, an emphatically singular assertion of Wilde’s aesthetic theory that draws its rhetorical force by repeating famous words Walter Pater forcefully stated decades earlier.

Prompted by Ernest, the dialogue’s conventionally earnest Socratic foil, Gilbert argues against Matthew Arnold’s authoritative dictum that the purpose of criticism is ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’ When Gilbert makes the recognizably Paterian claim that ‘the critic’s sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions,’ an echo of Pater’s own revision of Arnold from the ‘Preface’ to The Renaissance where Pater says the aim of criticism is to ‘see the object as in itself it really is … to me,’ Ernest responds with opprobrium: ‘I seem to have heard another theory of Criticism.’ Earnest Ernest is the voice of the Victorian doxa, systematically presenting the common aesthetic assumptions of his day; in response to every one of the (by my count) eight theses Ernest propounds, Gilbert goes against the doxa, against orthodox opinion with unorthodox, paradoxical reversals of them. Gilbert demonstrates this rhetorical pattern when he recites verbatim Arnold’s phrase, with a mock bow to his authority and hyperbolic description of its wide-spread hegemonic acceptance: ‘Yes: it has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere … that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is.’

We see Wilde’s more obvious contrarian streak in the next sentence, which baldly states its opposition to the ‘revered’ opinion: ‘this is a very serious error.’ This sheer reversal, outrageous and seemingly willfully perverse, is what Wilde is perhaps best known for – for instance, the claim in ‘The Decay of Lying’ that ‘art does not imitate life, rather life imitates art’ (which Nordau the literalist thoroughly misreads). Ernest himself highlights Gilbert’s penchant for reversal, and also seems to do the work for Wilde of showing what a simplistic, or literal, misreading of such reversals might look like when he sums up the elegantly dense and intricate example I am about to read with a pithy wrongness (or at least half wrongness) that could come straight out of Nordau: ‘The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?’ (369) Gilbert somewhat facetiously agrees, ‘Yes, that is my theory,’ but then immediately lays stress on the first part of Ernest’s summary, reminding Ernest and the reader of his reverential description of the ‘highest Criticism’ of Ruskin’s and Pater’s painterly ekphrases. ‘Who cares whether Mr. Ruskin’s views on Turner are sound or not? What does it matter? That mighty and majestic prose of his, so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence … so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet…’ (366). Gilbert’s appreciation continues, positing that even the materiality of Ruskin’s prose surpasses the material achievement and sheer physical vitality of Turner’s ‘sunsets that bleach or rot on their corrupted canvases in England’s Gallery.’ Significantly, the superior achievement of Ruskin’s ‘creation’ stems both from his singularly expressive power of his impression (that is, his ability to express his powerful impression) and from the superior medium of the word.

The notable emphasis on the textuality of Ruskin’s memorable impression makes way for the striking rhetorical presentation of Gilbert’s next example: the impressionistic power of Pater’s description of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa.’ He repeats the rhetorical question with which he first cites Ruskin: ‘Who, again, cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa something that Lionardo never dreamed of?’ The answer, clearly, is that we shouldn’t, as Gilbert clearly does not. He doesn’t because the question of original intention fades to insignificance in the face of the enchanting power of his words. But Gilbert does not merely tell Ernest that this is the case, his example acts it out, in a remarkable anecdotal dialogue within this dialogue:

whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure ‘set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as in some faint light under sea,’ I murmur to myself, ‘She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as St. Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.’ And I say to my friend, ‘The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years man had come to desire,’ and he answers me, ‘Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,” and the eyelids are a little weary.’

The ‘highest Criticism’ does not slavishly devote itself to recording a common sense of what ‘is,’ but rather to recording the critics own -- and only his own -- impressions. Wilde counters Arnold's vision of an objective, universal aesthetic judgment with an aesthetic grounded in the singularity of a unique, personal, subjective judgment. Gilbert offers the example of Pater’s Mona Lisa in response to Ernest’s Arnoldian proposition that criticism is lower than creative art, and serves it. Gilbert also wants to refute Arnold’s imperative that, in its subordinate position, criticism has a duty to serve art faithfully, objectively – and implicitly in such a way that would achieve consensus. For objectivity implies an inclusiveness, a universal assent, that subjectivism by contrast would eschew. Thus the irresponsibility – or in the case of Nordau, the sheer immorality and degeneracy – of an ‘aesthetic school’ devoted to an experience with art that is turned inward, singular, concerned not with communal consensus but rather what Gilbert later calls ‘the cultivation of self-culture.’

Nordau approves of ‘healthy’ individualism, but always implies that such an artist, of robust character and sound mind, does not maintain his individualistic ‘vision’ at the expense of the community. In Wilde, there seems to be an initial step that requires a turn inward, a rigorous and willful attention to the singular impression that gains its integrity by means of an at least implicit ‘separation’ and ‘distinction’ from not only the objective, existing impressions of other – but even from the very work under critical consideration. Only by first asserting this absolute freedom from the work and others can the ‘new creation’ of the aesthete’s impression ‘alone… can be made perfect.’ Gilbert calls this specific kind of creative autonomy ‘the critical spirit,’ and it is not unlike the proper, ‘personal’ individualism Nordau attributes exclusively to the ‘healthy’ author, opposed to the cultish, degenerate notions of the ‘aesthetic schools.’

Thus in ‘The Critic as Artist,’ Wilde's Gilbert proudly, nearly point by point, identifies the virtues of the very ‘aesthetic school’ Nordau condemns as vice. Gilbert too asserts an aestheticism defined both by separation and profound associations, ‘bindings’ created by a tightly held and intimately communicated set of shared ideas. But whereas Nordau opposes these supposedly morbid tendencies to the ‘healthy’ activities the good artist, Gilbert emphatically identifies them with one another. Gilbert’s ideal creator, capable of producing the ‘highest Criticism,’ distinguishes himself by remaining ‘uncompromisingly’ true to his most personal vision, faithful only to his most individual ‘creative impulses.’

From his premise that weak minds fall prey to cultish devotions, Nordau predicts that the genealogy, or ‘natural history of the aesthetic schools’ leads to an inevitable dead end. For devotees paradoxically reproduce ungeneratively; they ‘propagate’ but make nothing new. They are ‘intellectual eunuchs, incapable of producing with their own powers a living mental work, but quite able to imitation the process of production’ (31). Conversely Gilbert maintains that the subjective – even conspicuously idiosyncratic – work of Ruskin and Pater, with the perhaps disproportionate extravagance of their words in relation to the paints and canvases they describe – deserve to be called works of art of the ‘highest kind’ because they produce lasting and intense affect. In their uncompromisingly personal impression, especially Pater’s, the impression is dynamically impressive: has the power of materially impressing itself upon others. This is why Gilbert’s description of the affect of Pater’s Mona Lisa, the uncanny way in which it inspires, indeed inhabits the speech of Gilbert and his friend as they view the Mona Lisa, is so striking. The strange language of possession, the way that Gilbert’s own impression of the Mona Lisa is, after Pater, guided by Pater’s words – indeed becomes Pater’s words – figures the expression of impression, the communication of impression from one impressed aesthete to another, as a scene of inscription. The visual experience of the work comes to be mediated by a text. More strangely, Pater’s words not only communicate themselves uncannily to Gilbert and his friend, they become the means by which the two communicate their transformed impression to one another. The citation of Pater in Wilde’s essay, then, serves as an intricate model for the way in which citation – and here re-citation – becomes a truly generative creative act in its own right.

This model, I would argue, powerfully re-writes the clichéd notion of the ‘aesthetic schools’ as cults of discipleship and slavish recitations of feverishly exclusive dogma, creating an exclusive but thereby sterile environment of shared tired tropes or worse, dead-ended plagiarism. Nordau’s ‘intellectual eunuchs’ only repeat and imitate the existing works of others, generating work that is new only temporally, attenuating and attenuated reiteration that is the opposite of generative. His etiological explanation for this phenomenon harkens back to the deleteriously exclusive group-think of these almost criminally influential leaders and their criminally slavish devotees: ‘Other degenerate, hysterical, neuraesthenical minds flock around [the aesthetic apostle], receive from his lips the new doctrine, and live thenceforth only to propagate it’ (31). But Wilde’s gorgeously sly recitation of Pater’s Mona Lisa does far more than this. Rather than a symptom of degeneracy, Wilde presents it as a triumphant, ecstatic instance of creative generativity. As Pater’s words cross the ‘lips’ of Gilbert, standing before the famous painting, they imagine anew what Lionardo himself ‘lent to the lips of La Gioconda,’ her ‘subtle and poisonous curves’ (367). Through Pater, Gilbert and his friend experience a new exchange with the painting. And furthermore, Pater’s words occasion a communal exchange from one subject to another, as ‘I say to my friend’ and ‘he answers me.’ Wilde’s elegant presentation of this dialogue even extends the communicable affect of Pater’s words by having them come to shape the syntax of Gilbert’s anecdote itself. The accreted ‘and … and… ands’ of Pater’s ekphrasis get mimicked in the dialogic markers I just cited, ‘And I say to my friend,’ ‘and he answers me.’ And then in Gilbert’s next paragraph, where the lesson of his little parable is made clear: ‘And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing, and the music of the mystical prose is ... sweet in our ears,’ and so on. ‘And it is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.’ Through Gilbert’s story, we see that this also famous observation means much more than Ernest’s simplistic summary of it, ‘to see the object as in itself it really is not.’ And that Nordau’s similarly dismissive characterization of the degeneracy of the ‘aesthetic schools’ in general and his disapproving condemnation of Oscar Wilde in particular is itself what’s joyless and dead-end, and gives little credit to the emphatically transformative power of this textual communion with ‘the lips of [Pater’s] doctrine.’

What Nordau would call slavish plagiarism, or what even an ‘objective’ critic might conventionally call citation, I believe demonstrates much more. If we read these passages performatively, if we think of citation with more particularity than the terms ‘plagiarism’ or even ‘intertextuality’ invite, a more suggestive pictures emerges. The specific way in which Wilde makes Pater’s words speak, the way in which he has his characters speak about them, we are better impressed with Gilbert’s critical argument that Pater’s words bring new life (a renaissance) to Leonardo’s work. Just as the Mona Lisa, as Pater tells us, has lived many lives, Pater’s incantation makes her speak again, having her ‘deliver a message far other than that which was put into [the painting’s] lips to say.’

Through his intricately staged, dialogic citation of Pater, Wilde in turn does the same for Pater’s words. He brings them to life again – through communication and within a community, a fellowship of two that signals further fellowship with his readers – that resembles none of the unimaginative assessments Nordau would seem to give it. Neither degenerate nor slavish, obsessional, hysterical, nor dead-ended, Wilde’s restaging of Pater’s criticism produces in its own turn a criticism of the ‘highest kind,’ an expression of the critical spirit at once haunting and alive.

Works Cited:

Nordau, Max. Degeneration (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1968).

Wilde, Oscar. ‘The Critic as Artist,’ in The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

Megan Becker-Leckrone is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Her most recent book is Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory (Palgrave, 2005). In 2006 she was awarded the University’s Morris Award for Excellence in Research and Scholarship in 2006. For permission to quote from this article, please contact Dr Becker-Leckrone @

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