Oscar Wilde ca. 1882. Photograph: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Liberation of the Artist from Neoclassicism to Aestheticism

It’s no secret that some dramatic writers have struggled to be accepted in their time. From the ancient Agora of Athens to the theaters of Renaissance London and even in today’s online social networks, writers have found themselves subject to withering ridicule, critical disdain, state censure, and sometimes violence. Often, throughout history, these writers are members of marginalized communities—cursed at birth with two X chromosomes and doomed to suffer for the sins of Eve or finding themselves attracted to the same sex—and so their works were judged by their contemporary critics, not on their merits, but on those prejudices held against the artist merely for the simple fact of who they were at heart. This essay will examine two popular literary-critical theories, Neoclassicism and Aestheticism, and demonstrate how two marginalized English writers in their time, Aphra Behn and Oscar Wilde, harnessed the tenets of these theories to push back against bigotry, chauvinism, and elitist notions of what constituted worthy forms of art. In so doing, one can see how the phrase “art for art’s sake,” at its core, reaches back to the fundamental human desires for freedom of expression, to be able to live authentically and to share that authenticity of self with the world through art.

Neoclassicism bloomed from the early seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth century on the tail end of the Renaissance as Europe lurched into modernity. The movement broadly encompassed the visual arts, theater, literature, architecture, and music. Furthering the humanist values of the Renaissance, it championed a renewed appreciation for the literary styles, classical modes of reasoning, and artistic culture of Roman and Greek antiquity. Proponents of Neoclassicism, nostalgic for a bygone era of art and criticism, derived from the teachings of ancients like Plato, Aristotle, and Horace a deep emphasis on the interlinked concepts of imitation and nature. Imitation, quite simply, means that critics and artists of the day ought to embody these higher precepts practiced by the ancients in a renewed appreciation for objectivity, reason, and the need for art to impart a moral lesson. Nature, in one sense, speaks to what Neoclassicists saw as the perfect ordering of the universe vis-à-vis the natural world. Informed by Newtonian physics, it references the stars, the planets, and the Earth and all its natural beings contained therein—a vast machine subject to absolute laws; everything with a purpose and everything in its place: Objective. Rational. Impersonal. (Habib 99) This great hierarchy stretches from God, who is infinite and unchanging, through the heavens to the angels, through finite and mortal humankind, and finally through the animals ordered by their degrees of intellect. We see this emphasis on nature occasionally reflected in art of the time to signal an upending of this order when something “unnatural” occurs. Shakespeare’s Hamlet declares that “Time is out of joint” in Denmark after Claudius murders his way to the throne. Likewise, ranting King Lear wanders across a desolate heath amid a furious lightning storm to demonstrate the depths of his madness. Mary Shelley’s repeated reliance on foul weather to foreshadow the terrible fate awaiting Victor Frankenstein at the hands of his unholy creation is arguably a callback to this dramatic device. “Nature,” insofar as it represented a pathway toward greater truths, was a matter of moral significance to Neoclassicists. It was down this pathway that they saw such truths to be imitated in the classical precepts of Greece and Rome, and no one of the period better articulated and applied these precepts than Alexander Pope.

Pope, in keeping with a theme, was an outcast in his day. Born in London in 1688 at the outset of the Glorious Revolution as the son of a Catholic linen merchant, Pope’s family found themselves on the wrong side of England’s anti-Catholic fervor. Forced to move away from London and banned from any official schooling, Pope was privately tutored in Greek and Latin by a local priest, leading to his keen admiration of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. It was with this education that he waded into the “imitation” of the ancients and, a week before his twenty-third birthday in 1711, published An Essay on Criticism, which masterfully articulates the principles of Neoclassical literary criticism and artistic aesthetics. (Leitch, et al. 367-369)

None of the views Pope advanced in the volume were original to him, but where his Essay shines is in its use of heroic couplets, an artful verse form evocative of Horace’s Ars Poetica. Like the lyrical verses the Roman poet set down in 19 BCE to advise on the best practices of crafting poetry and drama, Pope adopts a breezy tone with his readers, seeking to resurrect what ought to be familiar teachings and breathe fresh life into the wisdom of classical thought in the hope that they will be applied to the “modern” world. “Like many writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he judges literature to be plagued by ill-informed, careless, proud, and pompous critics, whose mistaken evaluations of texts mislead authors as well as readers.” (Leitch, et al. 368) Here we see a belief that will be echoed later by Behn and Wilde that the stagnation of literary criticism is, in turn, results in the stagnation of the very art it is appraising. Core to Pope’s argument was his assertion that criticism as a scholarly method had been in a steady state of decline from its rational and moral apex under the Greeks and Romans when towering critics like Longinus and Hermogenes earnestly considered how writers could sharpen their craft and helped readers to appreciate their work. An Essay on Criticism was his attempt to reverse this spiral by offering, like Horace in Ars Poetica, a series of “best practices” with observations and bits of wisdom aimed at his readers on the nature of art and the value of studying the ancient minds.

The greatest works of art, according to Pope, are born of an extensive study of nature and the sound principles of reason, harmony, and order that nature alone can teach humanity. The classical artists were attuned with “nature,” he argued, and so their works rightfully evoke these universal truths. Any contemporary artist hoping to emulate their greatness must likewise open themselves to the timelessness of the natural world, a point impressed in the following lines:

First follow NATURE, and your Judgement frame

By her just Standard, which is still the same:

Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,

One clear, unchang’d, and Universal Light,

Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,

At once the Source, and the End, and Test of Art.” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 371)

Pope declares in this passage that following nature and its eternal qualities is the first and foremost directive for any critic looking to measure the value of art, yet he does not stop there. According to him, critics and artists alike must not just be attuned with nature, but with themselves and each another, and come equipped with a finely honed moral sense and purpose.

While it is the artist’s job to channel their expression in a way that will most authentically convey nature, Pope commits sections of his Essay to explain what he feels a proper critic must keep in mind when judging the artist. One bit stands out: “In ev’ry Work regard the Writer’s End, / Since none can compass more than they Intend” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 373). This is an impressive display of grace demonstrated by Pope for his time. He is asking the critic to spare an ounce of humanity for the artist, give them the benefit of the doubt and base their interpretation on the artist’s intention. Race, religion, sexuality, social class, etc., seemingly has little to do with Pope’s theory of good and proper criticism. Essentially, a critic should not pass judgment on a poem, a play, a painting, whatever, without first being acutely familiar with the artist they are examining. “Judge the art by its own merits,” Pope might say, “and not the warped lens through which you may see the artist.” This idea might have found welcome reception by many artists and writers throughout history who never had a chance to be honestly appraised on their talent due to the innate bigotry and half-baked misconceptions harbored by scores of critics all around them. A generation before Alexander Pope published his Essay, one London playwright demanded such a fighting chance from hers.

Lauded by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own with the line, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,” Behn is most remembered as one of the first women to earn a living as a writer. (Leitch, et al. 326) Although many details of her early life are unclear, it is believed that her unfortunate family situation, coupled with the untimely death of her husband—a Dutch merchant, thought to have died of the plague—forced Behn to find the means to support herself. After a stint in a debtor’s prison and serving as a spy in Antwerp, she tried her little lingering luck on London’s raucous theater industry and began an unlikely career as a dramatist and accidental literary critic. Behn wrote at a time of major political and social upheaval in England. The Restoration, which began in 1660, saw King Charles II return from exile in France, ending the twenty-year Interregnum of failed republican experiments under the Puritan movement. For English actors and playwrights, the Restoration brought about the reopening of theaters after their closure by the Puritans for supposedly fostering acts of frivolity and immorality. Alongside this reopening was the revolutionary development that women, as opposed to boys, could now play women’s roles. (Leitch, et al. 327-328) The advent of actresses on London’s stages undoubtedly aided Behn’s status as a playwright, who wrote prolifically throughout her career. However, her gender prevented her from ever being seen as respectably as her male colleagues, a frustration she met with utter contempt.

Behn’s contribution to Neoclassical literary criticism was likely unintentional but is marked by two distinct works, both soaked in her characteristic acerbic wit: the “Epistle to the Reader,” prefacing her third play, The Dutch Lover (1673), and the preface to The Lucky Chance (1687), which was written near the end of her life. While her views track closely with most Neoclassical dogma of the day—emphasizing reason, objectivity, and realism—she would hardly find herself in lockstep with the likes of Alexander Pope, and she certainly wouldn’t have seen much value in imitating ancient Greek and Roman scholars. The constant sexism Behn faced as a woman playwright makes her thoughts on criticism highly individualistic and deliberately geared to buck tradition. In her “Epistle” to The Dutch Lover, Behn denounces the “Academick frippery” around the “musty rules of Unity”—those being the three dramatic unities of time, place, and action—then confesses further that her intent in writing the play was “only to make this as entertaining as I could,” before declaring that the audience, not the critics, will judge her success (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 329-334). Behn is complementary to Pope here in that she, too, is out to expose the elitist rot undermining the foundations of late seventeenth-century literary theory but rejects two significant tenets of Neoclassicism when she dismisses the unities of drama and Horace’s maxim that good literature must instruct a moral lesson as well as delight.

Written fourteen years later, her preface to The Lucky Chance is a frontal assault on the blatant sexual biases she faced daily and the double standards of critics condemning her plays as indecent—“those Censures that Malice, and ill Nature have thrown upon it, tho’ in vain”—despite male playwrights staging similar “indecencies” with few complaints. In a touching show of honesty eerily prescient of A Room of One’s Own, Behn levels with her critics and asks if they could just pretend and appraise her work as if she was a man and afford her the chance to succeed as so many writers before her: “All I ask, is the Privilege for my Masculine Part the Poet in me… to tread in those successful Paths my Predecessors have so long thriv’d in” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 334-337). Behn’s frustration is vivid. Perhaps most affecting is the knowledge that, in the face of the routine sexism and double standards that plagued her career, writing was not a matter of entertainment for Behn; it was her livelihood. It was not merely a hobby; it was her only means to support herself. The misogyny she invited on herself by choosing to produce and share her art with strangers again and again and again was a direct existential threat to her wellbeing, and she kept going. Behn believed in what she was doing, and yet, cast outside the mainstream due to the most basic fact of her human identity, she could never be fully appreciated and validated as an artist in her lifetime. Like Pope, Behn implored her critics to “regard the writer’s intent,” to first try and identify with the artist on a human level before attempting to examine the worth and legitimacy of their artistic expression. Within two centuries, this notion would become fully liberated, and at once, anything could be art so long as it made the subject feel something. There was no longer any need to link it back to “classical precepts” or the “universal truths of nature”—and, beyond that, all art was quite useless anyway.

Aestheticism was another movement, not as broad as Neoclassicism, but crucial to the development of postmodern theory and criticism, that positioned itself as anathema to the mainstream values of late-nineteenth-century Victorian culture, which had long produced its own literature and art permeated with moral earnestness and prudish attitudes in the service of important ethical roles. The movement gained prominence in England after the summer of 1865 when Walter Pater, an Oxford essayist and tutor, returned from his first continental sojourn to Italy. Pater was taken by the style of art produced by Florence’s Renaissance masters of the fifteenth century. The paintings and other works of art he saw there gave him “a richer, more daring sense of life than any to be seen in Oxford.” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 711) He was so affected by the tip that, to him, knowing and experiencing Renaissance art was something more that he felt, intimately, in a way that belied any attempt to logically describe why he found the experience so aesthetically pleasing.

Back home, Pater first coined the English phrase, “art for art’s sake,” and developed a new theory that placed emphasis “on artistic autonomy, on aesthetic experience as opposed to aesthetic object, and on experience in general as an ever-vanishing flux” that must be continuously pursued. (Habib 177-178) In an 1866 study of Coleridge for the Westminster Review, Pater offered an early thesis for Aestheticism, claiming that “Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the ‘relative’ spirit in place of the ‘absolute.’ … To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under certain conditions.” By 1873, Pater had published Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which served as a treatise on his concept of art as religion and declares on the opening page, “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative.” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 711-713) Whereas Neoclassicism focused on humanity and nature as a hierarchy, Aestheticism focused on beauty for beauty’s sake without any thought for the sticky Victorian issues of morality and ethics. Whereas Neoclassicism was fundamentally conservative and communal, Aestheticism was fundamentally modern and individualistic in a way that emancipates the subjective experience of art, and the artist, from preexisting religious, societal, or philosophical constraints. In many respects, it was the natural endpoint for Western culture’s relationship to art, when an aesthetic experience can be bereft of any greater meaning whatsoever if the subject or the artist wish to perceive it that way. This exaltation of the aesthetic experience above all else earned Pater his share of detractors. Some reviews ofStudies attacked Pater for supposedly advocating hedonism and “pleasure as the highest good and self-gratification as the best rule for the conduct of life.” (Leitch, et al. 712) Other more traditional contemporaries of Pater were dismayed by the fact that Aestheticism is secular from top to bottom. For the first time since Plato—through the long run of aesthetic criticism, from Rome to the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment—God, or any concept of morality and order to the universe, was absent from this school of thought. For the first time, one could credibly claim that a work of art was beautiful, not because it conveyed the absolute truths of nature or was crafted by the human spirit in the perfect image of a higher power, but because it moved them. Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance was one of the earliest harbingers of our modern concepts of art and life, so perhaps it is no surprise that one of the most forward-looking, progressive, and independent young minds of the late nineteenth century flew to Aestheticism like a moth to a flame.

Born in Dublin in 1854 to Anglo-Irish intellectuals, Oscar Wilde was of age at a time when his contemporary writers on the island such as W.B. Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Lady Gregory, John Synge, and others were busy orchestrating a grand revival of Irish culture through plays, music, poetry, literature, and art that celebrated their Gaelic heritage and showed that Ireland was much more than a backwater British Crown colony. However, Wilde wanted nothing to do with this. After studying at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, he spent much of the rest of his life in London, where he became a celebrated poet and playwright whose works satirized the morals of late-Victorian English society and later became concerned with issues of aesthetics and the supremacy of art. Wilde was an early student of Walter Pater and one of Aestheticism’s most ardent champions, seeing the movement as a means toward greater freedom of expression and dissent, to buck the status quo loudly and unambiguously. In a series of three works published at the turn of the 1890s, Wilde exhibited his views on aesthetics, decadence, morality, the relationship between art and criticism, and his rejection of absolutes.

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)—his only novel, which tells the story of a beautiful young man who seems never to age while his portrait grows old and fades over time as a symbol of his soul’s corruption—Wilde offers readers a series of pithy aphorisms. In no more than a page’s worth of text, he states that the “artist is the creator of beautiful things” and that, in his view, the “critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things;” proclaims that “There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book,” and “The artist can express everything;” but, most provocatively, ends the preface with the declaration that, in fact, “All art is quite useless.” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 765-766) With this preface, Wilde briefly sketches an overview of what would become his own, more encompassing brand of Aestheticism.

In two essays published the following year, “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist,” revisits the topics of art and criticism in the preface to Dorian Gray and aggressively expands upon them. Presented as conversations in the vein of a Socratic dialogue between two pairs of characters, Wilde utilizes his mouthpiece in each, Vivian and Gilbert, to voice his claims. As for art, he argues that “Art never expresses anything but itself,” while “The highest art rejects the burden of the human spirit … She develops purely on her own lines. She is not symbolic of any age. It is the ages that are her symbols.” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 766-767) Whereas for criticism, he insists that “Criticism is itself an art … the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is … in itself, and to itself, an end” (qtd. in Leitch, et al. 774). With this statement, Wilde advances Aestheticism beyond anything Pater proposed. It is no longer enough, he says here, for just art to be separated from any religious, societal, or philosophical constraints. Criticism is itself an art, and now it must come, too. Wilde demands that this package deal that had been lumped together for over two thousand years—art and criticism, inseparable—should be fully autonomous from each other and all other constraints. Art should be its own thing, and criticism should be its own thing. No other considerations should come between the art and its artist, between the art and its subject, or between the art and its critic—and no critic should have to appraise art based on any preconceived notions of what makes it good or not. Wilde went to great lengths to champion Aestheticism and the ultimate autonomy of art and criticism, for the right of the artist to express “everything.” It would be worth asking why, looking beyond the obvious issues of freedom of dissent and contesting the status quo of conservative Victorian society to the possibility of something more profound and more tragic at play.

Being unable to authentically express who you are as a human being is akin to losing your sense of sight or hearing. It hobbles your ability to interact with the external world, and over time, as a means of survival, other modes of self-expression are strengthened, which often manifests through art.

Oscar Wilde, we know now, was a closeted gay man. He had a wife and two sons. In 1895, on the opening night of his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde was outed by the Marquess of Queensberry, a British aristocrat and the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde sued the Marquess for criminal libel, but the trial uncovered evidence of his affairs with men. He, in turn, was arrested for gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labor, the maximum penalty. On his release, Wilde immediately left England for France, where he died three years later of meningitis at forty-six, penniless and broken. Wilde lived with and suppressed this secret his entire adult life, knowing all the while that, even at the height of his fame and creative prowess, one careless misstep, one callous betrayal from someone he trusted, could destroy him almost overnight. Like Aphra Behn, the very production of his art represented an existential threat, and yet he did it anyway.

This great showman, renowned for his legendary wit and unrivaled conversational skill across London’s highest rung of society, put up a façade for the masses.

With that truth in mind, it isn’t hard to imagine why Wilde placed such value on freedom of artistic expression. The principles of Aestheticism—that the artist can express everything, that art never expresses anything but itself, that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, that the only important relationship in art is the experience between the subject and the object— when taken together, allowed Wilde to write sub-textually about his sexual orientation, in full view of Victorian society. The Picture of Dorian Gray is heavily queer coded insofar as the actions and relationships between the characters, especially Basil Hallward and his infatuation with Dorian, can be interpreted as homoerotic. However, Wilde’s maxim that art expresses nothing but itself, that there is thus nothing to be gleaned between the lines, that if a reader interprets the book in that way, it says more about the reader and their subjective relationship with the art, cleverly deflects any blame from the artist. Aestheticism enabled Wilde to authentically, albeit artistically, express who he was as a human being without the trouble of deeper meanings and interpretations because, beyond that, all art was quite useless anyway.

Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. “’Epistle to the Reader’ from The Dutch Lover.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 329-334.

Behn, Aphra. “Preface to The Lucky Chance.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 334-337.

Habib, M.A.R. Literary Criticism from Plato to the Present: An Introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Pater, Walter. “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 713-719.

Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 370-383.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 770-783.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying: An Observation.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp. 766-770.

Wilde, Oscar. “Preface toThe Picture of Dorian Gray.”The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 3rd ed., W.W. Norton, 2018, pp.765-766.