Among other tales, this collection contains "The Remarkable Rocket," Wilde's satirical tale of a personified toy rocket whose ego is so immense that he believes his "setting off" is the cause of a royal celebration, neglecting to see that instead the Prince's marriage is the cause of the communal excitement, and his use only a mere footnote to the party. When the Rocket begins an exhortation on his superiority to the other fireworks and his importance to the future of the Prince and Princess, he pathetically begins to weep, and thus destroys his ability to be ignited. His fuse wet, he gets tossed onto a trash heap where uninterested children, who do not even watch the explosion, set him off as they walk away. And while the narrator tells us, "But nobody saw him," the Rocket dies swearing, "I knew I should create a great sensation." (2) The placement of this tale in Wilde's oeuvre and his gifting it to Ruskin becomes particularly relevant to this article. "The Remarkable Rocket" of 1888 was almost certainly an allegorical rendering of his former friend and famous egotist J. M. Whistler. By the time of this publication, Wilde had detached himself from the chains of Whistler's authority, and in his gift to Ruskin he asserted his symbolic return to the master's school of thought. That Wilde remained ever uncomfortable about Whistler's influence, and tried routinely to exorcise his impact, speaks to Wilde's struggle to reconcile the artistically opposing forces in his life. (3)

Twenty years the senior, Whistler insisted on playing master to the young dandy Wilde, and it is in this association that we are able to understand the evolving relationship between artist and critic during modernism's--and British democracy's--nascence. At this historical moment, when the growing bourgeois public made the critic even more important in directing the art economy, Whistler and Wilde were working out the ramifications of this change in their personal relationship. Whistler resisted and resented the critic's--and the public's--role in sustaining his art. Wilde, however, proved decidedly more fickle, fluctuating between a whistlerian and a Ruskinian philosophy of art. Indeed, the morphing dynamic between Wilde and Whistler reflects the unfolding conflict amongst critic, art, artist, and public in the Victorian period. Here we are able to refract the aesthetic moment and the theoretical clash between the artist's self-understood project and the critic's need to democratize art, to make it understood by the new mass public, through the relationship between these two men. (4)

Beginning this study with the Whistler versus Ruskin trial is particularly useful, for in it we best see Whistler's vociferous and anti-democratic attacks on both the critic and the public and the influence of this position on Wilde's early thinking. In April 1877, Oscar Wilde modestly initiated his career as critic when he reviewed the opening show of the Grosvenor Gallery for the Dublin University Magazine. (5) His review exemplifies his early attitudes toward the coming of modernism, views clearly derived from Ruskin. Wilde elevates that which represents nature most clearly to the highest position of excellence ("It is wonderful what a world of atmosphere and reality may be condensed into a very small space" (6)), although, like Ruskin, he allows brilliance of color to trump precision of image (leaving room for the likes of Turner). Wilde saves his most damning critique for Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (the same picture that Ruskin would make infamous in his own review and the one that Wilde would parody in "The Remarkable Rocket"), mocking it as "certainly worth looking at for about as long as one looks at a real rocket, that is, for somewhat less than a quarter of a minute." (7) Significantly, though, Wilde does offer the American a more diplomatic criticism than Ruskin does (calling his portrait of Carlyle evidence that he is "an artist of very great power when he likes"). This praise reflects the nervousness of the new, undifferentiated critic not wanting prematurely to close potential doors of opportunity. (8)

In perhaps the most famous denunciation of modern art, Ruskin condemned Whistler's highly interpretive Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket: "I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." (9) Ruskin could not reconcile the eccentricity and chaos of image and color with his abiding belief that since nature was in accord with morality, the best art was that which most fully mirrored nature's beauty, and in that mimesis, showed truth. For Ruskin, Whistler's painting was an affront to tradition, a worsening of the current artistic climate, and a potential detriment to future art. Ruskin understood the critic's role to "enable the spectator, in his own person, to understand, or to detect, the alleged merit or unworthiness of the picture; and the true work of the critic is not to make his hearer believe him, but agree with him." (10) His denunciation was intended to dissuade visitors and potential buyers from liking the painting, from ignorantly ascribing it beauty or value (moral, aesthetic, or economic). For the critic whose self-understood role was to direct the aesthetic tastes of a nation, Whistler's approximation, but ultimate failure, of Turner would be too great a risk not to annihilate. (11) In other words, he suspected that Whistler would get away with fraud.

When placed next to traditionally representational work, Whistler's Nocturnes and Symphonies appear a radical departure. His landscapes often appear as kinds of painted palimpsests, ones with thin layers of wash distinct from the central images, lending to each a kind of secondary level of meaning. The musical titles further push the critic away from "reading" the painting's "story." In an age of criticism that favored a central narrative, Whistler eluded those who wanted to apply literary standards to his decidedly plotless pictures. Enlarging the brush stroke to create a smoky effect, Whistler did not take time to paint with the assiduousness of the great masters. (12) Firmly ensconced in the Aesthetic Movement, hailing Gautier's l'art pour l'art as his mantra, a painting for Whistler became the manifestation of the artist's mind, the perfect articulation of the painter's self, not a mere record of sight. Precision gave way to beauty, which alone, even in its utter uselessness, became the standard by which all should be judged. Betokening the coming of modernism, Whistler intentionally exchanged realism for expressionism as the ideal articulation of the artist's mind.

On the witness stand testifying against Ruskin in his libel complaint, Whistler stressed that his paintings were not "views" of specific places, but rather, they were attempts to "represent" places and moments. (13) In other words, Whistler tried to position nature as merely the raw material for his painting, not the inspiration, subject, and object as Ruskin had advocated. Whistler would later develop this in his "Ten O' Clock" lecture, noting "Nature contains the elements of color and form of all pictures--as the keyboard contains the notes of all music--but the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group ... until he brings forth from chaos, glorious harmony." (14) Whistler shifts the creation paradigm from the artist as the transcriber of nature's truths to the artist as fabricator of his--and the world's--own truths. Any critical evaluation of this new art must properly understand the art's aims and methodology; otherwise, the product cannot be rightly understood.

One critical attempt to position the Whistler versus Ruskin trial symbolically is Linda Dowling's The Vulgarization of Art. Dowling convincingly argues that, in this event, Whistler and Ruskin ironically unite in their shared anti-democratic conception of art. whistler, while sitting on the witness stand, advocates "technical criticism by a man whose life is passed in the practice of the science that he criticizes ... I hold that none but an artist can be a competent critic," (15) thus making clear that the general public should not feel justified in making artistic judgments for themselves; rather, only the artist is entitled to give the affirming nod. (16) Likewise, Ruskin's self-conception as critic is bound to his belief that only the critic can say what is good and what is bad, thus what is morally right and what is wrong. As Dowling points out, this trial is a "symbolic episode," as it marks the conclusion--or at least a contradiction--of Ruskin's benevolent vision and the rise of his authoritarianism. (17) The intensely contested question of the trial is what role the critic can and should play as the work of modern painters grows continually more amorphous and abstract. To answer this question through the work of Whistler and Wilde, we must first attempt to configure the artist's new relationship to his work.

The year after Whistler's trial, the Grosvenor Gallery opened its 1879 show and again a young Oscar Wilde reviewed it. This time Wilde conspicuously praises Whistler, suggesting the developing cordiality between the men and Wilde's burgeoning independence from Ruskin. Wilde even dares to call Ruskin's Fors Clavigera remarks "philippics." This brief review marks the beginning of nearly a decade of friendship and collaboration between Wilde and Whistler. (18) Throughout this period, 1879 to 1889, Whistler exerts a tremendous influence, encouraging Wilde to unite with him in his rejection of an aesthetics fused with morality and any type of unscientific criticism; however, where Whistler ultimately could not create a viable critical epistemology, Wilde ends with a more durable, though perhaps naive, theory once he breaks with the painter.

What exists from this time--a couple of Whistler's diatribes, a ream of letters, and the body of Wilde's critical work--becomes a circuitous map of their dynamic relationship. Their respective ideas become so entangled that it is often impossible to tell which one is relying on the resonance of the other. The paucity of Whistler's written work means that we tend to read his later denunciations of Wilde's plagiarism as poor sportsmanship or the irrational rantings of the egoist. Though we cannot always place the chicken and the egg in their proper order, what becomes most interesting here is the way Wilde and Whistler together develop their respective ideologies in fits and starts, collaborating and then, ultimately, diverging.

Ironically, both men exhibit extreme anxiety about imitation, while simultaneously drawing heavily not only on each other, but also on Pater, Swinburne, Gautier, Mallarme, Baudelaire, and others, all of whom lie outside the scope of this essay. (19) Especially late in his career, Wilde shows himself eager to be thought exclusively self-created, thus heightening his prestige. In both The Picture of Dorian Gray and "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," Wilde denounces imitation as "wrong." (20) In both works, Wilde posits artistic innovation as the driving force of society, without debt to collaborators. Not surprisingly, then, Wilde and Whistler's artistic co-dependence founders on dual accusations of plagiarism.

According to legend, when Wilde reported the contents of his "Lecture to Art Students" at the Royal Academy in June 1883 to Whistler at a public dinner, the latter bowed at each successive point, taking credit for his protegee's verbal acumen. (21) Such staged posturing suggests both the ironic formalism of the dandy and Whistler's need to demonstrate publicly his influence on Wilde. While the lecture's theme is the divorce of both the artist and his art from any and all worldly surroundings, Wilde pushes art's singularity further, ridiculing the theory that any one historical period is more "artistic" than another: "All good art ... has nothing to do with any particular century ... there has never been an artistic age, or an artistic people." (22) By severing art's tie to a particular earthly moment, Wilde crafts an aesthetic (one certainly derived from Gautier and Whistler) that reaffirms both beauty's uselessness and her accessibility. While Wilde partially concedes Ruskin's point that the decadence of art comes from the decadence of beauty, he wants to position the artist as less vulnerable to the world's whims; the artist immune or "indifferent" to "ugliness" is the true artist, for he is able to show "things as they are not." (23) As more fully articulated in his 1889 "The Decay of Lying," the artist fabricates beauty out of the growing misery of modern life; as the factory comes to dominate the skyline, the artist should look inward for inspiration to produce beauty. Art (beauty) must exist for itself ("Art never expresses anything but itself") by becoming the vessel for life's energy. For Wilde, art does not imitate life; but rather, life comes to imitate art, turning the mimetic tradition on its head.

Like Wilde, Whistler explicitly intones, "Listen!--there never was an artistic period!" (24) That both men stress this absence suggests that they want to formulate an artistic continuum without a debilitating nostalgia for past masterpieces, one that sees modernity as an equally viable producer of art (as ancient Greece). Selfishly, this paves the way for favorable receptions of their own creative work because the viewer is asked to "read" them as either isolated products of beauty in their own right or valuable products in a line of splendor. Either way, the modern audience is told to believe that art from all periods is equally sacred and that elevating the aged--just because of a passage of time--is foolish.

Whistler's famous "Peacock Room," the year-long decorating project that obsessed the artist and enraged his patron, became a kind of shrine to this ideology. In the room festooned with turquoise and gold detailing--walls and ceiling completely covered--the artist produced a livable space devoid of reminders of modernity, a place that configures decoration as its sole purpose. Likewise, in his own 1885 "Ten O' Clock" lecture, whistler "preached" a similar aesthetic. Though three years after Wilde's lecture, he implies originality with his ornate, heady commands to conceive of art not as an educator, but only a "selfish" force that "seek[s] and find[s] the beautiful in all conditions." (25) Also anti-mimetic, Whistler grants art a radical "force" to drive life. Wilde later "borrows" this strain of Whistler's aesthetic to form the foundation of his conception of forms.

The artist's "brain," the ability to "distill" a "refined essence," and similar scientific metaphors become increasingly important to Whistler. Art becomes greater than reality, creating forms superior to those of nature. This becomes the fertile ground that Wilde, perhaps ironically, develops in "The Decay of Lying." (28) Art is not just superior to nature and reality, but has the power to create nature: "Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place." (29) Nature is reduced from supreme creation to raw material. Whistler articulates this same notion and his painting further exemplifies it. By beginning with "representations" of nature, paring them down to their essence, and then rendering them more beautiful, Whistler moves toward an expressionist, inner-directed epistemology and away from traditional imitation. Emptying art of its need to mirror reality also entails resistance to Ruskin and Arnold's insistence on art's morality. Though Whistler cleanly severs beauty and ethics, Wilde oscillates between the view that art is strictly amoral and the view that individuals, not social groups or institutions, should be the bearers of morality. While these two beliefs are not entirely consistent in Wilde, they both find expression in his philosophy. Wilde's aesthetic supplants art's morality with individual morality (a shift he ironically plays out in The Picture of Dorian Gray), which complements modernity's increasing emphasis on the self. This ideological thread was being woven in 1890, when Wilde deemed "aesthetics higher than ethics." (30) Here Wilde moves beyond Whistler, for he gives humans the ability to "discern beauty" as a method of transcending worldly ethics, and as a way to create new forms. Where the fictional Dorian is able to swindle his portrait into housing all his nefariousness for the bulk of the story, ultimately Wilde resists this fantasy in Dorian's brutal death, betokening an age in which individual behavior and individual relations to art have consequences. One's life, like an art work, does not reflect a preexisting reality or set of moral rules. The life and work must be created--and the individual must be responsible for his actions, his creations. Whistler had devalued realism in favor of the artist as creator years earlier: "The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If a man paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer." (31) In a move typical of their intellectual relationship, Wilde borrows aestheticist seeds that Whistler alone could not bring to fruition and nurtures them with enough subtlety to raise his "own" theories. (32)

Both men also protest against the mass production of art objects in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. For Whistler, the factory destroys the original: "... and the world was flooded with all that was beautiful--until there arose a new class who discovered the cheap.... The taste of the tradesman, supplanted the science of the artist." (33) For Whistler, this transition marks the arrival of kitsch, and yet another demotion of the innovative in a market economy that privileges uniformity and low cost over originality and beauty. Artists once created functional objects, but now the production of such items will be the domain of the factory. The artist must focus his efforts on creating only that which is beautiful and useless; the useful lacks "taste." This hierarchy, of course, calls for a methodology to determine originality, and, thus, value. Whistler's famous insignia (a butterfly) grows larger as his artistic career progresses, suggesting that it becomes evermore important to validate his own work. When Wilde sets out to write "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," for the Fortnightly Review in 1890, he seems to have Whistler in mind when he suggests that "the community by means of organization of machinery will supply the useful things, and the beautiful will be made by the individual." (34) He then proceeds to best Whistler by placing this initial distinction into a more sophisticated articulation of art as "the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want." (35) Where Whistler was only able to express discomfort with mechanization, Wilde here borrows from his friend and confronts consumer culture head on, asserting an absolute divide between the artist and popular demand.

Wilde's debt to Whistler (among others) in his aesthetic formulations is indisputable. This borrowing was not lost on Whistler either, and in their developing relationship, we see not only the origins of Wilde's critical views, but also Whistler's outrage at producing a student who first imitated, then surpassed, and finally contradicted him. Following Wilde's 1889 "The Decay of Lying," in which Whistler recognized his own repositioning of nature as the artist's raw material (amongst other borrowed ideas), Whistler published a biting letter to Wilde in the popular publication Truth. He begins, "Most valiant truth--Among your ruthless exposures of the shams to-day, nothing, I confess, have I enjoyed with keener relish than your late tilt at that arch-imposter and pest of the period the all-pervading plagiarist!" (36) In calling out to the cosmic force of truth in the pages of the newspaper, Whistler attempts to protect his claims on originality, while not betraying any earnest hurt. He announces that he "had, in good fellowship, crammed him, that he might not add deplorable failure to foolish appearance"; nevertheless, his attempt at public humiliation betokens less benevolence. In a comic--and yet pathetic--attempt to save face, Whistler configures Wilde's plagiarism as "his latest proof of open admiration." And then addressing Wilde directly, he adds: "You, Oscar, can go further, and with fresh effrontery, that will bring you the envy of all criminal confreres, unblushingly boast, 'Moi,je prend son bien la ouje le trouve!'" (37) What is striking about this letter, and those that follow, is both Whistler's arrogance (after all, he too had borrowed from Gautier and Swinburne) and his distrust of his former friend. He shamelessly portrays Wilde as a robber of ideas, without regard to his own intentions. Wilde prints his reply a week later in the same paper and first calls Whistler's accusations "deliberately untrue" and then, "as for borrowing Mr. Whistler's ideas about Art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself." (38) Here Wilde both distances himself from his mentor, and turns the finger of accusation on him. Taken in tandem, as a pair of uncomfortably witty epigrams, these letters suggest that while the men shared a similar aesthetic, Wilde recognized a need to break free from the suffocation of Whistler. To do so decisively, he would have to become the critic his teacher scorned.

Thus far we have seen that Ruskin (among others) initially shaped Wilde's aesthetic vision, but that once Wilde came under the influence of Whistler, his conception of art shifted (at least temporarily) toward that of his new master. That Wilde--and Whistler for that matter--dealt poorly with their mutual influence should be apparent in the letters passed between them. More pointedly, however, Richard Ellmann explains that in the original draft of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde wrote the character of Basil Hallward, the painter murdered by Dorian, as a libelous portrait of Whistler. That he removed the telling characteristics in fear of a trial does not lessen the impact of his "homicidal impulse" toward his onetime friend. (39) This biographical detail exemplifies the hostility between the two men by 1890, and the way in which Wilde reconciled, or rather did not reconcile, his influences as his critical career developed. While certainly Whistler proved a difficult personality--pronouncing, "My nature needs enemies" (40)--Wilde also felt it necessary to kill off those who guided him most closely. Beyond its mere gossip value, their relationship is interesting because it highlights the troubled question of criticism's proper role. Wilde most decisively breaks with Whistler in coming to value the cosmopolitan critic. Whistler's hostility to critics, which Wilde first adopted before repudiating him, was influenced by the painter's chronic economic problems and his cherished self-image as a misunderstood genius.

Whistler had vainly hoped to realize a "substantial" sum from the Ruskin trial--and had to plot his next career move with his creditors in mind. (41) Criticism directly influenced a painter's sales. A month after the disappointing verdict, Whistler hastily published the pamphlet Whistler v Ruskin: Art and Art Critics, which offers his most substantial and serious articulation of his hostility toward the critics. He declares "war" between "the brush and the pen," and challenges the "raison d'etre of the critic." (42) Whistler argues that the best art was produced in the times of least criticism, so now he must fight to defuse the power of the pen before it suffocates all innovation. He presents criticism as an institution invested in telling the public what their tastes should be, without any kind of scientific or exacting standards. To that end, he spends fully half of the brief narrative degrading Ruskin--and all critics--as men who cannot comprehend that which they do not practice ("a life passed among pictures does not make a painter else the policeman in the National Gallery might assert himself" (43)). Whistler also insists that formal education is a useless tool for judging art. (44) Just as he wanted to purge art of its goal of educating the masses, he suggests that experiential knowledge is the only tool to understand the picture, and therefore the mind, of the artist.

For Whistler, the critic's work seemed too easy, too effortless, and must therefore be driven by economic motives: "What a commerce it all is, to be sure!" Given the rise of print culture--and particularly the explosion of the newspaper--Whistler's shock at the sheer quantity of criticism, much of it in the form of hurried, three-inch reviews of single paintings, seems reasonable. By dismissing critics as avaricious hacks, motivated solely by their fear of "ennuyering" their audience and wanting to tell the "story" of a picture, whistler generalizes criticism as necessarily disingenuous and, consequently, degrading to his artistic project. (45) For the artist who failed out of West Point, a collapsed and conceited read of art history proves his case. Whistler syllogistically conflates his claim that art criticism is a recent innovation with what he deems the critics' universal nostalgia for past masterpieces, and he emerges with the theory that the best art--according to his "enemies"--is produced in the times of the least criticism.

Whistler rails against the economy of criticism in his 1885 "Ten O' Clock" lecture, deriding the critics as "middlemen" in the art market who "widened the gulf between the people and the painter" by spreading their misunderstanding throughout the population. Whistler, like many of his peers, recognized that his artistic viability was tied directly to middle-class interest in his painting. This population was rapidly expanding and taking its cultural cues not only from the aristocracy, but also from newspaper critics. Whistler claimed that the "unattached writer" could not possibly understand his work, but would only further confuse the ignorant public. The tragedy for Whistler arises from his awareness that at the moment "Art is upon the town," (46) and if the foolish critics did not stop crucifying him, he would surely miss out on a period of art-buying exuberance. Since Whistler deemed much of contemporary art bad, and the critics poor judges of it, the entire aesthetic standards of a nation would be poisoned. Therefore, Whistler often took advantage of the publishing fad of printing one's letters in the newspapers as a way to confront his buyers directly, to meet them on their own terms and advertise his project. Wilde, on the other hand, tries to turn the critic's public hostility to good account when he explains, "an artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified." (47) Not only does this become an eerie foreshadow of the later attacks on Wilde, but also a testament to the way that Whistler grew increasingly vociferous in his arguments, pitting himself against all the major critics of the day. Certainly his widely circulated letters with Tom Taylor and Philip Hamerton, two prominent critics, attest to this need to defend and promote himself publicly.

While the self-righteousness of Art and Art Critics may well have stemmed from his emotional need to point the finger at the critics for his lackluster picture sales in the wake of the trial, by 1885 Whistler is most angered by the critics' tendency to see art from "a literary point of view," and therefore, necessarily to seek a "a literary climax" in each picture. (49) The critic who wants narrative cannot, because of both his ignorance and critical miseducation, understand "the painter's poetry." (50) In other words, Whistler thinks his own modernism defies the conventional vocabulary of criticism, and so critics unfairly denounce his work as bad because they judge it by the wrong criteria. And then, in a string of alliterative expletives, Whistler dilutes the credibility of this argument by categorizing their work as "Exhorting--denouncing--directing--Filled with worth and Earnestness--Bringing powers of persuasion and polish of language to prove nothing! Torn with much teaching--having nought to impart--Impressive--important--shallow. Defiant--distressed--desperate." (51) While this sort of mock pathos may have entertained, it suggests that Whistler's raillery was, at least in part, sport. As he accuses the critics of limited artistic vocabularies, he seems intentionally to adorn his prose with the kind of ingenuity that his critics lack.

Here we see Wilde delighted with Whistler's refusal to win over his audience (the new middle-class consumer); he recognizes that while Whistler may entertain, he has effectively shot himself in the foot and created a completely isolated and untenable role for the artist (one in which he must simultaneously create and judge his, and all other, art). Wilde also takes aim at Whistler's prescribed scientific standards for criticism by showing the "surgeon's" inability to understand the life of the matter. He suggests that the cold-hearted physician cannot possibly have the tools to apprehend (or criticize) beauty. Crucially, Whistler's exhortation becomes the spur for Wilde to conclude "An artist is not an isolated fact," (53) and that the people who surround the artist have the right and ability to discern that which they find beautiful. And Wilde will eventually assert: "nor do I accept the dictum that only a painter is a judge of painting." (54) By denying his teacher's command that painters be the sole judges of painting--offering instead "only an artist is a judge of art"--Wilde repositions the poet as the "supreme artist ... the master of colour and form ... the lord over all life and all arts." (55) Wilde reinvests the artist as a general type with a kind of common sensibility. Accordingly, all creators of beauty share this essence. To claim one specific kind of artist a better judge is necessarily short-sighted. Sheridan Ford, in his introduction to Whistler's 1890 The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, affirms this: "While Art has no need of the Pen, the Public, of which the newspaper is the Voice, has need of Art, and the Pen must be reckoned with," (56) and indeed, such a reconciliation becomes Wilde's goal when he sets out to write his treatise on criticism, "The Critic As Artist."

As we recall, in 1889 Whistler and Wilde exchanged several hostile letters, ones in which Whistler accused Wilde of plagiarizing him in "The Decay of Lying." While in those letters the antagonism is palpable, Wilde decided to terminate decisively all relations with his former mentor by publishing his public repudiation of Whistler's ideology in "The Critic As Artist." In this dialogue, Wilde pits Gilbert (whom most take to be Wilde himself) against Ernest (Whistler) who is hopelessly naive about art and criticism, and must, therefore, rely on the brilliance of his friend to correct his understanding. Ernest asks, Whistler-like, "what is the use of art-criticism?" and later asserts, "Simply this: that in the best days of art there were no art-critics." (57) This fictional baiting finally allows Wilde the opportunity to confront Whistler without giving his opponent the chance to answer. According to Wilde's fantasy, he successfully persuades Whistler of his foolishness.

For Whistler, criticism could only be a destructive force, one degrading to his artistic project and damaging to the tastes of the growing public. In radical opposition, Wilde renders criticism the most elevated, most advanced art form, for it is "the critical faculty" that "invents fresh forms." (58) Because art left to itself endlessly repeats itself (there are only so many stories to be told and most were exhausted in ancient Greece), the critic is needed to mobilize the artist to innovate. Describing him as a mere "honest worker," Wilde demotes the artist's project to "stand[ing] in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings no new element of pleasure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty.... It should be left to the oblivion that it deserves." (59) Though seemingly hyperbolic (after all, Wilde was more artist than critic), Wilde denigrates art in order to cede critics the ability to pick and choose those creations that are most beautiful (remaining true to his aesthetic heritage) and to endow them with the meaning that only arises when they are put in relation with one another over the course of history. Furthermore, as "criticism is itself an art," (60) it need not be "accurate" (unlike Whistler's demands for a science of criticism) or "sound." What matters instead is the critic's splendor of image and perfection of structure; because he discovers greater meanings in the art object than its creator could have envisioned, "the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is, and reveals to us a secret." (61)

Wilde now rehabilitates Ruskin (another underhanded insult to Whistler) as an artist greater than the producers of the work he criticizes: "That mighty and majestic prose of his [Ruskin], so fervid and so fiery-coloured in its noble eloquence, so rich in its elaborate symphonic music, so sure and certain, at its best, in subtle choice of word and epithet." (62) Indeed, Wilde borrows Whistler's formulation of nature as the artist's raw material and transposes nature for art itself, making the objective "even more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not.... To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes." (63) To effectively invert Arnold's critical paradigm, allowing the critic to play the role of the artist, Wilde is forced beyond Whistler's requisite objective standards to a configuration of subjective criticism. (64)

In his design of criticism's goal ("to see the object as in itself it really is not"), Wilde affords the critic freedom not to measure the art object by what is real. The artist and critic would, therefore, be free to abide by their own subjectivities and sensibilities, making criticism "the only civilized form of autobiography." (65) The critic must also "intensify his own personality" in the interpretive process. (66) Because the critic describes himself through his interpretation of art, he forces the reader also to recognize continuity between himself (the reader) and the art object. Where Whistler saw his art as the perfect realization of his mind, Wilde instead posits high criticism as the perfect realization of the critic's self. Wilde's insistence on the power of masks to facilitate the artist's truth-telling now extends to the critic as well.

For Wilde the best critic could never be the artist himself. The act of initial creation must always overwhelm the artist's pool of energy and he must focus all his concentration on reproducing his artistic vision from his mind's eye. Such an act necessarily means elevating one's own work above all else. Wilde explains: "To the great poet, there is only one method of music--his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting--that which he himself employs. The aesthetic critic, and the aesthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal." (67) By understanding art as directly appealing to the critic, Wilde fashions a bridge from critic to consumer. Because the critic is endowed with the ability to rightly judge art, he can legitimately direct the tastes of the public. Under this paradigm the artist becomes a kind of mere middleman between the force of art itself and the critic who will teach the public to understand that which is new. It is not surprising that Wilde would fashion this role for the critic in 1890, when the majority of his work to that time had been critical; he had yet to publish a novel and his major plays were unwritten. In other words, he did not feel the economic impact of criticism as Whistler did. Ironically, Whistler would, before his death, gain the critical and popular admiration that he desired all along, while Wilde would be remembered not for his criticism but for his novel and plays, the same work used to convict him in his indecency trial and the same work that ultimately cost him his life.

Finally, Wilde's idealized "cosmopolitan critic" is able to reinvent or renew art in order that it may be continually relevant to the day. Here Wilde seems most optimistic in his sense that criticism "will annihilate race-prejudices, by insisting on the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war on another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element." (68) Because Wilde is generally far less earnestly political than this moment suggests, here he seems a bit Victorian. Surveying Britain and its Empire, he recognizes the racial struggles of his time, and so fashions a panacea made from the raw material of art. As criticism develops into this independent, and socially relevant art form, we are forced to recognize that art and beauty do have value. While Wilde remains unwilling to afford art a strictly utilitarian value, he implicitly affords it a social value by making it the only means to his political vision of a world at peace. Indeed, Wilde explodes Whistler's aestheticism; he surpasses "art for art's sake," offering instead, art for the sake of humanity.

Notes

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to John McGowan, Mark Oppenheimer, and Katherine Stirling for their helpful comments and generous insight on this article.

(1.) Oscar Wilde letters, "To John Ruskin," June 1888, Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde, Rupert Hart-Davis, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 71.

(2.) Oscar Wilde, "The Remarkable Rocket," Stories: Oscar Wilde (1888; London: Collins Press, 1952) 382.

(3.) While studying at Oxford, Wilde oscillated between his appreciation of Pater and his devotion to Ruskin. He tried on the theories of one and then the other, seeking to determine which best fit his own inchoate theories of art. Ellmann writes, "these worthies gradually passed into more complicated blends of Catholicism, Freemasonry, aestheticism, and various styles of behavior, all embraced fervently but impermanently," and later: "He would be neither a Catholic nor a Freemason; aesthetic one moment, he would be anaesthetic the next." Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988) 98-99.

(4.) Recent scholarship on the relationship between Wilde and Whistler has tended toward single, histericized chapters in their respective biographies and passing nods to their joint representation in the bohemian Victorian scene. The only sustained and scholarly consideration of Wilde and Whistler's relationship is the thorough, but aged, essay by Birgit Borelius: "Oscar Wilde, Whistler and Colours." Scripta Minora Regiae Societatis Humaniorum Litterarum Lundensis, 3 (1966-1967), 5-62. Borelius convincingly traces the Whistlerian influence on Wilde's poetry and fiction, along with the influences of Swinburne, Pater, and Ruskin. Borelius, however, does not consider Wilde's critical writing as derivative of Whistler, and therefore does not have direct impact on my discussion. The best recent scholarship on Wilde's critical writings includes the following: Julia Brown's Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde's Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), Bruce Bashford's Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Humanist (London: Associated University Press, 1999), and Richard Ellmann's "The Critic as Artist as Wilde," which I take from Harold Bloom's edited collection Modern Critical Views: Oscar Wilde (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1985).

(5.) Oscar Wilde, "The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877," The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: Miscellanies, Robert Ross, ed. (1877; London: Reutledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993), XIV: 5-23. As a testament to Wilde's seeking the approval of his intellectual mentors,he sent a copy of his first review to Pater, even though they had yet to meet. Ellmann sees this review as "congruent" with Pater's appreciate of Correggio (Ellmann, 83).

(6.) Wilde, "The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877," 9.

(7.) Ibid., 18.

(8.) Ibid., 19.

(9.) John Ruskin, "Letter 79: Life Guards of New Life," Fors Clavigera, 7 (July 1877), in The Works of John Ruskin, E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, eds. (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 29: 160.

(10.) Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint:Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1992), 49. (11.) Ibid., 52.

(12.) By viewing the paintings at an angle, one is able to perceive the washed surface. In both the series of Nocturnes and the series of Symphonies, Whistler's fluid style is most apparent.

(14.) James McNeill Whistler, "Mr. Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock' 20 February 1885," Whistler on Art: Selected Letters and Writings, Nigel Thorp, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 84.

(15.) Merrill, 148.

(16.) Here Whistler takes his cues from Baudelaire: "il n' y a que les poetes pour bien comprendre les poetes," in Robin Spencer, "Whistler, Swinburne and art for art's sake," After the Pre-Raphelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England, Elizabeth Prettejohn, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 61.

(17.) Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 41.

(18.) Though Wilde and Whistler met in 1878, they began to spend substantial amounts of time together in 1881 once Wilde moved to 3 Tire Street, becoming a neighbor to Whistler at 13 Tite Street. Roy McMullen, Victorian Outsider: A Biography of J. A. M. Whistler(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1973), 223.

(19.) It seems Whistler was also anxious about borrowing artistically. In a letter to fellow artist Albert Moore, Whistler apologizes for an embarrassingly similar "sentiment of movement" in one of his "sketches" to that of one of Moore's paintings. J. M. Whistler, "To Albert Moore: Comparison of his own work to that of Moore," September 1870. See Thorp's Whistler on Art: Selected Letters and Writings, 40.

(20.) In "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," he writes: "All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.... There are as many perfections as there are imperfect men. And while to the claims of charity a man may yield and yet be free, to the claims of conformity no man may yield and remain free at all." Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," De Profundis and Other Writings, Hesketh Pearson, ed. (1889; New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 30. (21.) Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 239.

(22.) Oscar Wilde, "Lecture to Art Students," Essays and Lectures: Oscar Wilde (1883; New York: Garland, 1978), 201-202.

(23.) Ibid., 209.

(24.) Whistler, "Ten O'Clock," 82.

(25.) Ibid., 80.

(26.) Wilde, "Decay," in De Profundis and Other Writings, Hesketh Pearson, ed. (1889; New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 86.

(27.) Wilde, "Lecture," 86.