by Umberto Eco
The world is divided into two classes; those who do the improbable, like everyone else, and those who believe the incredible, like me.
Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
Excess is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like moderation.
There is a fatality about good resolutions—they are always made too late.
There is a fatality about wicked resolutions—they are always made at the right time.
To be premature is to be perfect
To be premature is to be imperfect.
To be perfect is to be premature.
Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.
Knowledge is like a delicate exotic fruit: touch it and the bloom is gone.
The more we study Art the less we care for Nature.
The more we study Nature the less we care for Art.
Sunsets are quite old-fashioned. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of provincialism.
Sunsets are back in fashion. They belong to the time when Turner was the last note in art. To admire them is a distinct sign of one's modernity.
Beauty reveals everything because it expresses nothing.
Beauty reveals nothing because it expresses everything.
No married man is ever attractive, except to his wife. And often, I'm told, not even to her.
Every married man is attractive, except to his wife. But often, I'm told, even to her.
Dandyism, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty.
Dandyism, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute unmodernity of beauty.
Conversation should touch everything but should concentrate itself on nothing.
Conversation should touch on nothing but should concentrate itself on everything.
I love talking about nothing. It's the only thing I know everything about.
I love talking about everything. It's the only thing I know nothing about.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being clear.
Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it.
Anyone can write history. Only a great man can make it.
The English have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
The English have nothing in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.
It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.
It is only the old-fashioned that ever becomes modern.
If we had to stop here our verdict on Wilde would be quite severe: the very incarnation of the dandy (though Lord Brummel and even Wilde's own beloved Des Esseintes got there first), he does not bother distinguishing paradoxes, those bearers of outrageous truths, from aphorisms, which contain acceptable truths, or from reversible aphorisms, which are mere jeux d'esprit that are indifferent to the truth. And in any case, Wilde's ideas on art would appear to authorize his behavior, seeing that no aphorism ought to aim at either utility, truth, or morality, but only beauty and elegance of style.
However, this pursuit of aesthetic and stylistic provocation would not be enough to absolve Wilde, since he did not manage to distinguish between paradoxical provocation and mere fatuousness. As we know, to be true to his own principles he should have been sent to prison not for having loved Lord Douglas but for having sent him letters with lines like this: "It is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should have been made no less for music of song than for madness of kisses"—and not only for this, but also for having maintained during his trial that the letter was a stylistic exercise and a kind of sonnet in prose.
The Picture of Dorian Gray was condemned by the London judges for thoroughly stupid reasons, but from the point of view of literary originality, despite its undoubted charm, it is merely an imitation of Balzac's Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass's Skin) and broadly copies (even though this was admitted indirectly) Huysmans' A rebours. Mario Praz noted that Dorian Gray also owes very much to Lorrain's Monsieur de Phocas, and even one of Wilde the aesthete's fundamental maxims ("No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity itself is a crime") is a version of Baudelaire's "A dandy can never be a vulgar man: if he commits a crime, he would lose none of his reputation, but if this crime were caused by a trivial motive, the damage done to his honor would be irreparable."
Nevertheless, as Alex Falzon commented in the Italian edition of Wilde's aphorisms cited above, it is difficult to collect aphorisms by an author who has never written a book of aphorisms—so that what we consider aphorisms were created not to shine alone, devoid of any context, but in a narrative or theatrical work, and therefore said by someone in a particular context. For instance, can one consider an aphorism weak if the author puts it in the mouth of a ludicrous character? Is what Lady Bracknell says in The Importance of Being Earnest an aphorism: "To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness"? Hence the legitimate suspicion that Wilde did not believe in any of the aphorisms he pronounced, nor even in the best of his paradoxes: he was only interested in putting on stage a society capable of appreciating them.
In places he actually says as much. Consider this dialogue from The Importance of Being Earnest.
ALGERNON: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.
JACK: Is that clever?
ALGERNON: It is perfectly phrased! And quite as true as any observation in civilised life should be.
Thus Wilde should be seen not as an immoral creator of aphorisms but, rather, as a satirical author, a critic of society's morals. The fact that he lived within that society's set of morals is a different matter, for that was his misfortune.
Let us reread The Picture of Dorian Gray. With just one or two exceptions, the most memorable aphorisms are voiced by ludicrous characters like Lord Wotton. Wilde does not offer them to us as aphorisms for life, which he himself could guarantee.
Lord Wotton pronounces, albeit wittily, an endless series of commonplaces about the society of his time (and precisely for this reason Wilde's readers enjoyed his false paradoxes): A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen. The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it. The one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties (though later Lord Wotton will say that the real drawback of marriage is that it makes one unselfish). I don't suppose that ten per cent of the proletariat live correctly. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless but cannot. I don't want money: it is only people who pay their bills who want that, and I never pay mine. I do not desire to change anything in England, except the weather. To get back one's youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies. Men marry because they are tired, women because they are curious. No woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. Women are wonderfully practical, much more practical than we are: we often forget to say anything about marriage and they always remind us. When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy. The real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial (who knows if Wotton had read The Communist Manifesto, where he would have discovered that the poor have nothing to lose but their chains?). To adore is better than being adored: being adored is a nuisance. For every effect we produce we make an enemy, so to be popular we have to be mediocre. Anybody can be good in the country; there are no temptations there. Married life is nothing but habit. Crime is the exclusive preserve of the lower classes: crime is for them what art is for us, a way out of the ordinary sensations. Murder is always a mistake: one should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner....
Alongside this series of banalities, which become brilliant only because he fires them out one aft
er the other (just as in lists where the most trite words can astonish us through the incongruous relationship they set up with other equally trite words), Lord Wotton shows a particular genius for identifying commonplaces that would not be worthy even of being used in wrapping papers for chocolates, and then making them interesting by reversing them:
Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.
What I want is information: not useful information, of course, but useless information.
'I assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans.' 'How dreadful!'
I can sympathize with everything except suffering.
Nowadays most people ... discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
I don't think I am likely to marry. I am too much in love [but this is Dorian, infected by his master].
My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really the shallow people.
There is always something infinitely mean about other people's tragedies.
Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest of motives.*
Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others.
A man can be happy with any woman as long as he does not love her.
It is better to be beautiful than to be good.†
Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues.
The only people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much younger than myself.
Only shallow people do not judge by appearances.
It is perfectly monstrous the way people go around, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.
The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.
One cannot deny that Lord Wotton invents some effective paradoxes however, such as:
I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects.
American girls are as clever at concealing their parents as English women are at concealing their past.
Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic.
I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable.
I like Wagners music better than anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says.
When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self and one always ends by deceiving others.
A grande passion is the privilege of people who have nothing to do.
Women inspire us with the desire to create masterpieces and always prevent us from carrying them out.
The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.
But Lord Wotton's paradoxes are more commonly reversible aphorisms (the reversals are, of course, my own):
Sin is the only real colour element left in modern life.
Virtue is the only real colour element left in modern life.
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
Humanity does not take itself seriously enough. It is the
world's original sin. If the caveman had known how not to laugh, history would have been different.
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Men represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as women represent the triumph of mind over morals.
The truth is that Dorian Gray portrays the inanity of Lord Wotton, and at the same time denounces it. One character says of him: "Don't mind him, my dear ... He never means anything he says." The author says of him: "He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. [...] He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination."
Lord Wotton delights in what he thinks are paradoxes, but his acquaintances do not hold paradoxes in high esteem:
'They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris,' chuckled Sir Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.... 'Paradoxes are all very well in their way...,' rejoined the baronet.
It is true that Lord Erskine says: "Was that a paradox? I didn't think so. Perhaps it was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tightrope. When the verities become acrobats, we can judge them." Lord Erskine was not wrong, but Lord Wotton—not having anything to believe in—was mean with paradoxes, and on his tightrope it was common sense rather than Truth that performed acrobatics. But what did matter to Lord Wotton in any case?
'And now my dear young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you really meant all that you said to us at lunch?'
'I quite forget what I said,' smiled Lord Henry. 'Was it all very bad?'
In Dorian Gray few terrible things are said, but many are done. But basically Dorian does them because his friends have ruined him with their false paradoxes. In the end this is the lesson we can take from the novel. But Wilde would even deny this lesson, because he says clearly in the preface that "No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." And the style of Dorian Gray resides totally in the portrayal of fatuousness. Consequently, even though Wilde was himself a victim of the very cynicism that he so ostentatiously displayed, and that so delighted readers and audiences, we should not do him the injustice of quoting his aphorisms in isolation, as though they were intended or were able to teach us something.
It is true that some of the best Wildean paradoxes appear in those Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, which he published as maxims for life in an Oxford journal:
Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.
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.
Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.
In examinations the foolish ask the questions that the wise cannot answer.
Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.
The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has discovered.
Nothing that actually occurs is of the smallest importance.
Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.
When one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.
Only the shallow know themselves.
The extent to which he considered these teachings to be true is evident in the replies he gave at his trial, when those sentences were objected to: "I rarely think that anything I write is true." Or: "That is a pleasing paradox, but I do not set very high store on it as an axiom." In any case, if "a truth ceases to be a truth when more than one person believes in it," to what collective consensus could a truth uttered by Wilde aspire? And since "in all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential, and in all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential," it is right not to ask Wilde for a strict distinction between (true) paradoxes, (obvious) aphorisms, and (false, or devoid of any truth value) reversible aphorisms. What he exhibits is a juror sententialis (which is a pleasurable rhetorical incontinence), not a passion for philosophy.
Wilde would have sworn by one single aphorism, and he staked his life on it in the end: "All art is quite useless."
Pape
r given at a conference on Oscar Wilde held at the University of Bologna on 9 November 2000.
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS BACHELOR
I am probably the least suitable speaker to celebrate Joyce's bachelor of arts degree. After all, an article published in St. Stephens Magazine in 1901 claimed that it was ideas from Italy that had corrupted Joyce. But I did not ask to give this commemorative address: that is the responsibility of University College. As for the title of my lecture, perhaps my intertextual wordplay is not terribly original, but then I am only "a playboy of the southern world."
I do, however, feel ill at ease with the title I have chosen: I would have liked to speak of the time when Jim, at Clongowes Wood College, announced his age by saying, "I am half past six." But let us not stray from the subject, which is, of course Joyce as bachelor.
All of you know probably that bachelor has become a magic word in many studies of contemporary semantics, ever since it was passed down from author to author as the supreme example of an ambiguous term possessing at least four different meanings. A bachelor is (i) an unmarried male adult; (ii) a young knight in the service of another; (iii) a person who has obtained his first degree; and (iv) a male seal who has not yet managed to mate during the mating season. Nevertheless, Roman Jakobson has pointed out that despite their semantic differences, these four homonyms have an element of incompleteness in common, or at least of something unfinished. In any context, a bachelor is, then, someone who has not yet reached a state of maturity. The young male is not yet a husband or mature father, the page is not yet a knight who has received investiture, the young B.A. graduate is not yet a Ph.D., and the poor male seal has not yet discovered the joys of sex.
