Christa Giles

eauty as that which the middle classes call ugliness 6 as
well as his belief that deviations from instinct or nature
allow for the creation of beauty in art. In the wake of
Baudelaire and Huysmans, Wilde felt that natural law and,
by extension, certain social and economic realities were
abominable. Artifice became the means of defying the
materialistic ethos and the determinism of the world of
Malthus and Darwin.
Beauty, then, could exist only through man, that is,
when created consciously or artificially. A natural
corollary of this idea is that nature must be transmuted and
re-created by the redemptive powers of the imagination
before it could become art. Wilde, then, rejects the classical
idea of art as the imitation of nature and suggests rather the
subordination of nature to man. Indeed, ˝nature˝ in effect
becomes, in Wilde’s view, ˝our creation˝:
It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
Things are because we see them, and what we
see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts
that have influenced us. To look at a thing is
very different from seeing a thing. One does
not see anything until one sees its beauty.
Then, and then only, does it come into
existence. 7
This idea is, in part, derived from Baudelaire’s Salon de
1859, where he claims that man’s view will be limited since
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