Christa Giles

18
to an English tavern, as to visit the country in question
would simply result in disappointment. For when Des
Esseintes does visit Holland, he expects to enter a painting
by Bruegel and is disillusioned: reality, he concludes, is a
poor second to art. Wilde adopts this idea that the mind is
its own place and can make a Holland of Paris and a Paris
of Holland if it so chooses, but he modifies it for his own
purposes. In order to visit Japan, Wilde maintained, one
does not go there, for Japan is the invention of Japanese
artists. As creators, artists are the fabricators of the only
true reality. Thus, Wilde concludes, to see Japan, one has
but to immerse oneself in a Japanese art. Wilde, then, does
not advocate a mere deception of the senses, but believes
that what we see is due to the medium of art, and ˝art, very
fortunately, has never once told us the truth.˝ 30
In rejecting the reality of the external world and
attempting to create a new world through imaginative
means, the concomitant withdrawal into the self
predisposed the decadent to narcissism and introspection.
There was a new focus upon man’s unconscious as the
wellspring of the personality, and the decadent’s deliberate
search to experience or depict the totality of man’s nature
also resulted in a new emphasis upon evil as an aspect of
man’s personality. This interest in the complexity of the self
issued in part from a sense that man in the 1880s could
embrace no certitudes. Humean scepticism was prevalent,