Christa Giles

consciousness of our real position would drive man out of
his senses.˝ Art, he concludes, is not a solace, but ˝before all
things an escape.˝ 55
Wilde’s work also reflects Huysmans’ idea that the
escape into art is both an attempt to assert total faith in the
powers of the imagination (˝it is through Art, and through
Art only, that we can realise our perfection˝) 56 and a means
of escaping the world (it is ˝through Art and through Art
only, that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of
actual existence˝). 57 It is in part for this reason that
Huysmans felt the artist is compelled to turn to the dream
or other ages for his subject matter:
The fact is that when the period in which a
man of talent is condemned to live is dull and
stupid, the artist is haunted, perhaps
unknown to himself, by a nostalgic yearning
for another age. . . . In some cases there is a
return to past ages, to vanished civilizations,
to dead centuries; in others there is a pursuit
of dream and fantasy… 58
This desire to escape from a social and spiritual wasteland
accounts for Wilde’s great interest in the exotic, the
legendary, and the fantastic as manifested in Salomé, Vera,
or the Nihilists, A Florentine Tragedy, and La Sainte
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