Christa Giles

Quite apart from the emphasis on style in the
sphinx, the poem’s subject matter was in large part
determined by Wilde’s desire to point out the ˝uselessness˝
of all useful things, for by deliberately dealing with the
imaginary and underlining the idea that all art is amoral, he
implicitly upholds his belief that all art is essentially
hermetic and ˝never expresses anything but itself.˝ 66 The
decadents rejected the idea that didacticism had any place
in art, and the decadent movement of art towards artifice,
or away from nature, suggested not only a rejection of
reality, but also the autonomy and self-sufficiency of the
new reality created by the work. Thus in the preface to The
Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde maintained that ˝There is no
such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written or badly written. That is all.˝ 67 Similarly, Baudelaire
wrote that poetry ‘must not under the penalty of death or
degradation assimilate itself to science or to morality. It
does not have truth as its end, it has only itself.˝ 68 Gautier in
his preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin (1834) encapsulates
many of the ideas associated with the doctrine of ˝l’art pour
l’art.˝ Art, he perceived, became the means of liberating the
self from the constraints imposed upon man by society and
by his own animal nature. He insisted upon the autonomy
of art and attacked utilitarian and moralistic journalists,
while formulating his own artistic credo:
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