Christa Giles

essentially a symbolist work and, as such, reflects
Mallarmé’s idea that ˝to name is to destroy, to suggest is to
create.˝ 265 In Salomé, Wilde seeks to create mystery by
presenting us with a suggestive art, hoping, like Redon, to
˝inspire˝ rather than to offer sterile explanation, and to
˝place us as music does, in the ambiguous world of the
indeterminate.˝ 266 The idea that all art should aspire to the
condition of music was, of course, Pater’s dictum and
Wilde echoes his belief, claiming further that music is the
perfect type of art, precisely because it ˝can never reveal its
ultimate secret.˝ 267 According to Wilde, music appeals to the
aesthetic sense alone as well as to our desire for mystery,
and consequently reason and recognition have no place in
our appreciation of it. Thus, paradoxically, art ˝becomes
complete in beauty˝ through ˝its very incompleteness,˝ and
˝beauty,˝ Wilde maintains, is the ˝symbol of symbols.˝ 268
But if all art is at once ˝surface and symbol,˝ 269 Wilde’s all-
pervasive awareness of style and form in Salomé suggests a
kind of self-consciousness which endows the play with a
quality of artificiality, which, quite independent of the
subject matter, connotes decadence. The use of repetition,
the rhythmic quality of the sentences, the complex web of
interconnecting symbols, the incantatory quality of the
language, all serve to evoke a sense of stasis, a feeling of
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