For Oscar Wilde, the liar is the poetic leader who saves art, life, and the individual from the dull tedium of the real. In The Decay of Lying, Vivian is a mouthpiece for Wilde’s aesthetic vision for how to create and live. Art, or the artefact, is an embodiment of beauty and intensity, qualities Vivian sees lacking in nature. A life dedicated to art is a life dedicated to lies — ‘beautiful untrue things’ — making poetic lies the bedrock of heightened experience and vitality.
This article explores Wilde’s ideas and their implications for how to create and live.
Beautiful untrue things
‘The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.’ — Vivian, The Decay of Lying
That all great art is a lie — a deliberate construction of fictions and myths — is a very Wildean idea. Throughout the text, there’s a tension throughout between true and untruth, nature and artefact, the former always characterised as monotonous and dreary while the latter is lofty and beautiful. Vivian sees lying as the antidote to the monotony of the real, as it’s the mechanism for transfiguring life into an artefact.
Lying is essential for the liveliness of art, society, and the individual
For Vivian, the degeneration of art and literature has a simple cause: the decay of lying:
‘One of the chief causes that can be assigned for the curiously commonplace character of most of the literature of our age is undoubtedly the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure.’
Revive the lost art of lying, he claims, and there ‘may be a new Renaissance of Art’.
What type of lies does he mean?
Vivian isn’t talking about self-serving lies; nor does he mean dishonesty in the most basic sense: that of bending or misrepresenting the truth. For example, he criticises the prosaic lies of politicians, who, ‘never rise beyond the level of misrepresentation, and actually condescend to prove, to discuss, to argue’. The true liar is characterised by ‘his frank, fearless statements, his superb responsibility his healthy, natural disdain of proof of any kind’.
To lie is to create a fiction that is self-sustaining without the need for evidence or justification. These are creative, imaginative lies that don’t represent reality, but create their own reality. A good lie is:
‘Simply that which is its own evidence, If a man is sufficiently unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might just as well speak the truth at once.’
Truth, realism, facts, histories, and the like are dull and tedious in comparison, and have should have no place in art, for they oppose the beauty of the poetic lie, which justifies itself:
‘The only form of lying that is absolutely beyond reproach is lying for its own sake, and the highest development of this is, as we have already pointed out, Lying in Art. Just as those who do not love Plato more than Truth cannot pass beyond the threshold of the Academe, so those who do not love Beauty more than Truth never know the inmost shrine of Art.‘
Art demands that beauty be placed above fact or truth, and only those who love beauty more than truth can enter the innermost sanctuary of art. Therefore, an artist’s allegiance is always to beauty, even if it means deviating from literal truth.
Vivian argues the primacy of art over life — life mimics art, rather than the other way round — so his point has wider implications for life. The art life Vivian describes here is, he believes, the correct way to live: a life dedicated to beauty and fiction — ‘beautiful untrue things’ — as opposed to the drudgery of the real.
The slow death of the liar
Vivian describes how those with a knack for exaggeration soon fall into ‘careless habits of accuracy’ or take to ‘frequenting the society of the aged and well-informed’. The consequences on the creative faculties are grave:
‘Both things are equally fatal to his imagination, as indeed they would be fatal to the imagination of anybody, and in a short time he develops a morbid and unhealthy faculty of truth-telling, begins to verify all statements made in his presence, has no hesitation in contradicting people who are much younger than himself, and often ends by writing novels which are so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability. This is no isolated instance that we are giving. It is simply one example out of many; and if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts, Art will become sterile, and beauty will pass away from the land.’
A ‘monstrous worship of facts’ doesn’t just lead to artistic loss, but a slow-surrender of the self’s capacity to shapeshift. Vivian declares:
‘Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire.’
Lying is an art
Despite this proclivity for lying in children, Wilde sees it as an art, and something that requires practice:
‘People have a careless way of talking about a “born liar,” just as they talk about a “born poet.” But in both cases they are wrong. Lying and poetry are arts—arts, as Pinto saw, not unconnected with each other—and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion.’
Any great work of imaginative art or fiction is essentially a lie — a commitment to constructing a world or myth greater than the reality we inhabit. In Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Jack and Algernon embody this idea, inventing fictional personas so they can take on different identities and shirk responsibilities.
The reference to literary characters — particularly Wilde’s own — is relevant. In The Decay of Lying, Vivian claims literature requires ‘distinction, charm, beauty, and imaginative power’ — qualities he sees as products of the mind, imagination, and artistic practice, distinguishing them from real life. Of literary characters, Vivian finds most interesting ‘the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies behind the mask’. He bemoans the ‘dreadful universal thing called human nature’ that underlies differences in appearance, opinions, and other ‘accidentals’:
‘…the brotherhood of man is no mere poet’s dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality.’
This recalls Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose protagonist falls in love with actress Sibyl Vane because:
“She was all the great heroines of the world to me. One evening she was Rosalind, and the next evening she was Imogen. She was Juliet one night and Ophelia the next. She lived all the great romances. She was all the heroines of tragedy.”
However, when her performance is flat, he falls out of love, telling her:
“Without your art, you are nothing.”
Dorian falls in love with her lack of fixed self — her masks — and the minute the mask drops and reality is revealed the spell is broken. Put simply, our shared being is dull and dreary, and for Wilde’s characters, the artifice that obscures it is what’s interesting.
Vivian values liveliness and intensity of character, and quotes Baudelaire’s point that all Balzac’s characters are:
‘gifted with the same ardour of life that animated himself. All his fictions are as deeply coloured as dreams. Each mind is a weapon loaded to the muzzle with will. The very scullions have genius.’
He expands:
‘A steady course of Balzac reduces our living friends to shadows, and our acquaintances to the shadows of shades. His characters have a kind of fervent fiery-coloured existence.’
This is because Balzac used art and the imagination to craft characters larger than those we see in real life: he ‘created life, he did not copy it’.
Fictions are ‘deeply coloured’ while our real acquaintances are ‘shadows of shades’; through Vivian, Wilde argues that the fictitious and imaginative is actually more substantial than the real.
The next point, then, is hardly surprising.
The everyday should not be art’s subject matter
Vivian is believes everyday objects or ideas should never be the subject matter of art:
‘The public imagine that, because they are interested in their immediate surroundings, Art should be interested in them also, and should take them as her subject-matter. But the mere fact that they are interested in these things makes them unsuitable subjects for Art. The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art.’
Similarly:
‘We have mistaken the common livery of the age for the vesture of the Muses, and spend our days in the sordid streets and hideous suburbs of our vile cities when we should be out on the hillside with Apollo. Certainly we are a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.’
So art should not be mundane, but the elevated, sacred, inspired. Likewise, its settings should be mythic and imaginative, not realistic.
How art yields to life and loses its vitality
We’ve seen how Vivian pits life and art in opposition. Life is the mundane, the real, the factual; art is the inspired, elevated, mythic. The malaise in art, culture, and the individual Vivian criticises is a result of art yielding to life and losing its vitality and wonder. He outlines the stages by which this unfolds:
Abstract decoration: Art begins as purely imaginative, pleasurable work concerned with the unreal and non-existent.
Life admitted, on art’s terms: Life is drawn in as raw material, but art recreates and refashions it, staying indifferent to fact, protected by ‘the impenetrable barrier of beautiful style.’
Life takes over: Life gets the upper hand and drives art into the wilderness. This, Vivian says, is the true decadence — the stage he claims his society is stuck in.
He cites English drama as a real-life example:
Abstract decoration: In the hands of the monks, drama began abstract, decorative, and mythological.
Life admitted, on art’s terms: Drama took life’s external forms but reshaped them into something larger than life: figures ‘whose sorrows were more terrible than any sorrow man has ever felt, whose joys were keener than lover’s joys, who had the rage of the Titans and the calm of the gods, who had monstrous and marvellous sins, monstrous and marvellous virtues.’ Old myth and legend ‘took shape and substance,’ and history was ‘entirely re-written’ because, as Vivian puts it, ‘the object of Art is not simple truth but complex beauty.’ Yet even here the seams show: Vivian cites Shakespeare and points to the ‘breaking-up of the blank-verse in the later plays’, the growing use of prose, and passages that turn ‘uncouth, vulgar, exaggerated, fantastic, obscene even’. These qualities themselves aren’t bad if they’re shaped or heightened by art, only when they’re like raw life breaking through the artistic style. Vivian says these are signs of Life ‘calling for an echo of her own voice’ against style.
Life takes over: The endpoint is modern melodrama, where characters ‘talk on the stage exactly as they would talk off it’, reproducing life’s vulgarity down to the smallest detail. Wilde describes realism as a method a ‘complete failure.’
The liar as the artistic and cultural saviour
Vivian sees the liar as a culture hero who will revive art and life from its doldrums. He pictures a listless society looking towards this godlike figure:
‘Bored by the tedious and improving conversation of those who have neither the wit to exaggerate nor the genius to romance, tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability, and who is at any time liable to be corroborated by the merest Philistine who happens to be present, Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.’
He then imagines the first caveman recounting mythic tales (or lies) of killing as ‘the true founder of social intercourse’:
‘For the aim of the liar is simply to charm, to delight, to give pleasure. He is the very basis of civilised society, and without him a dinner-party, even at the mansions of the great, is as dull as a lecture at the Royal Society, or a debate at the Incorporated Authors, or one of Mr. Burnand’s farcical comedies. Nor will he be welcomed by society alone. Art, breaking from the prison-house of realism, will run to greet him, and will kiss his false, beautiful lips, knowing that he alone is in possession of the great secret of all her manifestations, the secret that Truth is entirely and absolutely a matter of style; while Life—poor, probable, uninteresting human life—tired of repeating herself for the benefit of Mr. Herbert Spencer, scientific historians, and the compilers of statistics in general, will follow meekly after him, and try to reproduce, in her own simple and untutored way, some of the marvels of which he talks.’
Art is not subject to the standards, rules, or limitations of life or nature, but to be judged on its own terms:
‘Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance… Nature has, in her eyes, no laws, no uniformity. She can work miracles at her will, and when she calls monsters from the deep they come.’
The artistic liar influences life when his disciples imitate him. But the ideal disciple will not imitate his art, but become his art:
‘the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil.’
This is because life seeks expression, and art is expression’s most beautiful form.
This brings us to Vivian’s doctrines.
Vivian’s four doctrines
Vivian’s doctrines comprise a kind of manifesto for creating art that’s beautiful and untrue:
‘Briefly, then, they are these. Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines.’
‘The second doctrine is this. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything.’
‘The third doctrine is that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy. It is a theory that has never been put forward before, but it is extremely fruitful, and throws an entirely new light upon the history of Art.’
‘The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.’
Through Vivian, Wilde argues a playful philosophy for creating and living: let the fictitious and imaginative reign, and never let it yield to the dull tedium of the plausible and the prosaic. The pursuit of any heightened artistic experience requires revolution against the tyranny of fact.
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This didactic operates from the masculine assumption of safety and security—to posit that daily life is dull without the fiction a lie strikes me as inherently privileged.