Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.
A brief recap
Wilde, born in 1854, made his literary debut with a volume of slender and derivative poems in 1881 (aged 26) and was promptly invited to undertake a lecture tour of America in 1882 (27) which proved fabulously successful. Throughout the 1880s he established a reputation via essays, reviews and articles (not least for The Woman’s World magazine, which he edited for a spell, 1887 to 1889) as a flamboyant journalist, a leading representative of the Aesthetic movement, as well as fashioning himself into one of the London’s most notorious and newsworthy personalities.
Tiring of makepiece journalism, towards the end of the decade Wilde made the transition to being a full-time writer of prose, with a series of short stories and essays, collected in a series of volumes:
- The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)
- The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue (1889)
- Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories (1891)
- A House of Pomegranates (1891)
- The Critic As Artist (1891)
He also wrote his inspired and fabulous novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), before embarking on the series of comic dramas which clinched his reputation:
- Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892)
- A Woman of No Importance (1893)
- An Ideal Husband (1894)
- The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
The Soul of Man Under Socialism, published in 1891, was therefore written at the height of Wilde’s powers as a prose artist.
The Soul of Man under Socialism
Believe it or not, this essay was written under the influence of the contemporary anarchist philosopher, Peter Kropotkin, whose works Wilde had been reading.
It is foolish to try and extract too sensible, coherent or linear an argument from a Wilde text. His whole purpose is to entertain and delight so that in his works witty paradoxes or bon mots will always take precedence over logic. And sure enough the second half of this long essay does wander a long way from the ostensible topic, so much so that it ceases to be a consideration of socialism, the political platform espoused by (in their very different ways) contemporaries like George Bernard Shaw or William Morris, and becomes a long defence of Wilde’s theory of Individualism.
In the first part, insofar as there is an ‘argument’ in what amounts to Wilde’s only statement on politics, it can be summed up quickly: Capitalism forces men to waste their energy and genius trying to help each other in vain and silly ‘politics’ or pointless ‘charity’. In a world set free by technology, everyone would be free to express themselves creatively. Wilde the artist and art critic (rather inevitably) sees Art as the highest form of being, and involvement in creating or appreciating Art as the highest fulfilment of human nature.
His vision of socialism is one where everyone devotes all their energies to developing and moulding themselves into the most exquisite works of art possible. It is everyone’s duty to cultivate their individuality. Anything which prevents this (i.e. the entire ideology of Victorian society) is bad.
Arguments for individualism
Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism.
Under the new conditions Individualism will be far freer, far finer, and far more intensified than it is now. I am not talking of the great imaginatively-realised Individualism of such poets as I have mentioned, but of the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally.
With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
In the central part of the essay, at its hinge or transition, Wilde makes a prolonged case for Jesus as the first prophet of Individualism. This is obviously a radical reinterpretation, spangled with Wildean paradox, but it eventually becomes quite convincing, quite as convincing as many of the other sects which have felt free to interpret the Messiah’s teachings.
Wilde presents a Jesus who is continually emphasising that the kingdom of God is within you and so nothing to do with external possessions, or even actions:
He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’
At moments a straightforward rehash of Jesus’s teachings, at other moments the essay suddenly sheds new light, transforming Jesus into an 1890s Aesthete. This section can’t have made him many friends with the sternly religious late-Victorians, and it would be brought against him at his trial. Indeed, everything beautiful and inspiring which he wrote would be used against him.
And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him.
It is to be noted also that Individualism does not come to man with any sickly cant about duty, which merely means doing what other people want because they want it; or any hideous cant about self-sacrifice, which is merely a survival of savage mutilation. In fact, it does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens. And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself.
‘Sickly cant about duty.’ This feels like a deliberate insult to the Kipling worldview and the administrative ethos of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen. For the public school ethos, as perfected during the 19th century, aimed to provide the administrators of the Empire for whom Duty is paramount, and Duty is about suppressing the self, crushing the self, denying the self, in order to do your duty by God and Her Majesty the Queen-Empress.
Knowing what lay ahead for Wilde i.e. his arrest, trial and imprisonment, it is impossible to read this bating of the Establishment of his day without anxiety and sadness.
Against coercion
Wilde repeatedly warns that the whole point of socialism or communism (in his view) is to free people to do as they want and to be themselves. It follows that any sign of compulsion in the movement will risk instituting a new tyranny worse than the current one. (How horribly prophetic.)
I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.
[For] all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.
No Authoritarian Socialism will do. For while under the present system a very large number of people can lead lives of a certain amount of freedom and expression and happiness, under an industrial-barrack system, or a system of economic tyranny, nobody would be able to have any such freedom at all.
What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.
People sometimes inquire what form of government is most suitable for an artist to live under. To this question there is only one answer. The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous…all authority is equally bad.
William Morris and Oscar Wilde
Both men are more radical than their modern, watered-down reputations suggest. Morris vehemently called for a violent revolution. Wilde supported Irish nationalism and signed petitions supporting anarchists who’d been arrested. They both fiercely attacked the British Establishment. They both thought the British Empire was ridiculous and immoral. (When Kipling returned to London for the first time as an adult in 1889, this is the kind of ‘treasonous’ literary culture and writing which he found so offensively ignorant and irresponsible. Which side would you have been on?)
Superficially their utopias sound very different: Morris’s utopia, in News from Nowhere, is rural and simple and arts and crafts-y. It in effect calls for a radical simplification of human nature, until everyone is reduced to the level of a pipe-smoking rustic. Wilde’s utopia sounds, at first, as if it lies at the other extreme, overwhelmingly urban, upper-class, cosmopolitan and super-sophisticated.
And yet Wilde – after the Jesus section mentioned above – disconcerts the reader by going on to describe a vision of the future, a vision of a liberated, humanity, a vision which is in its way even more wilfully infantile than Morris’s:
It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.
More art, more individualism
The second half of the essay wanders away from politics altogeher to become an extended disquisition on the nature of Individualism and the necessary individualism of the artist. It explains how, as a result of being individualists, all genuine artists must prompt the enmity of the stupid, suburban, philistine English and their lackeys in the popular press, the critics who always want more of the same and never understand the New or the Beautiful.
‘Socialism’ is left quite a way behind in all this. The essay should really have been called something like ‘The Necessity of Individualism’.
And on reflection I realise this is the weakness in Wilde’s argument (if it is, indeed, an argument rather than a collection of beautifully written witticisms and generalisations about Art). It is that no matter how many times he writes that he is thinking about everyone in society when he urges a philosophy of Individualism, in practice his figure of the Individual is always set against the hectoring of vile popular journalists, ignorant art critics, bombastic politicians and, behind them all, the vast stupid public, brought up to have the lowest, most degraded taste, and to be the great squid against which the true Individual must struggle to assert himself.
This, as Morris, Shaw and others realised, was not the language of the joiner, the supporter, the member of any political movement they recognised. How to get from a society where a few scattered individuals (like Wilde and his clique) were fortunate enough to be able to truly express themselves to one where everyone, absolutely everyone, either wants to or can express themselves, is a vast leap Wilde just takes for granted.
Just as Morris struggled to imagine how society could possibly make the transition from dirty, crowded, polluted Victorian industrialism to the clean and village-based utopia described in News from Nowhere, and can only resort to describing it in the vaguest terms as some kind of great spiritual awakening.
We now know that revolution is brought about by social breakdown, anarchy and then the seizure of power by a well-organised vanguard who seize the mechanism of the state and institute a reign of terror. England 1647. Paris 1792. Petersburg 1917. Tehran 1979. And Wildean individualism is the first thing to go, all artists being dragooned into parroting the Party line or shot.
Individualistic socialism of the type Wilde describes at such length is a lovely, if flawed idea. But in the world we actually live in Authoritarian Socialism has always, and will always, triumph.
Summary
The Soul of Man under Socialism is often spoilt, wilful, showy, overly paradoxical. And yet in his disgust at the poverty and misery of so many of his fellow human beings in Victorian England’s grotesquely unfair society and his genuine wish to do something about it – and in his warning against the coercive element in Socialism which threatened to impose a tyranny far worse than the ills it set out to cure, Wilde was bang on the nail.
And in his combination of good humour, clever sophistry, lucid style and witty paradoxes, Wilde is a master of the essay form, to be enjoyed and relished for his skill and peerless prose, no matter what he’s writing about.
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