The Decay of Lying

“The Decay of Lying” is Oscar Wilde’s rejection of Realism in art and literature and an appeal to embrace the principles of Aestheticism, which the essay lays out and defends in narrative form. First published as an independent essay in 1889 before being revised and published as part of an essay collection in 1891, the piece explores a number of questions related to art, nature, and life, as well as the interrelationships between these concepts. The central themes of the essay are Lying as a Necessary Creative Act, Art as an Inventive Force, and Art for Art’s Sake.

A major proponent of the Aestheticism movement, Wilde was a prolific writer and found particular success as an essayist, playwright, and poet. Born in Dublin but active largely in London and Paris, Wilde was well known as a socialite whose flamboyant lifestyle and beliefs oftentimes clashed with the staid mores of the Victorian era.

This study guide refers to the 1913 Methuen and Co edition of the essay collection Intentions freely available on Project Gutenberg.

The essay takes the form of a dialogue between two characters, Cyril and Vivian. The essay opens with Cyril inviting Vivian to take leave of the confines of the library and come outside to enjoy nature. This sparks a series of criticisms from Vivian about the idealization of nature in discourse and particularly the contemporary taste for nature-based art, which he links to a broader degradation of the arts in favor of realism. Vivian uses this foundation to present an argument propounding that true art is created from the imagination, which he describes as lying.

The essay progresses with a question-answer structure as a Socratic dialogue. In this dialogue, Vivian is the protagonist, while Cyril is the listener who poses questions to interrogate Vivian’s claims. The dialogue is heavily reliant on an article Vivian has written titled “The Decay of Lying: A Protest.” Their conversation functions as a frame story for Vivian to present Cyril with the text of the article. The article’s principal aim is to criticize “the decay of Lying as an art, a science, and a social pleasure” (1), with particularly grave consequences for literature. Modern society’s dedication to facts and real life is, according to Vivian, “fatal to the imagination” (3).

Vivian’s argument is backed by a series of examples in which he lampoons a number of contemporary novelists as victims of the modern tendency toward truth-telling. Targets of his criticism include famous writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, and George Eliot, among others. The works of these writers fail because they are moralistic, “dreary” (4), “obvious” (3), and uninteresting. In contrast, writers like George Meredith and Honoré de Balzac are writers whom Vivian enjoys and distinguishes from the realists.

The issue Vivan takes with his contemporaries’ work is that they use their surroundings as their basis and copy from life. This, Vivian argues, is an inherently misguided approach that misinterprets art as a reflection of life rather than life as a reflection of art. Vivian dismisses contemporary exhortations to “return to Life and Nature” (6) as failing to recognize this point. Vivian cites the beginning of this decline in literature as being apparent in Shakespeare, whose writing sometimes favors imitation of the vulgarity of everyday language instead of relying only on artistic creation and imagination to impose perfection of form.

Vivian reserves praise for Eastern artistic practices and poets, which he deems as remaining faithful to original, abstract artistic creation without the return to life that degrades much of modern Western art. Naming Herodotus the “Father of Lies,” Vivian lists a number of others—nominating the likes of Cicero to Pliny, Marco Polo, Napoleon, and Thomas Carlyle—who have privileged art over reality and kept facts “in their proper subordinate position, or else entirely excluded on the general ground of dulness” (8).

To buttress his position after being questioned by Cyril regarding the paradoxical notion that life imitates art, Vivian gives a number of examples in which art has determined behaviors and tastes in both visual arts and literature. He recalls a friend of his with whom he shared a serial in a magazine because she reminded him of the story’s protagonist. Later, after discovering the tragic ending of the story, he wrote to his friend to lament the protagonist’s fate only to find that the friend had copied the protagonist and come to the same sad ending.

Having persuaded Cyril of his claim that life imitates art, Vivian then tackles proving that nature, too, imitates art. To make this point, Vivian asserts that nature is also the creation of the imagination. He distinguishes between looking at something and seeing it. Seeing is what creates the thing itself, and “what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us” (12). Using landscape painting as an example, he claims that overuse of artistic tropes renders the repetitive events of nature, like sunsets, tired and cliché. However, this only happens because the artworks representing these scenes lack originality.

Cyril feels convinced by these arguments, but he then poses another question: does art represent the conditions of the time in which it is made? Vivian categorically denies that art is related to the conditions surrounding its production. Instead, great art creates the images and symbols that become associated with particular places, times, and people. To illustrate this point, Vivian uses the example of Japan and Japanese arts. He refers to the works of Hokusai and Hokkei, both artists of the Edo period in Japan, as having a major role in inventing the perceptions of the Japanese effect, meaning “a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art” (14). To understand this effect, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the artworks of these great artists. Once the style has been understood, the effect can be found anywhere, not just within Japan.

Once Vivian establishes the fundamentality of style in art, he moves toward the conclusion of his article. At this point, he advocates for the revival of the “old art of Lying” (15) and particularly “Lying for its own sake” and “Lying in Art” (16). Once lying is restored to its former position of privilege over fact, a series of fantastical imaginings will follow that inspire people with “things that are lovely and that never happened, of things that are not and that should be” (16).

The essay concludes with a summary of the four key principles of Vivian’s aesthetic doctrine: 1) Art is independent and does not reference external conditions or circumstances; 2) Art must not idealize life or nature; 3) Art does not imitate life, but rather life imitates art; and 4) Art’s objective is to lie, or to tell “beautiful untrue things” (17).