For the true dandy these things are only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his personality.” And, Baudelaire again, “Dandyism is the last burst of heroism in a time of decadence.” Pater’s emphasis on sensation is not found in Baudelaire, but we have in both writers an emphasis on the individual, a person set apart from the trivial people who perceive the world in conventional terms. For Wilde, and for some other authors, the world is ugly and disgusting, made bearable only by a rigorous art—that is to say, by artifice. Unconventional but carefully arranged dress, like the shapely utterances of wit, is the symbol of this passion for the discipline of art. Hence we find Wilde writing “One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art,” and “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has as yet discovered. ”

The emphasis on artifice, though sometimes trivialized in Wilde, has a respectable history. The gist of the idea, as found in Baudelaire’s “Praise of Cosmetics,” is that nature is a fallen, wicked world (a view that has a respectable Christian history), and since we are naturally wicked it follows that virtue or the good is “artificial.” “Evil,” he writes, “arises of itself, naturally and by predestination. Good is always the product of a creative skill.” If for “creative skill” we substitute “carefully built-up civilization,” even “education” or “artifice,” we can see that the idea is not utterly preposterous, though Wilde liked to put it in forms that were more shocking. For instance, he wrote: “It is only the superficial qualities that last. Man’s deeper nature is soon found out.” And: “What art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.... Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.” Wilde, like some others who held that art is superior to nature, made the view visible in elegant and unusual dress, and in a studied. impassive manner—hence, of course, his costume and his sometimes heartless epigrams.

But there can be no doubt that Wilde was genuinely concerned about social issues and that he saw esthetic appreciation as a way (he told his audiences during his lecture tour, when he spoke of “The English Renaissance of Art”) of creating a “beautiful national life.” Similarly, his reported comments to young hustlers on the beauty of naked Greek athletes probably were genuinely high-minded; indeed, his interest in these lower-class companions was partly rooted in his belief that the appreciation of beauty should not be limited to the privileged few. His remark, in the lecture on the renaissance of art in England, that “art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day,” is sometimes taken to be a manifesto on behalf of Art for Art’s Sake, but it should be understood in the context of his view that art sets a standard to which life—in this case ugly, commercial Victorian society—should aspire. Unlike those proponents of Art for Art’s Sake who see art as utterly independent of daily life, in his essays Wilde often sees art as a standard, an ideal to which life must aspire. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1890), his only sustained political essay, he argues that humanity is most likely to achieve its fullest development in a classless society that has abolished private property. Only under these conditions can life be beautiful.

How much social criticism, we may ask, can one find in Lady Windermere’s Fan? A little in the epigrams, and perhaps a little more in the overall plot. Like A Woman of No Importance, Lady Windermere’s Fan has a woman with a guilty past (in A Woman of No Importance Mrs. Arbuthnot has had an illegitimate son), and the audience, along with Lady Windermere, is brought to see that such a person can be “a very good woman,” to quote the final line of the play. But these “social dramas,” or “social comedies,” or “society comedies” can scarcely be said to challenge society’s values, say as the plays of Ibsen’s do. (Translations of Ibsen were made in England in the 1870’s, and at least half a dozen of Ibsen’s plays had been performed in London by the time of Lady Windermere; A Doll’s House, for instance, was performed as early as 1889.)

In Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lady Windermere begins as a sort of puritan, strongly condemning Mrs. Erlynne, but she learns two things: that she herself is capable of performing a guilty act (leaving her husband, abandoning her child), and that the despised Mrs. Erlynne is capable of performing a self-sacrificing act. And so Lady Windermere is moved to her final judgment that Mrs. Erlynne is “a very good woman.” The play might seem to merit the tide “The Education of Lady Windermere,” especially since the action is set, significantly, on her twenty-first birthday, the day she comes of age, but the more one thinks about it, the less satisfactory this reading is. Lady Windermere never learns that Mrs. Erlynne is her mother—a relationship that makes Mrs. Erlynne’s act of self-sacrifice somewhat less disinterested. And, more important, the play never vigorously suggests that indeed a woman may be justified in abandoning her husband and child. That is, Mrs. Erlynne looks on her early action, when she left her family, as a terrible mistake, and it is clear to the audience that Lady Windermere’s proposed flight from her family is similarly a mistake.