Essays and Lectures

Оглавление

Wilde Oscar. Essays and Lectures

PREFACE

THE RISE OF HISTORICAL CRITICISM

I

II

III

IV

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE OF ART

HOUSE DECORATION

ART AND THE HANDICRAFTSMAN

LECTURE TO ART STUDENTS

LONDON MODELS

POEMS IN PROSE

The Artist

The Doer of Good

The Disciple

The Master

The House of Judgment

The Teacher of Wisdom

Отрывок из книги

Historical criticism nowhere occurs as an isolated fact in the civilisation or literature of any people. It is part of that complex working towards freedom which may be described as the revolt against authority. It is merely one facet of that speculative spirit of an innovation, which in the sphere of action produces democracy and revolution, and in that of thought is the parent of philosophy and physical science; and its importance as a factor of progress is based not so much on the results it attains, as on the tone of thought which it represents, and the method by which it works.

Being thus the resultant of forces essentially revolutionary, it is not to be found in the ancient world among the material despotisms of Asia or the stationary civilisation of Egypt. The clay cylinders of Assyria and Babylon, the hieroglyphics of the pyramids, form not history but the material for history.

.....

The investigation into the two great problems of the origin of society and the philosophy of history occupies such an important position in the evolution of Greek thought that, to obtain any clear view of the workings of the critical spirit, it will be necessary to trace at some length their rise and scientific development as evinced not merely in the works of historians proper, but also in the philosophical treatises of Plato and Aristotle. The important position which these two great thinkers occupy in the progress of historical criticism can hardly be over-estimated. I do not mean merely as regards their treatment of the Greek Bible, and Plato’s endeavours to purge sacred history of its immorality by the application of ethical canons at the time when Aristotle was beginning to undermine the basis of miracles by his scientific conception of law, but with reference to these two wider questions of the rise of civil institutions and the philosophy of history.

And first, as regards the current theories of the primitive condition of society, there was a wide divergence of opinion in Hellenic society, just as there is now. For while the majority of the orthodox public, of whom Hesiod may be taken as the representative, looked back, as a great many of our own day still do, to a fabulous age of innocent happiness, a bell’ età dell’ auro, where sin and death were unknown and men and women were like Gods, the foremost men of intellect such as Aristotle and Plato, Æschylus and many of the other poets 1 saw in primitive man ‘a few small sparks of humanity preserved on the tops of mountains after some deluge,’ ‘without an idea of cities, governments or legislation,’ ‘living the lives of wild beasts in sunless caves,’ ‘their only law being the survival of the fittest.’

.....