I'm currently slogging my way through the works of Oscar Wilde, and as much as I enjoy his fiction, his essays leave me cold. This is no different. I find them unfocused and poorly reasoned. His prose is always good, of course, but prose is not enough to be convincing. The thing is, the basic idea is sympathetic: Wilde thinks that with a more enlightened political reality, individuals will have more freedom and more happiness; he is especially concerned with the freedom and happiness of artists. He thinks that socialism will do this, but it seems like what he's really describing is a libertarianism shaded with socialism, and with the best will in the world, I don't have a lot of time for libertarianism.

Even if I did, the reasoning here is often, well, inconsistent, and I should note here that I read Wilde's De Profundis yesterday, and that it was written some time after The Soul of Man. It's notable that in the latter he rails against the effects of private property and charity, on the grounds that one leads to an obsession with material things, and the other is variously degrading, and uses private wealth to prop up an immoral system, instead of remaking the system so that charity isn't needed. Come the time of De Profundis, however, when Wilde has been made bankrupt and all his own private property sold off, he is lamenting the losses dreadfully, and reproaching his ex-lover for not using his own funds to save some of Wilde's property for him; charity is clearly less "immoral and unfair" then. This isn't even getting into Wilde's arguing on one page that the Renaissance was great because artists didn't have to bother solving social problems and this allowed them to develop into individuals that made art in their own different ways, and then follows it up, not two pages latter, on the monotony of subjects in Renaissance art. Or the deeply ignorant assertion that African American slaves in America weren't actually much concerned with getting themselves freedom because they'd become used to slavery, which is apparently meant to support the argument that poor people don't revolt against poverty because they're used to it, rather than, say, the fact that all their energy is bent on trying to survive.

So yeah, unsympathetic reading here. It's idealism written by someone who's experienced none of what he's pontificating about, and when he does experience poverty and degradation, some time down the road, it seems he finds a lot of it doesn't hold up.