Nature pales before the furniture of ‘the street which from Oxford has borrowed its name,’ as the poet you love so much once vilely phrased it. Why, even Morris’s poorest workman could make you a more comfortable seat than the whole of Nature can. Grass is hard and lumpy and damp, and full of dreadful black insects. You can lie on the grass and smoke and talk. Well, you need not look at the landscape. It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her.ĬYRIL. As for the infinite variety of Nature, that is a pure myth. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have no art at all. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. My own experience is that the more we study Art, the less we care for Nature.

People tell us that Art makes us love Nature more than we loved her before that it reveals her secrets to us and that after a careful study of Corot and Constable we see things in her that had escaped our observation. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty.

Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. My dear Vivian, don’t coop yourself up all day in the library. Scene: the Library of a country house in Nottinghamshire.ĬYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). Transcribed from the 1913 edition by David Price, email Decay of LyingĪ DIALOGUE.

Wilde intentions