Oscar Wilde : The Artist as Dreamer
Feasting With The Greeks
The pathways of the poets are often traversed by dreamers destined to wake up one day to the dangers of the real world.
One such idealist in Victorian London was Oscar Wilde who, in the homophobic 1890s, was often to be found obliviously “feasting with panthers”1 in fashionable restaurants such as Kettner’s.
Wilde’s apparent blind faith in the future inevitably led to charges such as those made by Edward Carson under cross-examination in court—particularly the one about Wilde (not) kissing the waiter—which proved to be the fatal turning point of his trials.
Had Wilde been acting recklessly? Or had he simply been living in a world of sleepy delusion?
Consider the following insight made by the art historian Malcolm Easton over 50 years ago:
“Wilde, the classical scholar and enthusiastic disciple of Pater, lived in part at least in a dream world, imagining himself back among the elegant and lively-minded young men who paced the courts of the palaestra. One cannot doubt that the Symposium, most delightful of Plato’s conversation-pieces, was often in his mind, with its finely-woven argument in favour of a spiritual love between men. And he really seems to have persuaded himself into believing that a supper-party with a couple of male prostitutes sent round on approval from Little College Street2 constituted an agreeable ‘Hellenic’ evening out.”
Malcolm Easton
Aubrey and the Dying Lady, A Beardsley Riddle, p. 29
Food For Thought
The analogy of Wilde’s feasting with panthers being a proxy for the Greek Symposium is—literally in his case—food for thought.
And thus one is prompted to look for links to the dream world in Wilde’s own Socratic dialogues. As it happens, the more of the Wilde dialectic we digest the more breadcrumbs we find.
For instance: in Wilde’s Platonic-style conversation ‘The Critic as Artist’ his tacit stand-in, Gilbert, admits to a visionary life—although he warns it must inevitably be avenged by those who have not yet seen:
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
The punishment for Wilde was accompanied by two years hard labor, a rude awakening he seemed to accept because he says towards the end of his time in prison, “what lies before me is my past. I have got to make myself look on that with different eyes.”3
Sadly, it was a false dawn.
During his post-prison exile Wilde frequently reverted to classical charades when courting young men, as evidenced by the poem he restyled as “Ideal Love” and gave to an American journalist in Paris.
Indeed, Wilde never did relinquish the dark-side of self-delusion, which is ultimately forgivable because in 1900 his lifestyle resided very much in the subconscious of public discourse as well.
We know now that the sleepwalking Wilde really had experienced the enlightenment before the rest of the world, but it took society almost a century to catch up to him before that day dawned.
Now, happily, we can point out what is seldom noted in connection with the daybreak metaphor in ‘The Critic as Artist’—that Gilbert concludes by reassuring us that in addition to the punishment at the dawn may also come the reward.
© John Cooper, 2026.
Footnotes:
- People thought it dreadful of me to have entertained at dinner the evil things of life, and to have found pleasure in their company. But then, from the point of view through which I, as an artist in life, approach them they were delightfully suggestive and stimulating. It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.
De Profundis. ↩︎ - Alfred Taylor, a co-defendant of Wilde in the first criminal trial, had lodgings at 13 Little College Street, in Westminster, where he facilitated meetings between young men in the early 1890s. ↩︎
- De Profundis. ↩︎
Related:
The Critic As Artist by Oscar Wilde.