Writing two years later, Nietzsche, affirming art and life over moral/philosophical conundrums, tells us that, for well-constituted spirits, such an “opposition” as that between “chastity” and “sensuality” need not be “among the arguments against existence-the subtlest and brightest, like Goethe, like Hafiz, have even seen it as one more stimulus to life. “A truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true,” says Wilde. It might also be said that, in many ways, Nietzsche “completes” Wilde. Yeats after the turn of the century, when his reading of Wilde became aligned with his earlier study of Blake and his “excited” recent reading of Nietzsche, that “strong enchanter” whose thought, he believed, “completes Blake and has the same roots.” In fact, Wilde’s fusion of Hegelian dialectic with Blake’s insistence on the fruitful clash of “Contraries” would have particularly resonated with W. The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.” That final aphorism might, in style and content, have been written by Friedrich Nietzsche. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true….It is only in art criticism, and through it, that we can realize Hegel’s system of contraries. That collection also includes “The Truth of Masks,” an essay on theatrical costumes that ends with Wilde’s declaration that “in art there is no such thing as a universal truth.
On Christmas Day 1888, Oscar Wilde read to Yeats “The Decay of Lying,” later published in Intentions.
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