【正文】 e never really or pletely discarded the moral awareness. Then he transgressed the moral into aesthetics. In the long history of western literature, spiritual function of literary was dominated. As early as in the earliest Greek mythology, there had been the moral message. Plato banished the poets from the Republic, because the poetry did not moralize. Aristotle discoursed at great length on the validity of Greek tragedy by arguing that the tragedy aroused emotional tumult in the audiences? hearts, which gave them catharsis and purified their soul. In fact most of the great Greek tragedies explored ethnic problems. In the long period of the religious Mediation, religion was the exclusive subject of literary and the only criterion. In the Re naissance period the writers spared no effort to establish the new moral standard that adapted to the developing bourgeoisie society. Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare or other great writers, all quested for a grander moral theme: the social morality. Sir Philip Sydney, the great English critic, in his Apology for Poetry argued that poem was a superior means of munication and its value based on what was municated. The world of the poem was a better world than the real one and was presented in such a way that the readers were stimulated to try and imitate it in their own practice. When it came to the 19th century, the moral awareness was wider and deeper. Balzac, the great French 蘇州大學(xué)成教本科畢業(yè)論 文 4 novelist, in his works scrutinized the whole society in the light of morality. Charles Dickens tried so hard to punish the vice and encourage goodness that he was under the suspicion that he preached too much. These great writers influenced the readers with the moral proposition bined in their works. The writers of the modern genres also showed their speculation on morality, though they didn?t always sustain the predominant one. And their moral anxiety was shown in a more diverting way. 蘇州大學(xué)成教本科畢業(yè)論 文 5 Chapter 2 Art and Morality of Wilde’s Works . Wilde’s Arti stic Theories . Theory of “Art for Art?s Sake” During the late nieenth century, the industrial revolution undermined the three main corners of the Victorian society (namely religion, family and duty) without offering readymade alternatives. Social skepticism grew, the Victorian morality was under pressure. When the central governing standards of the Victorian society were challenged by the first economic crisis and by social reformers like the Fabians, the avantgarde of artists and intellectuals like Oscar Wilde were forced to realize the bankruptcy of the old values. Since the materialist values of the middleclass could not satisfy him, Oscar Wilde followed the theory of “art for art?s sake.” He advocated the palace of beauty, appealing to beauty and art. And declared, “Beauty is a form of Geniusis higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the reflection[s] in dark waters…it cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty” (Ellmann 22). Wilde held that art represented pure beauty with the optimal forms. “The object of art is not simple truth but plex beauty” (Wilde 1997, 21). “All bad art es from returning to life and nature elevating them into ideals” (Wilde 1997, 52), because neither life nor nature should be perfect, ugly sometimes. Wilde urged people to believe in nonutilitarian art, claiming: The only beautiful things are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art (Wilde 1997, 16). Therefore, “Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day” (趙武平 15). And “into the secure and sacred house of Beauty the true artist will admit nothing that is harsh or disturbing, nothing that gives pain, nothing 蘇州大學(xué)成教本科畢業(yè)論 文 6 that is debatable, nothing about which men argue” (趙武平 16). Wilde argued for the separation of life and art and claimed that literary realism violated this first law of aesthetics, whereas romance reverently obeyed it. He set art and life in irreconcilable conflict and denied that literature needed in any way to be responsible to life. Wilde?s such claim that art did not adhere to life but being independent became a rebellion against the reality and life. Noheless, from time to time, Oscar Wilde would keep aloof from the ivory tower of the “beauty” to boldly expose and sharply criticize the ugliness and darkness of the reality and life. He even wrote a prose of “The Soul of Man under Socialism” in 1891 though his opinions towards socialism might need to be carefully further thought about. His action revealed that such an artist who wrote such kind of article would never be ignorant of life or reality at all, so the art that he had been propagating should not be absolutely nonutilitarian. Furthermore, Wilde?s literary creation could never be outside of the reality of life, from not even his fairy tales which have usually been considered the most far away from the real life. Fairy tales need not abandon reality in order to satisfy man?s psychological developments needs and desires. On the contrary, they should reflect essential and conditions of man?s existence (Cohen 77). For instance, in a letter Wilde connected the relationship between fairy tales and reality with that between literary modes of realism and romance: “The story ?The Happy Prince? is an attempt to treat a tragic modern problem in a form that aims at delicacy and imaginative treatment: it is a reaction against the purely imitative character of modern art” (C