Richard Snowden-Leak
‘ absorbed in the changing expression of my own eyes ’, because the ‘ mirror reflected a face which was like my own , but whiter , and so thin that I hardly recognised it .’. Him painting over the mirror in this painting , then , is not only demonstrative of how unstable one ’ s own perception can be , but how , in a way , to see one ’ s self is to immediately make some sort of unconscious judgement , or painting , over the you that you see . Hildred , after all , hardly recognises himself , and this dissonance between perceived- self and felt-self ( the self one feels they are ) is all that Hildred feels in the moment .
Nordau ’ s worry about the writer giving themselves the ‘ air of a painter ’ here might be said as well for how one perceives their own reality , then , as Hildred , in looking in the mirror , can be regarded as an act of creation on par with painting . This connection is bridged also by Oscar Wilde ’ s assertion that ‘ Lying , the telling of beautiful untrue things , is the proper aim of Art .’. Perhaps it ’ s because Chambers is directly drawing a parallel between perception and creation , as if to perceive the world is to create it , to make it ‘ beautiful ’ yet ‘ untrue ’, just as Hildred does . Hildred envisions himself as someone who will ‘ secure the happiness and prosperity of a continent ’, for instance , because he can ’ t face the reality of living in an asylum for the criminally insane . There is a melding of life and of art in Decadent literature , then , of making content out of your existence — which again reminds me of another
Wilde piece , The Picture of Dorian Gray , when Harry says to Dorian that ‘ Life has been your art .’ But if one ’ s life becomes one ’ s art , what can be said of Symons ’ s remark , ‘ What Decadence , in literature , really means is that learned corruption of language by which style ceases to be organic , and becomes , in pursuit of some new expressiveness or beauty , deliberately abnormal ’? Furthermore , if one considers Wilde ’ s assertion that life imitates art , then Chambers sees the horror in a world where everyone tries to live their lives in the pursuit of that art , fearing that the conflation of art with life will lead them to living a life ‘ deliberately
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