Summary
Wilde opens by calling Rodd the dearest to him of the young men working to perfect the English Renaissance. Joy in art comes from the sensuous life of verse, and in painting from colour and design, never from the subject. The best painting of the movement is therefore not the Pre-Raphaelites' but that of Whistler and Albert Moore, whose work, like music, is an end in itself, for music is the art in which form and matter are one.
This love of art for art's sake is where the younger school leaves Ruskin. Wilde honours him as the master who taught them at Oxford an enthusiasm for beauty, but Ruskin's aesthetics are always ethical: he judges a picture by its moral ideas. To the young school, the question is not what an artist meant to do but what he has done. A painting has no more spiritual message than a blue tile from Damascus; it is 'a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more', moving us by style, design and colour alone.
Rodd's poems, Wilde says, show this new departure. He praises The Sea-King's Grave, In a Church, the scene in Chartres Cathedral, At Lanuvium, In the Coliseum, the lyric interludes and the sonnets, all aiming at a purely artistic effect. But a work must also bear a distinct individuality, resting on 'the two poles of personality and perfection', and he traces through the volume a young life: a boy's joy in field and flower, the death of a friend, first love and its autumn, wandering among strange peoples, a turn to art and to Greek things, and a return to joy in a pinewood by the sea.
Wilde warns that such a reading may miss the poems' true quality, since one's real life is often the life one does not lead. Romantic poetry, like the painting of Whistler and Moore, deals in impressions and momentary situations. The artist's sincerity is perfection of execution, and his constancy is only to beauty; he tests new forms of belief and seeks experience itself, as Emerson and Gautier say.
Such work cannot be described in terms of intellectual criticism, only by likeness to the other arts: Venetian glass, a Whistler etching, a Tanagra figure, a twilight by Corot. The best likeness Wilde ever saw was the landscape by the Loire, where he and Rodd once stayed at Amboise, sketched from wine barges and made plans to annoy the philistines. The land was plain, but a gleam of broken light could transfigure it for a moment, and that, he ends, is the quality of his friend's verse.