Themes
Art for art's sake
Wilde names the creed plainly: 'this love of art for art's sake' is 'the new departure of our younger school.' Art should be loved 'for what it is', not for what it symbolises; a painting is 'a beautifully coloured surface, nothing more', and moves us by 'no suggestion stolen from philosophy, no pathos pilfered from literature'. Music is the model, the art 'in which form and matter are always one', to which the painting of Whistler and Albert Moore aspires.
The break with Ruskin
The introduction is also a farewell to a teacher. Ruskin remains 'Master indeed of the knowledge of all noble living', who 'taught us at Oxford that enthusiasm for beauty which is the secret of Hellenism'. But 'the keystone to his æsthetic system is ethical always': he judges a picture by 'the amount of noble moral ideas it expresses' and sees perfect workmanship as pride. Wilde answers that of artists 'the question that we ask is not what they had ever meant to do, but what they have done.'
Personality and perfection
Pure artistry is not enough on its own. A lasting work needs 'the impress of a distinct individuality', and nineteenth-century art 'must rest on the two poles of personality and perfection.' Wilde finds both in Rodd, tracing a personal story through the book from a boy's gladness to grief, love and the pinewood by the sea. The best poems, he says, turn that experience into form, living 'in the perfection of the form more than in the pathos of the feeling.'
Impressions and moods
Wilde defines romantic poetry as 'the poetry of impressions', concerned with 'the momentary situations of life, the momentary aspects of nature'. The artist will be 'always curiously testing new forms of belief' and 'searching for experience itself, and not for the fruits of experience'. He quotes Emerson, 'I am always insincere, as knowing that there are other moods', and Gautier's line that emotions differ but being moved is what matters. The closing Loire landscape, briefly transfigured by light, gives the idea its image.