Themes
Style as the first test
Wilde judges every book first by how it is written. He sets out fourteen of Saintsbury's sentences in Half-Hours with the Worst Authors, complains that Symonds writes poetical prose but never the prose of a poet, and ends his warm review of Mahaffy on conversation by regretting the 'arid and jejune' style: 'If Mr. Mahaffy would only write as he talks, his book would be much pleasanter reading.' Pater is the standard against which the rest fall short. In Imaginary Portraits Wilde admires 'the true tact of omission', and in Appreciations he praises the essay on Style for showing that behind a perfect style 'must lie the passion of a man's soul.'
Imagination against reporting
Wilde's case against realism runs through the whole volume. Balzac is 'no mere reporter': the difference between Zola and Balzac is 'the distinction between unimaginative realism and imaginative reality.' In Olivia at the Lyceum he says it is only the unimaginative who ever invents, since originality lies in treatment. In The Woman's World he laments that we have made Truth and not Beauty the aim of art, and he praises Violet Fane because romance 'welcomes what is wonderful'. Morris's archaic House of the Wolfings earns the same defence: when the result is beautiful, the method is justified.
Personality and perfection
One phrase frames the volume. In 1885 Wilde calls Irving a great actor because he brings to his Hamlet 'the qualities of personality and of perfection'; in 1890 he finds in Pater, as in Cardinal Newman, 'the union of personality with perfection.' Between them he quotes George Sand to show that art without personality is impossible, and lets Whitman explain that Leaves of Grass puts a person on record. The reverse case is Swinburne, 'the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his own personality', and who succeeds: 'We hear the song, but we never know the singer.'
Against good intentions
Wilde distrusts sincerity and earnestness when they stand in for art. Astray, a novel by four authors, is 'tedious from the noblest motives'; a batch of versified Gospels prompts the remark that the worst work is always done with the best intentions; the anonymous Judgment of the City has every sincerity except the artist's. In the Woman's World columns he regrets novelists who are 'reformers masquerading as story-tellers'. The Chinese sage review turns the point into comedy, enjoying Chuang Tzu's view that trying to make others good is as silly as beating a drum in a forest to find a fugitive.
Translators, editors and biographers
Much of Wilde's anger falls on the people who stand between a writer and the reader. Routledge's Balzac translators do not understand French; Gustave Masson's version of Caro's George Sand is astoundingly careless. Anthologies and calendars are condemned for misprints and misquotations, as in The Children of the Poets, where two misprints ruin a poem by Bret Harte. The 'Great Writers' lives of Rossetti and Keats rely on anecdote, and Wilde objects that 'the keyhole and the backstairs' are the modern biographer's method, since a true artist reveals himself in his work. Good translation, by contrast, is a poet's version of a poet, as in Morris's Odyssey.
Women, work and dress
As editor of The Woman's World Wilde gives his columns to books by and about women, and to their education and work. He praises Emily Pfeiffer's Women and Work, quotes Defoe's scheme for a women's college in every county, and argues that women poets have gained their strength through education. He writes on Elizabeth Gilbert's workshops for the blind and on lady shopkeepers. Dress is a recurring subject: working women dress sensibly, fashion is a form of ugliness, the fifteen-inch corset is condemned, and dressmaking should be regarded 'not merely as a learned profession, but as a fine art.'