Themes
Life imitates Art
The dialogue's most famous claim reverses the old idea that art copies life. Vivian argues that 'Life holds the mirror up to Art': people copy the types that artists invent. His evidence runs from the women at private views who look like figures in Rossetti's paintings, to the boy-burglars who copy Dick Turpin, to the woman who felt compelled to follow the heroine of a French serial into disaster. Behind the jokes is a serious point: human beings seek forms for expressing themselves, and art supplies the forms that life then takes up.
The failure of realism
Vivian's article is an attack on the realist novel and the realist stage. Novelists who research their subjects and copy their neighbours produce work 'so lifelike that no one can possibly believe in their probability'. Zola is 'perfectly truthful' and therefore dull; Daudet's characters die the moment he admits they were taken from life. Melodrama's characters 'would pass unnoticed in a third-class railway carriage'. Against this Vivian sets Balzac, who 'created life, he did not copy it', and the Elizabethan dramatists, who gave their characters a language 'different from that of actual use'.
Nature as a work of art
Vivian begins by refusing to go outside, and ends by claiming that Nature is 'our creation'. We see only what art has taught us to see: nobody noticed London's fogs until poets and painters showed their 'mysterious loveliness', and now they are overdone, so that the uncultured catch cold. A sunset is 'a very second-rate Turner', and the Channel at Hastings looks too often like a Henry Moore. The joke becomes a theory of perception: 'To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing.'
Lying as the aim of art
The title's paradox is meant seriously. For Vivian a fine lie is 'that which is its own evidence', and art at its best is the telling of 'beautiful untrue things'. Art is 'a veil, rather than a mirror', and it 'never expresses anything but itself': it is not the voice of its age, and historians are wrong to read an age from its art. The closing vision of Behemoth, dragons and the Hippogriff returning to the world shows what Vivian hopes lying will restore: wonder, and 'things that are not and that should be'.