Themes
What makes the arts one
Image finds the unity of the arts in their resemblances, bringing a play, a fresco, a painting and a history under one creed. Wilde moves the question from the works to the person who receives them: 'to the really artistic nature all the arts have the same message and speak the same language though with different tongues.' The unity is in the listener's response, not in any borrowing of one art from another.
The critic need not practise
Wilde rejects the idea that a critic must make what he judges. 'No amount of daubing on a cellar wall' will explain Michelangelo's Sybils, and nobody needs to write a blank verse drama to appreciate Hamlet. The critic needs a nature 'receptive of beautiful impressions' and the intuition to recognise style and truth; without them, 'a reckless career of water-colour painting' will not help.
Comedy of the tea table
Half the notice is a sketch of the audience. Wilde recommends Image's refreshments to other lecturers and then reports the 'Five-o'clock-tea School of Criticism' at work: one listener sighs over 'the fatal sterility of the judicial mind', another fears that the Century Guild is becoming rational. The joke is that Image's chief virtue, his fairness, is the very thing the fashionable audience holds against him.