From Chinese Wisdom to Irish Wit: Zhuangzi and Oscar Wilde‪.‬

In February 1890, there appeared an extraordinary review. Under the title of 'A Chinese Sage', it hailed the 'first complete English translation' by Herbert A. Giles of the works of Zhuangzi (or 'Chuang Tsu' as it was spelled under the old Wade-Giles system later replaced by pinyin). (1) The author was Oscar Wilde. How Wilde came to review this book is not known. His friend Wemyss Reid presumably had asked Wilde to write such a piece for The Speaker, a journal he had just founded, leaving the choice of book to Wilde. But what could have led Wilde to choose to review the thoughts of a man who lived more than two thousand years ago in a very distant country--and one separated by a virtual abyss in terms of civilization? And how can we, as readers, account for its impact on Wilde, evidently galvanized by this Chinese thinker who, in so many ways, contributed to his own evolving creed of the value of the useless, the obnoxious influence of do-gooders, and the importance of doing nothing? Before the 1890 review of Zhuangzi, China never attracted Wilde's attention, but as early as 1882 he did consider following up his trip to America with one to Japan. (2) Japanese art was coming into vogue, and Wilde seized on it as an example of the new abstract style which would come to define the modern for painters such as his (then) friend James McNeill Whistler. Seven years later, in a key passage of his essay "The Decay of Lying', Wilde extols Oriental art for a rejection of naturalism so complete that, as his mouthpiece, Vivian, argues, the Western perception of Japan has been entirely formed by the art of that country. 'In fact', he concludes, with typical hyperbole, 'the whole of Japan is a pure invention'. (3)