Æsthetics is, therefore, not art criticism. Art criticism deals with this or that particular work or type of art, while the æsthetic theory seeks to formulate the mere abstract and fundamental conceptions, distinctions, and principles which underlie artistic criticism, and alone make it possible. Art criticism is the link between æsthetic science and the ordinary intelligent appreciation of a work of art by an ordinary intelligence. Much more may be said in defining the functions of æsthetics, but this is sufficient before we begin to examine Wilde's own æsthetic theories. His ideas were promulgated in the three works mentioned above, and also given to the world in lectures which he delivered at various times. It is true, as Mr Arthur Symons very clearly pointed out some years ago, that Oscar Wilde wrote much that was true, new, and valuable about art and the artist. But in everything that he wrote he wrote from the outside. He said nothing which had not been said before him, or which was not the mere wilful contrary of what had been said before him. Indeed, it is not too much to say that Oscar Wilde never saw the full face of beauty. He saw it always in profile, always in a limited way. The pretence of strict logic in Wilde's writing on "Artistic Philosophy" is only a pretence, and severe and steady thinkers recognise the fallacy. Let us examine Oscar Wilde's æsthetic teaching. In one of his lectures given in America he said-- "And now I would point out to you the operation of the artistic spirit in the choice of subject. Like the philosopher of the platonic vision, the poet is the spectator of all time and all existence. For him no form is obsolete, no subject out of date; rather, whatever of life and passion the world has known in the desert of Judea or in Arcadian valley, by the ruins of Troy or Damascus, in the crowded and hideous streets of the modern city, or by the pleasant ways of Camelot, all lies before him like an open scroll, all is still instinct with beautiful life. He will take of it what is salutary for his own spirit, choosing some facts and rejecting others, with the calm artistic control of one who is in possession of the secret of beauty. It is to no avail that the muse of poetry be called even by such a clarion note as Whitman's to migrate from Greece and Ionia and to placard 'removed' and 'to let' on the rocks of the snowy Parnassus. For art, to quote a noble passage of Mr Swinburne's, is very life itself and knows nothing of death. And so it comes that he who seems to stand most remote from his age is he who mirrors it best, because he has stripped life of that mist of familiarity, which, as Shelley used to say, makes life obscure to us.