The Fall of the House of Wilde (45 page)

Dorian is a blank silhouette. He acts like a child masquerading as an adult, a male Lolita
avant la lettre
, at once gravely innocent and gravely perverse. Dorian is real and not real, a work of art and a being in the world. He goes to art for everything – as Oscar blithely recommended in his critical essays: to poetry for love, to the theatre for his wife, to a book for his fate. This is a comedy. His first lover is an actress, Sibyl. He falls in love not with Sibyl but with the Shakespearean characters she plays. He mistakes art for life. This love – precious and obsessive – has all the tiresomeness of adolescence in it. Dorian tires of her and she commits suicide. Like Shakespeare's Juliet, Sybil is too weak for the woe of the tragedy: too soft, too easily dead, and Dorian could not care less.

Above all, the novel turns on a portrait – it ‘held the secret of his life and told his story. It had taught [Dorian] to love his own beauty' of ‘gold hair, blue eyes, and red-rose lips'. The leitmotif of the novel is the changing face. As Dorian wreaks havoc on those who cross his path, the portrait worsens to reflect his degeneration. Drunk on life, the face in the portrait becomes that ‘of a satyr', with ‘leering eyes', and Dorian becomes obsessed with losing face, of his retrogression being visible to society, of people seeing that his – borrowing lines from Hamlet – is ‘a face without a heart', of people knowing his secret, his ‘shame'.
⁹

Without a soul, Dorian is all surface. Lord Henry's stress on momentary sensation is a radical departure from Walter Pater's. Pater's Marius – from
Marius the Epicurean
, Pater's only novel, published in 1885 – has depth. He is one for whom ‘the moral attitude developed in his childhood makes a purely aesthetic appreciation of life impossible for him'. Marius never loses himself in ‘a kind of idolatry of mere life', but is at pains to integrate all his different experiences and memories.
¹⁰
Depth is what Dorian lacks. He is a character for the new age of cinema, of celebrity, of glamour. The novel is a parody of a traditional
bildungsroman.
Dorian's exclusivity, his narcissism, his egotism, his momentariness, went against the grain of nineteenth-century tradition, where character tends to move to a moral and psychological expansion.

The remark thrown out by Oscar shines some light on how he saw things. The novel, he said, ‘contains much of me in it. Basil Hallward is what I think I am, Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be . . . in other ages, perhaps.'
¹¹
It would be truer to say Oscar distributed his personality across all three. Basil Hallward is the one who lets his life and art be dominated by a fascinating personality. Lord Henry is the serpent infusing his wicked personality into others to dominate them. Dorian Gray is the literal materialisation of New Hedonism. If allowing oneself to be dominated by a person and wanting to dominate a person are contradictory, then so was Oscar – as his life would demonstrate. It is what psychologists called sadomasochism. As for the Dorian prototype, Oscar seems fascinated by states of abandonment – to the senses and to sex – but experiences it as guilt-inducing and his often repeated word, ‘shameful'.

With its retrogression and primitivism,
The Picture of Dorian Gray
satirises social Darwinism and the notion of
fin-de-siècle
decadence and degeneracy. Society at the time was thought to be degenerating, as the privileged became hopelessly weak and effete, and the disadvantaged poor, such as those in the East End of London, thought to be regressing down the evolutionary scale into the animalistic.

More controversially, the book celebrates homosexuality, though not explicitly. It was done with the wit and assurance of a man who showed how versatile prose is by means of what it implies rather than what it states.

It became the book of the year for the amount of comment it aroused, much of which was vehemently hostile. The
Daily Chronicle
hated the novel's ‘effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophising and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity'. For
Punch
, it was pure ‘poison'. The
Athenaeum
found it reprehensible, ‘the book is unmanly, sickening, vicious (though not exactly what is called “improper”), and tedious'. The
St James Gazette
advised its readers to throw the book in the fire, condemning it as ‘stupid and vulgar'. Their critic, Samuel Henry James, at least had the merit of being prophetic – he warned the writer he was likely to find himself in Bow Street (at the magistrate's court) one of these days. When it came to Oscar's trial at the Old Bailey, the conflation of Dorian Gray's moral degradation with that of the author was an easy one to make, at least for the public prosecutor, Edward Carson, who charged him with ‘putting forward perverted moral views'.
¹²

The Picture of Dorian Gray
buttonholed critics with a new voice, a new presentation of a world beyond good and evil, all calculated to bring gooseflesh to the puritan maiden aunt's life. W. H. Smith refused to stock it. It raised hackles, laughs and the standard of English literature. Jane declared it ‘the most wonderful piece of writing in all the fiction of the day'.
¹³
Dorian Gray became an emblematic figure of the 1890s, epitomising decadence. Dorian is perhaps the avatar of Frank Wedekind's Lulu, another beautiful, amoral young creature and the central character of his two best-known plays. In any case, the book took on a cult status. One young Oxford student, Lord Alfred Douglas, claimed to some to have read it nine times, or fourteen, he could not remember which.
¹⁴
There is a common misconception that Dorian Gray is modelled on Lord Alfred Douglas. He is not. Oscar met Douglas six months later, so Dorian was conceived
a priori
. He is a beautiful boy from antiquity given a modern decadent personality.

31

‘It is personalities, not principles that move the age'

Yeats had spent Christmas 1888 with Oscar and his family at Tite Street. Yeats later wrote that Oscar's life seemed ‘perhaps too perfect in its unity, his past of a few years before had gone too completely'. ‘I remember thinking,' Yeats continued, ‘that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and two children, suggested some deliberate artistic composition.' Yeats had first met Oscar some months earlier. ‘My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all overnight with labour and yet all spontaneous.' As Yeats tells it, Oscar had Jane's habit of both commending and dispraising himself, and her habit of flattering the intellect of every person she liked. That Christmas Oscar had compared Yeats to Homer, a comparison Yeats was unlikely to forget.
¹
Unforgettable for Yeats, too, was Oscar's reading to him that evening the proofs of his essay ‘The Decay of Lying' which was published in the January 1889 edition of
Nineteenth Century
.

‘The Decay of Lying' is a dialogue on aesthetics. The debate has its roots in antiquity. According to Aristotle, Homer ‘had taught the others the art of framing lies in the right way'.
²
Oscar also advocates lying in art: ‘the telling of beautiful untrue things.'
³
For him, truth in art has nothing to do with resemblance to nature or life – it is based on the work's internal perfection. ‘Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward . . . the body instinct with the spirit.'
⁴
If truth is relieved of objective reference, then what informs the vision? Art is Oscar's answer. What the individual sees, and how he sees it, depends on the arts to whose influence he has been exposed. Rossetti, for instance, had taught us to appreciate a particular type of feminine beauty – a woman with long flowing hair, ivory neck and ‘mystic eyes' – hitherto unrecognised.
⁵
Why go to life for art when it is so ‘deficient in form', guided by pure chance?
⁶
Art is superior.

For Oscar, art is an act of will and imagination, a cool, deliberate construct. With the fantastic, dream-like figures of the
fin-de-siècle
symbolists, art established itself as self-sufficient. In art's withdrawal into the private world, Oscar builds on Pater's ‘narrow chamber of the individual mind', ‘each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world'.
⁷

The following year, Oscar had ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism' published in the July and September 1890 editions of
Nineteenth Century
. This essay was subsequently renamed ‘The Critic as Artist', when Oscar put the essays together in a book entitled
Intentions
in May 1891. The essay challenges reigning thoughts on what is criticism. The title, ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism', invokes Matthew Arnold's lecture on ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time', given in 1864 when he was professor of poetry at Oxford. Arnold stated ‘the aim of criticism is to see the object in itself as it really is', seeing the critic as an objective, disinterested observer. Pater disagreed. In his preface to
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
, written in 1874, he shifts attention from knowing the object ‘as it really is' to the perceiver knowing ‘one's own impression' of the object. Oscar takes Pater's line and says the most perfect form of criticism ‘is in its essence purely subjective'. For Oscar the best example is Pater's criticism. ‘Who cares . . . whether Mr Pater has put into the portrait of Monna Lisa [
sic
] something that Lionardo [
sic
] never dreamed of?' he asked. What matters is that every time he visits the Louvre and stands before the painting he murmurs to himself Pater's prose poem, ‘She is older than the rocks . . .' Pater has made the painting more wonderful to him than it really is ‘and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it [the painting] knows nothing'.
⁸
Pater's subjective criticism, Oscar believes, is the highest form, as it treats the work of art simply as a staging point for a new creation. ‘And in this [Pater] was right, for the meaning of any beautiful thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in the soul of him who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives . . .'
⁹
The best critic, according to Oscar, is he or she who can articulate the age and thereby shape its culture.

Like many of his contemporaries, from William Morris to George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians, Oscar wanted a transformed society, one he called socialist. Inspired by their thoughts, he wrote ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism', and had it published in the February 1891 edition of the
Fortnightly Review
. In this ideal society the poor would rise up against poverty instead of passively submitting to it. ‘It is through disobedience that progress is made . . .'
¹⁰
The state would play a minimum role, ‘for all authority is quite degrading'. Individualism would flourish, the most intensive form of it being art. Free love would foster better relations between men and women, so marriage should be without legal obligations. He saw the talk of the ‘dignity of manual labour' as ignoring the indisputable fact that all manual labour is sheer suffering.
¹¹
Machines, Oscar claims, will do all work not involving creativity.

The cure for poverty, Oscar says, lies neither in charity nor in altruism, but in measures to end inequality, such as the abolition of private property. The imbalance in distribution of income is what creates crime, not moral degradation, as many of his contemporaries argued. Oscar joined the ranks in opposing the notion of a society defining itself through goods and property:

For the recognition of private property has harmed Individualism, and obscured it, by confusing a man with what he possesses. It has led Individualism entirely astray. It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.
¹²

The ceaseless quest for property has thwarted the individual from fulfilling his real purpose in life – the realisation of himself. Oscar was responding to a society where the question of the day, according to Mrs Talbot Coke's decorating and household management guide,
The Gentlewoman at Home
of 1892, was not ‘“Who are they?” but “What
have
they?”' Around the middle classes, according to
The Gentlewoman at Home
, ‘individuality had to be earned. As . . . other signs of belonging diminished, material belongings gained in significance. An artistically furnished room did not simply express one's status; it conferred status.'
¹³

By the 1890s certainly, if not before, Aestheticism had lost its cultish status as a religion of beauty for the connoisseur, and the market had become flooded with bric-a-brac. By then, Liberty at Oxford Circus, which had been enlightened and commercially astute enough to promote Aestheticism, was packing its shelves with gifts of the sixpenny fan variety, and the store soon became indistinguishable from other department stores in the mass-produced, wearisome wares it offered. In his promotion of Aestheticism Oscar had contributed to this rise in consumerism and its power to confer status. The movement Oscar had done so much to foster was revealing its inherent vulgarity, and by 1891 Oscar had become a stranger to it. Then again, he believed consistency was the last refuge of the unimaginative.