The Picture of Dorian Gray (32 page)

1
Tartuffe
: A character typifying hypocrisy, from Moliere's play
The Hypocrite.

2
the survival of the pushing… It is a malady
: This exchange exemplifies the polarities that were drawn at the end of the nineteenth century, between ‘getting on', and the attitude cultivated by self-consciously avant-garde artists. Again, Max Nordau's
Degeneration
provides the best testimony to this opposition. Here the principles of ‘social Darwinism', the application of evolutionary laws to social phenomena in order to explain why the ‘fittest' (bourgeois) citizens would triumph, was celebrated, and the ‘diseased' tendencies of unconventional art were stigmatized. For Nordau such aesthetic ‘degenerates' as Nietzsche, Wagner, Zola, Huysmans, Ibsen, Baudelaire and Wilde ‘must succumb… They can neither adapt themselves to the conditions of Nature and civilization, nor maintain themselves in the struggle for existence against the healthy.' For Nordau, conventional art was healthy, and unconventional art – and therefore its practitioners – were unhealthy, and would fail in the struggle for existence. Lord Henry typifies the ‘Decadent' celebration of disease in opposition to the values which Nordau champions.

3
the Parthian manner
: A Parthian retreat is one in which a combatant attacks while appearing to retreat from the field of battle.

1
ennui
: boredom. In stigmatizing boredom in this way, and using the French word, Wilde is following Charles Baudelaire, who famously prefaced his infamous book of poems,
Les Fleurs du Mal
(‘Flowers of Evil'), with a poem dedicated to the reader. In this he claims ‘ennui' is the ugliest and foulest of all vices, and rounds on the reader as the scandalous poet's ‘counterpart' and ‘brother'.

2
Artemis: A
Greek goddess who was fond of hunting, called Diana in Roman mythology.

3
strawberry leaves: A
ducal crown is embellished with strawberry leaves.

(Originally this was the final chapter, coming directly after Campbell had disposed of Basil Hallward's body (now Chapter XIV). Wilde divided it in two in 1891.)

1
Do you think this girl will ever be really contented now with any one of her own rank?
: Wilde may be thinking of a scene from Huysmans's
À Rebours
, where Des Esseintes deliberately creates such a situation. In Chapter 6 Des Esseintes attempts to turn a street urchin into a murderer by introducing him to refined vices, and then, when they have become a necessity to him, cutting off his supply: ‘I shall have contributed, to the best of my ability, to the making of a scoundrel, one enemy the more for the hideous society which is bleeding us white'
(Against Nature
, trans. Baldick (1959), 92). The amoral Lord Henry has many points of comparison with Des Esseintes.

2
Waterbury watch
: A watch of little value.

3
simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations
: This paragraph was added in 1891.

4
A face without a heart: Hamlet
, IV. vii.

5
some vulgar street-preacher
: In 1872 the right of assembly was granted to the area at the north-east corner of Hyde Park, where speakers could express their views in freedom. Speakers' Corner, as it is now known, exists today and is –inexplicably – a popular Sunday attraction.

6
Marsyas
: In Greek mythology Marsyas was a satyr who learned to play the flute and challenged Apollo to a music contest. He lost, and was flayed alive by the god.

7
What an exquisite life you have had!
: Originally this was followed by the lines ‘I have always been too much of a critic. I have been afraid of things wounding me, and have looked on', but Wilde cancelled these lines in the typescript.

8
You have crushed the grapes against your palate
: An echo of Keats's ‘Ode on Melancholy', which ends with the lines:

Though seen by none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

9
As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that
: In l891 Wilde added this refutation of one of the most significant ideas in the novel. Lord Henry's denial of the dangerous effects of literature is aimed at the critics who had labelled
Dorian Gray
itself ‘poisonous', a common term in the repertoire of moralistic criticism at the time. Lord Henry's contention that ‘The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame' elaborates on the strategy Wilde employed when he defended the 1890 edition of his book in the press: ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray. What Dorian Gray's sins are no one knows. He who finds them has brought them' (letter to the
Scots Observer;
Mason, 81). It also illustrates the maxims found in the Preface concerning Caliban's rage at the reflective power of art.

(This chapter originally formed part of Chapter XIII, the final chapter in the 1890 edition. The major changes Wilde effected when he revised this chapter were to make explicit the motive behind Dorian's final actions. He sought to tone down the ‘too obvious' moral and to make it clear that Dorian rebelled against the burden of conscience that the portrait had become, and sought to free himself from its reproaches.)

1
Was there no hope for him?
: Wilde added the next two paragraphs, from ‘Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion', to ‘Youth had spoiled him' in 1891.

2
No. There had been nothing more… He recognized that now
: Wilde added this realization in 1891.

3
It would kill this monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace
: Wilde added this important sentence in 1891, making it explicit that Dorian sought freedom from the claims of conscience.