The Picture Of Dorian Gray (27 page)

Oscar Wilde has written for
Lippincott’s Magazine
a story called ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ which, if we did not know the author’s name, and skipped one or two phrases, would strike us as a ‘moral tale’, intended to excite a loathing for sin; though we should also have thought that he had unintentionally gone further, and not merely given his readers what was given Christian in ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’, a glimpse into hell, but had taken them across its threshold and filled their lungs with its fumes. To credit this to Oscar Wilde, however, would be an injustice, for in certain replies to his critics (revealing a conceit so colossal that other men could hardly have imagined its existence even in
this Master of Vanity) he declares that the story must be considered simply as a work of art. Taking it on this lower level, then, we need only say that the story is a rather tedious attempt to follow in the footsteps of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and that the ostentatiously manufactured clevernesses of Oscar Wilde do not approach the genius of R. L. Stevenson.

A Novel by Mr Oscar Wilde

There is always something of an excellent talker about the writing of Mr Oscar Wilde; and in his hands, as happens so rarely with those who practise it, the form of dialogue is justified by its being really alive. His genial, laughter-loving sense of life and its enjoyable intercourse, goes far to obviate any crudity there may be in the paradox, with which, as with the bright and shining truth which often underlies it, Mr Wilde, startling his ‘countrymen’, carries on, more perhaps than any other writer, the brilliant critical work of Matthew Arnold. ‘The Decay of Lying’, for instance, is all but unique in its half-humorous, yet wholly convinced, presentment of certain valuable truths of criticism. Conversational case, the fluidity of life, felicitous expression, are qualities which have a natural alliance to the successful writing of fiction; and side by side with Mr Wilde’s ‘Intentions’ (so he entitles his critical efforts) comes a novel, certainly original, and affording the reader a fair opportunity of comparing his practice as a creative artist with many a precept he has enounced as critic concerning it.

A wholesome dislike of the commonplace, rightly or wrongly identified by him with the
bourgeois
, with our middle-class – its habits and tastes – leads him to protest emphatically against so-called ‘realism’ in art; life, as he argues, with much plausibility, as a matter of fact, when it is really awake, following art – the fashion an effective artist sets; while art, on the other hand, influential and effective art, has never taken its cue from actual life. In ‘Dorian Gray’ he is true certainly, on the whole, to the aesthetic philosophy of his ‘Intentions’; yet not infallibly, even on this point: there is a certain amount of the intrusion of real life and its sordid aspects – the low theatre, the pleasures and griefs, the faces of some very unrefined people, managed, of course, cleverly enough. The interlude of Jim Vane, his half-sullen but wholly faithful care for his sister’s honour, is as good as perhaps anything of the kind, marked by a homely but real pathos, sufficiently proving a versatility in the writer’s talent,
which should make his books popular. Clever always, this book, however, seems intended to set forth anything but a homely philosophy of life for the middle-class – a kind of dainty Epicurean theory, rather – yet fails, to some degree, in this; and one can see why. A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism. To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr Wilde’s hero – his heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development. As a story, however, a partly supernatural story, it is first-rate in artistic management; those Epicurean niceties only adding to the decorative colour of its central figure, like so many exotic flowers, like the charming scenery and the perpetual, epigrammatic, surprising, yet so natural, conversations, like an atmosphere all about it. All that pleasant accessory detail, taken straight from the culture, the intellectual and social interests, the conventionalities, of the moment, have, in fact, after all, the effect of the better sort of realism, throwing into relief the adroitly-devised supernatural element after the manner of Poe, but with a grace he never reached, which supersedes that earlier didactic purpose, and makes the quite sufficing interest of an excellent story.

We like the hero, and, spite of his, somewhat unsociable, devotion to his art, Hallward, better than Lord Henry Wotton. He has too much of a not very really refined world in and about him, and his somewhat cynic opinions, which seem sometimes to be those of the writer, who may, however, have intended Lord Henry as a satiric sketch. Mr Wilde can hardly have intended him, with his cynic amity of mind and temper, any more than the miserable end of Dorian himself, to figure the motive and tendency of a true Cyrenaic or Epicurean doctrine of life. In contrast with Hallward, the artist, whose sensibilities idealise the world around him, the personality of Dorian Gray, above all, into something magnificent and strange, we might say that Lord Henry, and even more the, from the first, suicidal hero, loses too much in life to be a true Epicurean – loses so much in the way of impressions, of pleasant memories, and subsequent hopes, which Hallward, by a really Epicurean economy, manages to secure. It should be said, however, in fairness, that the writer is impersonal: seems not to have identified himself entirely with any of his characters: and Wotton’s cynicism, or whatever it be, atleast makes a very clever story possible. He becomes the spoiler of the fair young man, whose bodily form remains un-aged: while his picture, the
chef d’?uvre
of the artist Hallward, changes miraculously with the gradual corruption of his soul. How true, what a light on the artistic nature, is the following on actual personalities and their revealing influence in art. We quote it as an example of Mr Wilde’s more serious style.

I sometimes think that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinou¨s was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course I have done all that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won’t tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that Art cannot express it. There is nothing that Art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way… his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before.

Dorian himself, though certainly a quite unsuccessful experiment in Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward spoiling takes visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of his story) a beautiful creation. But his story is also a vivid, though carefully considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a very plain moral pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly. General readers, nevertheless, will probably care less for this moral, less for the fine, varied, largely appreciative culture of the writer, in evidence from page to page, than for the story itself, with its adroitly managed supernatural incidents, its almost equally wonderful applications of natural science; impossible, surely, in fact, but plausible enough in fiction. Its interest turns on that very old theme, old because based on some inherent experience or fancy of the human brain, of a double life: of Doppelganger – not of two
persons
, in this case, but of the man and his portrait; the latter of which, as we hinted above, changes, decays, is spoiled, while the former, through a long course of corruption, remains, to the outward eye, unchanged, still in all the beauty of a seemingly immaculate youth – ‘the devil’s bargain’. But it would be a pity to spoil the reader’s enjoyment by further detail. We need only emphasize once more, the skill, the real subtlety of art, the ease and fluidity withal of one telling a story by word of mouth, with which the consciousness of the supernatural is introduced into, and maintained amid, the elaborately conventional, sophisticated, disabused world Mr Wilde depicts so cleverly, so mercilessly. The special fascination of the piece is, of course, just there – at that point of contrast. Mr Wilde’s work may fairly claim to go with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same kind, done, probably, in more or less conscious imitation of it.

Walter Pater

1
The Woman’s World
: Wilde became editor of what was then called
Lady’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society
, published by Cassell & Co. in 1887. He urged Cassell’s to change its name to
Woman’s World
, and the first number under Wilde’s editorship appeared in November that year. He acted in this capacity for two years.

2
Ouida
: The
nom deplume
of Marie Louise de la Ramee (1839–1908), an extremely successful novelist in her day, now almost completely forgotten.

3
Puppy
: arrogant and conceited young man
(OED).

4
Rider Haggard
: Henry Rider Haggard (1856–1925), author of very popular escapist romances, the most famous being
King Solomon’s Mines
(1885),
She
(1887) and
Allan Quartermain
(1887). He was knighted in 1912.

5
Grant Allen
: Grant Allen (1848–99), campaigning novelist, whose most famous work
The Woman Who Did
(1895) was a notorious example of the ‘New Women’ novel, which depicted emancipated women who defy moral and social expectations.

6
Mr Stead’s famous outbursts
: W. T. Stead was the editor of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, which shocked the public when it published an article entitled ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ (6–10 July 1885), exposing the trade in virgins that existed in the capital. Stead had posed as a customer at a house of ill-repute and published a lurid account of his experience of ‘buying’ a young working-class girl. His publications, which mixed prurient reportage with righteously indignant campaigning, did bring about the awareness he sought, and contributed to the pressure on Parliament to raise the law of consent from thirteen years to sixteen. There is some irony in the fact that Wilde and Stead are being compared here, as it was the Amendment to this law (1885) which convicted Wilde in 1895.

7
outlawed noblemen and perverse telegraph-boys
: A reference to the Cleveland Street affair, when in September 1889 it was revealed that a homosexual brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, London, employed young men from the nearby Telegraph Office to cater for the tastes of the likes of Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston. This scandal was last mentioned in the press a few months before the publication of Wilde’s novel in 1890, so this allusion would be likely to be understood by most of the readership of the
Scots Observer.

The composition of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
was determined, like so many of the events in Oscar Wilde’s life, by chance: Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle were dining with an American publisher, J. M. Stoddart, and during the course of this dinner Stoddart commissioned both of them to write for
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine.
Conan Doyle has taken up the story:

Wilde’s contribution was
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, a book which is surely upon a high moral plane, while I wrote
The Sign of Four.

As soon as he received the commission Wilde wrote swiftly – the sad history of Dorian Gray was no doubt one he carried in his head – and the story appeared in the July 1890 issue of
Lippincott’s.

Although Conan Doyle may have considered
Dorian Gray
to be a ‘high moral plane’, his opinion was not shared by the first reviewers who condemned the work for its speculative treatment of immoral or at least uncomfortable subjects. Charles Whibley, in the
Scots Observer
, declared that ‘Mr Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten’ (the ‘again’ refers to Wilde’s earlier essay on Shakespeare’s admiration for a boy actor,
The Portrait of Mr W.H.
); and he
went on,‘… he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys’. This was an unambiguous reference to a homosexual scandal of 1889, which had compromised both Lord Arthur Somerset and a number of Post Office employees who frequented a male brothel in Cleveland Street.

Wilde made a spirited reply to this and to other damaging attacks, and in the month of its publication declared to an acquaintance that the story would be ‘… ultimately recognized as a real work of art with a strong ethical lesson inherent in it’. To Conan Doyle himself he wrote, ‘I cannot understand how they can treat
Dorian Gray
as immoral.’ That may be so, but there can be no doubt that the public controversy unnerved Wilde: book publication was planned for the following year, and he took care not only to add chapters which are of a more conventional Victorian nature (specifically the sub-plot
concerning the putative revenge of James Vane upon Dorian Gray) but also to give a less ‘purple’ tone to those passages which might be described as homoerotic in spirit. It is possible that he had written the first version too quickly, or with the thoughtlessness of inspiration, and did not realize that it was as self-revealing as it now seemed to be; but, despite the changes he made, the publication of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
marked the first stage in Wilde’s long descent into open scandal and eventual infamy.

The point was that
Dorian Gray
presented in oblique form an image of the double life which Wilde himself was leading at this time, and there are some critics who believe the book to represent Wilde’s need for confession if not expiation. His adolescence had been in certain respects a conventional one, but his years after Oxford were marked by his pose as an Aesthete. Then in the spring of 1884 (in his twenty-ninth year) he married Constance Lloyd; their first child, Cyril, was born a year later. It seems at first to have been a happy marriage, despite the sharp remarks about matrimony made in this novel, and Wilde retired into an obscurity only alleviated by his brief editorship of
Woman’s World.
But in 1886 he met a young man, Robert Ross, who became something more than a disciple: it is from this date that Wilde began to engage in homosexual practices and to become part of a ‘Uranian’ circle in London. So by the time
Dorian Gray
was published in
Lippincott’s
, there had already been rumours about his behaviour, and the taint of a clandestine life meant that there were occasions when he was snubbed in public places –this is, of course, the life to which Dorian Gray is forced to become accustomed in the novel, and there is no doubt that Wilde is drawing directly upon his own experiences in order to furnish that atmosphere of scandal which fills its last chapters.

But there were certain other parallels with Wilde’s own life which made the book’s reception peculiarly important to him. When he was at Oxford he became a close friend of Frank Miles, a painter, and through Miles he met the homosexual aesthete Lord Ronald Gower. It seems possible that both Miles and Gower are represented in
Dorian Gray
by Basil Hallward and Lord Henry Wotton, just as the philosophies of Pater and of Ruskin (whom Wilde had also met at Oxford) animate the more theoretical disquisitions in the novel. There is much here, also, that might act as an emblem of Wilde’s own emotional life – not just in the note of mystery and secrecy which is struck at the beginning, but in the mood of ennui and even despair which envelops the narrative at the close. That Wilde himself was prey to such feelings is not in doubt; in his correspondence there is a sense of world-weariness and personal failure (of being ‘burned out’, as he claimed in 1880), and of his belief that he was walking upon an artificial stage. This novel is more than a veiled account
of Wilde’s sexual predilections, it is also an exploration of that
accidie
which afflicted him in his private moments.

Oscar Wilde was also an intensely superstitious man – although it cannot be said that his numerous visits to palmists and to fortune-tellers materially assisted him – and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
is from the beginning invaded by the idea of fatality and doom. The tone is introduced very early, in some of Basil Hallward’s first words to Lord Henry Wotton: ‘… we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly’. And it was when Wilde himself was suffering in just such a manner, while locked up in a cell within the confines of Reading gaol, that he returned to this theme and meditated upon its annunciation in the novel which he had composed only seven years before his great fall: ‘Doom,’ he wrote in the famous prison letter that was later to be called
De Profundis
, ‘that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of
Dorian Gray.’
In the novel itself there are strange anticipations of Wilde’s own eventual fate:

Here, one should never make one’s
début with
a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age.

Shades of the Marquess of Queensberry appear in a further sentence, which Wilde also remembered in his prison cell:

I say, in
Dorian Gray
somewhere, that ‘a man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies’…

And it might be pointed out that, on their second meeting in July 1891, Wilde gave a copy of this book to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man who in so many ways is prefigured in the character of Dorian Gray and who would be the catalyst of Wilde’s ill-fortune. Never has a novel been surrounded by so many portents.

And never has a novel so marked out its author. Before its publication Wilde was perhaps best known for his fairy stories –
The Happy Prince and Other Tales
had been published in 1888 – and for his contributions to aesthetic criticism –
The Decay of Lying
was published in 1889. Of course his youthful pose as an aesthete had earned him a temporary notoriety, but after
Dorian Gray
everything changed and, as Philippe Jullian has remarked, ‘the name of Wilde became a synonym for all that was most unhealthy’. There was one sense in which this was inevitable for, by introducing the painted portrait of Dorian Gray as an emblem of sin, he was also putting his finger on a peculiar Victorian complex which was associated with the idea of sexual guilt: as Owen Burdett has suggested, in the late nineteenth century ‘art and scandal came to be associated, and the imaginative life began to take vice for its province’.

It was not just a question of ‘scandal’, however, since in this novel Wilde had effectively challenged English society on a number of levels; he continually characterizes it, for example, as the haven of the hypocrite or the dissembler: ‘My dear fellow,’ Dorian Gray observes to Basil Hallward, ‘you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.’ English readers were not accustomed to such a forceful characterization of their civilization, and Wilde went even further than this; he mocked both the artistic pretensions and the social morality of the English, and some of the most powerful passages in the novel disclose the grinding poverty and hopelessness against which ‘Society’ turned its face. Wilde, an Irishman, was putting a mirror up to his oppressors – and their shocked reactions would eventually encircle him when he stood in the dock at the Old Bailey.

It would be wrong to suggest, however, that the contemporary reaction was entirely one of horror or of outrage: W. B. Yeats described it as a ‘wonderful book’ and Walter Pater characterized it as ‘really alive’; and it can fairly be said that those who were not fatally compromised by the Victorian ethic found much in
Dorian Gray
to admire and to praise. It is significant, in this context, that the reviews in America were much more favourable. Wilde himself was not slow to emphasize its merits and, after the first shock of scandal had passed, he was always at pains to defend his novel. He speaks of it in the fondest terms in
De Profundis
and, after his release from custody, he wrote to one publisher, ‘I only know that
Dorian Gray
is a classic, and deservedly.’

Like any classic, of course, it is established upon other classics, although it would be difficult to offer more than a tentative provenance for it. Several sources for
Dorian Gray
have been identified, among them Huysmans’s
À Rebours
, Balzac’s
La Peau de Chagrin
, Gautier’s
Mademoiselle duMaupin
and Pater’s
Gaston de Latour.
Echoes of these books are no doubt present (and Wilde was not one to shrink from open plagiarism, even plagiarism of himself, when the occasion warranted) and it is also true, as Wilde once noted, that the strange book which ‘poisons’ Dorian Gray is meant to be an extrapolation from
À Rebours
: ‘It is’, he told one correspondent, ‘a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age.’ But it would be rash to assert Wilde’s resemblance to other writers, or his debt to other books, in too deterministic a manner. As he said in an interview in 1895:

Setting aside the prose and poetry of the Greek and Latin authors, the only writers who have influenced me are Keats, Flaubert, and Walter Pater; and before I came across them I had already gone more than half-way to meet them.

It will be noted that two out of the three authors mentioned here are English, and so it was perhaps slightly over-enthusiastic of Arthur Ransome to assert
of
Dorian Gray
that it is ‘the first French novel to be written in the English language’.

Certainly its emphasis upon strange sins, and its somewhat uninventive borrowings from Huysmans in such matters as the symbolism of jewels, give it a French demeanour; but the book’s wit is Irish and its melodrama is English. There was always a streak of vulgarity in Wilde’s imagination (like summer lightning, it appears at the most unexpected moments), and he was rarely able to refrain from taking a readily available convention to excessive lengths: as a story of passion,
Dorian Gray
is closer to the work of Hall Caine than of Flaubert, and in the morbid sonorities of its prose there is more than a hint of Victorian pathos. The characters of Sibyl and James Vane, for example, might have been derived from the kind of play which Wilde himself was prone to mock; they might even have stepped from the one example mentioned in the novel itself: ‘
The Idiot Boy or Dumb but Innocent
. Our fathers used to like that sort of piece, I believe.’ It is a mark of Wilde’s most complicated temperament that he was able to parody the faults from which he himself was not immune – magniloquence of a sentimental kind being one of them.

But that is not the sum of his achievement in this book and, in a work which is striated with images of duality and the double life, it is not surprising that
Dorian Gray
should be composed in two distinct tones – one being that of sentimental tragedy, the other of outrageous epigram. This is of course a distinctive feature of Wilde’s work – in his earliest drama,
Vera
, the epigrams are given to the aristocrats and the melodrama is lavished upon the revolutionaries – but it reaches its most elaborate form here.
Dorian Gray
in fact stands at the pivotal point of Wilde’s writing: both the aesthetic discussions and the theatrical plot look back to his earlier essays and stories, while the flourishes of epigrammatic wit (most notably in the sections he wrote later, for the volume edition) anticipate the plays for which he will always be remembered. It is no accident that he should have begun work on the first of these dramas,
Lady Windermere’s Fan
, at the time he was completing his revision of
Dorian Gray
. And it could be said that, just as the novel’s publication marked the onset of Wilde’s fatal reputation, it also gave him the self-confidence (as well as the style) with which to start the composition of his major works.

But
Dorian Gray
is filled with more troubled intimations and it is the oscillation between epigram and tragedy, between the celebration of individualism and the assertion of doom, that properly characterizes the book. In the conversations of Lord Henry Wotton and the behaviour of Dorian Gray there is clearly a sense in which Wilde is continuing to celebrate the triumphs of a truly individual life and to suggest that, in the perfection of personality,
self-expression can be turned into an art. And yet this world of self-assertion and self-development is one that is seen to fall apart. For beneath the brilliant surface of Wilde’s prose there is the mordant gaze of the moralist, and it would not be too much to say that on occasions there was a congenital Puritan lurking behind his mask of the Aesthete or the Dandy. He loved that bright world which he created, but he also allows it to be destroyed with Dorian Gray’s cry, ‘so horrible in its agony’. In his own life he saw through his ‘pose’ and even courted his eventual destruction; in his fiction, he raised a world in his own image and then condemned it for its emptiness and its follies.