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The (Fai)Lure of the Aesthetic Ideal and the (Re)Formation of Art: The Medieval Paradigm that Frames The Picture of Dorian Gray

Felicia Bonaparte

[This was first published as a chapter in Medievalism in the Modern World, Essays in honour of Leslie J. Workman, edited by Richard J Utz;  T A Shippey;  Leslie J Workman, Turnhout: Brepols, 1998, and is here republished by kind permission. - Editor, The Oscholars].

Everyone knows that Walter Pater, writing what in effect would become the manifesto of aestheticism, opened his Studies in the History of the Renaissance by implicitly repudiating one of the fundamental principles of the Victorian ideal of art, namely that the task of the artist, as Matthew Arnold had first expressed it in  his 1862 lecture at Oxford ‘On Translating Homer’[1] —Arnold assuming here the role of the spokesman of his contemporaries as well as the arbiter of their judgment—was to seek ‘to see the object as in itself it really is.’ Quoting these words as though he agreed at the beginning of his ‘Preface,’ Pater instantly subverts them, slipping in the qualification that ‘the first step’ towards that end is ‘to know one’s own impression as it really is.’[2] Many have held that between these two lies that moment in which was born the relativism and subjectivity of the modern point of view. I would, however, argue that Arnold is not so naïve as to believe in such a knowable reality. My sense of the Victorians, at least, is that they were acutely aware of the scepticism entailed in the empiricist philosophy which was taking over the age and that writers like Matthew Arnold were insisting so intently on a fixed, objective truth because they were all too keenly conscious that their epistemological grounds were sliding out from under them. What distinguishes Pater, rather, is that in those seventeen years between the date of his birth and Arnold’s a different generation was born for whom the relative and subjective were not a burden but a release. From that moment aestheticism seemed to be inevitable, an aestheticism, moreover, wedded inexorably to hedonism. For if the world outside our perceptions could only be a doubtful hypothesis, all one could vouch for were one’s impressions. And, since there were no objective criteria by which impressions could be evaluated, these could be neither false nor true or, more importantly, right or wrong. All they could do was give pleasure or pain, often by their beauty or ugliness.

In a very important sense, Oscar Wilde was Pater’s heir, and in some ways his creation, falling under the spell of the man during his early years at Oxford and under the spell of that very volume, a work he called his ‘golden book’ and which he almost committed to memory.[3] Indeed, whole phrases from that work make their way into Dorian Gray. ‘Yes,’ for example writes Oscar Wilde, ‘there was to be . . . a new Hedonism that was to recreate life . . . Its aim’—and here comes a central sentence from the ‘Conclusion’ of Pater’s book—’was to be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might be. . . . [I]t was to teach man to concentrate’—and this is another Paterian thought, not a quotation but a paraphrase, also taken from the ‘Conclusion’ (188)—’closely himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.’[4] In the same vein, he echoes Pater’s repudiation of Matthew Arnold when, in ‘The Decay of Lying,’ he observes that ‘No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist’  (Works 988).  And almost the identical point is made in the ‘Preface’ to Dorian Gray: ‘It is the spectator,’ writes Wilde, ‘and not life, that art really mirrors.’

Many still see Wilde as an aesthete—as, for example, Linda Dowling in her The Vulgarization of Art, in which she holds that Wilde believed in what she calls the ‘Aristocracy of the Aesthete’[5] —but Ellmann is right to suggest that ‘aestheticism’ was more ‘a problem’ for Wilde than ‘a creed.’[6] We might say he felt a conflict between the beautiful and the good but it would probably be more accurate to say there were two identities in him—if one may propose such a thing without hinting at schizophrenia—one entirely committed to the principles of aestheticism, the other seriously disturbed by the moral neutrality of the aesthetic attitude. Wilde himself seems to have thought of his identity in this way, writing, for instance in one letter that, in The Picture of Dorian Gray he saw himself as both Basil and Dorian, the former, a deeply moral artist, being what he thought he was, the latter what he ‘would like to be’ but only ‘in other ages, perhaps.’[7] Illustrating this double attitude, the novel itself often expresses entirely antithetical views. Often it seems to support aestheticism. Thus, denying that art may be required to serve any end but its own, Lord Henry is made to say, for instance, that ‘Art has no influence upon action.  It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile’ (Works 163). Against the scurrilous reviews the novel received in many quarters, Wilde, again, defended his work frequently on aesthetic grounds. ‘I am quite incapable,’ he wrote to Sidney James Mark Low, the editor of the St. James’s Gazette, in response to comments made in his paper in a review on the morality of the novel, ‘of understanding how any work of art can be criticised from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate’ (Letters  257). He looks forward, he observes in a letter to someone else written at nearly the same moment, ‘to the time when aesthetics will take the place of ethics, when the sense of beauty will be the dominant law of life’ (Letters  265). The ‘Preface’ Wilde wrote for Dorian Gray, only after the novel was published and in answer to those reviews that had quarrelled with its morals, takes a self-defensively brash stand once more on aesthetic grounds. ‘My novel,’ he wrote to one correspondent in March of 1891, ‘appears in volume form next month, and I am curious to see whether these wretched journalists will assail it so ignorantly and pruriently as they did before. My preface should teach them to mend their wicked ways.’ (Letters 290).

But there had never been a time when the earnestly moral Wilde—and I use the adverb advisedly—had not challenged the aesthete in him. In his earliest days at Oxford Pater had not been the only don who had cast a spell on Wilde. John Ruskin had affected him too, so much so that he had volunteered to help Ruskin improve the countryside, work that entailed hard physical labor with shovel, wheelbarrow, and spade.[8] Ruskin, of course, was an aesthete too, but an aesthete who believed that the beautiful depended for its beauty on the good. Many at the end of the century saw this, as do many today, as characteristic of an era overzealous about morality. But I would argue that John Ruskin, and the age he helped define, were, if overzealous at all, so persistent on this issue precisely because it was clear to them that the connection between the two was on the verge of being severed, had indeed been severed already by the very relativism and subjectivity of the day, and they realized only too well that, if allowed to be cut completely, there would be nothing to keep beauty from slipping into an alliance not with the good but with its opposite, as it was doing already, in fact, in the aestheticism of the Decadence. Wilde himself is well aware of this. ‘There were moments’ Wilde observes of the protagonist of his novel, ‘when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful’ (Works 115). Pater himself was not untroubled by the dangers of aestheticism. When readers were shocked by what they recognized as the amoral view of art proffered in his Renaissance, especially in its closing remarks, Pater withdrew the offending ‘Conclusion’ from the subsequent edition, restoring it only some time later after making a number of changes and adding a footnote in which he conceded that there might have been ‘young men’ whom his words could have misled and that Marius the Epicurean  might explain his meaning better.[9] And what Marius seeks to do is to estyablish a connection between aesthetics and religion, the hero, a Paterian aesthete, ending a spiritual convert, and pretty nearly a formal one, to the early Christian faith.

Oscar Wilde understood this well. In a letter to Alfred Douglas, written while he was in prison, Wilde remarked that what Pater sought in writing Marius the Epicurean was to ‘reconcile the artistic life with the life of religion’ (Letters 476). He himself saw distinctly enough that the aesthetic could never serve as a foundation for the moral. He rejects that possibility explicitly in Dorian Gray. A ‘’charming artistic basis for ethics’,’ scoffs Lord Henry when Dorian expresses a fear that his soul might be rendered ‘hideous’ if he continued in his sins (Works 82). He himself was as eager as Pater to link the beautiful and the good. The very subject of Dorian Gray—and we have not sufficiently noted how large a part in Wilde’s works and letters religion and morality play—alerts us to its deeper concerns. In the ‘Preface,’ it is true, Wilde insisted on a distinction between the subject of a work and the author’s perspective on it. While the moral might be a subject, the artist could have no moral sympathies. And yet when a number of Christian newspapers praised the novel for its morality, Wilde accepted their approbation with remarkable equanimity. Indeed, in that identical letter he wrote to Sidney James Mark Low about the review in St. James’s Gazette, Wilde observed that the public would ‘find’ his was ‘a story with a moral.’ He grants it might be an ‘error,’ artistically, that there should be one in a novel. But he proceeds to spell it out, ending with the frank admission ‘Yes; there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray—a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy’ (Letters 259).

Wilde, in the very novel itself, provides a comment on this question by including in the narrative a reflexive paradigm, the book Lord Henry sends Dorian Gray. He does not name the book in the novel but he describes it at some length: ‘the sins of the world,’ he writes, as Dorian opens it to peruse its pages, ‘were passing in dumb show before him. . . . It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who spent his life trying to realise in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin’ (Works 101). It has generally been assumed that this book is Joris-Karl Huysmans’s1884 novel A Rebours, and Wilde confirmed as much at his trial.[10] He does not name it, however, I think, not only because he does not want to seem to be attacking Huysmans but because, remaining unnamed, the book can stand, self-referentially, as an allusion to his own. But there is a very real difference between Huysmans’s book and Wilde’s. Huysmans is a genuine aesthete. His hero tastes forbidden fruit but the author makes no judgment, either authorially or in the manner in which the events are made to occur. That is why there is no plot. As Wilde so strikingly reminds us in his summary of the novel, in that true Paterian way that values experience for its own sake, the tasting for Huysmans is the point. Including that book in his own, however, Wilde rewrites it in a sense. Whether it is the book that poisons him, as he argues at one moment (Works 149), or his own inclinations to sin which the book evokes in part (Works 163), the fact is that, living a similar life, Dorian is not only corrupted but judged to be so by his author. Unlike Huysmans, Wilde subsumes the aesthetic under the moral.

This, I believe, is what he intends to establish in Dorian Gray. Certainly not rejecting aestheticism but redefining it as a principle that can function only within carefully circumscribed moral boundaries, Wilde repudiates the manifesto with which Pater opened  the Renaissance and makes his way, I want to argue, back to an Arnoldian concept of the function and purpose of art. Wilde was a great admirer of Arnold’s and said so, for instance, to Helena Sickert, the popular writer and sufragette, on presenting her with the gift of a volume of Arnold’s poems (Letters 60). And he must have meant what he said, for during his darkest hours in prison, he asked for those poems to be mailed to him (Letters 416 n.). When he published his own first verses, he sent them to Arnold as a tribute, adding a letter in which he expressed how greatly he held him in esteem (Letters 78). Poet, critic, creator of taste, Wilde in many ways must have felt he was assuming Arnold’s mantle. Pater had felt much the same way, hence his opening allusion to the man he thought at least he was destined to replace. Certainly, the original title of Wilde’s essay ‘The Critic as Artist’—’The True Function and Value of Criticism’—echoes the title of Arnold’s lectures, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,’ delivered in 1864, long before Wilde arrived at Oxford, but undoubtedly a legend he could not but have wished to rival.[11]

 The principle to which Wilde returns is perhaps the very basis of Arnold’s canonical position, namely that the function of art, as Arnold put it in 1880 in The Study of Poetry, is to be a ‘criticism of life.’[12] Arnold means ‘criticism’ etymologically. Art is a means of judging life, a means of measuring reality against the standard of the ideal, and of altering it accordingly. It is, in essence, the view that Shelley had expressed in The Defense of Poetry when he had designated the poet the unacknowledged legislator of the world. Life, reality are flawed. And after Darwin if not before, so, in the deepest sense, is nature. The artist is that being who, by the power of imagination, is able to conceive those truths in whose image life may be shaped. Wilde suggests his Arnoldian view in his novel in two ways. First, the portrait is itself a perfect instance of this principle. It passes judgment on Dorian’s life. Second, exactly as Wilde intends to circumscribe the aesthetic life by placing it within moral limits, the novel encloses the life of an aesthete in the implicit moral perspective of a medieval morality play. The structure of the novel, thus, ‘criticizes’ the tale it tells.

The very fact that Wilde encloses his narrative in medieval form is a repudiation of Pater who, in the subject and title both of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, had rejected the Midle Ages, urging his readers to embrace, as he had stated it in his ‘Preface,’ the absolute antithesis that characterized the Renaissance, with its ‘care for physical beauty, the worship of the body, the’ very ‘breaking down of those limits which the religious system of the middle age imposed on the heart and the imagination.’[13] A similar attack may be found on the medieval period on the pages of Dorian Gray. ‘‘I believe’,’ Lord Henry comments, ‘‘that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal’’ (Works 29). This opposition between the Hellenic and medieval view of life is itself an Arnoldian dichotomy,[14] one that, in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold insists we must reconcile, as, in a sense, Wilde is doing himself through the relationship between the content and the form of his book. For Lord Henry’s view of this period is not by any means Oscar Wilde’s. Wilde knew the Middle Ages well and it is of special importance to the thesis of my essay that he was also an avid reader of medieval literature—Thomas à Kempis, St. Augustine, and, beyond all others, Dante, to name only a few of the authors he habitually read—read and took comfort from, apparently, for, as his letters indicate, he asked continually for these to be sent to him in prison.

The tale itself is medieval, concerned as it is with sin and guilt, conscience and moral retribution, and, although it is obviously set in the period in which it is written—indeed, its modernity is important, as I shall shortly hope to show—Wilde is intent on keeping our thoughts on the medieval world. He often refers to those writers, for instance, he liked to read himself from the period. Dorian, thus, is said, at one juncture, to appear to many young men ‘to be of the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to ‘make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty’’ (Works 103). Such a comment places Dorian virtually in Dante’s Hell, literarily in the ultimate paradigm of moral judgment. Allusions to medieval genres also keep the age before us. As Dorian, for instance, reads the book by which he will claim to have been corrupted, he hardly knows, the narrator comments recalling the genre of the saint’s life,  whether he’s reading ‘the ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the . . . confessions of a modern sinner’ (Works 101). The fact that all the major characters are said to have attended Oxford—Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry—serves the same historical purpose. Wilde, of course, went to Oxford himself, but that is not why he takes the trouble to introduce the university so prominently in his book. Oxford, in the 19th century and well into the 20th, was more a metaphor than a place, the very image, as Matthew Arnold had put it in 1865 in his ‘Preface’ to Essays in Criticism, First Series, of ‘the last enchantments of the Middle Age.’ Thomas Hardy makes use of this image, quoting from this very ‘Preface,’ in his novel Jude the Obscure published only a few years after The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared, and Max Beerbohm, Wilde’s good friend, quoting also from Arnold’s ‘Preface,’ invokes it still in 1911 in the opening paragraph of his novel Zuleika Dobson. There is no question Wilde is using Oxford in this symbolic way. The physician, Alan Campbell, a scientist, therefore a modern man, went to Cambridge not to Oxford (Works 127). Lord Henry, of course, makes a crucial distinction in the very novel itself between medieval art, which is ‘’charming’,’ and what he calls ‘’medieval emotions’’ which he considers ‘’out of date’.’  He grants that ‘one can use them in fiction. . . . But then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact’ (Works 69). It is important to note, however, that it is the medieval rather than Lord Henry’s view that is realized in the book.

Dorian Gray is not the only work in which Oscar Wilde invokes the frame of a medieval genre. In a more ironic relationship to the paradigm of its form, Salomé, I would suggest, is essentially a miracle play. Both of these works are aware of themselves as literary artifacts in an historical tradition. As Dorian, for example, wonders what he’s inherited from his forebears, he comments reflexively on his character: ‘one had ancestors,’ he remarks, ‘in literature, as well as in one’s own race’ (Works 113). Often Wilde calls our attention to the family tree of each trope. When Dorian makes up his mind to reform, the girl he decides to spare after planning to seduce her is given the name of Hetty Merton (Works 165), a name that cannot fail to remind us of Hetty Sorrel in Adam Bede who is seduced by Arthur Donnithorne. The fact that the character Dorian delivers from his own rapacious clutches is offered as a generic character shifts the attention from the action to more artifactual questions concerning the making of the book, therefore to the question of art.[15]

The medieval morality play subsumes everything in the novel: the action, the characters, the imagery. Joseph W. Barley has demonstrated that this medieval genre, having virtually disappeared after the latter Middle Ages, suddenly enjoyed a revival in the early 1900’s.[16] Wilde is reviving it even earlier. He, to be sure, is writing a novel, but he only in part abandons the dramatic form of the genre. He was a dramatist, after all, and a good deal of the novel seems to have been conceived dramatically.[17] The action proceeds through dialogue chiefly and the character of the dialogue is almost classical in nature, strongly resembling the stichomythy of the Greek stage Wilde so loved. The following is a typical instance.

‘What of Art?’ she asked.
 ‘It is a malady.’
‘Love?’
‘An illusion.’
‘Religion?’
‘The fashionable substitute for Belief.’
‘You are a sceptic.’
‘Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith’ (Works 149).

Wilde might well have written a play out of the matter of this narrative. The reason he chose to write a novel—and this, we recall, was his only novel, a fact that requires an explanation, and not the usual one which argues that he simply disliked long tasks—is that it was the dominant form. He saw himself, as Pater had, as the artistic voice of his age and he wanted to address it in its characteristic idiom.

Allegory, in the subjective and relativistic Decadence, had been rapidly disappearing. But if he was to reestablish a moral ideal on the basis of which art could hope to criticize life, Wilde has no choice but to reclaim it. Maria Edelson has shown that Wilde is often allegorical in his fantasies and fairy tales.[18] Although in a far less obvious way, Dorian is his deepest allegory. A similar allegory exists in a tale to which, I believe, Wilde is indebted for his plot. Many works have been suggested as the origin of this narrative: Disraeli’s Vivien Grey, Balzac’s La peau de chagrin, Meinhold’s Sidonia, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and William Sharp’s Children-of-To-morrow, not to mention A Rebours and the novels of Edmond Goncourt whose fiction Wilde admired immensely (Letters 144-45). Elements of these, undoubtedly, and many others found their way into the concept of the novel. And tales of young men exchanging their souls for eternal youth and beauty were a cliché at the end of the century.[19] But none provides as precise a parallel as an incident in a novel written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton published in 1862 and entitled A Strange Story. Bulwer-Lytton was one of the earliest novelists to use the occult in his allegorical tales, and in this novel, whose central argument is the inadequacy of materialism as a philosophic ground on which to reconceive a world that had conceptually disintegrated, the protagonist, Alan Fenwick, comes to have a strange relationship with a character named Margrave. Something of a Wandering Jew, a figure enormously popular through the entire nineteenth century, Margrave, although he looks young enough (ch. 25), seems to have lived through untold centuries. One day Fenwick is put in a trance in which he is given special powers to see beyond the empirical realm. ‘I saw before me,’ he observes, as he peruses Margrave’s features, ‘the still rigid form of Margrave, and my sight seemed, with ease, to penetrate through its covering of flesh, and to survey the mechanism of the whole interior being; . . . gradually, . . . the form and face on which I looked changed from the exuberant youth into infirm old age. The discolored, wrinkled skin, the bleared, dim eye, the flaccid muscles, the brittle, sapless bones. Nor was the change that of age alone; the expression of the countenance had passed into gloomy discontent, and in every furrow a passion or a vice had sown the seeds of grief. . . . The brain now opened on my sight. . . . I saw therein a moral world, charred and ruined. . . . The powers abused to evil had been originally of rare order; imagination and scope; the energies that dare; the faculties that discover. But the moral part of the brain had failed to dominate the mental. Defective veneration of what is good or great; cynical disdain of what is right and just; in fine, a great intellect, first misguided, when perverted, and now falling with the decay of the body into ghastly but imposing ruins’ (ch. 32).

Much like Bulwer, Wilde constructs his allegorical narrative by the use of religious language, often the language commonly used in medieval literature, but which the characters, having lost the moral significance of these terms, speak in a casual, meaningless, way. Words like ‘sin,’ ‘temptation,’ ‘judgement’ appear and reappear in the book, frequently without the user being aware of their origins. Sometimes Wilde threads a single word through the entire length of the novel with incremental significance. ‘Scarlet,’ for instance, whose Biblical meaning is not always negative but which came to be associated, undoubtedly through the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelations, with, as John the Divine describes it, moral ‘filth and abomination,’ begins as the color of Dorian’s lips (Works 31), is given moral definition by Lord Henry when, in a witticism, he remarks that in the ‘’sombre’’ costume of the nineteenth century ‘’sin’’ is ‘’the only . . . colour-element left’’ (Works 36), expresses the growing relationship between Dorian and Lord Henry when the former is said to flower, under the guidance of the latter, into ‘blossoms of scarlet flame’ (Works 54), finally to become the color of the spot on Dorian’s hand when the painting chronicles Dorian’s brutal murder of Basil (Works 166). Invariably, at critical moments, characters utter the very words a protagonist would have used in a medieval allegory, the most striking being the moment at the beginning in which Dorian wishes the portrait to age for him: ‘I would give my soul for that!’ (Works 34). Dorian only means to give added emphasis to his speech but at the allegorical level he is indicating his willingness to strike a bargain with the devil. There is intentional irony in the fact that the allegorical meanings of statements such as these depend on their literal signification while their modern usage rests on their metaphoric sense. Wilde is making a substantive point, namely that in the modern world words which in the Middle Ages stood of our relationship to divine and ultimate ends have, as literal assertions, lost their ontological status.

Remarks like the one above of Dorian’s remind us continually in the narrative that as its subject the novel takes precisely the subject of the morality play: the life of man, the fate of the soul. Dorian does sell his soul to the devil. Wilde himself explained to the editor of the Daily Chronicle in which the book had been attacked that this compact had been among his earliest concepts for the novel (Letters 263). This theme indeed is so important that Wilde feels the need to keep restating it and not with his usual subtlety: ‘’There goes the devil’s bargain’,’ for instance, Wilde has a woman cry out in the book when she spots Dorian in an opium-den (Works 144).

As in the morality play, the drama proceeds through abstract characters, figures that stand for general types, Dorian being the Everyman who gives his name to the most famous and last instance of the genre. Many have seen him as a Faust,[20] and he is that in part as well. But Wilde suggests what he is thinking when he names his character Gray. The common view has always been that Wilde chose this name to flatter John Gray, a handsome young man who had aspirations of becoming a writer himself (and published some pieces in The Dial) and whom Wilde met in the late 80’s. Gray appears to have shared this view for he often signed himself ‘Dorian’ in his letters to Oscar Wilde.[21] But, while he did not seem averse to letting John Gray think what he liked, Wilde was too good, too serious, an artist to use his novel as sexual bait. There are many names in the novel whose meanings, as in morality plays, fix the characters allegorically. An obvious instance is Lady Agatha, Lord Henry’s aunt whose name means ‘good’ and whose function in the novel is to represent good works, a cause to which she is devoted (Works 26). And good works, we might remember, in the character of Good Deeds, is a central figure in Everyman, being the only one who is willing, unlike Cousin, Kindred, Fellowship, and above all Worldly Goods, to go with Everyman to his grave, where, the implications is, he will plead for his salvation. Dorian is Gray because he is neutral at the beginning of the novel. We meet him at the threshold of life, still in the bloom of ‘youth’s’ first ‘purity,’ as yet ‘unspotted’ by ‘the world’ (Works 27). He is neither white nor black, in those traditional connotations. But the potential for both is in him and Dorian is Gray in that sense too, capable of good and evil, although not committed to either yet. ‘’Each of us’,’ as Dorian says, ‘’has a Heaven and Hell in him’ (Works 159). In both these senses, the name Gray has a long Victorian history—and it is important here to remind ourselves that Wilde does not spring unprecedented on the scene of English fiction, that he is not only the heir of the nineteenth-century novel but, and not only chronologically, part of that tradition himself: Cytherea and Owen Graye in Thomas Hardy’s Desperate Remedies; Frank and Lizzie Greystock in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds; John Grey in Can You Forgive Her?; and the title character in Disraeli’s Vivien Grey, to name a few of the prominent instances. In Dorian Gray there is one moment, when we discover that Dorian has promised to help his aunt in the East End (Works 27), a moment at which he seems about to choose the correct allegorical path. All of Lady Agatha’s works are centered in the East End of London, a section often alluded to, becoming the novel’s metaphor for the ills of society. Dorian, is, thus, about to assume his moral and social responsibility. But when we hear of this promise again, it is to learn he has forgotten it (Works 27). Like his medieval type, Dorian turns away from Good Deeds to fall under a rival influence.

The pivotal point in the morality play, namely the moment in which the protagonist chooses the path that will seal his destiny, is also the pivotal point of the novel. It occurs after Sibyl’s suicide, when Wilde has Dorian explicitly say that he feels the time has come for him to make a decisive choice (Works 87) . This moment, moreover, lays the foundation for the novel to reclaim another convention of the morality play. In the typological way in which medieval allegory takes all subsequent events as replications of Biblical paradigms, Everyman in making this choice is seen as an incarnation of Adam facing his archetypal temptation. Wilde, as Joyce Carol Oates has shown, also constructs that Biblical narrative. The whole of the novel reenacts it. The opening, though it begins indoors, soon moves into Basil’s ‘garden’ where Dorian, listening to Lord Henry, faces what is called his ‘temptation’ (Works 18), a temptation to which he surrenders, he later realizes, in ‘pride’ (Works 160).

Like the medieval morality play, which uses the Edenic paradigm to stress that every human being relives that universal tale, the novel clearly wants to address the eternal human condition. But morality plays are sometimes concerned not only with the eternal but with the form eternal questions assume in their own specific time. Thus in Mankind there is one character, called appropriately Now-A-Days, who not only represents those who live in the here and now but in the present of the play, about 1475, in which this character’s manner of thinking is held to be the modern way. Wilde does something very similar. Acutely conscious of his age as an historical circumstance, Wilde considers how the eternal reveals itself in modern form. The adjective ‘modern’ is attached to every important noun in the novel. The narrator speaks of ‘modern times,’ ‘modern life,’ the ‘modern ideal,’ ‘modern art,’ ‘modern romance,’ and above all ‘modern morality,’ to mention only a handful of instances. Dorian, although an eternal Everyman, is thus also typically modern. ‘’You are the type’,’ Lord Henry tells him, ‘’of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found’ (Works 217). The picture too has this double character. ‘’My dear fellow’,’ Lord Henry tells Basil on first studying the portrait. ‘’It is the finest portrait of modern times’’ (Works 33). The words are deliberately ambiguous. It is either the finest portrait that has been painted in modern times or the finest representation of the character of the period.

This ambiguity is obvious in every element of the allegory and most significantly in the battle, waged in the morality play by God and Satan for man’s soul, fought in the novel by their surrogates, Basil Hallward and Lord Henry. Both tend to speak as though their words had, beside their immediate meaning, a preternatural significance.  ‘’I have known everything’,’ says Lord Henry in one characteristic instance, ‘with a tired look in his eyes’ (Works 70), as though he has lived from time immemorial and, like the devil, seen all things.[22] His ‘smoking’ (Works 18) is meant to serve the same purpose, being a common Victorian way of identifying the devil. In Tess of the D’Urbervilles, we recall, another of the novels Hardy published not long after Dorian Gray, the first time Tess encounters Alec—the man who on the surface at least plays the diabolical role—he is smoking a cigar. And this scene occurs in the garden of the D’Urberville estate, or on the lawn, the nearest thing to it. Hardy is making sure we recognize the Edenic paradigm (ch. 5). Wilde is even more patently obvious, setting the moment, as we have seen, of Dorian’s first meeting with Lord Henry in the garden of Basil’s home, thus identifying the latter as the archetypal tempter, the Vice of the morality play. 

Keeping strictly to the paradigms of his medieval form, Wilde maintains the traditional triad of the world, the flesh, and the devil—a triad represented as characters in another morality play, The Castle of Perseverance—in his development of Lord Henry. Thus, for example, at a dinner party, a woman flirting with Lord Henry tells him she is not ‘’surprised’’ to find the ‘’the world’’ consider him ‘’wicked’.’ ‘‘But what world is that?’’ Lord Henry asks. ‘’It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms’’ (Works 136). And of this worldliness the translation in modern terms is materialism, both the materialism Victorians often attacked as Mammonism as well as the philosophic materialism, against which Victorians had also railed, that had reduced the universe to little more than atoms and molecules. A year before he had written Dorian, Wilde had attacked just such materialism in writing about the United States. ‘The crude commercialism of America,’ he had observed in ‘The Decay of Lying,’ ‘its materialising spirit, its indifference to the poetical side of things, and its lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals, are entirely due to the country having adopted for its national hero a man who, according to his own confession, was incapable of telling a lie’ (Works 980). In Dorian Gray Basil Hallward says ‘’I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can made modern life mysterious or marvelous to us’’ (Works 20). Awe and wonder have disappeared. It is a completely secular world rooted in the physical universe. And Wilde sees Lord Henry as its creation. ‘’What have you or I to do’,’ Lord Henry inquires of Dorian at one point, ‘’with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up our belief in the soul’ (Works 161-62). A telling exchange occurs when Basil explains to Lord Henry he has put too much of himself into the painting to be able to exhibit it. Lord Henry tells him he is too vain. ‘’I really can’t see any resemblance between you . . . and this young Adonis’’ (Works 19). This misunderstanding of Basil, one of the many wonderful bits of psychological characterization which rests on the way in which the mind reads its own thoughts into the world, blatantly demonstrates the bias of Lord Henry’s point of view. Belonging to the material world, he cannot grasp that Basil means he has put his heart and soul not his face into the picture. Surface is Lord Henry’s creed. ‘’It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances’,’ he says. ‘’The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible’ (Works 32).

As is often the case in the novel, Lord Henry hits on a partial truth and Wilde allows him to develop it, as the devil often will, in a subtle sophistic argument: ‘Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments os spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the physical impulse began? How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists! And yet how difficult to divide between the claims of the various schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also’ (Works 56). Falling prey to Lord Henry’s influence, Dorian takes these thoughts further yet: ‘The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried. . . . But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic’ (Works 104). What makes this argument partially true is that this is Paterian aestheticism. It is still a temptation to Wilde. But in the novel Wilde places these thoughts, a fictional version of the typical match in the morality play between the body and the soul, in the allegorical context of a debate between virtue and pleasure, between salvation and damnation.

In medieval allegory, the devil tempts humankind by lying. By definition Himself the truth, God and his messengers do not lie. They speak to us without deceit on what is needed for salvation. The only way the devil can work his wicked ways on the human mind is by rank prevarication. In the modern world, however, it is morality that lies, a lie in Wilde’s own sense of the word in ‘The Decay of Lying,’ for instance. It is a human fabrication, a truth, that is, not of the world but of the human imagination. In the medieval world, it is Satan who embodies, and so the word itself suggests, the pandemonium of moral anarchy. In the modern, a secular world in which there is not only no deity but no overarching order conferring meaning on the universe, chaos,’ as Dorian realizes, is to be found in ‘Actual life’ (Works 151). This actual world has no moral order. ‘In the common world of fact the wicked,’ Dorian declares, ‘were not punished, nor the good rewarded.’ ‘It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin’ (Works 151).

Lord Henry is that actual chaos. About the world of matter and fact he never speaks what is not the truth. That is why he is so compelling, such a vital, original force. It is no accident that it is he who is the scientist of the novel, far more so than Alan Campbell, who is only a physician, working on the human body. For Lord Henry, all humankind is a clinical laboratory. ‘He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science; but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human life—that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating’ (Works 55). Like a scientist, he is dedicated to the ‘experimental method’ which to him appears ideally suited to lead to ‘fruitful results’ in his search to analyze the genesis of human passion (Works 56).

But he is also the novel’s aesthete. Nearly every aestheticism articulated in the narrative is articulated by Lord Henry. Linda Dowling, for this reason, takes him to be the embodiment of that aesthetic aristocracy in which she holds Wilde put his faith.[23] And his repartées, his witticisms, his paradoxes, do indeed sometimes sound like Oscar Wilde. A part of Wilde must have enjoyed expressing itself through Lord Henry’s dialogue. But it is interesting that Wilde, in that letter in which he grants that he is Basil and Dorian both, does not see himself as Lord Henry. Lord Henry, he comments in that letter, is only ‘what the world thinks’ he is ‘ (Letters 352). It may seem strange that the novel’s scientist should turn out to be its aesthete too. But one of the most remarkable insights on the pages of Dorian Gray is Wilde’s extraordinary recognition that, in a strange and unlikely way, science and aestheticism are, in fact, one and the same. Both seek knowledge that is derived only through the use of the senses; both, whatever may be their differences, experiment in the sensory world.

Not surprisingly, Lord Henry is a total relativist. In answer to Shakespeare’s ‘What’s in a name?’ Lord Henry implicitly replies, in a very postmodern notion of ontological realities, that a name is merely the category under which we have chosen to classify, also in a postmodern view of the entire linguistic enterprise, the thing to which we have assigned it. ‘’Names are everything’,’ he says. ‘’I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words’’ (Works 147). There is nothing good or bad, Lord Henry might say with another character from the Shakespearean repertoire. Only naming makes it so.

Lord Henry is therefore also amoral. His witty cynicisms express a view of the world which grants no place to classifications of right and wrong. ‘’I never approve, or disapprove’,’ he breezily remarks to Basil. ‘’It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices’’ (Works 66). When Basil speaks of conscience and cowardice, seeking to make a distinction between them, Lord Henry answers they ‘’are really the same’.’ ‘’Conscience is the trade name of the firm. That is all’’ (Works 22). As one guest remarks at Lady Agatha’s, where he has been invited to dinner, Lord Henry is ‘’charmingly . . . demoralizing’’ (Works 45). This is another of those words that function differently in the literal and in the allegorical narrative, meaning little at the surface except that the guest is pleasantly shocked at Lord Henry’s witty remarks, but meaning exactly what it says at the allegorical level. What Lord Henry does is simply take morality away. A critical moment on this point occurs when Lord Henry cautions Dorian not to allow himself to be drawn into joining Lady Agatha in her good works at the East End. They will ‘’squander the gold of’ your ’days’’ (Works 32). He is urging Dorian, that is, to abandon those Good Deeds that alone can guarantee Everyman a place in heaven.

This contrast, however, between the character and the frame in which he is placed is an historical contrast too. In both his science and his aestheticism, Lord Henry is a modern man. Seducing Dorian to his views, he seduces him to the modern. That is one of the reasons Dorian is so easy to seduce. The medieval Everyman, even when he chose to do evil, knew the meaning of right and wrong. The modern Everyman does not. That is the difference between the immoral and the considerably worse amoral. The latter entices us not to evil, to which we have always been enticeable, but to the loss of the ability to distinguish right from wrong. Dorian begins with real moral instincts. He has the wisdom at the beginning to be ‘afraid’ of committing a sin (Works 31). When he hears Lord Henry speak of living ‘’fully and completely’,’ giving ‘’form to every feeling’,’ ‘’reality to every dream’’ (Works 29), he senses that something is deeply wrong. ‘’Stop!’’ he cries, trying to silence him. And it is just what he ought to say, a version of ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ But even to himself he cannot formulate what the problem is. You ‘’bewilder me’,’ he confesses. ‘’I don’t know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don’t speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think’ (Works 29). Having lost his moral moorings, he is no longer capable of knowing evil when he sees it.

As D. H. Lawrence would have said, the body is the new religion. When that debate between body and soul common in the morality play is reenacted in Dorian’s mind under the forces of modernism, Dorian can only make one choice. Looking at Basil’s portrait of him, he thinks of his beauty and of its brevity. ‘The life that was to make his soul would mar his body,’ he reflects (Works 34). It is under the spell of this moment that he makes his fatal wish to let the portrait age in his place. His words—’’I would give my soul for that!’’ (34)—although not only allegorical but the formulaic words of the deadliest transaction in the medieval world—carry, as we have seen already, very little meaning for him. As a modern Everyman, for him not the soul but the body is real. It is this that is the Hedonism for whose coming Lord Henry prays (Works 32). Lawrence was happy in this new creed, which, of course, he interpreted differently. Wilde is a more conventional moralist. For him, although not unattractive, it is  nonetheless a dangerous doctrine. It urges the cultivation of freedom even at the price of doing right. ‘’We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us’.’ It urges the cultivation of self. ‘’The aim of life is self-development’,’ Lord Henry preaches to Dorian Gray. The ‘’highest of all duties’,’ he argues, unaware of his own paradox, ‘’is the duty . . . to one’s self’ (Works 29).

What makes aestheticism so dangerous is that, as Wilde well understands, it is a creed that cannot be held without being simultaneously implemented in life as fully as in art. Dorian can hardly tell the difference. ‘Life itself,’ he reflects at one point, ‘is the first, the greatest, of the arts’ (Works 132). Many Victorians would have agreed. In a world that had turned to chaos, order could only be made by art, whether in fiction or in life. In The Study of Poetry, Matthew Arnold himself had pronounced that poetry would in time to come replace both philosophy and religion.[24]

And by ‘poetry’ he had meant, using the word etymologically, the act of making, of creation. Poetry had seemed to him to have so immense a future because, in a world that had come apart, all things required to be made. Life, the self, reality, were all essentially works of art. But art in this sense was a Shelleyean enterprise, the creation in the world of the ideal the mind had perceived. Lord Henry’s art is something else, based—and thus again it is one with science—not on the ideal but on the real, not on what should be but on what is.

This, at least, is one reality, the reality of empiricism. There is another in the novel, a reality explored in the actress Sibyl Vane and in Dorian’s relationship to her. Strictly speaking, on his part, there is no genuine relationship. Filtering all his perceptions and feelings through aesthetic categories, Dorian forms an association not with Sibyl but with the parts he has seen her portray on stage. ‘’You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you’,’ says Lord Henry, ‘’all the heroines of romance—that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen’’ (Works 86). It is not a mere figure of speech that Dorian, describing her to Lord Henry, says that ‘’one evening she is Rosalind’,’ another ‘she is Imogen’’ (Works 51; italics mine). The verb ‘to be’ is exactly right. Sibyl, for Dorian, does not enact these romantic heroines. For him, she is the roles she plays. Only through them can be conceive her. And this is still true after she dies. ‘Poor Sibyl!’ he exclaims on being told of her suicide. ‘What a romance it had all been!  She had often mimicked death on the stage.  Then Death himself had . . . taken her. . . . How had she played that dreadful last scene?’ (Works 87; italics mine). Sibyl’s relationship to Dorian is offered as the antithesis. Many have assumed her name was meant as a homonym for ‘Vain.’ But there is nothing vain in Sibyl. Rather, she is a weather vane, a norm, a standard, provided for us against which to measure Dorian’s views. Sibyl is an artist also, ‘’a born artist’,’ Dorian says (Works 67). That is what attracts him to her.  And she too begins by seeing him not as a man but as a part. She calls him ‘Prince Charming’  and, as Dorian rightly reports her to Lord Henry, ‘’regards’’’ him initially as no more than ‘’a person in a play’’ (Works 53). But then she falls in love with him. Wilde may simply be here exhibiting the sentimentality of which we know that he is sometimes capable. But he may also be availing himself of a common Victorian trope to stress a new and important point, namely that the moment she loves is the moment she loses her art  (Works 73). Before ‘’I knew you’,’ she explains, ‘’acting was the only reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived.  . . . I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. . . . You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. . . You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what love really is’’ (Works 74-75). These, of course, are Platonic words. Wilde’s acquaintance with Plato’s thought is well attested historically—as in the Commonplace Book he kept while at Oxford, for example[25] —as well as in the novel itself. Before she fell in love with Dorian, Sibyl is saying, she lived in the cave, taking the shadows for that reality represented by the Forms. Love has taught her to distinguish between the truth of those ideals and their copies in the world. This is virtually the ‘Symposium,’ an essay we know Wilde knew very well,[26] in which the love of another being serves as the path to a recognition and a love of the ideal. Critical to this amazing speech is the point, of which Sibyl herself is the dramatic manifestation, that art is mere shadow and passes away the moment genuine truth is grasped. This is not to say that Wilde subscribes to Plato’s view of art as a twice inferior image of the reality of the philosopher, but—and the woman, let us remember, who represents it is named Sibyl, priestess of transcendent truths—in insisting on this distinction between that reality and art, he is rejecting mere aestheticism as a tenable ground for life.

Wilde, in fact, goes even further, associating genuine art not only with Platonic Forms but specifically with Christ, therefore with Christianity. When the narrator refers to Lord Henry’s ‘poisonous theories that in Basil Hallward's garden had first stirred’ in Dorian’s mind ‘the passion for impossible things’ (Works 79), Wilde connects aestheticism with the temptation of the serpent. But here, very much as in the morality play, the serpent is also the Anti-Christ. Sitting with Basil in that garden in which the temptation is to take place, Lord Henry leans over to pick a daisy which he begins ‘pulling . . . to bits’ (Works 22). Typical of the Decadent style, the opening chapter focuses on a wealth of sensory detail, especially on the scent of flowers, but it is obvious, here as elsewhere, that Wilde is well aware of the meanings of flowers in medieval allegory. Popular in the fifteenth century, in particular in Dutch art, in paintings of the ‘Adoration,’ the daisy symbolizes the Christ Child. The act of pulling it apart—while it also reenacts, in keeping with the vegetation myths alluded to throughout the novel, the sparagmos of the fertility god—serves, in the medieval fashion that sees Satanic rituals as parodies of Christian rites (as, for example, in the Black Mass), as a mockery of the Eucharist. But Christ, for Wilde, is more than a deity. He is a rival concept of art. In one of his most extraordinary letters, written from prison to Alfred Douglas over a period of several months early in 1897, Wilde says of Christ that ‘he ranks with the poets,’ for He realized, Wilde explains, ‘in the entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation’ (Letters 476-77). Lord Henry, we are pointedly told, is completely devoid of sympathy. ‘’I can sympathise’,’ he remarks, in one of the many delightful paradoxes which hinge on our being able to recognize the etymologies of the words, ‘’with everything, except suffering’’ (Works 44). As the Anti-Christ, Lord Henry is the antithesis of true art. [27]

Basil Hallward, who is described as a ‘contrast’ to Lord Henry (Works 28), is clearly his allegorical opposite. If Lord Henry stands for the devil, Basil stands in the place of God. This is suggested in his name. Many have held that Dorian Gray was conceived when Basil Ward, a well-known artist of the period, painting a portrait of Oscar Wilde, happened to say it would be delightful if it were the painting that aged while the sitter remained the same, and that Wilde acknowledged that fact by naming his painter Basil Hallward.[28] Certainly the similarity in the names is not insignificant. But Basil, from the Greek for ‘king,’ was a very popular name in the nineteenth-century novel for characters meant as the King of Heaven. Many of these, in a secular age in which creation had fallen to art, were, like Basil—called ‘the artist’ as though it were his epithet (Works 18)—one kind of artist or another: Basil Morton, for example, the writer in George Gissing’s The Whirlpool and the title character of Wilkie Collins’s novel Basil, to name only two of many. There is an allegorical edge to nearly every situation in which Basil finds himself, especially in relation to Dorian. ‘’You are the one man in the world’,’ Dorian for example tells him, ‘’who is entitled to know everything about me’ (Works 120). When Basil lectures him on his doings, itself an allegorical act, Dorian angrily demands to know ‘what right had Basil to have spoken to him as he had done? who had made him a judge over others?’ (Works 141). It is, we recall, in Basil’s garden that Lord Henry first tempts Dorian. And the quarrel between the two in the novel’s opening scene over Dorian’s destiny reenacts the allegorical conflict between God and Satan in and over the soul of man.

Basil’s aesthetic, in opposition to the views Lord Henry holds, is both religious and Platonic. Speaking with admiration of Sibyl as Dorian has described her to him in her performances on the stage, Basil declares that to ‘’spiritualize one's age—that is something worth doing’’ (Works 71). What attracts him to Dorian Gray is that in him he imagines the embodiment of the ideal. If there is a homosexual element in their relationship, as has been suggested by many,[29] it is again the relationship—as Wilde makes clear when he remarks that the love Basil bore Dorian was not born of the senses only, was not merely the admiration of his physical pulchritude (Works 101)—described by Plato in the Symposium, in which homoerotic love is, preeminently, the means of reaching the love of the ideal. And here Wilde actually designates Plato as the source of his ideas. Referring to the artistic works he hopes in his new school to create, Basil calls them ‘patterns of some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real.’ He remembered, Wilde then adds, ‘something like it in history. Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analysed it?’ (Works 41). Dorian, he later repeats the point in distinctly Platonic terms, was the ‘’visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists’’ (Works 93).

Not only does Wilde provide for Basil a Christian and Platonic ground for his aesthetic principles, he specifies precisely the art that those principles produce. Art, as Basil envisions it, denies neither the soul nor the body. Speaking of Dorian Gray again, Basil says that ‘’Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body--how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void’’ (Works 24). It is important here to note that Basil speaks of aesthetic questions in terms of philosophic ideas. Far from being its own end, art for him is plainly rooted in a philosophic position, a position that, moreover, is not only its justification but the logic of its form. The body and soul, whose harmony he thinks he has achieved in his school, is each an ontological postulate and an epistemological base before it becomes an artistic claim. The body, thus, produces realism because its focus is the material and its manner of knowing empirical, these being the underpinnings of the realistic method. Wilde had always opposed mere realism and always on these identical grounds. In ‘The Decay of Lying,’ for instance, he excoriates English fiction for its realistic bent. We ‘are,’ he declares, ‘a degraded race, and have sold our birthright for a mess of facts.’ Mere ideality, however, which Wilde affiliates with the soul, is to be rejected also. What Basil is looking for is a synthesis, the harmony of the real and ideal. Some twenty years before Dorian Gray, the artist of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Adolf Naumann, had expressed the essence of his artistic vision by saying that what he wanted to find was a means of embodying the ‘’idealistic in the real’’ (ch. 22). Wilde may not be thinking of Middlemarch but the similarity here is by no means accidental. As I have tried to show elsewhere, Eliot is simply describing here, in language typical of the century, what she too sees as the need for a synthesis of the two, both philosophically and artistically. And for her, as for the century, that synthesis is achieved in symbolism.[30] Eliot is thinking of a symbol very much as Thomas Carlyle defines the term in Sartor Resartus when, in a chapter entitled ‘Symbols,’ he speaks of a symbol as the embodiment of the infinite in the finite, of the eternal in the temporal, of the spirit in the flesh. It is that ‘’visible incarnation’’ for which Basil himself is searching. Basil is aware that symbolism is his natural expression. Repeating his Platonic view that art is only a shadowing forth of the ideal the mind perceives, he speaks of his art as therefore ‘symbolical’ (Works 41). Art in this strictly symbolical sense is just what Basil has achieved in his portrait of Dorian Gray. Although it pictures his physical features, the painting mirrors Dorian’s soul. That is why it reflects his sins. The portrait thus fulfills precisely the Arnoldian function of art: it is a criticism of life, a criticism of Dorian’s life, a means of pointing out the difference between the ideal of life and the real. Dorian accepts it as such at one point, calling it that ‘terrible portrait whose changing features’ had served to show him ‘the real degradation of his life’(Works 111).

Carrying a moral ideal in this way, Basil Hallward’s symbolism would have served Wilde’s needs very well. And symbolism, as it happened, was the fashion of Wilde’s day. Dorian Gray was published in fact at the height of the Symbolist movement. But the idea of the symbol had undergone a radical change since Eliot and Carlyle had first urged it. Although in The Symbolist Movement in Literature, published in 1899, Arthur Symons still occasionally speaks of a symbol in the old way, writing, for instance, on his first pages, that the symbolic in literature, ‘in speaking to us . . . as only religion had hitherto spoken to us, . . . becomes itself a kind of religion, with all the duties and responsibilities of the sacred ritual,’ as a movement Symbolism was passing into something else, something evocative, impressionistic, something more designed to stir sentiment and sensibility than to recall transcendent truths. It had become a purely secular and even a purely aesthetic enterprise. Wilde is certainly not averse to this evocative kind of symbolism, and uses it himself, in fact, on the pages of Dorian Gray, as, for example, in Chapter 11 in his suggestive catalogue of the associations of gems. But having lost its moral core in shedding its transcendent meaning, a symbol is no longer capable of joining the beautiful to the good. Wilde makes a point of this himself on the pages of the novel. In contrast to Basil, who speaks of symbolism in that still religious vein, the narrator speaks of the Symbolistes as that school, of French conception, to which belongs that poisonous book whose influence is so deadly to Dorian (Works 101).

Dorian is, furthermore, not the only victim of this decline in symbolism. Basil himself has suffered from it. For it is obvious that while his theories are precisely what Wilde is looking for, he himself is far from able to work them out in his own art or, indeed, in his own mind. For one thing, in contrast to Lord Henry, who sees reality very well but not the world of the ideal, Basil has a good deal of difficulty apprehending the actual. Thus, for example, he never believes that Lord Henry means what he says. ‘’You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose’’ (Works 20). Lord Henry assures him he is mistaken: ‘’I mean everything that I have said’’ (Works 67). But Basil cannot be convinced, despite incontrovertible evidence in his influence on Dorian. Basil is wrong about Dorian too. Arriving the day after Sibyl’s death, he says he called the night before to be told Dorian was at the opera. ‘’Of course I knew that was impossible’’ (Works 89). He cannot imagine Dorian so callous as to join his friends at the opera on the day of Sibyl’s suicide. But that is just what Dorian did.

The problem is not that he lacks perception, although it finally comes to that. The problem is, rather, that morality being in Wilde’s special sense a lie, Basil can only hold on to it by shutting his eyes to reality. Lord Henry says he has ‘’no curiosity’.’ He means, of course, that Basil exhibits no passion for forbidden fruit. He neither transgresses moral boundaries nor permits himself to feel the desire to transgress them. This, indeed, is what allows him to live within a moral frame. But it is also what prevents him from apprehending the actual world. It is therefore his great virtue but ‘’his chief defect’’ as well (Works 160). That is why he speaks in aphorisms. Unlike Lord Henry, whose observations have the vitality of real life, being anchored in observation, Basil’s always tend to clichés, being formulaic positions held in an almost dogmatic way. And even so he cannot manage to observe them in his life. Although a Platonist in theory, not unlike Thomas Mann’s Gustav Aschenbach, the paradigm artist in ‘Death in Venice’ who first sees Tadzio as the embodiment of his own Platonic ideals—and that Mann is thinking of Plato is clear in his references to the Phaedrus, the dialogue that might be considered the companion to the Symposium on the subject of how love leads through beauty to the Forms—but comes very soon to make him an idol to be worshipped itself—taking the physical, that is, not as the means to higher truth but its own justification—Basil comes to worship Dorian. ‘’I worshipped you too much’,’ he admits when he beholds the hideous portrait on which are written Dorian’s sins (Works 122). In a materialistic age, even the artist cannot resist the power of the material world.

This is why religion is necessary. We have not sufficiently understood Oscar Wilde on this subject, I think. Undoubtedly, the romantic rituals, what Wilde himself characterized as the ‘perfume of belief’ (Harris 33), had, as it did for Walter Pater, an undeniable appeal.[31] But Wilde saw also that religion was a means of keeping alive the world of mystery and passion in a materialistic era. The ‘Roman ritual’,’ he writes in the novel of Dorian Gray, ‘had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize’ (Works 105; italics mine). And, as perhaps the second half of this observation suggests, religion, as an immovable ground for a concept of right and wrong, offered a basis for the morality the human tragedy required. In the novel, Dorian Gray, although he considers becoming a convert, ‘never’ falls into the ‘error of arresting,’ Wilde remarks, ‘his intellectual development by’ formally accepting that ‘creed’ (Works 106). These are certainly powerful words. Yet on his deathbed Wilde himself did at last choose to convert, having been on the brink of doing so time and again throughout his life.

It is also for this reason Wilde embeds the allegory of a morality play in his novel. Unlike symbolism, which has proven, historically if nothing else, that, unable to keep its grip on some sort of ideal principle, it can slide into becoming little more than a sensory stimulus, allegory, whether intrinsically or because it is so firmly grounded in that morality of which it is often the representation, does not lose, or has not lost, its solid ethical foundation, a foundation, furthermore, deeply rooted in religion. This is eminently evident in the genealogical tree of the morality play itself. A dramatization of an exemplum, which begins as an extended illustration in a sermon, which in turn has a scriptural passage generally as its starting point, the morality play derives ultimately from a Biblical text. And often, in fact, it points explicitly to the genres it subsumes. So does Oscar Wilde in his novel. Clearly aware of the descent of the form he takes as his frame, Wilde incorporates them all into the structure of his narrative. Under the entire story lies the Biblical text of the sermon, actually two Biblical texts. One is spoken by Lord Henry who, however, does not recall the crucial conclusion of the passage. ‘’By the way’,’ he asks at one point speaking to Dorian Gray one day, ‘’what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose’ how does the quotation run?—’his own soul’’?’ (Works 161). A verse that appears in Mark 8:36 as well as in Matthew 16:26, this was a text that haunted Wilde. He had alluded to it already in the opening poem, ‘Hélas!’ of his first published volume of verse nearly a decade before the novel, asking there whether the poet, because of his love for the sensuous world, was doomed to ‘lose a soul’s inheritance’—asking, that is whether aestheticism was necessarily and inherently incompatible with religion, a question which he finally answered in the affirmative in Dorian Gray. The second of the Biblical texts is articulated by Basil and it is more ironic yet that Basil cannot even remember the fact that this is a scriptural passage, Isiah 1:18, as it happens. ‘’Isn’t there a verse somewhere,’ he asks when he sees the dreadful portrait, ‘though your sins be as scarlet I will make them white as snow’’’ (Works 122). As in the sermon and the exemplum, the Biblical text of the morality play is intended as a lesson designed for man’s spiritual good. Again, Wilde follows the paradigm. Looking on that frightful portrait, Basil exclaims ‘’What an awful lesson!’’ (Works 122).  And the lesson of the portrait is the lesson of the book.

The allegory of the novel is atemporal, of course—the eternal moral truth—but Wilde is concerned to encompass in it the historical moment also, to bring that eternal vision to bear—otherwise it is utterly useless—on the condition of modern life, and this he does by a striking twist on yet another traditional element in the morality play, the Summons of Death. The point of this trope in the Middle Ages was to remind us of our mortality, therefore of the day of judgment, and it was critical to the morality play because it was, in turn,  a reminder of the importance of choosing virtue before that ultimate day arrives. The Pride of Life, one of the earliest of the morality plays extant (although its ending has been lost), is a typical example, showing a King who embodies the title because he does not believe he will die but who discovers that those things on which he counts to stave off death cannot protect him in the end. Dorian speaks in a similar vein. Although he confesses to being terrified by the thought of approaching death, Death itself, he proudly boasts, is something of which he has ‘‘no terror’’ (Works 153). He is exactly that Everyman who needs to be reminded of death and of the judgment it entails, and that reminder comes, in fact, in the figure of James Vane, another of the many characters who play an allegorical role. The younger brother of Sibyl Vane, James makes a vow when he leaves England, having decided to go to sea, that if anyone harms his sister he will kill him on his return. He does not return for many years but, on arriving in England again and learning that Dorian is responsible for his sister’s suicide, Vane determines to keep his vow. Tracking Dorian through the streets, he acts as that allegorical figure. But when he finally catches up with him, Dorian, citing his youthful appearance, persuades him he is not old enough to be the man Vane thinks he is. For the moment, Death is cheated. Death seems cheated yet again when Vane, his misapprehension corrected, follows Dorian to Selby Royal, the ancestral Gray estate. The house itself, in Gothic style, assumes an inauspicious character. It is an ‘ill-omened place,’ thinks Dorian. ‘Death’ walks ‘in the sunlight’ there (Works 156). The words are almost allegorical and they are allegorically realized. Glancing out of his window one day, standing framed against the window-sill precisely as his portrait is framed, Dorian catches sight of Vane watching him from the sunny field (Works 151). There is a hunting party, however, walking through the identical field, and aiming wildly at a hare, Sir Geoffrey shoots James Vane instead. Once again, it would appear, Dorian has managed to escape the allegorical retribution. But this is not at all the case. For it is this incident that so disgusts Dorian with himself that, when he sees his sins inscribed on his portrait one more time, he grabs a knife and stabs his image, only to find he has stabbed himself. As in the morality play, Death has summoned and been answered.

It is not Dorian alone, however, who is being summoned here. Dorian’s are the sins of the age. He is an Everyman because his is the character of his era. What is at stake here is not one man who happens to have gone astray. It is the very progress of history and the direction in which it is headed. ‘’Civilization’,’ says Lord Henry in one of his many true remarks on the nature of reality, is not ‘’an easy thing to attain to’’ (Works 157). And the principles of which Dorian has been the representative type is as deadly to the period as it has turned out to be to him. When Lord Henry, in response to Lady Narborough’s remarks on the mores of the time, explains by saying ‘’Fin de siècle’,’ his hostess answers ‘’Fin du globe’’ (137). This sense of doom and apocalypse marks the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, in which the very name of the hero recalls the writing on the wall, to D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, which ends in an emblematic death for Gerald Critch, its Western Everyman. And for most of those who prophecy an apocalyptic end, the causes are the skepticism and the materialism of the age. Wilde is characteristic and different. Although it was Victorian skepticism that inspired Walter Pater to take issue with Matthew Arnold on the nature and purpose of art, Wilde, by putting aestheticism at the center of the question, as the symptom and then the cause of a certain view of life, places the moral burden of history where Matthew Arnold had placed it himself when he had predicted that poetry would be required to take up the work of philosophy and religion, squarely in the hands of art.  But it is not the art of aestheticism. If, in trying to create out of the chaos of the material something ordered and meaningful, art must be opposed to realism, in seeking to carry a moral vision and to give a shape to history, it must equally be opposed to the aestheticism that argues that art must be only its own end.

This is precisely where Oscar Wilde ends The Picture of Dorian Gray. Alluring as he finds the freedom and the beauty of aestheticism, he cannot reject the responsibility art must assume in the modern world. By enclosing his own narrative in a medieval allegory, he offers an artistic parable that gives to purely aesthetic principles the boundary of a moral form.

 


NOTES

1.The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. Robert H. Super. 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1960-77), I, 140.  Arnold repeated these very words two years later in his essay ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (Arnold III: 258).

2.Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. By Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: The University of Californbia Press, 1980), p. xix.

3. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), p. 47.

4.Pater, p. 188; Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, with an Introduction by Vyvyan Holland (London and Glasgow: Colins, 1948, repr. 1984), p. 104. Subsequent references to Wilde's works will be given in parentheses in the body of the text.

5.The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1996), chapter IV.  

6.P. 310

7.The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. By Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), p. 352. Subsequent references to Wilde's letters will be given in parentheses in the body of the text.

8.Ellmann pp. 49 ff.

9.P. 186.

10.  Ellmann, p. 316.

11.And, if Apryl L.D. Heath is right—in his ‘An Unnoted Allusion to Matthew Arnold in The Picture of Dorian Gray', Notes & Queries, 35.3 (233) (1988), 332,—there is in the very text of the novel an acknowledgement of the master.

12.  Arnold, IX, 163.

13.  Pp. xxii-xxiii.

14.  Further discussion of the relationship of Hebraism and Hellenism in the novel can be found in Jan B. Gordon, 'Hebraism, Hellenism, and The Picture of Dorian Gray', Die Neueren Sprachen, 15 (1966), 324-32.

15.A different perspective on the uses of reflexivity in Wilde is offered by Douglas Robillard Jr., in 'Self-Reflexive Art and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray', Essays in Arts and Sciences, 18 (1989), 29-38.

16.'The Morality Motive in Contemporary English Drama' (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1911).

17.Patrice Hannon makes a good case for the place of the theatrical in the language of Dorian Gray. See his ‘Theatre and Theory in the Language of Dorian Gray', Victorian Literature and Culture, 19 (1991), 143-66.

18.'The Language of Allegory in Oscar Wilde's Tales', Anglo-Irish and Irish Literature: Aspects of Language and Culture, ed. By Birgit Bramsback and Martin Croghan (Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 1988), pp. 165-171.

19.Henry Proctor’s Perpetual Youth and James Clark Bennett’s Shedding the Years are two examples of such novels.

20.Ellmann, for instance (p. 315), and Dominick Rossi in his ‘Parallels in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Goethe's Faust', College LanguageAssociation Journal, 13 (1969), 188-91.

21.See Ellmann, p. 308.

22.Robert André—in 'Oscar Wilde et Lucifer', Nouvelle Revue Française, 14 (1967), 1072-77—and  Madame Euschi—in 'The Devil in Dorian Gray', Mythes, Croyances et Religions dans le Monde Anglo Saxon, 5 (1987), 85-89—comment on some other aspects of the devil in Dorian Gray.

23. P. 95.

24.Arnold, IX, 162.

25.See Ellmann, p. 41.

26.See Ellmann, p. 88.

27.On other aspects of Oscar Wilde's relationship to Christianity, see John Albert, O.C.S.O., 'The Christ of Oscar Wilde', American Benedictine Review, 39.4 (1988), 372-403; John Allen Quintus, 'Christ, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde', Texas Studies in Literature and Language , 33.4 (1991), 514-27; and Guy Willoughby, 'The Marvellous Rose: Christ and the Meaning of Art in ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’', English Studies in Africa: A Journal of the Humanities, 31.2 (1988), 107-17. 

28.See Hesketh Pearson, The Life of Oscar Wilde (London: Methuen, 1946), p. 145.

29.See, for example, Ed Cohen, 'Writing Gone Wilde: Homoerotic Desire in the Closet of Representation', PMLA 102 (1987), 801-13; Richard Dellamora, 'Representation and Homophobia in The Picture of Dorian Gray', Homosexual Themes in Literary Studies, ed. by Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson (New York: Garland Press, 1992), pp. 82-85; and Jeff Nunokawa, 'Homosexual Desire and the Effacement of the Self in The Picture of Dorian Gray', American Imago: Studies in Psychoanalysis and Culture, 49.3 (1992), 311-21.

30.A full discussion of this question can be found in my 'Middlemarch: The Genesis of Myth in the English Novel: The Relationship Between Literary Form and the Modern Predicament', The Notre Dame English Journal (1981), 107-54.

31.Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions (New York: Horizon Press, 1930; repr. 1974 with an introduction by Frank McShane), p. 33.

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