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THE OSCHOLARS LIBRARY |
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The Picture of Dorian Gray: An
Introduction |
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Isobel Murray |
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In 1974,
Oxford University Press published an edition of The Picture of Dorian
Gray in the series Oxford English
Novels, under the general editorship of James Kinsley, Professor of English
Studies at the University of Nottingham.
Dorian Gray was edited with
an Introduction by Isobel Murray, then Lecturer in English at Aberdeen
University, and now Honorary Professor in Modern Scottish Literature at that
university. This was the first scholarly edition, and was reprinted with
revisions in 1981 as a World’s Classic paperback, with new impressions in
1991 and 1998. It is not always easy
to follow the republication of The Picture of Dorian Gray through the various Oxford editions
(Oxford English Novels; World’s Classics; Oxford World’s Classics; Oxford
Bookworms Library), and the current stable leader is The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, Volume 3 (2005), edited by
Joseph Bristow for the
series Oxford English Texts. Professor
Bristow is also the editor of the current edition in the Oxford World’s
Classics series. This being so, the original introduction by Isobel Murray is
now thoroughly veiled, and it is with great pleasure that we republish it
with Professor’s Murray kind permission. Of the two editions that she edited,
concerning that of 1974 Professor Murray writes ‘It has more new material
in it, especially with regard to the influence on Wilde of Edward Heron Allen
and his Suicide of Sylvester Gray. I had to rewrite the Intro for a more
general readership’ [i.e. for the 1981 edition;
e-mail Isobel Murray to D.C. Rose, 20th August 2008]. As no electronic version exists, what follows has been retyped from
the edition and submitted to Professor Murray for validation. Numbers in parentheses (Arab numerals)
refer to page numbers in the text of the Murray edition. Numbers in square
brackets refer to the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde edited by G.B. Foreman, 1966. |
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Ellipses […] are as in the text. The only changes have been to justify
rather than indent the first line of each paragraph, to insert the page
numbers (Roman numerals) between ‘slashes’ /, and to relocate the footnotes
as endnotes. The formatting of the endnote references has also been changed,
from superscript to on-line, and now function as hyperlinks. |
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I have added
two new endnotes identified by * and †. |
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This has all
been submitted to Professor Murray for her approval, which has been
generously given. |
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— Editor, THE
OSCHOLARS, April 2009. |
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/p.vii/ Gilbert, the more voluble speaker in
Wilde’s dialogue ‘The Critic as Artist’, has a great deal to say about
current and future fiction. Although
his general theme is that ‘creation is doomed’ [1055],[1]
while ‘the subject matter of criticism increases daily’, he does see two
possible kinds of fiction still: ‘He who would stir us now by fiction must
either give us an entirely new background, or reveal to us the soul of man in
its innermost workings’ [1054].
Kipling’s Plain Tales from the
Hills, he continues, ‘fulfil the first requirement; one feels as if one
were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of
vulgarity.’ Concentration on the
‘innermost working of the soul’ is exemplified in the work of Meredith and
Browning. Browning was fascinated by
‘the subtle mechanism of mind’ [1012], and is praised earlier as ‘the most
supreme writer of fiction . . . that we have ever had [1013]. Gilbert criticizes Browning’s inarticulacy,
but claims: ‘Considered from the point of view as a creator of character he
ranks next to him who made Hamlet’ [1013].
Later in his argument Gilbert comes back to Browning: |
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Browning might have given us a Hamlet who would
have realised his mission by thought.
Incident and event were to him unreal or unmeaning. He made the soul the protagonist of life’s
tragedy, and looked on action as the one undramatic element of a play. [1042] |
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There may be a clue here to Wilde’s method in Dorian Gray. Wilde was aware that the original version
of the novel lacked action: ‘I am afraid it is rather like my own life–all
conversation /p.viii/ and no action. I
can’t describe action: my people sit in chairs and chatter.’[2] |
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The self-criticism is both just and
misleading. Wilde added
considerably–and more than sufficiently–to the action before the novel was
published in its present form. But
this is a novel of sensibilities rather than a novel of action, and it needs
only enough action to reveal the essential natures of the characters, and
their development. |
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When Lord Henry sends Dorian the fatal French novel
which is to ‘poison’ him and occupy the passing of time until Dorian’s good
looks are quite clearly supernaturally preserved, we are told: ‘It was novel
without a plot.’ In a sense, this is
true of Dorian Gray also. A great deal
of the action is suppressed or anticipated, so that it provides motives for
Dorian’s development rather than an interest in itself. So at our first meeting with Basil Hallward
at the beginning of the novel, we see him with the wonderful portrait and are
introduced to ‘Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago
caused, at the time, such public excitement’.
The first conversation between Lord Henry and Basil gives us the main donnée, the characters of these young
men and Basil’s infatuation with Dorian, and Basil is already predicting the
outcome: ‘Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are–my art,
whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks–we shall all suffer for
what the gods have given us, suffer terribly’ (3). With a great deal of qualification and more
subtlety than is evident here, this turns out to be the theme of the
book. Wilde himself spelled it out in
correspondence over a review in the St
James’s Gazette of the first version of the story: |
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And the moral is this: all excess, as well as all
renunciation, brings its own punishment.
The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much,
as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a
monstrous and absurd vanity.
/p.ix/Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure,
tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator
of life. He finds that those who
reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.[3] |
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And so a vast area of life is ‘missed out’ of the
novel, not because Wilde could not describe it, but because his aim is
concentration on a specialized area of ‘soul’. So it was the disappointment of early
reviewers that seized on the mystery of Dorian’s sins and evil ways, for the
most part left purposely vague: |
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It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development
of this story to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral
corruption. Otherwise the story would
have had no meaning and the plot no issue. To keep this atmosphere vague and
indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story. .
. . Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.[4] |
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Almost every detail of the plot or action that is
unnecessary to our understanding of Dorian or of his relations with Basil
Hallward and Lord Henry is suppressed.
We never know, for example, the nature of the hold Dorian has over
scientist Alan Campbell, and the necessary fact of his later suicide is
dropped casually into a conversation which is packed with other interest
(Chapter xix). |
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What the novel amounts to then in a wide sense, is
the growth, education, and development of an exceptional youth, who, through
personalities, a book, perhaps even a picture, is moulded or moulds himself,
discovering himself and what he believes in: using Wilde’s term as loosely as
he does, we may call it ‘The Story of a Soul’. And it is at this most basic level that we
can see the extent of Wilde’s indebtedness to Pater, or at least of his
desire to follow him. Pater began two
full-length novels with almost identical themes, to give his own account of a
central developing sensibility, and to illustrate what he /p.x/ had really
meant by the ‘Conclusion’ to his Renaissance, which had been sensationally
misunderstood, most publicly by Wilde himself. |
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Marius the
Epicurean (1885) is a novel set in the time of Marcus Aurelius. The period setting is very important in
Pater: he chooses an era distant in time but closely parallel in many
spiritual or cultural ways to the time of writing. So, with the Roman Empire poised on the
brink of destruction and in its decadence, Pater paints the development of
the orphan Marius’s sensibility, the sensibility of a natural religious
soul. There are two male friends who
influence Marius greatly: his schoolmate at Pisa, Flavian, aiming to be a
writer with acute scrupulosity of style, doomed to an early death from plague
in Marius’s arms, and the soldier Cornelius, whose acceptance of Christianity
serves to stress by contrast Marius’s hesitancy. And the other major influence on Marius,
besides the differently religious atmospheres of home and school, is a
book. His ‘golden book’, to the description
of which Pater devotes more than a chapter, is the Metamorphoses of Apuleius.
The story of Cupid and Psyche is retold in the novel, and the effect
of the book on Marius is described in detail, and is seen as important to his
development: ‘a book which awakened the poetic or romantic capacity as
perhaps some other book might have done, but was peculiar in giving it a
direction emphatically sensuous’ (i.54). |
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This outline of Marius
shows it to be in many ways parallel to Dorian
Gray, however different in tone or outcome: the death of one hero as a
near-martyr, with the sacraments of the Church on his deathbed, is an
appropriate contrast to the death of the other, in a vain attempt to kill
conscience once and for all. But if we
look at the other novel Pater began, the parallels are the more
pronounced. Gaston de Latour was never finished, but its first five chapters
were published serially in Macmillan’s
Magazine in 1888, when Wilde was engaged on Dorian Gray. It is set in
the time of the French Religious Wars.
Gaston, like Dorian, is an orphan with a /p.xi/ romantic
background. His development is
influenced by his education at Chartres, by his ‘Triumvirate’ of friends,
Jasmin, Amadée, and Camille, and by a book, in this case the Odes of Pierre de Ronsard. The chapter on the book and its author is
this time called ‘Modernity’, and Pater again emphasizes the impact the book
has on his hero: |
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Gaston’s demand ... was for a poetry as veritable,
as intimately near, as corporeal, as the new faces of the hour, the flowers
of the actual season. ... Things were become were more deeply sensuous and
more deeply ideal. ... It had been a lesson, a doctrine, the communication of
an art–the art of placing the pleasantly aesthetic, the welcome elements of
life at an advantage in one’s view of it till they seemed to occupy the
entire surface: and he was sincerely grateful for an undeniable good
service. And yet the gifted poet
seemed but to have spoken what was already in his own mind, what he had
longed to say, had been just going to say: so near it came that it had the
charm of recovery of one’s own.[5] |
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Lord Henry Wotton’s initial impact on Dorian, which
Wilde says is analogous to the effect a book had on Lord Henry himself when
he was sixteen, is similarly described: |
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He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh
influences were at work within him.
Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words
that Basil’s friend had said to him . . . had touched some secret chord that
had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and
throbbing to curious pulses. (18) |
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The book with which Lord Henry’s work of corruption
is completed has a similar awakening effect on Dorian: ‘Things he had dimly
dreamed of were suddenly made real to him.
Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed’
(125). It is in the nature of its
effect that Dorian’s book is different.
Ronsard and Apuleius help to widen and deepen their respective heroes’
sensibilities, and both include celebrations of healthy sensuousness, but
Lord Henry and his /xii/ French novel have a baleful effect, which Dorian
refuses to recognize until it is too late: ‘Yet you poisoned me with a book
once. I should not forgive that’
(218). In the emotional turmoil
induced in him by Lord Henry’s first revelation of his ideas, Dorian
meditated on the power of these words: |
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Words! Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid and cruel! One could
not escape from them. And yet what a
subtle magic there was in them! They
seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to have a
music of their own as sweet as that of viol or lute. Mere words!
Was there anything so real as words? (19) |
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This seems almost certainly inspired by Gaston’s
thoughts about Ronsard’s Odes, more
or less a verbal echo: |
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With a masterly appliance of what was near and
familiar, or in the way of bold innovation, he found new words for
perennially new things, and the novel accent awakened long-slumbering
associations. Never before had words,
single words, meant so much. What
expansion, what liberty of heart, in speech: how associable to music, to
singing, the written words![6] |
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And the book which Wilde echoes most frequently and
most importantly in Dorian Gray is
Pater’s Renaissance, the book that
Wilde praised extravagantly to Yeats on their first meeting: ‘It is my golden
book; I never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of
decadence.’[7] But the important point here is something
much wider than mere verbal echo. It
is very helpful to a reading of Dorian
Gray to see that Pater’s is the kind of novel Wilde wants to write, the
account of the evolution under diverse influences of his hero’s sensibility
and moral outlook–loosely, ‘soul’.
Wilde’s description of future fiction in ‘The Critic as Artist’ can be
seen as a description of this emergent ‘school’. |
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But there is still much to be done in the sphere of
introspection. People sometime say
that fiction is getting too morbid. As
far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We /p.xiii/ have merely touched the surface
of the soul, that is all. In one
single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous
and more terrible than even they have dreamed of, who, like the author of Le Rouge et le Noir, have sought to
track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its
dearest sins. [1055] |
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There is a sense in which the novel enacts the
process of Dorian’s changing, recording the gradual changes due to evil and
‘age’s evils’. The oil painting Basil
made of Dorian is only a slight reflection of the real painting that Wilde
has made of Dorian, much as James painted Isabel Archer and Joyce Stephen
Dedalus. |
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At the beginning of the book Dorian is young,
outstandingly good-looking, and relatively untouched. The changes that are to be wrought will
come through the influence of Lord Henry, the book he lends Dorian, and the
knowledge of his own beauty that the portrait gives him. The influences for evil are only notionally
counteracted by influences for good, because the positively good characters
in the book, the artists Basil Hallward and Sibyl Vane, are weak and passive
compared to the attractive corruption of the others. So Dorian is pulled by two sounds: ‘Your
voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane are the two things that I shall never
forget. When I close my eyes, I hear
them, and each of them says something different’ (50). One touch of Sibyl’s hand, again, makes
Dorian forget all Lord Henry’s ‘wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful
theories’ (77). But Lord Henry’s
influence on Dorian was prior, and is clearly to prevail. Basil, on the other hand, is the
‘discoverer’ of Dorian Gray, but he cannot protect him from Lord Henry. In Basil’s garden Lord Henry enacts the
part of the serpent in Eden, and his success is as inevitable. Eventually Basil’s love is dimly recognised
by Dorian, but so is his comparative weakness. Dorian leaves him, despite his entreaties,
with the portrait, ‘the real Dorian’, at the end of chapter ii, and goes off
with Lord Henry. Basil is ready to
destroy the picture rather than distress Dorian: his affection for Dorian,
clearly at least in part homosexual, is affirmed as pure and good, and Wilde
played down /p.xiv/ the homosexuality in his revisions for the sake of his
audience. Dorian thinks ‘for a moment’ that Basil could have helped him to
resist ‘Lord Henry’s influence, and the still more poisonous influences that
came from his own temperament’. His
‘was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann,
and Shakespeare himself’ (119). It is
Basil who asserts the unpleasant truths, who talks of remorse and suffering
and the ‘consciousness of degradation’ (78).
Dorian recognizes his status in chapter ix: ‘Of course I am very fond
of Harry. But I know that you are
better than he is. You are not
stronger–you are too much afraid of life–but you are better’ (110). It is Basil who taxes Dorian at last with
the hidden horrors of his life, and Basil who is shown the picture: it is
characteristic that his horrified reaction is the need for prayer, but his
existence forces Dorian to confront aspects of reality he is determined to
ignore, and so his murder is accomplished, and any remaining influence from
Basil Hallward comes from the portrait, which causes Dorian to wonder, even
at the end, if he should not confess.
And so the good or neutral characters we see near Dorian are Basil,
Sibyl Vane, and Alan Campbell; and Basil is murdered, and because of Dorian
both Sibyl Vane and Alan Campbell commit suicide. Our glimpse of Adrian Singleton in the
opium den and of the crone there whom Dorian has ‘ruined’ convinces us also
of the truth of rumour’s accusations. |
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All this means that it is important to establish
the nature of Lord Henry’s message that so attracts and so corrupts
Dorian. Initially, as the boy poses for
his portrait, Lord Henry preaches his ideal of self-development. He takes over Arnold’s division of life
into Hebraism and Hellenism: he is for
Hellenism, what Arnold called ‘spontaneity of consciousness’, and he
describes it as giving ‘form to every feeling, expression to every thought,
reality to every dream (17-8), which is related to the aphorism from ‘The
Soul of Man under Socialism’ that Wilde added to his preface: ‘No artist is
ever morbid. The artist can express
everything.’ Lord Henry despises
self-/p.xv/ denial, guilt feelings, ideas of sin, all the elements that
Arnold called Hebraism, ‘strictness of conscience’, and Lord Henry calls ‘all
the maladies of medievalism’. Aspects
of this view of life are further investigated by Wilde in ‘The Critic as
Artist’ and ‘The Soul of Man’, and rejection of law, antinomianism, and
advocacy of Individualism are permanent parts of his thought. This helps him
to convey the attraction of Lord Henry, while he is honest in the novel in
examining the consequences of the doctrine, so that if no human voice in the
novel can stand against Lord Henry’s, the objective or supernatural evidence
of the portrait remains to the end significant of the reality of sin and
conscience. An immediate corollary to
Lord Henry’s ‘new Hedonism’ is his worship of youth and beauty, a
characteristic which he shares with such other Wilde characters as the evil
and ageing dandy Lord Illingworth, in A
Woman of No Importance. And it is the realisation of his own youth and
beauty that makes Dorian utter his fatal ‘prayer’ over the picture. So Lord Henry’s initial lessons are simple:
‘The aim of life is self-development. To realise one’s nature perfectly’ (17)
and ‘There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth’ (23). Pater had argued much the same, in the
notorious ‘Conclusion’ to his Renaissance,
when he talked of ‘this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its
awful brevity’[8]:
but Lord Henry is able to conceive of depravity unsuspected by Pater. By the end of Dorian Gray, in the last chapter, Dorian’s very consciousness and
mental ability are impaired, but these basic lessons of Lord Henry are
bitterly present then; he vacillates between remorse and continuance in
crime; he blames his worship of youth and beauty but is finally most
horrified by ‘the living death of his own soul’. His final act is a vain attempt to
vindicate Lord Henry’s theories of the unreality of conscience: the picture
has been conscience, so the knife that killed Basil is to kill conscience
also: ‘It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life,
/p.xvi/ and, without its hideous warnings, he would be at peace’ (223). The event is the final refutation of Lord
Henry. |
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There is one other major teaching of Lord Henry
which Dorian willingly accepts: it is intricately traced in the fabric of the
novel. I have already quoted Wilde’s
comment: ‘Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle
are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.’ This is another idea treated at greater
length and with greater respect in ‘The Critic as Artist’, where it becomes
the reward of those who, following Pater, ‘treat life in the spirit of art’.
A life of contemplation is there proposed as the ideal by the leading
character. There, the true critic and
man of culture has mastered the secrets of art and develops ‘that spirit of
disinterested curiosity’ (Arnold again!) which makes him one of the
Immortals: |
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We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves to
witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature
afford. … From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the
æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce
between the joints of his harness. He
at least is safe. He has discovered
how to live. [1042] |
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The intricacies of this spectator sport develop.
Lord Henry muses in chapter iii on Dorian’s background and his own influence
and the pleasure it gives him: ‘Talking to him was like playing on an
exquisite violin. … There was nothing that one could not do with him’
(35-6). At this stage he finds Basil
almost equally interesting as a psychological study, and as we watch Lord
Henry watching his prey we realize how wrong Basil is, always giving Lord
Henry credit for human feelings of which he never shows any evidence. There is only pleasure in his domination of
Dorian, as when he confesses his love for Sibyl Vane. He takes pleasure in the lad being |
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to a large extent … his own creation. … To the few,
to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed. … Sometimes this was the
effect … chiefly of the art of literature. … But now and then a /xvii/
complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed,
in its way, a real work of art. (57) |
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And here Lord Henry begins to show the dreadful
distancing that will most harm Dorian: he sees Dorian ‘as one of those
gracious figures in a pageant or a play’: it is too short a step from this to
seeing a dead actress as merely an incident in a play. Lord Henry here finally determines to
investigate or ‘vivisect’ Dorian. And the recognition that despite his
interest in Dorian he feels not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy
about Dorian’s love for Sibyl Vane (compare Basil’s reaction), only
underlines our recognition of his lack of feeling. So contemplation of life
as opposed to participation in it, the end proposed for the æsthetic critic
in ‘The Critic as Artist’, is the attitude most dramatically implicitly
condemned by the book. Lord Henry and
Dorian do not wish to be hurt by things, merely to find them ‘exquisite’:
Dorian is always intent on destroying the past, or on creating new worlds, as
in the ‘poison book’ chapter, ‘in which the past would have little or no
place’ (132). Both Lord Henry and
Dorian are sufficiently corrupted by their beliefs to become spectators of
life merely, but the portrait is one visible proof that they are wilfully
ignoring aspects of reality, and Lord Henry’s sadness and envy in chapter are
those of a tired and disillusioned man.
The novel implies the existence of an objective reality that neither
conscience nor consciousness can finally warp or destroy. |
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There are two chapters in particular where this
truth is dramatized. ‘To treat life in
the spirit of art’ may or may not be bad, but to treat death as Lord Henry
encourages Dorian to do is demonstrably evil.
Lord Henry’s evil is more effective than that of Graham Greene’s Harry
Lime in proportion as his distortion of reality is more effective in
proportion as his distortion of reality is more subtle and efficacious. By the time he hears of Sibyl’s death,
Dorian is sufficiently corrupted by his mentor and his own ‘unconscious
egotism’ to suggest for himself that Sibyl’s suicide, which momentarily
affected him so much, is not distressing.
He says: ‘It seems to me to be /xviii/ simply like a wonderful ending
to a wonderful play. It has all the
terrible beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part,
but by which I have not been wounded’ (100).
Lord Henry agrees that tragedy in real life is usually less tidy, more
inartistic; but if the tragedy has ‘artistic elements of beauty’ it appeals
to our sense of dramatic effect, so that, instead of actors, we become
spectators. (As Gilbert again says in
‘The Critic as Artist, ‘Life is terribly deficient in form’ [1034].) Lord
Henry reasons on until he has eradicated any distinction between art and
life: Sibyl was Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, and as such may be mourned, but
her death must be thought of as a scene from a Jacobean tragedy: ‘The girl
never really lived, and so she has never really died. . . . The moment she
touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed
away’ (103). Wilde indicates in chapter vii that Dorian is already some kind
of monster of egotism, retreating from reality: he cries that Sibyl had no
right to kill herself, it was selfish.
Such ‘logic’ leads on to his final meditation. But Wilde does not moralize: it is not
necessary. He does further demonstrate
Dorian’s ‘progress’ in his reception
of Basil, who comes to comfort him over Sibyl’s death. ‘She lived her finest tragedy,’ he proudly
announces. As for her death, Dorian
hates the ugly talk of inquests and the like: ‘She passed again into the
sphere of art’ (109). And he tells
Basil he has developed, and accepted new ideas: ‘To become the spectator of
one’s own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life’ (110). |
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The point is reinforced by an analogous scene later
in the novel when Dorian, on his own and no longer requiring Lord Henry’s
help, treats death in the spirit of art.
This is of course Basil’s murder, and the most horrible thing about it
is not the nervous strain Dorian suffers but the ease with which,
nevertheless, he distances it. By the
time Basil is killed, Dorian has grown older in evil and self indulgence: he
is hardened, and uninterested in those whose lives Basil accuses him of
ruining. The poisoning, by Lord Henry
and by the book, seems /xix/ complete.
This does not mean that Dorian becomes as cold hearted as Lord Henry;
indeed the murder itself shows that.
Lord Henry dismisses the very notion: ‘One should never do anything
that one cannot talk about after dinner’ (213). It is Dorian’s impulsive, romantic nature
that makes him show Basil the picture, and that leads him to commit murder,
just as his relief at the death of James Vane makes him impulsively resolve
to be good and ‘renounce’ Hetty Merton.
The passion and the grim reality of the murder are described, but
before even leaving the room Dorian has refused to look at ‘the thing’ in the
chair. ‘He felt that the secret of the
whole thing was not to realise the situation.
The friend who had painted the fatal portrait to which all his misery
had been due, had gone out of his life’ (159). |
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Of course, it is not so easy: he is haunted by the
presence of the body, by the physical evidence of his crime. He is almost mastered by the knowledge of
the crime, and has to drive it out of his mind, ‘to be strangled lest it
might strangle one itself’ (163). And
so he tries to escape into art while he waits for Alan Campbell, but in Emaux et Camées he lights on the poem
about the hand of the murderer Lacenaire.
Then he reads on successfully until he can muse, ‘Poor Basil! What a
horrible way for a man to die!’ But
before Alan Campbell arrives, art has failed him and sheer panic almost
overcomes him. If art cannot quite
divert him, he thinks science by destroying the evidence can destroy the
crime, but even after this he has to resort to Lord Henry’s early advice, ‘To
cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the
soul.’ Even in the opium den he is
haunted by Basil’s eyes: it is a new threat to himself, from James Vane, that
helps Dorian to put aside the murder, and by the end he is simply blaming
Basil for painting the portrait ‘that had done everything’ (221), and
resenting the way one little murder can dog him all his life. |
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So what action there is in the novel tends to be
ritualistic, inevitable and even symmetrical: the most obvious example //xx//
of this being the interchange of knives, portraits and bodies. In chapter ii Basil tries to destroy the
picture with a knife to avoid Dorian’s pain, but Dorian intervenes: ‘Don’t,
Basil, don’t!’ he cried, ‘It would be murder!’ In chapter xiii Dorian shows Basil the
corrupted portrait and, impelled by uncontrollable hatred, kills the
painter. In chapter xx, moved by a
delusion of escape from his past, Dorian takes the same knife with which he killed
Basil to destroy the picture at last, but, in stabbing the picture, he places
the knife in his own heart. |
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A good deal of ink has been spilt to prove that
Wilde borrowed so much of the material for this book from Pater, Huysmans,
Disraeli, Poe, Bulwer Lytton, Balzac and various others that it hardly merits
consideration as a genuine work of art.
I have considered this question elsewhere,[9]
concluding that on the whole Wilde is not ‘borrowing’ from individual writers
but combining two fairly well-known traditions, the ‘Gothick’ one of, for
example, Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer
and Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’, and the ‘decadent’ one of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin, Huysmans’ A Rebours and Pater’s Marius the Epicurean. I have already suggested above[10]
that Pater is the most important and most basic influence, although Huysmans
has been more often cited and is more openly and deliberately
‘decadent’. The book with which Lord
Henry Wotton ‘poisons’ Dorian Gray has an importance in the novel analogous
to the Metamorphoses for Marius and
Ronsard’s Odes for Gaston de
Latour, and as it is described it almost inevitably reminds the reader of A Rebours. In fact, Wilde clearly
created his poison book on the lines of A
Rebours but with his own material, not fom careful or scholarly research
but casually with whatever was to hand: books he had reviewed and enjoyed,
like Lefébure’s book on lace, a wide variety of South Kensington Museum Art
Hand-/xxi/books, and such encyclopedic compendia of information as William
Jones’s History and Mystery of Precious
Stones.[11] |
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Having suggested that the multiplicity and variety
of Wilde’s borrowings free him from over-dependence on any individual
sources, I nonetheless wish to draw attention to one source for the novel
which has been quite neglected. This
is a short novel by Wilde’s friend Edward Heron-Allen, called Ashes of the Future (A Study of mere Human
Nature): The Suicide of Sylvester Gray.[12] Like Gaston de Latour, this book was published when Wilde was
preparing to write Dorian Gray, and there are many elements, both important
and trivial, which the books have in common.
There is of course the title, which immediately reveals a coincidence
of plot, as well as the similarity of names, more convincing when the book is
considered as a whole than the case which has frequently been made for Vivian Grey. The story is told by Dr. John Tompkins, a
non-artistic Basil Hallward figure, who loves and admires Sylvester from schooldays. Like Dorian Gray, Sylvester is
outstandingly beautiful as a boy and as a young man ‘superlatively handsome’
(p.23): over the years he looks ‘not a day older … if possible, handsomer
than ever: but beyond that, absolutely unchanged’ (p.46), but now with
‘everything a man can want on the material plane’ (p.49), ‘the most
fascinatingly interesting and accomplished vagabond in Europe’ (p.47). Like Dorian Gray, Sylvester is an orphan
with a romantic background; his father was an officer ‘who had fallen for his
queen and country at Balaclava’ /xxii/ (p.16), and as Wilde anticipates the
catastrophe of Dorian Gray in the first chapter of his novel, Heron- Allen’s
narrative warns us not only in the title but in the first chapter: ‘Sylvester
Gray killed himself one warm spring night in Rome, when he was only thirty’
(p.17). |
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The story and the spirit in which it is told have
much in common with Dorian Gray. Sylvester, who has a sister, Sibyl, has a
youthful affair with Evelyn Wooster: something unspeakable goes wrong, he
betrays and leaves her, and in three years she dies. Outwardly he continues supremely
successful: ‘He had but one object in life–to amuse himself; and his efforts
in that direction met, apparently, with the completest success’ (p.48). But he has a ‘handsome impenetrable mask’
(p.123), and is in fact dogged by conscience: ‘There is something in my life so horrible to remember, that it clouds
my enjoyment of every moment of my existence’ (p.54). He talks of ‘the real Sylvester Gray that
lies under an exterior which, fortunately, is not disagreeable to people’
(p.55). There is a central discussion
in which the narrator indirectly gives Sylvester Gray advice analogous to
Lord Henry’s to Dorian, to treat life in the spirit of art: ‘Your own history,
viewed and criticised merely as a work of art, will lose its importance, its
horrors, for you’ (p.68). Sylvester
breaks hearts casually, but at last falls in love with a beautiful widow and
cannot convince her–or even finally himself–of his sincerity: here is a
variation of the Sibyl Vane dilemma: ‘for the very reason he had been acting
a part, … he could not throw his whole soul into his words when at last the
curtain fell upon the comedy, and a scene of the drama of real life began to
be enacted behind it’ (pp.111-12). The
confusion of mask and face, and his inability to separate truth and
histrionics eventually lead Sylvester Gray to suicide. Dorian has a comparable difficulty over his
‘renunciation’ of Hetty Merton. |
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All this seems more than enough to establish a
close relation between the books. One
puzzling reference in Dorian Gray
is in the description of the ‘poison book’: Wilde tells us that /xxiii/
Dorian never knew ‘that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors and polished
metal surfaces, and still water, which came upon the young Parisian so early
in his life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had
once, apparently, been so remarkable’ (127).
There is no such reference in Huysmans, or in any other of the
commonly cited ‘source-books’, but in The
Suicide of Sylvester Gray the hero declares dramatically: ‘I’m a thing so
loathsome, so contemptible, that I shudder at the sight of myself in a
looking glass. … The beauty of some painted, venomous insect, which an
humanitarian would crush beneath his heel!’ (p.40). But it is not necessary to search for
sources too far–in Wilde’s earlier work we can point to the horror of the
Dwarf in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’ when the mirror reveals his ugliness
to him; and Wilde’s ‘Star-Child’ is in love with his own very beautiful
reflection, and is punished for cruelty by ugliness: ‘So he went to the well
of water and looked into it, and lo! his face was as the face of a toad, and
his body was scaled like an adder’ [78]. |
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There is no physical portrait in Sylvester Gray: only the gradual
destruction of a genuine face or identity behind a beautiful mask. But in ‘An Atlantic Tragedy’, one of the
stories in A Fatal Fiddle[13]
with a common pool of characters, including Gray and Tompkins, Heron-Allen
presents a mysterious picture: ‘I say a picture frame, for the picture, if
picture it contained, was carefully hidden behind a crimson silk curtain
which was drawn carefully over the space that should contain the
canvas.’ Heron-Allen refers casually
to Wilde in his books, and the similarities between Wilde’s ‘The Canterville
Ghost’ and his ‘Autobiography of a Disembodied Spirit’[14]
are striking. Heron-Allen was interested in cheiromancy: he had an article on
the subject in the number of Lippincott's Magazine in which Dorian
Gray was first published, and he almost certainly inspired the writing of
‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’. Wilde
wrote to him a week after the birth of /xxiv/ his first son in 1885, asking
him to cast the child’s horoscope,[15]
and there is sufficient evidence of their friendship from this time;
occasional letters, arrangements to meet, records of Heron-Allen taking Wilde
to dine with the Sette of Odde Volumes.[16] |
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But Heron-Allen is only a more immediate source
than all the others, and not overwhelmingly significant. Any suggestion of influence is misleading
if it helps to obscure the central place that The Picture of Dorian Gray
has in Wilde’s own thought and development.
The Happy Prince and A House of Pomegranates are
centrally concerned with the moral implications of the love of beauty, and in
particular the Young King, the Star-Child and the Happy Prince are all very
beautiful and gifted heroes, who are tested and either overcome temptation or
learn by it sufficiently to care for the sufferings of others above their own
essentially selfish concern for beauty: they all have a tangential
relationship with Tennyson’s ‘The Palace of Art’. The journalistic short stories, published
as Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories can all be read in a
sense as practice runs for Dorian Gray, with many similarities of
plot, Situation and character. ‘The
Model Millionaire’ is centred on an artist’s studio and the painting of a
portrait, but the closest parallels are in ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’ (1887),
whose hero is young, orphaned*,
wealthy, romantic, impulsive, and reacts like Dorian, only to an essentially
ludicrous situation, his duty being to commit murder and get it over before
he is free to marry. The numerous tiny
parallels make the short story read like a pre-figuring parody of the novel,
and even an attitude seriously investigated in Dorian Gray, like Lord Henry’s dictum ‘Nothing can cure the soul
but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul’, is
germinally present in the earlier story, where a luxurious bath restores Lord
Arthur’s spirits: ‘The exquisite physical /xxv/ condition of the moment had
dominated him, as indeed often happens in the case of finely-wrought natures,
for the senses, like fire, can purify as well as destroy’ [177]. Wilde’s other fictional exercise, The
Portrait of Mr W.H., a piece of clever sleuthing about the identity of
the unknown young man in Shakespeare’s sonnets, is framed in a complex short
story form which contains many of Wilde’s recurrent themes about truth and
conviction, and attractive personalities–Cyril Graham was something of a
Dorian Gray, and the portrait forged at the instigation of Cyril Graham to
convince Erskine of the truth of his theory has a central importance in the
story. |
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Wilde expanded The Portrait of Mr W.H.
greatly after its initial publication, as he did with Dorian Gray, and most of the work first published in
periodicals was revised thoroughly and polished before its appearance in
volume form, but the story is almost doubled in length, and the whole
structure and impact of the novel are altered. A comparison of the two versions reveals a
great deal about Wilde’s pre-occupations and his aims in the novel.[17]
Briefly, the revisions show how he greatly improves the action,
structure, and balance of the novel, as well as details of style. He clarifies the moral structure, by
stressing Basil Hallward’s goodness and his weakness, and elaborating the
attraction of Lord Henry and his destructive doctrines. |
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The
polishing, repetition, and elaboration of epigrams takes place throughout
Wilde’s work, and in a few typical cases this is recorded in the Explanatory
Notes†,
to indicate
how wholly the novel is a part of Wilde’s developing thought and
expression. In similar ways themes,
motifs, and situations are repeated and elaborated, treated in different
moods and from different points of view: Lord Henry’s doctrines about
becoming a spectator of life, which are shown as corrupting and evil in Dorian Gray, are much more seriously
and /xxvi/ sympathetically developed in an æsthetic context in ‘The Critic as
Artist’ [1042], but the kernel of this idea is already carefully stated in
‘The Rise of Historical Criticism’ [1142, 1143], which he wrote as a
university exercise, in the course of an admiring description of
Polybius. The situation where an older
man in some way corrupts a younger is present very crudely in The Duchess
of Padua (1883), in great detail in Dorian Gray, and with more
immediate and explicit condemnation in A Woman of No Importance
(1893). The series of epigrams which
Wilde placed as a Preface to his novel summarizes in characteristic fashion
the main preoccupations of his art, which he continued to develop in terms of
recurrent themes, in a range of modes from the morbid intensity of Salome
to the careless insouciance of The
Importance of being Earnest. In Dorian
Gray he gives his fullest analysis of the attractions of æstheticism and
treating life in the spirit of art, and gives his clearest diagnosis of the
central difficulty–that Lord Henry’s ideal of self-development, a
theoretically attractive notion, only too easily deteriorates into
self-indulgence, manifestly an ugly one.
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[* This is an error. Lord Arthur’s mother, a duchess, appears in
Chapter V and the Duke is mentioned in Chapter VI. – Editor, THE OSCHOLARS.] |
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[† pp.238-49 in the edition; not
given here. –Editor, THE OSCHOLARS.] |
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