The ideas and themes he scattered were sometimes reaped by his young admirers. The novelist W. B. Maxwell, while a boy, had heard many stories from Wilde, and wrote one of them down and published it. He confessed to Wilde, whose face clouded, then cleared as he mixed approval with reproach, ‘Stealing my story was the act of a gentleman, but not telling me you had stolen it was to ignore the claims of friendship.’ Then he suddenly became serious: ‘You mustn’t take a story that I told you of a man and a picture. No, absolutely, I want that for myself. I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.’11 This first mention of The Picture of Dorian Gray antedated by several years, Maxwell says, the actual composition.
Painting Dorian’s Portrait
‘Harry,’ said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, ‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.’
For Wilde, aestheticism was not a creed but a problem. Exploring its ramifications provided him with his subject, and he responded to it with a mixture of serious espousal and mockery—an attitude that Beerbohm found it fruitful to copy. Gautier had preached an icy aestheticism—Wilde did not subscribe, but sometimes enjoyed pretending that he did. The slogan of ‘art for art’s sake’ he had long since disavowed. But he saw his story of a man and his portrait as containing most of the ingredients that he wanted to exploit. ‘To become a work of art is the object of living,’ he wrote.12 Dorian was one of two portraits he would write of a man in decay, the other being the professed self-portrait in De Profundis. Wilde’s novel connects somewhat with other narratives. In Henry James’s The Tragic Muse, published in 1890, the aesthete Gabriel Nash bears traces of Wilde, including the aesthetic cosmopolitanism which James found so annoying in 1882. When Nick Dormer asks Nash, ‘Don’t we both live in London, after all, and in the Nineteenth Century?,’ Nash replies, ‘Ah, my dear Dormer, excuse me. I don’t live in the Nineteenth Century. Jamais de la vie!’ ‘Nor in London either?’ ‘Yes—when I’m not in Samarcand.’ Nash sits for a portrait, but disappears: no one knows where he has gone, and his unfinished image on the canvas fades away as impalpably as the original. James’s theme was that aestheticism, being indifferent to concrete detail, could confer upon its followers only an illusory existence. But if James was hard on aestheticism, Wilde would be hard on it too, at least in his novel.
Wilde liked telling stories about portraits. Charles Ricketts remembered someone speaking to Wilde of the excellence of Holbein’s portrait of Anne of Cleves. Her ugliness had overwhelmed Henry VIII. ‘You believe she was really ugly?’ said Wilde. ‘No, my dear boy, she was exquisite as we see her in the Louvre. But in the escort, sent to bring her to England, travelled also a beautiful young nobleman of whom she became passionately enamoured, and on the ship they became lovers. What could be done? Discovery meant death. So she stained her face, and put uncouth clothing upon her body, till she seemed the monster Henry thought her. Now, do you know what happened? Years passed, and one day, when the king went hawking, he heard a woman singing in an orchard close, and rising in his stirrups to see who, with lovely voice, had entranced him, he beheld Anne of Cleves, young and beautiful, singing in the arms of her lover.’13
Among the many sources that have been offered for The Picture of Dorian Gray are Balzac’s La Peau de chagrin, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Goethe’s Faust, Meinhold’s Sidonia. The list could be multiplied indefinitely. As Yeats says, ‘Works of art beget works of art.’ No specific work is exactly comparable. Wilde had hit upon a myth for aestheticism, the myth of the vindictive image, an art that turns upon its original as son against father or man against God. He began with a familiar theme: ‘I first conceived the idea of a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth—an idea that is old in the history of literature, but to which I have given new form,’ he said in a letter to an editor about the book. The new form came from localizing this theme in the contemporary controversy of art versus life. That the story was as old as Salome’s did not distress him. He wanted to make Dorian a figure to vie with Marius and Des Esseintes, not to mention Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré—and succeeded.
There was a long brooding before Dorian Gray came into being. Wilde had been much concerned with images. He had painted self-portrait after self-portrait: at Trinity College he experimented with a beard, then shaved it off; he let his hair grow long at Oxford and had it waved, then in Paris had it cut and curled Roman-style, then let it grow long again. His clothing also passed through transformations: dandiacal in London, it became outré in America, elaborately decorous afterwards. No wonder he spoke often about poses and masks. ‘The first duty in life is to assume a pose,’ he said; ‘what the second duty is no one yet has found out.’ As Yeats would insist after him, the imaginative creation of oneself goes on almost from birth. He was moved by the attempt of Des Esseintes in A Rebours to construct an artistic world in which to live artistically, and he spoke approvingly in ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ of life as art. He disagreed with those who called him artificial. He thought of the self as having multiple possibilities, and of his life as manifesting each of these in turn.
Portraits, and mirrors, were therefore subjects for his dialectic. Mirrors may be naturalistic, as in ‘The Birthday of the Infanta,’ where the dwarf dies at the sight of his own image, or in Dorian’s favorite book, in which the hero has ‘a grotesque dread of mirrors and polished steel surfaces and still water’ because they will disclose his fading beauty. But they may also be symbolic. In Wilde’s fable, Narcissus looks at his image in the water, but does not know that the water sees only its own image in his eyes. In ‘The Decay of Lying,’ instead of art mirroring nature, nature mirrors art. The preface to Dorian Gray declares, ‘It is the spectator, and not Life, that art really mirrors,’ yet in the novel the portrait ceases to mirror Dorian’s external beauty and mirrors only his internal ugliness.
He also had in mind his controversy with Whistler, when he had argued, in his 1885 review of ‘Mr Whistler’s Ten o’Clock,’ that the supreme artist was the poet (not, as Whistler maintained, the painter), because the poet could make use of all experience rather than a part. He knew Lessing’s theory that painting was spatial and literature temporal, and ‘The Critic as Artist,’ written at the same time as Dorian Gray, insists that the time world is superior, since it involves a psychic response to one’s own history:
The statue is concentrated in one moment of perfection. The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of life, for the secrets of life belong to those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone.
For his novel he dreamed of transcending these generic limits. It had to be written in words, but with the words he could describe a painting with the attributes Lessing had denied to pictorial art: once the portrait had transfigured its object—the sitter—by concentrating him in one moment of perfection, it would disfigure its achievement as though it would claim time rather than space. That literature and painting could not exchange their roles was the idea which Dorian Gray would alter; in the end each art would revert to its norm, but literature would show itself capable of doing what painting could not do, exist temporally rather than eternally, and yet enshrine a portrait of its beautiful and monstrous hero. Though he had removed all traces of Whistler from the book, the novel carries on their old dispute about the relative merits of their two arts. Wilde wins by bringing together, as Whistler could not, the exalted moment and its disintegration.
This concern with time reflected Wilde’s sense of his own changes. Now that he was firmly homosexual, he wondered if he had always been so. Dorian moves from innocence to guilt. Wilde did not feel particularly guilty, but he could wonder if he had
ever been innocent. Had his youthful love life been only a pretense? Such questions led him to the two Dorians.
So many people asked about the originals of the characters that Wilde amused himself by giving conflicting answers. Hesketh Pearson reports one, that Basil Hallward was so named because in 1884 Wilde sat for the painter Basil Ward; having finished the picture, Ward remarked, ‘How delightful it would be if you could remain exactly as you are, while the portrait aged and withered in your stead.’14 The story would be more convincing if there was any evidence that a Basil Ward had painted Wilde, and if Wilde had not spread a second explanation. He was obviously the source for a story that appeared in the St James’s Gazette of 24 September 1891: the Canadian artist Frances Richards, whom Wilde had met in Canada in 1882, painted his portrait in 1887, prompting Wilde to say, ‘What a tragic thing it is. This portrait will never grow older, and I shall. If it was only the other way.’ Still another version was recorded by Ernest Dowson, who heard Wilde say at Herbert Home’s house on 9 October 1890 that the original of Basil Hallward was Charles Ricketts. This seems likely, at least for the homosexual tastes of Basil Hallward, which were more distinct in the magazine version than in the book. But the novel’s theme, the relation of passion to art, goes back to Charmides’ fevered night with Athena’s bronze nakedness in Wilde’s poem. Charmides’ violation of art by life was a sacrilege like Dorian’s attempt to substitute one for the other.
That Wilde wrote the book down instead of continuing to tell it to young men like Maxwell was partly owing to J. M. Stoddart, the Philadelphia publisher with whom seven years before Wilde had called on Walt Whitman, and who had been persuaded to publish Rennell Rodd’s Rose Leaf and Apple Leaf. One of his enterprises was Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and in an attempt to promote it Stoddart came to London about September 1889. He thought some short novels were needed, and so had two of his best prospects, Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde, with an Irish Member of Parliament, T. P. Gill, to dinner. Doyle left an account of the talk. There was some reference to Rodd’s or somebody else’s defection, which prompted Wilde to remark, as he would in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ ‘Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature—it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist to sympathise with a friend’s success.’ He illustrated the maxim with an anecdote:
The devil was once crossing the Libyan desert, and he came upon a spot where a number of small fiends were tormenting a holy hermit. The sainted man easily shook off their evil suggestions. The devil watched their failure and then he stepped forward to give them a lesson. ‘What you do is too crude.… Permit me for one moment.’ With that he whispered to the holy man, ‘Your brother has just been made Bishop of Alexandria.’ A scowl of malignant jealousy at once clouded the serene face of the hermit. ‘That,’ said the devil to his imps, ‘is the sort of thing which I should recommend.’
The conversation turned to wars of the future, and Doyle remembered Wilde’s saying with ‘upraised hand and precise face,’ his expression conjuring up a grotesque scene, ‘A chemist on each side will approach the frontier with a bottle.’ Stoddart brought the subject back to literature. Wilde had read Doyle’s Micah Clarke, and praised it, to the author’s pleasure. Doyle offered Stoddart his second Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Sign of Four,’ the first having had the aesthetic title ‘A Study in Scarlet.’ Wilde, possibly in response to Doyle’s description of a string of fearful murders, recounted his own story of Dorian’s murder of Hallward and himself, equally beyond ordinary detection. Stoddart closed with both writers immediately, and asked Wilde to send him the story by October.15 Wilde put him off until November, and does not seem to have delivered it until the next spring. In the meantime Stoddart asked for a hundred thousand words, but Wilde replied by cable, ‘There are not 100,000 beautiful words in the English language.’
The Picture of Dorian Gray was his longest prose narrative, and gave him much trouble. ‘I am afraid it is rather like my own life—all conversation and no action,’ he wrote early in 1890 to a writer friend, Beatrice Allhusen. ‘I can’t describe action: my people sit in chairs and chatter.’ He was as careful as he could be with the events he did narrate, such as the disposal of Hallward’s body. (A friendly surgeon informed him how this could be done by chemical means.16) Other difficulties also gave way, and the novel was published on 20 June 1890, as pp. 3–100 of the July issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. After this date, Victorian literature had a different look.
Dorian Repudiated
Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they are! There is animalism in the soul, and the body has its moments of spirituality. The senses can refine, and the intellect can degrade.
Both in its magazine form and in its form as a separate novel, Dorian Gray has faults. Parts of it are wooden, padded, self-indulgent. No one could mistake it for a workmanlike job: our hacks can do that for us. But its continual fascination teaches us to judge it by new standards. Wilde made it elegantly casual, as if writing a novel were a diversion rather than ‘a painful duty’ (as he characterized Henry James’s manner). The underlying legend, of trying to elicit more from life than life can give, arouses deep and criminal yearnings. These contrast with the polish of English civilization at its verbal peak, and create a tension beyond what the plot appears to hold. Wilde put into the book a negative version of what he had been brooding about for fourteen years and, under a veil, what he had been doing sexually for four. He could have taken a positive view of reconsidered aestheticism, as he would in ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ as he had already done in ‘The Decay of Lying.’ Instead, Dorian Gray is the aesthetic novel par excellence, not in espousing the doctrine, but in exhibiting its dangers. Pater’s refurbishing of aestheticism in the late 1860s and early 1870s had been followed by a series of attacks upon it: by James in Roderick Hudson, 1876; by Mallock in The New Republic, 1877; by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience, 1881; and by Punch and many others. In 1890 it would have been old hat for Wilde to offer an unequivocal defense. What he did instead was to write the tragedy of aestheticism. It was also premonitory of his own tragedy, for Dorian has, like Wilde, experimented with two forms of sexuality, love of women and of men. Through his hero Wilde was able to open a window into his own recent experience. The life of mere sensation is uncovered as anarchic and self-destructive. Dorian Gray is a test case. He fails. Life cannot be lived on such terms. Self-indulgence leads him to vandalize his own portrait, but this act is a reversal of what he intends and he discloses his better self, though only in death. Wilde’s hero has pushed through to the point where extremes meet. By unintentional suicide, Dorian becomes aestheticism’s first martyr. The text: Drift beautifully on the surface, and you will die unbeautifully in the depths. In response to critical abuse, Wilde added the preface, which flaunted the aestheticism that the book would indict. Dorian Gray is reflexive in the most cunning way, like its central image.
Dorian progresses, or regresses, to art and back to life. Everything in the book has an aesthetic and a clandestine quotient, in terms of which it can eventually be measured. The portrait of Dorian is executed by Basil Hallward just at the moment when Lord Henry is fishing for Dorian’s soul. Although Wilde states in the book’s preface, ‘To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim,’ Hallward fears that the portrait is too revealing of his love for Dorian, as Dorian later fears that it is too revealing of himself. Wilde the preface-writer and Wilde the novelist deconstruct each other. Dorian offers a Faustian pact (with no visible devil) that he will exchange places with his portrait, to preserve himself as a work of art.
But he is not to achieve timelessness easily. His role of invulnerable and detached profligate is challenged by love. His attachment to Sibyl Vane is an experiment in the aesthetic laboratory. The affair ends as badly as Faust’s with Gretchen, but Sibyl Vane differs from Gretchen in being an actress. She plays Shakespearean heroines, so Do
rian is able to aestheticize her in his imagination. ‘I have been right,’ he congratulates himself, ‘to take my love out of poetry and to find my wife in Shakespeare’s plays.’ Put to the test, however, Sibyl is no mere performer; her fatal weakness in his eyes is that she values life above art. She loses her capacity to act because, instead of preferring shadows to reality as she once did, she is drawn by love to prefer reality. She voices the heresy that ‘all art is but a reflection’ of that reality, and Dorian excommunicates her with the cruel words ‘Without your art you are nothing.’ Like Faust’s Gretchen, she poisons herself in despair. And even her death is rendered aesthetic, first by Lord Henry and then by Dorian. Lord Henry finds that she has played out her part, ‘a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy,’ and that ‘The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died.’ Dorian agrees with the same glibness, ‘She passed again into the sphere of art.’ Only her brother, and the reader, are left to mourn, and to judge. Sibyl is the opposite of Dorian. She gives up the pretense of art so as to live entirely artlessly in this world, only to commit suicide. Dorian tries to give up the causality of life and to live in the deathless (and lifeless) world of art, only to commit suicide too.
Dorian commits the primal sin against love, and it leads to his second crime. Basil Hallward discovers the secret of the portrait, and urges him to accept the consequences. For this insistence upon the moral causality of life, Basil too has to die. Dorian manages the murder, and the disposal of the body, as if De Quincey were right about murder’s being one of the fine arts. After the murder he sleeps insouciantly; next morning he chooses his tie and rings with special care, and reads Gautier’s Emaux et camées, finding in its chiseled quatrains some of the reassuring impersonality that Pound and Eliot were to derive from the same book during the First World War. The friend who helps to dispose of the body commits suicide, like Sibyl. What few twinges Dorian feels he obliterates in an opium den.
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