The first chapters deal with Dorian’s infection by Lord Henry, the later ones with his poisoning by a book. Wilde does not name the book, but at his trial he conceded that it was, or almost was, Huysmans’s A Rebours. Of course he also had in mind a book which preceded Huysmans’s, Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. In the first draft he gave the mysterious book a name, Le Secret de Raoul by Catulle Sarrazin. This author was a blend of Catulle Mendès, whom he had known for some years, and Gabriel Sarrazin, whom he met in September 1888, and the name of ‘Raoul’ came from Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus. To a correspondent he wrote that he had played ‘a fantastic variation’ upon A Rebours, and some day must write it down. The references in Dorian Gray to specific chapters of the unnamed book are deliberately inaccurate. Dorian is said to relish especially the seventh chapter, in which the hero fancies himself as Tiberius, Caligula, Domitian, and Elagabalus, and the eighth and ninth chapters, in which Renaissance crimes are described. Huysmans’s book has none of these: Des Esseintes shows no interest in imperial power, and Wilde borrowed the Renaissance scenes not from Huysmans but from his friend John Addington Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy.17 In fact, the mythical book which so affects Dorian, the pseudo—A Rebours, reads as if it had been plagiarized from Wilde. The hero is said to be alarmed ‘by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently, been so remarkable.’ Huysmans never describes Des Esseintes as beautiful, nor as concerned about no longer being so. Dorian says the hero has a dread of mirrors; Des Esseintes has none, though he does read a passage in Mallarmé’s ‘Hérodiade’ where this dread is expressed by her. The more genuine points of comparison are the cultivation of artificial pleasures and the alternations of exaltation and abasement. Though Wilde borrowed the idea for artificial-sensation seeking from Huysmans, he gives Dorian a more specialized interest in jewelry, for which, it appears, no French source was required. He borrowed all the details from South Kensington Museum pamphlets on musical instruments, precious stones, embroidery and lace, and textile fabrics.18
When Dorian tells Lord Henry that the pseudo-A Rebours has corrupted him, his friend denies that this could happen. ‘As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.’ But a book has completed for Dorian what Lord Henry began. We are not allowed to accept Wotton’s judgment, for it has already been made clear that he himself, when he was sixteen, had been overwhelmed by a book. His book is also left unnamed, but its identity can be established from his talk. Lord Henry is forever quoting, or misquoting, without acknowledgment, from Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Plagiarism is the worst of his crimes. He brazenly takes over the best-known passages. Pater had urged that we ‘be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy,’ and Lord Henry echoes him (though omitting the attribute of ‘purest’) when he says, ‘To realise one’s nature to perfection—that is what each of us is here for.’ Pater says we must not allow ‘theory or idea or system’ to oblige us to the ‘sacrifice of any part of this experience.’ Lord Henry goes further: ‘We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification.… The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick.’ Wilde was quite capable of taking this position himself, and in fact did so to André Gide; but, coming from Lord Henry, it is only a seducer’s version of the perils of repression. In the same way, Pater’s promise of a new hedonism attainable through art, which promises ‘frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake,’ is like Dorian’s new movement beyond asceticism and profligacy that will ‘teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of life that is itself but a moment.’ Pater reviewed the book at Wilde’s request, and objected that Dorian’s and Lord Henry’s hedonism left no place for the higher pleasures of generosity and renunciation.
Dorian turns this argument around to justify himself:
There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape. Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.
In ‘The Critic as Artist’ Wilde returns to the idea, with approval:
Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars in the land.
Through carelessness, impatience, or whim, Wilde sometimes forgot that his characters should always carry aestheticism to excess, and allowed them to articulate his own sentiments. But apart from these, he kept to his original plan, that Lord Henry should separate himself from life by being unwilling to recognize its obligations. Wotton denies the soul, denies suffering, thinks of art as a malady and love as an illusion. He is wrong in supposing that books cannot influence conduct, when they have influenced his own; he is wrong in praising Dorian’s life as a work of art when it has been a failure. Dorian quotes with approval one of Wotton’s misguided statements, ‘To become the spectator of one’s own life, as Harry says, is to “escape the sufferings of life.” ’ In defending the book Wilde explained, ‘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.’ To cultivate art apart from life is to build a fire that cannot burn. The artist cannot be all ice, chiseling in marble, as Gautier prescribed. Yet, as Des Esseintes says in a passage often overlooked, aestheticism is fundamentally an aspiration towards an ideal, towards an unknown universe, towards a beatitude, as desirable as that promised by the Scriptures.19
Dorian Gray, besides being about aestheticism, is also one of the first attempts to bring homosexuality into the English novel. Its appropriately covert presentation of this censored subject gave the book notoriety and originality. As Wilde had written in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism,’ Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of the subject-matter.’ Not that all Wilde’s principals are homosexuals, but they are scarcely anything else. Lord Henry is feebly married; rather to his satisfaction, his wife leaves him. He takes a cottage in Algiers (often a vacation spot for English homosexuals) for himself and Dorian, and his attempt to inseminate his friend spiritually is at least ambiguous. Dorian ruins men and women alike, as if his love in either mode is genuine only to the extent that it is tainted. As in A Rebours, both forms of love are rendered as corrupt. Hallward is murdered by the man he excessively loves. Dorian’s face has in fact been for Hallward’s art ‘the counterpart of Antinous’ in Greek sculpture. Not surprisingly, Hallward has painted Dorian ‘crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms … on the prow of Adrian’s barge.’ Dorian is perfectly aware of what love he has inspired in Basil: ‘It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.’ Like Proust, Wilde made use of the theme of homosexuality, but only in terms of unhappiness. Dorian’s propensities are made clear: he shares with Wilde the delight in dressing up, often as a king’s favorite such as Anne de Joyeuse, admiral of France—a darling for Henry III as Gaveston was for Edward II; and he likes to look at the portrait of his ancestor Philip Herbert, who was ‘caressed by the court [or, as the Lippincott’s version said, by James I] for his handsome face.’ Th
ere is something dubious in his identification of himself with Elagabalas, who had ‘painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage, and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.’ Dorian’s spiritual ancestry is strong in him. No wonder that Wilde’s friend, the novelist Ouida, to whom he sent a copy, said that she did understand it.
Wilde saw the three characters as refractions of his own image. He explained to a correspondent, ‘Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.’ At moments Dorian’s history conforms closely to Wilde’s: he has been rumored to be ‘about to join the Catholic communion,’ and has sampled mysticism as Wilde sampled Masonry. Dorian has narrowly missed being blackballed at a West End club; Wilde had suffered being removed from the list of prospective members of the Savile. Wilde gives a clue to himself and his work when he says that Dorian ‘would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having as it were caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, according to certain modem psychologists, is often a condition of it.’ Four years earlier he had written to Harry Marillier, about his own ‘curious mixture of ardour and indifference.’ Lord Henry echoes Pater’s early ascendancy over Wilde, though some of his pronouncements on the arts, on women, and on America are Wilde’s own. But he is the spokesman for an aestheticism gone extreme and insensitive. Hallward’s goodheartedness and delight in young men, and his image-making power, are close to Wilde too. But Wilde is larger than his three characters together: they represent distortions or narrowing of his personality, none of them reproducing his generosity of spirit or his sense of fun or his full creativeness.
The publication of Dorian Gray, though it had taken place only in a magazine, brought Wilde all the attention he could desire. It brought his wife more than she wanted, and she said, ‘Since Oscar wrote Dorian Gray, no one will speak to us.’ His mother was rapturous: ‘It is the most wonderful piece of writing in all the fiction of the day.… I nearly fainted at the last scene.’20 One effect can be measured by Wilde’s invitation to the Crabbet Club on 4 July 1891. George Curzon had agreed to play devil’s advocate and oppose Wilde for membership. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt wrote,
He had been at Oxford with Wilde and knew all his little weaknesses and did not spare him, playing with astonishing audacity and skill upon his reputation for sodomy and his treatment of the subject in Dorian Gray. Poor Oscar sat helplessly smiling, a fat mass, in his chair.… (He was sitting on my left and when he rose to reply I felt sorry for him—it seemed hardly fair) But he pulled himself together as he went on and gradually warmed into an amusing and excellent speech—What is really memorable about it all is that, when two years later he was arraigned in a real Court of Justice, Oscar’s line of defence was precisely the same as that made in his impromptu speech that evening at Crabbet.
Wilde was not content only to defend himself. He told Frank Harris that he had commented on Curzon’s mediocrity, his desperately hard work in pursuing a second-class degree and then a second-class career.21 But he never went back to the Crabbet Club.
The book repelled several of the reviewers, and Wilde bravely wrote long and persuasive letters in reply. His letters to editors are as good as any exercises in the form. The principal charges against him were that the novel was tedious and dull, that its characters were ‘puppies,’ that it was merely self-advertisement, and that it was immoral. As for tedium, Wilde contended that, on the contrary, ‘it is far too crowded with sensational incident, and far too paradoxical in style.… I feel that from a standpoint of art these are two defects in the book. But tedious and dull the book is not.’ As for puppies, he replied, ‘They are puppies. Does he [the reviewer] think that literature went to the dogs when Thackeray wrote about puppydom?’ As for self-advertisement, Wilde wrote,
I think I may say without vanity—though I do not wish to appear to run vanity down—that of all men in England I am the one who requires least advertisement. I am tired to death of being advertised. I feel no thrill when I see my name in a paper.… I wrote this book entirely for my own pleasure.… Whether it becomes popular or not is a matter of absolute indifference to me.
To the charge of immorality, he retorted, as Coleridge did with ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ that Dorian Gray was too moral. He summed up the message: ‘All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.’ The difficulty is that the book contains no renunciant, and although Dorian Gray does say that anchorites and hermits are as bestial as sybarites, the point cannot be regarded as fictionally demonstrated. Wilde was on safer ground when he said, ‘in his attempt to kill conscience Dorian Gray kills himself,’ a moral for which he claimed an ‘ethical beauty.’ The moral for aestheticism is that those who would be spectators only discover they are more spied upon than spying, and that to seek to become an aesthetic object, outside of time, is to die. In a letter to the editor of what he termed ‘a paper called the Daily Chronicle,’ Wilde wrote, ‘My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the crude brutality of plain realism. It is poisonous if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.’ He concluded his correspondence with the St James’s Gazette by saying, ‘As you assailed me first, I have a right to the last word. Let the last word be the present letter, and leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that it deserves.’22
Following this acerbic exchange he went to see the editor of the St James’s Gazette, Sidney Low, whom he had known at Oxford. Low summoned his assistant, a man named Samuel Henry Jeyes, who had written the review under the title ‘A Study in Puppydom.’ Wilde contended that no conclusions of a personal nature should be drawn from any theory of art. Jeyes replied belligerently, ‘What is the use of writing of, and hinting at, things that you do not mean?’ Wilde replied, ‘I mean every word I have said, and everything at which I have hinted in Dorian Gray.’ ‘Then,’ said Jeyes, ‘all I can say is that if you do mean them you are very likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days.’* Wilde called on Low three days later at the Whitefriars Club and had a long talk with him about Dorian Gray, after which the tone of the St James’s Gazette became more moderate.23
As a result of the initial response, Wilde composed a series of aphorisms, originally under the title ‘Dogmas for the Use of the Aged.’24 There were two that caught the eye of James Joyce, and went in modified form into his Ulysses: ‘The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.’ Some of them are answers to the critics: ‘Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. That is a fault.’ ‘There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.’ (But Dorian is corrupted by a book.) ‘Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.’ ‘Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.’ To prevent the book’s being treated as immoral, Wilde excluded morality from its province, although it exposed the follies of a false and excessive aestheticism.
Wilde took his ‘Preface,’ as he called it, to Frank Harris at The Fortnightly Review. Harris tried to persuade him that some aphorisms should be dropped as too weak. Wilde listened attentively, but the next day said those that Harris had singled out as weakest were the strongest, and he wanted them all to be published. Harris agreed, and the preface appeared in March 1891. The stage was now set for the novel’s publication in book form a month later. Wilde wrote to Ada Leverson, ‘It is quite tragic for me to think how completely Dorian Gray has been understood on all sides!’ He added some chapters and took out—at Pater’s urging—an
explicitly homosexual sentence about Hall ward’s affection for Dorian. His friend Coulson Kernahan urged him to remove the remark ‘The only way to resist temptation is to yield to it.’ Wilde declined, saying, ‘it is merely Luther’s Pecca Fortiter [Sin Boldly] put dramatically into the lips of a character.’25 After touching it up here and there, he asked Macmillan to publish it. They declined, on the ground that it contained unpleasant elements. A small firm, Ward, Lock & Co., agreed to bring it out. Wilde was about to dart off for Paris, but before leaving asked Kernahan to go over the proofs and check the usage of ‘shall’ and ‘will,’ about which ‘as an Irishman’ he was always hazy. Then a telegram from Paris arrived: ‘Stop all proofs. Wilde.’ He arrived by cab with a last-minute correction. He had given a picture-framer in the book the name ‘Ashton.’ It would not do. ‘Ashton is a gentleman’s name. And I’ve given it to a tradesman. It must be changed to Hubbard. Hubbard particularly smells of the tradesman.’26† ‘Hubbard’ it became.
Dorian Gray was published as a book in April 1891. Almost at once W. H. Smith refused to carry it, on the grounds that it was ‘filthy.’ But the Athenaeum and Theatre treated it with respect. Pater, who had—according to Frank Harris—refused to write an appreciation of the earlier version for The Fortnightly Review on the grounds that it was ‘too dangerous,’ wrote a notice for the Bookman. Pater, being now what D. S. MacColl terms ‘a saint of sensation,’ insisted that Lord Henry Wotton, who speaks so many of Pater’s sentences, was not a true Cyrenaic or Epicurean. But otherwise he was delighted with the book.28
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