Oscar

by Sturgis, Matthew;

  Back in London Wilde was unaware of these manoeuvres. His own excitement about the story was running on ahead. He was already looking beyond its imminent magazine life, and considering how to expand the tale for publication in book form, once the copyright reverted to him in September. He thought that two extra chapters should be sufficient; and the result would ‘make a sensation’. He approached at least two publishers in the hope that they would take it on. Macmillan & Co. was one of the firms. A ‘sensation’, however, was not what they wanted. Maurice Macmillan (the older brother of Wilde’s friend George) wrote back at once, regretting that the story was not for them – ‘We have done very little in the way of such strong situations; and I confess there is something in the power which Dorian Gray gets over the young nature scientist [whom he blackmails into helping him dispose of Basil Hallward’s body], and one or two other things, which is rather repelling.’ ‘I dare say,’ he added, ‘you do not mean it to be.’ And it seems that the other publishers were similarly wary. In the end Wilde came to an arrangement with Ward, Lock & Co., the firm that had recently taken on distribution of Lippincott’s Magazine in Britain.15

  The excitement of making plans for Dorian Gray seems to have stimulated the pace of Wilde’s other literary productions. Building upon the success of ‘The Decay of Lying’ he produced a second, longer, ‘Dialogue’ for the Nineteenth Century: a discussion between the super-cultured ‘Gilbert’ and the rather earnest ‘Ernest’ on ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’. It was another celebration of Wilde’s amoral and inutile Aesthetic, and an inversion of established hierarchies.

  Overturning Matthew Arnold’s resonant view, expressed in his famous 1864 essay ‘The Function of Criticism in the Present Time’, that the goal of criticism was ‘to see the object as in itself it really is’, Gilbert asserts that ‘the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not’. Criticism, he suggests, should be the purely subjective record of the critic’s impressions. ‘To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.’ The critic does not seek to ‘explain a work of art’ but rather to respond to its beauty – to ‘deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike’. The work of the ‘critic’ is thus equal to that of the ‘creative artist’; indeed superior, since the critic is engaging with refined ‘art’ rather than unrefined ‘nature’. This – like much else in the dialogue – was well calculated to annoy Whistler.

  To be fit for the task the critic must ‘intensify’ his own ‘individualism’ – not by limiting his sympathies, but expanding them. Wilde has Gilbert suggest that ‘Sin’ is one way to achieve this: ‘By its curiosity Sin increases the experiences of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type.’ But the critic must then adopt poses to express himself. ‘Man,’ Gilbert asserts, ‘is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth… What people call insincerity is simply a method by which we can multiply our personalities.’ The ‘Dialogue’ was to be published in two parts, in the periodical’s July and September issues.

  Added to his other recent essays, dialogues and stories – from ‘Pen, Pencil and Poison’ up to ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ – it confirmed Wilde’s vision of himself as one of the thinkers of his age. He had, as he later declared, ‘made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art’, had ‘summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram’.16 His succession of publications had also confirmed his vision of himself as a purely literary figure. At last he felt able to abandon the mere ‘journalism’ of reviewing. The four book reviews that he contributed in early part of 1890 to the Speaker – a new weekly edited by his former Cassell’s colleague Wemyss Reid – would be his last.17 He had gained a place on a wider and more exalted stage.

  By the third week in June the ‘July number’ of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine was on the London newsstands. Above its masthead ran the emblazoned legend: ‘This Number Contains a Complete Novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ By Oscar Wilde’. Wilde’s name was enough to ‘excite wide interest and curiosity’ in the venture. And the curiosity was repaid. The story created an immediate sensation.18 It was variously hailed and puffed as ‘one of the most brilliant and remarkable productions of the year’ – a story ‘full of strong and sustained interest’, ‘attractively written, with an easy dialogue and good character studies’.19 The plot was likened to Faust, the style to both Disraeli and Ouida. The ‘magic motive’ of the picture was compared to Poe and Hawthorne, and the essential idea to Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It was very soon ‘monopoliz[ing] the attention of Londoners that talk about books’.20 There was no denying that it was the literary sensation of the moment. For the first time in his career, it seemed, Wilde had matched his notoriety with a comparably notorious achievement.

  Lady Wilde was characteristically enthusiastic, confessing that she had ‘nearly fainted at the last scene’. The story, she announced, was ‘the most wonderful piece of writing in all the fiction of the day’.21 Robbie Ross reported that ‘even in the precincts of the Savile’ there was ‘nothing but praise of Dorian Gray though of course it is said to be very dangerous’ (Ross had heard a clergyman tempering his admiration for the novel with the regret that, ‘some of the sentiments of Lord Henry [were] apt to lead people astray’). Eighty copies of the magazine had been sold in a single day from a Strand booksellers: ‘the usual sale being about 3 a week’.22

  There were over 200 reviews – an extraordinary response to a novella published in an Anglo-American periodical. Not all, of course, were favourable. Wilde, it transpired, retained all his old ability to annoy the critics. One complained at his ‘uncertainty as to the use of “will” and “shall”’, another at ‘an amateurish lack of precision in the descriptive passages’.23 The Pall Mall Gazette, in a long critique, suggested that ‘Mr Oscar Wilde’s new novelette is compounded of three elements in equal proportion. It is one part Stevenson, one part Huysmans, one part Wilde.’ The distinctive Wildean strain (‘the genuine Oscar – the Oscar fin de siècle, whom we know’) was displayed in the ‘copious stream of paradox’ flowing through the dialogue. A generous selection of examples – both ‘ingenious’ and ‘trite’ – was provided (though it was left to the reader to judge which was which):

  ‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know.’ – ‘I can believe anything provided it is incredible.’ – ‘A man can’t be too careful in his choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool.’ – ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’ – ‘The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.’ – ‘Sin is the only colour-element left in modern life.’ – ‘Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.’ – ‘There are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.’ – ‘A cigarette is the type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied.’ – ‘Lord Henry was always late on principle, his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time.’ – ‘I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life.’

  As for the Stevensonian portion, the reviewer considered that although Wilde’s story could be ‘classed with Dr Jekyll as a moral tale… its morality [was] only skin deep’ – and not even logically coherent. The supposed moral served merely as ‘a conventional garment… to secure Mr. Wilde’s fantasy an entrance into decent Anglo-American society’. The ‘dominant element’ in Wilde’s literary ‘inspiration’ – it was claimed – was, rather, ‘the aesthetic paganism of the French “Decadents”’ in general, and of À Rebours in particular:

  It is the picturesque not the ethical aspects o
f virtue and vice that interest Mr. Wilde. Purity has its artistic value, if only as a contrast to its opposite; corruption is scintillant, iridescent, full of alluring effects… From the very outset [the author] plunges us in a sickly atmosphere. The way in which Lord Henry Wotton and Basil Hallward talk of, and to, Dorian Gray in the opening scene convinced us, for the moment, that the beautiful Dorian must be a woman in male attire. We were wrong; Dorian Gray with his ‘finely-curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes and his crisp gold hair’ is of the same sex as his admirers; but that does not make their worship of him, and the forms of its expression, seem any the less nauseous. And the atmosphere does not freshen as the story proceeds. The very vagueness of Mr. Wilde’s allusions to his hero’s vices is exceedingly effective from the Baudelairian point of view. We are conscious of a penetrating poison in the air, yet cannot see clearly whence it proceeds.24

  While some papers hailed the story’s ‘high spiritual import’, the gathering consensus chimed with the Pall Mall Gazette and the Savile Club membership in considering Wilde’s story somehow ‘morbid’, ‘unhealthy’, ‘dangerous’ and tinged with ‘poison’. The position was stated most emphatically in the St James’s Gazette, the Daily Chronicle and in W. E. Henley’s Scots Observer (where, ironically, Robbie Ross – after a single unhappy year at Cambridge – had taken a job). Each of them focused, in their differently coded ways, on the story’s undercurrents of ‘unnatural’ homosexual desire. They condemned the cloying relationships of the novel’s three main characters, the hedonistic creed proposed by Lord Henry Wotton, and the descriptions – vague though they might be – of Dorian’s depravities coupled with Wilde’s apparent enjoyment in writing about them.

  ‘Why go grubbing in muck heaps?’ demanded Charles Whibley, writing anonymously in the Scots Observer:

  The world is fair, and the proportion of healthy-minded men and honest women to those that are foul, fallen or unnatural is great. Mr. Oscar Wilde has again been writing stuff that were better unwritten; and while ‘The Picture of Dorian Gary’… is ingenious, interesting, full of cleverness, and plainly the work of a man of letters, it is false art, for its interest is medico-legal; it is false to human nature – for its hero is a devil; it is false to morality – for it is not made sufficiently clear that the writer does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity.25

  The Daily Chronicle called the story a ‘poisonous’ tale, ‘spawned by the leprous literature of the French Décadents… heavy with the odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’; the St James’s Gazette wondered whether ‘The Treasury or the Vigilance Society will think it worth while to prosecute Mr. Oscar Wilde’ or his publishers, for producing such a ‘corrupt’ and offensive work; while the Scots Observer suggested that a story which ‘dealt with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing – in camera’ would appeal to ‘none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph-boys’.26 The allusions to ‘telegraph boys’ and ‘outlawed noblemen’ to ‘medico-legal’ interests and the ‘Vigilance Committee’ all reflected, and encouraged, the sexual anxieties about ‘unnatural vice’ stirred up by the Cleveland Street Scandal.

  With (and even without) the insinuations of the press, many of those who read the book detected its ‘dangerous’ subtext. Violet Martin thought it ‘the most daring beastliness ever’; while John Addington Symonds, to whom Wilde had sent a copy, suggested ‘If the British public will stand this, they can stand anything.’ Wilde could not have been surprised at such reactions. He had, after all, refused to let the innocent-minded Graham Robertson read the story, telling him, ‘this book was not written for you’.27 Pater declined to review the story on the grounds that it was ‘too dangerous’; he was, he told Wilde, concerned that the ‘veil of mystery’ surrounding Dorian’s ‘sins’ slipped in some places, revealing too clearly the sexual passion that Basil Hallward had for him. He may have been concerned, too, that Lord Henry’s call to for a ‘New Hedonism’ seemed to echo the ideas, and even the phrases, of his controversial ‘Conclusion’ to The Renaissance, bending them to a new purpose. He himself had spent the intervening years seeking to qualify and mitigate his call to a life of seeking ‘experience’ for its own end. The hero of his own novel, Marius the Epicurean (published in 1885), advocated a more austere philosophy of life, very different from the ‘New Hedonism’ – an Epicureanism that recognized the importance of ‘the moral sense’ for the complete and ‘harmonious development of man’s entire organism’.28

  In America there was general incomprehension about the furore. A New York Times editorial at the end of June reported that the story had ‘excited vastly more interest’ in Britain than it had in the States, ‘simply because, since last year’s exposure of what are euphemistically styled the West End [i.e. Cleveland Street] scandals Englishmen have been abnormally sensitive to the faintest suggestion of pruriency in the direction of friendships’. Any such ‘bestial suspicion’ was unlikely to have crossed the mind of ‘one American reader out of ten thousand’.29

  Wilde professed to be delighted with the press attacks, on the grounds that, as the English public ‘takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral’, such reviews would ‘largely increase the sale of the magazine’. He only regretted that, having been paid outright for the piece, he would not be benefiting from this. To keep the subject alive he entered into a bantering correspondence with the three papers – adopting a variety of different defences. ‘I am quite incapable’, he told the St James’s Gazette, ‘of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate; and it is to the confusion between the two that we owe the appearance of Mrs. Grundy, that amusing old lady who represents the only original form of humour that the middle classes of this country have been able to produce.’30

  To the editor of the Daily Chronicle he confessed (with a deployment of one of his favourite alliterations) that the book ‘is poisonous if you like; but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at’.31 In a further letter to the St James’s Gazette he ruefully admitted that – ‘alas’ – his story did indeed have a moral. ‘And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment… Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book?’32 He side-stepped Whibley’s ‘grossly unjust’ insinuations, with the line that, although it had proved necessary for ‘the dramatic development of the story’ to ‘surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption’ he had deliberately left the details to the imagination of each reader: ‘Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.’33†

  Wilde’s cheerful assertion that the rumoured immorality of the story would be good for sales was not entirely borne out. Although things had begun well, on 10 July Ward, Lock & Co. received ‘an intimation from W. H. Smith and Son, that “[Wilde’s] story having been characterized in the press as a filthy one”, they are compelled to withdraw Lippincott’s Magazine from their bookstalls’. The publishers sought an immediate interview with Wilde, declaring that ‘this is a serious matter for us’.34 And it was. Over the previous two years the National Vigilance Society (a body established in 1885 ‘for the enforcement and improvement of the laws for the repression of criminal vice and public immorality’) had twice successfully prosecuted the English publisher Henry Vizetelly for distributing the novels of Emile Zola in translation. He had been fined a total of £300 and imprisoned for three months.

  It was perhaps Ward, Lock & Co.’s anxieties that prompted Wilde’s visit to the offices of the St James’s Gazette, where he sought an interview with Samuel Jeyes, the journalist who had penned the original hostile review, and was fuelling the ongoing controversy. Jeyes (who had been at Oxford the year behind Wilde) proved implacable. Though Wilde exerted ‘all the resources of his persuasive manner and abounding wit’, Jeyes refused
to be mollified. ‘What is the use of writing of, and hinting at, things you do not mean?’ he asked. ‘I assure you,’ replied Oscar earnestly, ‘I mean every word I have said, and everything at which I have hinted.’ ‘Then all I can say,’ answered Jeyes grimly, ‘is that if you do mean them, you are very likely to find yourself at Bow Street one of these days.’ Wilde greeted this with a ‘light laugh’.35

  Jeyes’s comment, however, carried a warning. There were many who were ready to read the hints about Dorian’s ‘disgusting sins and abominable crimes’ as reflections of Wilde’s own interests and deeds. As Whibley had suggested, the story left it unclear whether the writer himself ‘does not prefer a course of unnatural iniquity to a life of cleanliness, health and sanity’. Certainly the American-born baritone David Bispham, who was on the fringe of Wilde’s circle, regarded the story as little short of a reckless ‘confession’.36 The extraordinary interest and attention generated by the tale may have given Wilde a greatly enhanced literary standing, but it also hastened the insidious process of undermining his personal reputation. And although there was considerable exaggeration in Constance’s comment that ‘since Oscar wrote “Dorian Gray” no one will speak to us’, the story’s publication undoubtedly marked a further darkening of Wilde’s reputation. From that summer, in London’s cultured circles, it became harder to ignore the ‘strange things’ being whispered about him.37