The Mask of Art

I suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. I turned halfway round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. . . . I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. . . . I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. . . . We would have spoken to each other without any introduction. I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other.

Walter Pater had convinced Wilde to delete the only explicitly homosexual passage about Hallward’s love for Dorian.

The book enjoyed an immense success when it was published in 1891. As Richard Ellman has remarked in his definitive biography of Wilde, “No novel had commanded so much attention for years, or awakened sentiments so contradictory in its readers.” The bookseller W. H. Smith (which recently sold me my latest copy) originally refused to carry it on the grounds that it was “filthy.” Wilde’s wife, Constance, complained, “Since Oscar wrote Dorian Gray, no one will speak to us.” One newspaper said that Dorian Gray was a matter for the police, not the critic. Perhaps the most tragic consequence of the book’s notoriety was that it attracted the attention of the young man who would be the cause of Wilde’s downfall. Lord Alfred Douglas read it nine times and begged to be introduced to the author—an encounter that would lead four years later to Wilde’s trial and imprisonment.

If Dorian Gray created such a furor, it was not just because of its general aestheticism but also because of its specific homosexual subtext. The word “curious” is Wilde’s usual substitution for the more explicit “queer,” and indeed “curious” is surely the most frequently used adjective in the book.

When Hallward paints Dorian he has in mind Antinous, reputed to have been the Emperor Hadrian’s lover; Dorian is pictured as “crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms … on the prow of Adrian’s barge.” Dorian dresses up as Anne de Joyeuse, the French admiral who was one of Henry III’s mignons, just as Piers Gaveston was Edward II’s beloved. Wilde believed that this new (if veiled) content contributed to the book’s impact: “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.”

Sophisticated readers knew perfectly well what to make of the references to the “Hellenic ideal,” and with a bit more effort they could have decoded this sentence about Hallward’s affection for Dorian: “It was such love as Michael Angelo had known, and Montaigne, and Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself.” Michelangelo (whose sonnets had been mentioned earlier in the novel) wrote tormented love poems to the young heterosexual aristocrat Tommaso Cavalieri. Montaigne was the intimate friend of Etienne de La Boétie, and as Wilde put it in an essay, in Montaigne’s meditation on friendship, “he ranks it higher than the love of brother for brother, or the love of man for woman.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann—German art historian, Vatican librarian, and a founder of Neoclassicism in the eighteenth century—was notoriously homosexual; and Wilde had once written that “a romantic friendship with a young Roman of his day initiated Winckelmann into the secret of Greek art, taught him the mystery of its beauty and the meaning of its form.”

Wilde had devoted a notorious text (partially published originally in 1889 in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine but not printed in full until two decades after Wilde’s death) to the theory that Shakespeare’s sonnets had been addressed to a boy actor, a certain Willie Hughes, their “onlie begetter,” who, like Dorian, possesses the secret of eternal youth. The story-essay, “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” adumbrates several other themes that show up later in Dorian Gray—including a portrait (forged, in this case) and endless eulogies to the boy’s white and rose and gold beauty. In the frame tale of the story, the nineteenth-century inventor of the theory about Willie Hughes is a certain Cyril Graham, who played Shakespeare’s girls at Eton and Trinity and who, like Dorian, inherited his mother’s beauty, became an orphan while still a child, and was raised by a rough, disapproving grandfather (most of Wilde’s heroes are orphans, as though freedom from the family is the necessary condition for spiritual—and sexual—liberty).

An echo of that boy in Shakespeare can be heard in Dorian Gray when Dorian himself falls in love with Sibyl Vane on the night she is dressed in male attire and is playing Rosalind in As You Like It (the role in which Cyril Graham shone and which, according to the theory, was one of the handful that Shakespeare wrote for his beloved Willie Hughes). “When she came on in her boy’s clothes,” Dorian tells Lord Henry and Hallward, “she was perfectly wonderful. She wore a moss-colored velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves, slim brown cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green cap with a hawk’s feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red. She had never seemed to me more exquisite.”

Rosalind, of course, is disguised in the play as the boy Ganymede (“I’ll have no worse a name than Jove’s own page”). (Incidentally, the word “catamite” is a Latin derivation from the Greek name “Ganymede.”) When she encounters the man she loves, Orlando, she tells him that she will cure him of his love: “I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote, and woo me.” Although Orlando thinks he is speaking to a boy, he readily agrees to accept this “cure.” Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, teaches Orlando the arts of love and the understanding of a woman’s nature and even acts out a mock (or is it real?) engagement ceremony.

Perhaps the most striking scene occurs when “Ganymede” sees a blood-soaked handkerchief and learns that Orlando has fought a lioness to save his brother’s life and now lies gravely wounded in a cave. “Ganymede” faints, recovers, and is chided for a lack of manliness by Orlando’s brother Oliver.

Of course, what gives substance to these allusions to a counterfeit gender is not just that Rosalind is playing a gay boy, Ganymede, who instructs a man in how to make love to a woman but also that on Shakespeare’s stage the woman was acted by a real-life boy and the enthusiastic audience was in on the joke.

The androgyny of this situation stirs the ambiguous Dorian Gray to his first great passion. But the night he invites Lord Henry and Basil to see Sibyl Vane play Juliet (another role, according to the theory, that Shakespeare had written for Willie Hughes), she bitterly disappoints him with her listless, unconvincing performance. Her problem is that she has fallen in love with a flesh-and-blood human being, Dorian (though, paradoxically and unbelievably, she doesn’t know his real name and calls him simply “Prince Charming”). As she tearfully explains to him after his scalding reproaches, “You taught me what reality really is. Tonight, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played.”

Dorian refuses to understand, abandons her with a curse—and she kills herself. At this point the portrait begins to change; a new touch of cruelty appears at the mouth. Sibyl’s life has ended tragically because she had given up the mask of art for the face of reality. In “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” Wilde had already argued that inspired deception or counterfeiting is essential to the actor’s art, especially the travestied actor’s.

The dangerous ideas presented in both “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” and The Picture of Dorian Gray came back to haunt Wilde during his trial. Here’s an excerpt in the cross-examination by Edward Carson on 3 April 1895:

The curious truth is that if Dorian Gray is about the double life of a Victorian gentleman, it is also, in its construction, an example of formal and thematic doubling. It is on one level an archetypal parable, comparable to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—that is, a story that everyone knows but that few people have read, or have not reread since adolescence. Wilde began as a writer of fairy tales, an essentially oral form of art; indeed, as André Gide tells us in his little essay, “In Memoriam,” “Wilde didn’t converse: he recounted.” Gide remembers an evening in Paris in 1891 when, after dinner, Wilde told his French friends the story of the river in which Narcissus drowned because the boy was trying to embrace his own reflection. “‘But if I loved him,’ responded the river, ‘it was because when he bent over my waters I saw the reflection of my waters in his eyes.’”

Even when he wasn’t telling a tale, Wilde was reciting, as it were, the dialogue from his fiction and plays. To the astonished, puritanical Gide, longing to be tempted by Wilde in his guise as Lord Henry, the Irish writer said: “I don’t like your lips; they’re straight like the lips of someone who has never lied. I want to teach you how to lie so that your lips will become as beautiful and twisted as those of an ancient mask.”

Wilde’s working method was to start with a collection of quips and clever sayings and gradually build up scenes in which such remarks could be set off; he constructed the brooch around his precious gems. As a writer in the Gaelic tradition (his father, Sir William Wilde, had put together a collection of Irish folktales that the son later drew on), Oscar Wilde was alive to wit, paradox, puns, repetition, melodic language, and all the other oral, bardic strategies of literature—and he understood the importance of a gripping legend as he “recounted” his story to a spellbound audience.

But if Dorian Gray contains some of the most brilliant dialogue in English fiction, full of epigrams that the author would recycle in his plays, it is also a melodrama of the most conventional Victorian sort. I’m referring especially to the revenge that Sibyl Vane’s brother, James, has sworn to take on Dorian—a plot element that Wilde built up when he changed the text from a magazine story into a proper book. There’s the ruined prostitute’s denunciation of “Prince Charming,” the near escape outside the opium den, the accidental murder during the hunting season in the country—all the excitement that Wilkie Collins had trained contemporary readers to expect.

This double nature of the writing—creaky plot and oiled dialogue—corresponds to what the French critic Roland Barthes has identified as two different rates of reading, a fast scanning for plot appropriate to nineteenth-century potboilers and a close study suitable to modernist works. As Barthes puts it in The Pleasure of the Text, “Read slowly, read all of a novel by Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does, for what happens to the language does not happen to the plot.” Wilde, oddly enough, tempts us through suspense to read as fast as possible, whereas at the same time his epigrams, his mini-essays on jewels, embroideries, and ecclesiastical vestments, and his intricate philosophical speculations on conventional virtue versus hedonism all demand that we peruse those passages as slowly as possible. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a book to be read at two speeds; it is ambiguous in its very form. In French someone who lives à deux vitesses is leading a double life, or at least a contradictory one.

Morally, Dorian Gray is just as complex, especially when compared to a book that must have partially inspired it. Although uncanny and unsettling, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is about the asymmetrical relationship between two men inhabiting the same body; the monster, Hyde, is the respectable Jekyll’s “son,” in a sense, and Stevenson even writes, “Jekyll had more than a father’s interest; Hyde had more than a son’s indifference.” The repressed Jekyll relishes the crimes that the bestial Hyde commits. But when Jekyll discovers that he keeps turning into Hyde, even without swallowing the transforming chemical draught, he realizes that soon Hyde will entirely supplant him. At the moment the demonic Hyde is about to be caught by the law, he commits suicide.

Jekyll never exactly repents, but he gradually becomes aware that Hyde’s infamy expresses his own lust for evil. As Jekyll writes, weirdly discussing himself in the third person: “Henry Jekyll stood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde; but the situation was apart from ordinary laws, and insidiously relaxed the grasp of conscience. It was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone, that was guilty. Jekyll was no worse; he woke again to his good qualities seemingly unimpaired; he would even make haste, when it was possible, to undo the evil done by Hyde. And thus his conscience slumbered.”

Yet Jekyll’s conscience finally awakens, whereas Dorian’s never rises above self-pity and petulance. After he has murdered Hallward, Dorian “for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life.” He rather wanly regrets that he’s lost all ability to bestow affection on others; as he tells Lord Henry, “I wish I could love. . . . But I seem to have lost the passion, and forgotten the desire.” When he recalls Hallward, rather than feeling repentance for having killed him, he merely experiences all over again his original vexation. And when he slashes the picture it’s only to destroy the evidence of his evil—certainly not to end his life.

Even if Dorian does not repent, the reader is never left in any doubt that Lord Henry’s philosophy of self-indulgence and of the ultimate value of physical beauty and eternal youth has led the younger man astray. Indeed, Dorian’s terrible immorality—his nasty rejection of Sibyl Vane, his disastrous, reputation-destroying influence on the lives of many of the men and women he meets, his murder of Hallward and provocation of Alan Campbell’s suicide—are all the direct result of his aestheticism and hedonism. In the legal cross-examination quoted earlier, Wilde, if he’d only been willing to humble his pride, could easily have justified his novel as a stern, dramatic demonstration of the consequences of evil ideas. He certainly had not served his own cause (nor accurately presented his own work of fiction, which clearly solicits the reader’s indignation) by having written to a Scottish newspaper editor, in defense of the novel, “An artist, sir, has no ethical sympathies at all. Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colors on his palette are to the painter.” Wilde obviously enjoyed posing as the apostle of art for art’s sake before the shocked public, but in truth he had carefully (and more mundanely) constructed his plot to demonstrate the tares that wickedness reaps.

His opponents, of course, could quite rightly have pointed out that The Picture of Dorian Gray does not tell the whole tale. As Richard Ellmann puts it, “If Dorian Gray presented aestheticism in an almost negative way, his essays ‘The Critic as Artist’ and ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ gave it affirmation.” These long texts were published almost simultaneously with Dorian; the first essay came out in 1890, the second in 1891. Walter Pater, the philosopher of aestheticism who reviewed Dorian at Wilde’s request, had objected that Lord Henry’s hedonism left no place for the higher pleasures of generosity and renunciation. For long-range hedonism, as everyone knows, can be perfectly consistent with goodness; to be good is a pleasure. Now, in his essays, Wilde corrected the distorted image he’d projected in his novel. In “The Critic as Artist” Wilde rejects the Romantic idea of art as primitive excess of unconscious sentiment (“All bad poetry comes from genuine feeling”) and defends the notion that the critical faculty is crucial for generating fresh and beautiful forms.

In “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Wilde argues that a just division of goods and the abolition of private property would handle the problems of material existence and set the stage for the flourishing of art, a highly idiosyncratic business. According to Wilde, under socialism the community will supply the useful things, and “the beautiful things will be made by the individual.” In italics Wilde emphasizes: “Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” Through this clever division of labor, Wilde imagines that he has reconciled public justice with individual freedom of expression. These two faces of the same coin are, to be sure, less exciting and melodramatic than the contrast between Dorian’s flawless, unchanging face and the grotesque portrait.

For Wilde was torn not only by conflicting ideas of morality but also by contradictory styles of conceptualizing such problems. On one side Wilde was a Decadent, very much inspired by J.-K. Huysmans’s Against Nature (in French A Rebours), published in 1884. This is the book that Lord Henry gives to Dorian and that “poisons” his life; in his novel Wilde never gives the title, but in his trial he did identify Against Nature as the damaging fiction.

Like a combination of Lord Henry and Dorian, Des Esseintes, the hero of Against Nature, lives surrounded by beautiful furniture, reads curious old books, is hostile to marriage, smokes opium, and tries to corrupt young people. Des Esseintes, for instance, introduces an innocent, working-class man to the pleasures of a bordello, which the older man at first pays for. He then cuts the boy off financially—and hopes that the youngster will now be tempted to steal and even murder to pay for his visits (the plan comes to nothing, however). Like Dorian, Des Esseintes ends up disgusted and disillusioned by his amoral, single-minded pursuit of pleasure. If Huysmans, virtually the founder of the Decadent movement, inspired Wilde, nevertheless the Irish master was a far better writer—and a more modern spirit—than the French novelist. Huysmans smells today of opium and mothballs, and certainly his veering between blasphemy and piety in alternating gusts of brimstone and incense can only make a modern reader smile. Or gag.

Although Dorian Gray has its period side, especially in the way Wilde’s high-born rebels obediently attend tedious society events, nevertheless it is a far more contemporary novel than Huysmans’s. This fresh quality might be called Wilde’s Nietzschean side, even though these contemporaries (they both died in 1900) did not know of each other’s existence. Friedrich Nietzsche attacked the “slave morality” of Christianity and denounced the materialism and pessimism of his century. If Huysmans was the inventor of Decadence, Nietzsche was its great enemy. Thomas Mann was the first writer to make the parallel between Wilde and Nietzsche; both men, Mann pointed out, were waging a “furious war on morality” and calling for the transvaluation of moral into aesthetic values. Whereas Decadence, paradoxically, ended up reinforcing traditional morality (Huysmans, unsurprisingly, converted back to Catholicism), Wilde and Nietzsche posed a serious threat to establishment conventions. Wilde wanted society to give up its hypocrisy and admit the existence of homosexuality, for instance. Lord Henry sounds Nietzschean indeed when he says, “I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal—to something finer, richer, than the Hellenic ideal.” Lord Henry concludes: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”

We are only a step away from Nietzsche’s praise of the healthiness of paganism and his condemnation of the sickness of Christianity. We hear Wilde’s voice when Nietzsche writes: “Books for everybody are always malodorous books; the smell of petty people clings to them.” Both writers sound like elitists not because they respect the actual aristocracy but because they reject leveling small-mindedness.

Of course, there were differences. Wilde was a showman who put all his arrogance on display, whereas Nietzsche wrote in a riddling style and firmly believed in the difference between esoteric and exoteric wisdom (“Our supreme insights must—and should!—sound like follies, in certain cases like crimes,” he wrote, “when they come impermissibly to the ears of those who are not predisposed and predestined for them”). Wilde was not cautious, and he was so foolish that he thought he could bluff Mrs. Grundy into acknowledging his talented work as much as his genial life. When he entered into a correspondence with The St. James’s Gazette in defense of The Picture of Dorian Gray, he concluded his last letter with this remark: “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 it deserves.”