The Picture of Dorian Gray (26 page)

Time was (it was in the '70s) when we talked about Mr Oscar Wilde; time came (it came in the '80s) when he tried to write poetry and, more adventurous, we tried to read it; time is when we had forgotten him, or only remember him as the late editor of
The Woman's World
¹
– a part for which he was singularly unfitted, if we are to judge him by the work which he has been allowed to publish in
Lippincott's Magazine
and which Messrs Ward, Lock & Co. have not been ashamed to circulate in Great Britain. Not being curious in ordure, and not wishing to offend the nostrils of decent persons, we do not propose to analyse ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray': that would be to advertise the developments of an esoteric prurience. Whether the Treasury or the Vigilance Society will think it worth while to prosecute Mr Oscar Wilde or Messrs Ward, Lock & Co., we do not know; but on the whole we hope they will not.

The puzzle is that a young man of decent parts, who enjoyed (when he was at Oxford) the opportunity of associating with gentlemen, should put his name (such as it is) to so stupid and vulgar a piece of work. Let nobody read it in the hope of finding witty paradox or racy wickedness. The writer airs his cheap research among the garbage of the French
Décadents
like any drivelling pedant, and he bores you unmercifully with his prosy rigmaroles about the beauty of the Body and the corruption of the Soul. The grammar is better than Ouida's;
²
the erudition equal; but in every other respect we prefer the talented lady who broke off with ‘pious aposiopesis' when she touched upon ‘the horrors which are described in the pages of Suetonius and Livy'… not to mention the yet worse infamies believed by many scholars to be accurately portrayed in the lost works of Plutarch, Venus, and Nicodemus, especially Nicodemus.

Let us take one peep at the young men in Mr Oscar Wilde's story. Puppy
³
No. 1 is the painter of the picture of Dorian Gray; Puppy No. 2 is the critic (a courtesy lord, skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians and aweary of all
the sins and pleasures of London); Puppy No. 3 is the original, cultivated by Puppy No. 1 with a ‘romantic friendship'. The Puppies fall a-talking: Puppy No. 1 about his Art, Puppy No. 2 about his sins and pleasures and the pleasures of sin, and Puppy No. 3 about himself – always about himself, and generally about his face, which is ‘brainless and beautiful'. The Puppies appear to fill up the intervals of talk by plucking daisies and playing with them, and sometimes by drinking ‘something with strawberry in it'. The youngest Puppy is told that he is charming; but he mustn't sit in the sun for fear of spoiling his complexion. When he is rebuked for being a naughty, wilful boy, he makes a pretty
moue
– this man of twenty! This is how he is addressed by the Blase Puppy at their first meeting:

‘Yes, Mr Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away…. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you…. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.'

Why, bless our souls! haven't we read something of this kind somewhere in the classics? Yes, of course we have! But in what recondite author? Ah – yes – no – yes, it
was
in Horace! What an advantage it is to have received a classical education! And how it will astonish the Yankees! But we must not forget our Puppies, who have probably occupied their time in lapping ‘something with strawberry in it'. Puppy No.
1
(the Art Puppy) has been telling Puppy No.
3
(the Doll Puppy) how much he admires him. What is the answer? ‘I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know now that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.… I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose?… Oh, if it was only the other way! If the picture could only change, and I could be always what I am now!'

No sooner said than done! The picture
does
change: the original doesn't. Here's a situation for you! Théophile Gautier could have made it romantic, entrancing, beautiful. Mr Stevenson could have made it convincing, humorous, pathetic. Mr Anstey could have made it screamingly funny. It has been reserved for Mr Oscar Wilde to make it dull and nasty. The promising youth plunges into every kind of mean depravity, and ends in being ‘cut' by fast women and vicious men. He finishes with murder: the New Voluptuousness always leads up to blood-shedding… that is part of the cant. The gore and gashes wherein Mr Rider Haggard
⁴
takes a chaste delight are the natural diet for a cultivated palate which is tired of mere licentiousness. And every
wickedness or filthiness committed by Dorian Gray is faithfully registered upon his face in the picture; but his living features are undisturbed and unmarred by his inward vileness. This is the story which Mr Oscar Wilde has tried to tell; a very lame story it is, and very lamely it is told.

Why has he told it? There are two explanations; and, so far as we can see, not more than two. Not to give pleasure to his readers: the thing is too clumsy, too tedious, and – alas! that we should say it – too stupid. Perhaps it was to shock his readers, in order that they might cry Fie! upon him and talk about him, much as Mr Grant Allen
⁵
recently tried in
The Universal Review
to arouse, by a licentious theory of the sexual relations, an attention which is refused to his popular chatter about other men's science. Are we then to suppose that Mr Oscar Wilde has yielded to the craving for a notoriety which he once earned by talking fiddle-faddle about other men's art, and sees his only chance of recalling it by making himself obvious at the cost of being obnoxious, and by attracting the notice which the olfactory sense cannot refuse to the presence of certain self-asserting organisms? That is an uncharitable hypothesis, and we would gladly abandon it. It may be suggested (but is it more charitable?) that he derives pleasure from treating a subject merely because it is disgusting. The phenomenon is not unknown in recent literature; and it takes two forms, in appearance widely separate – in fact, two branches from the same root, a root which draws its life from malodorous putrefaction. One development is found in the Puritan prurience which produced Tolstoy's ‘Kreutzer Sonata' and Mr Stead's famous outbursts.
⁶
That is odious enough and mischievous enough, and it is rightly execrated, because it is tainted with an hypocrisy and the less culpable because charitable persons may believe it to be unconscious. But is it more odious or more mischievous than the ‘frank Paganism' (that is the word, is it not?) which delights in dirtiness and confesses its delight? Still they are both chips from the same block – ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray' – and both of them ought to be chucked into the fire. Not so much because they are dangerous and corrupt (they are corrupt but not dangerous) as because they are incurably silly, written by simpleton
poseurs
(whether they call themselves Puritan or Pagan) who know nothing about the life which they affect to have explored, and because they are mere catchpenny revelations of the non-existent, which, if they reveal anything at all, are revelations only of the singularly unpleasant minds from which they emerge.

Dulness and dirt are the chief features
of
Lippincott's
this month. The element in it that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr Oscar Wilde's story of ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray'. It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French
Décadents
–
a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction – a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be horrible and fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophisings, and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity which is over all Mr Wilde's elaborate Wardour Street aestheticism and obtrusively cheap scholarship.

Mr Wilde says his book has ‘a moral'. The ‘moral', so far as we can collect it, is that man's chief end is to develop his nature to the fullest by ‘always searching for new sensations', that when the soul gets sick the way to cure it is to deny the senses nothing, for ‘nothing', says one of Mr Wilde's characters, Lord Henry Wotton, ‘can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul'. Man is half angel and half ape, and Mr Wilde's book has no real use if it be not to inculcate the ‘moral' that when you feel yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than rush out and make a beast of yourself. There is not a single good and holy impulse of human nature, scarcely a fine feeling or instinct that civilization, art, and religion have developed throughout the ages as part of the barriers between Humanity and Animalism that is not held up to ridicule and contempt in ‘Dorian Gray', if, indeed, such strong words can be fitly applied to the actual effect of Mr Wilde's airy levity and fluent impudence. His desperate effort to vamp up a ‘moral' for the book at the end is, artistically speaking, coarse and crude, because the whole incident of Dorian Gray's death is, as they say on the stage, ‘out of the picture'. Dorian's only regret is that unbridled indulgence in every form of secret and unspeakable vice, every resource of luxury and art, and sometimes still more piquant to the jaded young man of fashion, whose lives ‘Dorian Gray' pretends to sketch, by every abomination of vulgarity and squalor is – what? Why, that it will leave traces of premature age and loathsome sensualness on his pretty face, rosy with the loveliness that endeared youth of his odious type to the paralytic patricians of the Lower Empire.

Dorian Gray prays that a portrait of himself which an artist, who raves about him as young men do about the women they love not wisely but too well, has painted may grow old instead of the original. This is what happens by some supernatural agency, the introduction of which seems purely farcical, so that Dorian goes on enjoying unfading youth year after year, and might go on for ever using his senses with impunity ‘to cure his soul', defiling English society with the moral pestilence which is incarnate in him, but for one thing. That is his sudden impulse not merely to murder the painter – which might be artistically defended on the plea that it is only a fresh development of his scheme for realizing every phase of life-experience – but to rip up the canvas in a rage, merely because, though he had permitted himself to do one good action, it had not made his portrait less hideous. But all this is inconsistent with Dorian Gray's cool, calculating, conscienceless character, evolved logically enough by Mr Wilde's ‘New Hedonism'.

Then Mr Wilde finishes his story by saying that on hearing a heavy fall Dorian Gray's servants rushed in, found the portrait on the wall as youthful looking as ever, its senile ugliness being transferred to the foul profligate himself, who is lying on the floor stabbed to the heart. This is a sham moral, as indeed everything in the book is a sham, except the one element in the book which will taint every young mind that comes in contact with it. That element is shockingly real, and it is the plausibly insinuated defence of the creed that appeals to the senses ‘to cure the soul' whenever the spiritual nature of man suffers from too much purity and self-denial.

The rest of this number of
Lippincott
consists of articles of harmless padding.

Why go grubbing in muck heaps? 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 Gray', which he contributes to
Lippincott's
, 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. The story – which deals with matters only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department or a hearing
in camera
– is discreditable alike to author and editor. Mr Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but if he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted
telegraph-boys,
⁷
the sooner he takes to tailoring (or some other decent trade) the better for his own reputation and the public morals.

Mr Oscar Wilde furnished us some time ago with a pleasant surprise by the production of the cleverest book of fairy tales that has been issued in his generation from the British press; and to this month's
Lippincott's Magazine
he contributes a story, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray', which is likely to make even a greater sensation. With a subtle power it portrays the gilded paganism which has been staining these latter years of the Victorian epoch with horrors that carry us back to the worst incidents in the history of ancient Rome; and in the tragic picture of Dorian Gray's life, given up to sensuous pleasure, with its mingled culture and corruption, Mr Wilde has performed a service to his age. As to the mechanism of the story, it is even more ingenious and striking than the ‘Dr Jekyll' of Mr Louis Stevenson, and the novel is studded with brilliant epigram. But the literary charm of even its most powerful passages is of small account compared with the motive dominating the writer. We can only hope that it will be read and pondered by those classes of British society whose corruption it delineates with such thrilling power, and that it may be the means of preserving many young lives from the temptations by which they are surrounded. One of its most impressive lessons lies in the fact that Dorian Gray's life was poisoned by a book. Although this remarkable novelette occupies a hundred pages, and would be cheap at the price charged for the number, there are nearly sixty pages more filled with excellent matter in prose and verse.