Paradox and the Preface to Oscar Wilde S the Picture of Dorian Gray

Paradox and the Preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

Eric Pudney ENGK01 Spring term 2010 English Studies The Centre for Languages and Literature Lund University Supervisor: Cecilia Wadsö-Lecaros Contents

Introduction 1 Art and the Artist 2 Art and Morality 6 Art and Money 10 Conclusion 15 Works cited 17 Eric Pudney Page 1

Introduction

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in the July 1890 edition of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, and immediately attracted a great deal of hostile attention from the London press. Many of the original reviewers were outraged by what they regarded as the immoral stance of the novella. Wilde defended his work wittily and eloquently in letters to his harshest critics. Even before the first version of the story was published he had begun work on an extended version, which was published in 1891. He expanded the story, adding a number of important scenes such as the visit to the opium den and the character of James Vane, but also toning down some of the suggestive dialogue between the three main characters (Bristow lii-lv). Just before the 1891 version of the novel was published, a series of twenty-three aphorisms appeared in The Fortnightly Review under the title ‘A Preface to “Dorian Gray”’. Many of these maxims were taken, in some cases word for word, from letters he had written to his critics, and the Preface was also included in the 1891 edition. As the editors of two scholarly editions of the novel point out, one key purpose of the Preface was to defend the work from previous criticism and to pre-empt new attacks on it (Gillespie 3n; Bristow lvi). However, there is more to it than that; the Preface also deals with ideas that are among the major concerns of the novel, and it serves to highlight the fact that Dorian Gray is a novel about art. Most critics are content to assume that it represents “the major points of [Wilde’s] aesthetic creed at the time” (Gillespie 3n) or serves as a kind of “manifesto” (Bristow lvi) for Aestheticism. It seems to me there is a tension between the two functions of the Preface. It was written as a defence of the novel, and statements made in the heat of argument might well be oversimplified or even entirely misleading. To take a concrete example, one aim of the Preface was to defend the novel from thinly-veiled claims that it contained homoerotic elements. These claims were in fact accurate, as nobody today would try to deny. So is it safe to assume that the Preface can be regarded as a straightforward statement of the novel’s ethical and aesthetic standpoint? Wilde’s biographer, Richard Ellmann, did not think so. According to Ellmann, the Preface “flaunted the aestheticism that the book would indict” (297). For him, the novel was not a celebration of Aestheticism but its “tragedy”: a conclusion diametrically opposed to those of many of the original reviewers. Ellmann’s position is more convincing, but ultimately I think it represents the novel as more coherent than it actually is. Eric Pudney Page 2

Wilde has often been compared to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Brown 113). He shared with Nietzsche a refusal to build a coherent intellectual system and a scorn for consistency. In this paper I will look at some of the most famous statements in the Preface, which set out a particular view of art in relation to the artist, morality and money. I will compare these statements with the evidence of the novel itself, in order to show that the novel both supports and contradicts the ideas put forward in the Preface, complicating its alleged status as an Aestheticist “manifesto”. I will draw in a number of Wilde’s essays, which help to illuminate his aesthetic thought and reveal the central place of paradox in his work.

Art and the Artist

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. (Dorian Gray 5)

By arguing that art is what matters, rather than the character of the artist, Wilde may have been anticipating some of the more personal criticism of his work. The reader should be focusing on the book itself, the aphorism suggests, rather than attacking the author. It also implies that Wilde remains hidden: the novel cannot be seen as self-revelatory. This is a convenient position for Wilde to take, since some of his angrier critics came as close to explicitly condemning the book for its homoerotic elements as was possible in late Victorian public discourse. If art hides the artist, then such elements would not tell us anything about Wilde himself – or so the aphorism might suggest. But the statement is more than just an expedient way of defending its author. There is a serious point here, and as Isaac Elimimian points out, this point is repeated in Wilde’s essays The Truth of Masks and The Decay of Lying (626). Elimimian argues that it represents a recurring theme in Wilde’s work. The Picture of Dorian Gray itself engages with the idea of art concealing the artist in a variety of ways. Most clearly, in the very first chapter, Basil Hallward tells Lord Henry that he will not exhibit the picture because “I have put too much of myself into it” (9). This could be taken as echoing the idea that art should conceal the artist – which would imply that Basil’s attempt to create art has failed. Houston A. Baker takes this view, arguing that Basil

has an ideal conception of the role of the artist, and he realises from the outset of the novel that he has not lived up to his conception…The artist has put into the picture his own idolatry and worship of the physical embodiment of his ideal…Hallward’s concession to his own egocentric desires has, in effect, corrupted the ideal. (352) Eric Pudney Page 3

On this view, the novel is a cautionary tale for the artist, in which Basil’s failure to hide himself, and his artistic imposition on Dorian, lead to disaster. Baker’s reading is not wholly convincing, for a number of reasons. Shifting all the burden of blame onto Basil seems unfair. After all, it is Dorian who wishes for eternal youth, and Lord Henry who acts as the “Mephistophelian” tempter. Baker’s implication that Basil has corrupted Dorian is undermined by the fact that he, and also the picture he has created, act as a kind of “conscience” for Dorian. More serious is the question of Basil’s conception of art. Baker asserts that it is “ideal”, but is corrupted when Basil puts himself into the artwork, which would imply that Basil’s view is similar to the one expressed in the Preface. In fact Basil’s view of art is strikingly at odds with that of the Preface:

‘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. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.’ (11-12)

Although Elimimian rightly points out that the idea of the artist’s concealment is a recurrent theme in Wilde’s essays, there is also support for the opposite view in the same writings. For example, in The Decay of Lying we are told that “[t]he justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art” (79). In The Soul of Man, “A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is” (248). It is difficult to square this view with the idea that the finished artwork should somehow ‘conceal’ the artist, since art here is presented as being entirely dependent on the character and personality of its creator. The clearest opposition to Elimimian’s view arises in The Critic as Artist, in which Gilbert says,

All artistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind; and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets who shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the poets themselves. (CW Vol. 4 184)

A writer, according to this, simply is his characters – and in fact, Wilde famously wrote that there was much of himself in all three of the main characters in Dorian Gray, too (Gillespie ix). Perhaps the most important problem for Baker’s argument is that Basil’s painting is not a failure; on the contrary, it is great art, as Lord Henry makes clear (32). Basil’s view of Eric Pudney Page 4 art suggests that the personal feeling he has put into the painting is precisely what makes it so great. Towards the end of the fourth chapter, Lord Henry is (as usual) holding forth on the relation of artist to art:

“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life…The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists…The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.” “I wonder is that really so, Harry?” said Dorian Gray…“It must be, if you say it.” (68)

This intriguing passage supports the idea that artists put themselves into their work, but then complicates this by declaring that a “really great poet” is completely “unpoetical” (68), and so presumably is not revealed in his everyday character by his work. This represents a synthesis of the two positions I have discussed, which shows how artists both pour themselves into their work and at the same time cannot be ‘revealed’ by it, precisely because their individuality and energy is transferred into the art they create. But this apparent solution is immediately followed by what looks like a warning. Dorian’s comment, as well as indicating the extent to which he is dominated by Lord Henry’s ideas, is a signal to the reader to be wary about coming to any definite conclusion. Sybil Vane is another example of an artist. A great actress when Dorian discovers her, she is transformed by love for him into an incompetent. When Dorian takes his friends to see her perform, she is unable to act the part of Juliet with any kind of feeling. But when he meets her backstage, “[h]er eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a radiance about her” (100). Until this point, all her emotional energy has been channelled into acting; her actual life has been devoid of any drama or passion. When she meets Dorian, the situation is reversed and she gains an emotional life at the expense of her artistic talent. Lord Henry, after Sybil’s death, says that “the girl never really lived, and so she has never really died”, and argues that Sybil was merely “a reed through which Shakespeare’s music sounded” (120). It would appear that there is in this case nothing for art to conceal. Behind the actor’s mask is – nothing, or perhaps just another mask. For the true artist, life is the illusion, not art: art has much greater force than the mundane business of reality. Another actress, Sybil Vane’s mother, shows her appreciation of this when she says goodbye to her son. James Vane, furious at the relationship between his sister and Dorian, swears to kill “Prince Charming” if he hurts Sybil: Eric Pudney Page 5

The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid to [Mrs Vane]…She would have liked to have continued the scene on the same emotional scale, but he cut her short. Trunks had to be carried down and mufflers looked for…The moment was lost in vulgar details. (85)

Mrs Vane has an artist’s sensibility; she prefers false emotion – art – to the tedium of “vulgar details”. The book’s final example of an artist is Dorian himself. Although he does not act or produce art objects, Dorian can still be seen as an artist – or perhaps rather a kind of anti- artist. Although it is Basil Hallward who originally paints the picture it is Dorian who, by his moral transgressions, alters it from its original form and creates from it a new vision which can hardly be said to belong to the everyday world of “vulgar details”. Of course, he makes the picture ugly rather than beautiful, which is why I suggest the term anti-artist to describe him. Throughout the novel, ugliness is associated with reality and life (see Dorian Gray 214), and beauty is associated with art and illusion. But this distinction is blurred by Dorian’s relationship with the painting itself. The beautiful, ‘real’ Dorian does not reflect the sinful reality of his existence – instead, the painting does, while Dorian remains beautiful. Meanwhile the painting, although a work of art and a ‘false’ representation of Dorian, is not beautiful but ugly, until the natural order of things is restored at the end of the novel. This situation produces another reversal, too. The artist (Dorian) conceals art (the painting) in a very literal sense – the painting is locked in the attic, hidden from public view. But Dorian continues to ‘reveal’ the artist – himself – to the high social circles in which he moves and is adored for his looks. There is another sense in which Dorian can be regarded as an artist. His abandonment of Sybil, and her subsequent suicide, is Dorian’s first step along the road to damnation. But it is also represented as a moment of artistic beauty, as Lord Henry explains:

It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style…Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives… Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. (117)

The use of the word ‘tragedy’ – which of course can denote a theatrical genre as well as an event in real life – hints at something interesting: the idea that life can itself become a form of art. Later in the passage Lord Henry suggests that a person can be both actor and audience, which brings up the question of Dorian himself. Dorian is a devotee of the arts in all their forms (audience). But it is also suggested that he is himself an artist (actor), for whom “Life Eric Pudney Page 6 itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts” (149). As Lord Henry points out towards the end of the novel, Dorian has created himself as a work of art: “Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets” (248). Dorian Gray is both artist and artwork; his life is his canvas, his sensations are his colours, and his sins are his paintbrush. Or, as the Preface puts it, “[v]ice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art” (5). The distinction between artist and artwork collapses in the character of Dorian Gray, and so do notions of concealment and revelation. After all, which is the ‘real’ Dorian Gray – the beautiful young aesthete or the twisted, hideous sinner? One of the original reviewers of the Lippincott’s edition, Julian Hawthorne, commented perceptively that “Dorian never quite solidifies. In fact, his portrait is rather the more real thing of the two” (Hawthorne 80). Or could it be that both Dorian and his portrait are both true and false, simultaneously?

Art and Morality

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. […] The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. (Dorian Gray 5)

The first of the maxims above is perhaps the most famous and discussed of the statements in the Preface. Its meaning is fairly clear: it asserts that works of art – books – are to be judged by aesthetic standards, not by moral standards. As Wilde put it in a letter to the St James’s Gazette, “the sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate” (cited in Beckson 67). Of course, plenty of readers and critics have found what they consider to be moral instruction in the novel, but Wilde clarified his point further with the second of the maxims. So the position of the Preface seems to be that, while there may be moral content in a novel, the novel is not to be judged on the basis of that moral content. It is worth repeating that this part of the Preface is at least in part a defence against accusations of immorality from some of the book’s reviewers. Moralistic reactions, according to these maxims, are beside the point and reveal that the reviewers are not really qualified to judge the book. The Preface goes further than this, too: in suggesting that “[i]t is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors,” (6) it implies that the critics themselves are degraded – not the novel. While the Preface does not deny that Dorian Gray has some moral content, the precise nature of it is a controversial matter. Wilde himself, in his letters, said that the moral was Eric Pudney Page 7 obvious: “all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment” (cited in Gillespie 365). Other critics disagreed; the Scots Observer’s reviewer thought that “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” (cited in Gillespie 366). The Daily Chronicle thought the book’s ending was a “sham moral” and objected to “the creed that appeals to the senses ‘to cure the soul’” (cited in Gillespie 364). However, some early reviewers liked the book, including The Christian Leader (Bristow footnote xviii), and a Mr Charles Whibley found “lots of morality” in it (Selected Letters 83). In general, the Lippincott’s edition was more warmly received, and more likely to be interpreted as ‘moral’, in the US than in Britain. This was most likely because of the sensitivity in Britain about any suggestion of homoeroticism in the wake of the ‘Cleveland Street Affair’, in which several aristocrats and a member of the royal family were implicated in the trials of prostitutes at a gay brothel that catered to the upper classes (see Gillespie 347- 8). In fact, the fiercest critics of the Lippincott’s edition of Dorian Gray all allude to its homoerotic content. An editorial note in the St James’s Gazette is particularly telling:

Mr Wilde says that his story is a moral tale, because the wicked persons in it come to a bad end…We simply say that every critic has the right to point out that a work of art or literature is dull or incompetent in its treatment – as The Picture of Dorian Gray is; and that its dullness and incompetence are not redeemed because it constantly hints, not obscurely, at disgusting sins and abominable crimes. (cited in Gillespie 359)

This is as close as any contemporary critic came to an explicit condemnation of the novel’s homoeroticism. It seems unlikely that the story would have aroused anything like so much indignation were it not for this feature of the narrative. Contemporary criticism is less disturbed by this aspect of the novel, but this has not settled the debate about whether or not it is a “moral tale”. A surface reading would certainly suggest that it is. Dorian Gray dies in his attempt to destroy the picture that represents his conscience, as the St James’s Gazette acknowledged. Some critics accept this as the moral message of the novel: “Dorian Gray distorts [Lord Henry’s] doctrine and becomes a fallen dandy…finally, in self-inflicted death, Dorian meets the punishment of excessive self-love” (Roditi 54-5). Others blame Basil for his sin of “idolatry” (see, for example, Joyce Carol Oates 421 and Baker 352). Another reading, referred to by Baker, regards Lord Henry as Mephistopheles and Dorian as Faust, making Lord Henry the villain. In short, a variety of moral or ethical readings of the novel are possible. Eric Pudney Page 8

Other critics reject ethical readings. Julia Brown argues that Dorian perishes not because of his sins but because of his attempt to destroy art (80). This would suggest that, as Wilde himself put it in The Critic as Artist, “[a]esthetics are higher than ethics” (CW Vol 3 204). Another recent book on Wilde refers to the novel’s “moral relativism”, and argues that the problem lies in working out what ethical or aesthetic approach to life the novel is “actually endorsing” (Guy & Small 183). Examining the text in order to decide on the moral attitude of the novel itself is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is uncontroversial to state that a variety of different readings are possible and have been articulated by critics, and that the novel is constructed in such a way as to make these multiple, mutually exclusive readings possible and even inevitable. The purpose of this paper is slightly different: to examine what the novel says about the ethical characteristics of art in general and compare this with the statements in the Preface. One interesting aspect of the novel with regard to this question is the fact that it features a novel that might well be described as ‘immoral’ as part of the plot. Modelled on A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans, the little yellow book, given to him by Lord Henry, has a corrupting effect on Dorian: “It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain…For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book” (Dorian Gray 146-7). The word ‘influence’ is critical here. Leaving aside the commonsense Victorian idea of what an immoral book is – one with a pernicious influence on the morals of the reader – the word is significant within the novel itself. Lord Henry explains why to Dorian early on in the novel:

All influence is immoral – immoral from the scientific point of view. […] to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed… The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for. (Dorian Gray 24-5)

The novel, then, contradicts the claim made in the Preface that there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book, and it does this very clearly and unambiguously by depicting a book that is immoral “from the scientific point of view” (exactly what that qualification means is, again, not relevant here). Wilde himself, in letters to his critics, described his own book as “poisonous” (cited in Gillespie 365), and so likened it to the little yellow book in Dorian Gray at the same time as defending it from accusations of immorality. It is difficult to see this as anything other than an act of pure mischief. Eric Pudney Page 9

Even if books, and artworks generally, can be ‘immoral’ in the sense that they have a poisonous influence it does not necessarily follow that they should be judged on this basis. Perhaps, as Wilde argued in letters to his critics (Beckson 67) and in the Preface, aesthetics and ethics are simply separate spheres and we should ignore the corrupting influence of a novel when judging its artistic merit. The trouble is that the novel does not support this reading either. Instead, beauty and goodness are inextricably linked throughout the story, as are ugliness and immorality or sin. This connection is not original to Wilde; as Crowell argues, the Victorians tended to equate morality with beauty and immorality with ugliness (617), and Wilde was no exception. Dorian relies on this connection in order to evade punishment for his sins:

Even those who had heard the most evil things against him -- and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs -- could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. (147-8)

Dorian is the exception that proves the rule: his picture becomes hideously ugly because of his sins, rather than Dorian himself, but this is only because of the Faustian pact he has made. His sins are still linked to ugliness, and his outward beauty is what makes people think he is good. Even Lord Henry, after years of friendship, is so fooled by appearances he tells Dorian late on in the novel that “[i]t is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder” (244). Basil also reinforces the connection between ugliness and sin, when telling Dorian about a commission that he turned down from a man on the grounds that “[t]here was something in the shape of his fingers that I hated. I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied about him.” (172) Physical beauty or ugliness, then, is in most circumstances a reliable guide to moral worth. This obviously undermines the idea that ethics and aesthetics can be separated. The Picture of Dorian Gray seems to insist on the link between beauty and goodness even more than other contemporary novels. In fact, although many novelists may have reinforced “[n]ineteenth century conventions of physiognomy [which] demanded that the human body display either virtue or corruption in its limbs and features” (Crowell 617), there were plenty of exceptions in Victorian fiction. Steerforth in David Copperfield, Mr Preston in Wives and Daughters, and the eponymous heroine of Lady Audley’s Secret are all physically attractive characters who are morally dubious or even evil. By contrast, in Dorian Gray, the connection between evil and ugliness is inescapably clear. This is not to say that the novel is, in fact, moral or moralistic in its outlook. Rather, it connects beauty and virtue in such a way as to subordinate the latter to the former: aesthetics Eric Pudney Page 10 are higher than ethics. Dorian suffers from occasional attacks of guilt, and at one point he confides in Lord Henry:

“I know what conscience is, to begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more -- at least not before me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.” “A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you on it.” (113)

Conscience, according to Dorian, is not based on sympathy for others or a particular code of behaviour. It is based on the sense of beauty, and is fundamentally self-regarding, in keeping with Wilde’s thoughts on individualism. Dorian does not feel ‘guilty’, in the normal sense – instead, he is concerned about the beauty of his own soul. One way to read the novel, then, is to regard it as a book about “how aesthetics can become ethics” (Allen 26). On this view, conscience is reduced – or perhaps raised – to a form of personal vanity. It might now seem safe to reach the conclusion that the novel puts forward an ethics based on a conception of the beautiful life, and there is a strong case for this, but there is also one problem. This view relies on accepting the perspectives of the three main characters, all of whom are deeply flawed in various ways. Even the supposedly brilliant Lord Henry ends the novel as a rather tame middle-aged divorcee whose wife has run off with another man (243). Despite the fact that Lord Henry’s aphorisms and Dorian’s experiments in self- development take up almost the entire novel, there is just enough space for a quick glimpse of an alternative viewpoint. It is expressed by Lady Monmouth, who seems not to serve any other purpose in the novel, but is described by her cousin Lord Henry as “very clever, too clever for a woman” (208). She tells Lord Henry that he “value[s] beauty far too much” (223), and this one sentence casts a shadow of doubt over everything.

Art and Money

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. (Dorian Gray 6)

These two maxims draw a clear distinction between art objects and useful objects, an idea which is not originally Wilde’s. This view of aesthetics can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, whose work Wilde had read (Roden 156; Brown 70). In the Critique of Judgement Kant wrote that “the liking involved in taste for the beautiful is disinterested and free…All interest either presupposes a need or gives rise to one; and, because interest is the basis that determines approval, it makes the judgement about the object unfree” (52). In other words, an interest in Eric Pudney Page 11 something corrupts the freedom and purity of aesthetic judgement by introducing compulsion. Wilde expanded on his position in a letter to a curious reader:

A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower...It is a misuse. (Selected Letters 96)

Here, the “misuse” of flowers is explicitly tied to economic transactions – to sell a flower is to ignore, and perhaps even to corrupt, its essence. This distinction, between economically useless but transcendent art on the one hand, and inartistic but useful commerce on the other, has become a familiar one in the humanities. From its Kantian roots, the idea has developed into what Barbara Herrnstein-Smith memorably dubbed “the double discourse of value”:

On the one hand there is the discourse of economic theory… on the other hand, there is the discourse of aesthetic axiology… In the first discourse, events are explained in terms of calculation, preferences, costs, benefits, profits, prices, and utility. In the second, events are explained…in terms of inspiration, discrimination, taste (good taste, bad taste, no taste), the test of time, intrinsic value, and transcendent value. (127)

This distinction is anticipated both in the Preface and in the novel. Lord Henry wants to buy the picture and asks Basil to name his price, but apparently more in hope than expectation: he does not seem in the least surprised or upset when Basil announces that he cannot sell the picture because it belongs to Dorian (33-34). Clearly, this does not fit in with normal ideas about property ownership, according to which Basil, as its creator, owns the painting. But all three men are happy to accept that, in some aesthetic or spiritual sense, the picture truly does belong to Dorian. And perhaps the most famous expression of the separation of artistic from economic value appears in the novel, when Lord Henry says that “Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing” (57).1 However, the novel again refuses to give the reader such a simple picture or conform to any consistent view of art. In the passage discussed above, although Basil refuses to sell the picture to Lord Henry, and although Lord Henry’s offer (“I will give you anything you like”) suggests that the value of art is beyond money, the painting is nonetheless described as “property”, and an offer to buy it is made. So the dividing line between art and money, even in this early passage, is not quite as clear as the Preface might suggest. Money is a recurring presence throughout the novel, and is often associated with objets d’art. The most extreme 1 Wilde repeated this phrase in the third act of Lady Windermere’s Fan, where he also complicated it with the reply: “CECIL GRAHAM. What is a cynic? [Sitting on the back of the sofa.] LORD DARLINGTON. A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. CECIL GRAHAM. And a sentimentalist, my dear Darlington, is a man who sees an absurd value in everything, and doesn't know the market price of any single thing.” Eric Pudney Page 12 example of this gleeful attitude to wealth is the heavily Huysmans-influenced Chapter 11, which describes in detail Dorian’s obsession with precious stones,

such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. (156)

These stones are beautiful things, but their beauty is partly dependent on their high monetary value. Shiny pebbles can also be nice to look at, but Dorian does not collect them. It is hard to reconcile this passage with the idea that art is entirely distinct from the grubby world of commerce, where value is equated with price. This is also hinted at in the descriptions of the Jewish manager of the theatre where Dorian meets Sybil. According to Dorian, this character “told me once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were entirely due to ‘The Bard,’ as he insisted on calling him. He seemed to think it a distinction.” (64) Lord Henry assures Dorian that the theatre manager is right. Apart from this explicit link between money and art made here, it is worth noting that Jewish people were popularly associated with money and commerce at the time, so this combination – Jew and devotee of the arts – is significant. All of the main characters are rich, and their lifestyles are described in sumptuous detail. Lord Henry does not have a mere clock: it is a “Louis Quatorze clock” (55). Basil Hallward’s studio is shaded by “long tussore-silk curtains” (7). Dorian, perhaps aping Lord Henry’s taste in furnishings, has a screen “of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a rather florid Louis Quatorze pattern,” (111) and when he steps into his “onyx-paved bathroom” he wears a “dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool” (109). All the objects that Wilde describes so lavishly are clearly beautiful objects, and the definition of an artwork (according to the Preface) is simply that it is beautiful. But so many of the art objects in the novel are, in fact, useful in a literal sense: they are functional objects. Dorian wears his dressing-gown; Lord Henry’s clock tells him what time it is; Basil’s curtains keep the light out and stop people looking in. In a lecture on Art and the Handicraftsman, Wilde claimed that “People often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing” (Essays and Lectures 64). This view is implicit in the descriptions of the beautiful possessions and surroundings of the rich, and the great emphasis placed on loving descriptions of furnishings. Of course, as well as being literally useful, these objects are also expensive and therefore economically useful. When Dorian reads his letters, he finds among them Eric Pudney Page 13

a rather heavy bill for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were several very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest. (109)

It makes sense to claim that a flower is not made to be sold – and perhaps also a painting, such as Dorian Gray’s portrait, which is given away. But can the same be said about a toilet- set, or a dressing-gown? These are clearly products made with the intention of being sold. But even if we were to accept that these objects are so beautiful that they in some way transcend their status as commercial products, the passage links art to money, and thus undermines the Preface’s view. Why keep mentioning money in connection to art, if it belongs to a separate sphere? “Unnecessary things” – that is, artworks – are described here as the “only necessities”. This paradox makes more sense when understood in the light of Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man. In it, Wilde argues that individuality is of overriding importance, and that self- development is the proper aim of life (Lord Henry offers a similar argument in favour of self- actualisation; see Dorian Gray 24-5). Self-development is only possible if the individual does not have to spend his or her time worrying about money, which is degrading. Wilde is critical of those altruists who try to help the poor, because ‘helping’ them only prolongs their misery. The poor are not worth bothering about because they have no hope of achieving the beautiful life that Dorian reaches for: individual greatness, not collective harmony, is what justifies human existence. From this point of view, it is too late for the poor; only the rich have any hope of achieving self-actualisation, because only the rich are free from the “vulgar details” of everyday reality. There is a clear distinction drawn between rich and poor characters in the novel. As Lord Henry puts it, “the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich” (92). Edouard Roditi complains of the novel that “From the brilliantly lit society with which the author seems so well acquainted, we step straight into a dim slum-land...whose denizens are all stock characters from almost ‘gothic’ melodrama” (51). This criticism seems justified, but perhaps it is not so much a failing as a dramatisation of the view that the poor are degraded by their poverty. This degradation – which here reduces them to simplistic, threatening caricatures like James Vane, makes them less real than the rich, because they are unable to develop their Eric Pudney Page 14 selves. (Of course, this creates yet another paradox in view of the association between ugliness/poverty and reality which I mentioned earlier.) In The Soul of Man Wilde seems to anticipate this kind of criticism when he comments that “[s]tarvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so uninteresting from any psychological point of view” (CW Vol. 4 245). From this point of view, and in the absence of the kind of socialism Wilde proposes as a solution, money becomes absolutely vital. It is a necessary condition for individual development, and the characters seem to be well aware of this. Lord Henry, despite his witticism about the difference between price and value, reveals this in conversation with his uncle:

“…I want to get something out of you.” “Money, I suppose,” said Lord Fermor, making a wry face. “Well, sit down and tell me all about it. Young people, nowadays, imagine that money is everything.” “Yes,” murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; “and when they grow older they know it.” (41)

As Dennis Denisoff argues, “[i]t was in Wilde’s time that the concepts of art and culture became inseparable from issues of consumption” (Roden 120). The novel shows great awareness of the emergence of a consumer society, and one feature of this is the continual smoking of cigarettes that the main characters engage in. Lord Henry tells Basil and Dorian that “[a] cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied” (93-4). What makes a cigarette “perfect”? It is precisely the fact that it is unsatisfactory; so the smoker needs to smoke more, and buys more cigarettes. The celebration of consumer capitalism sits uneasily alongside the insistence that art and the artistic life are wholly distinct from the economic world. The position of the novel, once again, turns out to be much more complex than the Preface suggests. Even if exquisite experience and the beauty of art do have a value that transcends the mundane world of commerce and economic exchange, it does not follow that this world can be ignored or escaped. Furthermore, such artistic treasures and beautiful experiences are only available to those who can afford them. The novel satirises romantic views of art even as it puts them forward.

Conclusion

The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray was written in order to defend the novel against the criticism the 1890 version had already received, and this is one reason to be sceptical Eric Pudney Page 15 about the extent to which it can be taken at face value. At the same time, it is clear that the Preface deals with ideas that constitute major themes within the novel. In some cases, the language of the Preface relates in a very direct and literal way to ideas presented in the novel, and here the novel often directly contradicts what the Preface has to say. For example, the idea that books cannot be immoral is contradicted by the ‘poisonous influence’ of the yellow book Lord Henry gives to Dorian, and the view of art argued for in the Preface is contradicted by Basil Hallward’s opinion – which is supported by the greatness of his picture. But the Preface is not just straightforwardly rejected by the novel. In the case of the relation of the artist to art, the novel both supports and contradicts the Preface’s view, and then complicates the question by blurring the distinction between art and life, concealment and revelation. With art and morality, the statement of the Preface appears to be supported by the importance attached to Dorian’s experiences and Lord Henry’s philosophy, only to be undermined very directly and literally by the presence of an immoral book in the novel itself, and the linking of beauty and moral goodness. In the case of the statement “all art is quite useless”, the novel seems to share a romantic view of art as something that transcends everyday monetary value while at the same time undermining and even mocking this view. It should not come as a surprise that paradox is a feature of the novel. Pithy, amusing paradoxical statements are a feature of all of Wilde’s writing, from the society plays to the essays, and Dorian Gray is no exception. But in the case of Dorian Gray at least, the paradoxes are not limited to dialogue: they are built into the plot and the imagery of the novel itself. What lies behind all this paradox? It is, of course, tempting to engage in biographical explanations for Wilde’s love of contradiction. His own double life as a gay man who was also married and a father of two is difficult to ignore. Other critics have pointed to his Anglo- Irish origins as a source of his “double nature” (Roden 249). But whatever truth there might be to these speculations, it is dangerous to attempt amateur psychoanalysis on a patient who died over 100 years ago, and whose mind we only have access to through writings which the writer himself declared to be unreliable. Another common tactic is to regard the novel, and Wilde’s other writings, as political or subversive. There is, no doubt, something to be said for this argument; according to Richard Ellmann, Wilde provided “an anatomy of his society, and a radical reconsideration of its ethics” (cited in Crowell 617). But this is only part of the point. The novel is more than just a simple satire; the commitment to paradox runs much deeper. Many critics have tried to find a coherent system of thought in Wilde’s writings (see for example Smith and Brown). This amounts to looking for something behind or beneath all Eric Pudney Page 16 those paradoxes. “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril” (6), warns the Preface (although we take the Preface at its word at our peril too). Paradox in Dorian Gray is not just being used to make a point; paradox is the point. Contradictory opinions are expressed simultaneously in Wilde’s work. The novel touches on a wide range of issues in ethics and aesthetics without coming to definite conclusions, and the Preface puts forward one version of the Aestheticist philosophy which the novel stops short of fully rejecting or embracing. The novel is (among other things) an intellectual game in which ideas are set out in opposition to each other, generating paradoxes and contradictions which are left unresolved: as the admittedly unreliable Preface says, “[n]o artist desires to prove anything” (5). This is one way to look at the novel. But, in the light of everything I have said in this paper, it might seem foolhardy to think that a definite conclusion can be reached. So I will end with a final paradox, from The Truth of Masks, which both supports and undermines my conclusion:

Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much with which I entirely disagree… For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. (CW Vol. 4 228) Eric Pudney Page 17

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