Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration]

PARALLEL.

Joe, the Fat Boy in Pickwick, startles the Old Lady; Oscar, the Fad Boy in Lippincott's, startles Mrs. Grundy:-- _Oscar, the Fad Boy_: "I want to make your flesh creep!"

_Reproduced by special permission of the proprietors of "Punch."_

PUNCH on "DORIAN GRAY."

By special permission of the Proprietors of _Punch_ the following review is reproduced from the issue of that journal dated July 19th, 1890.

OUR BOOKING OFFICE.

The Baron has read Oscar Wilde's wildest and Oscarest work, called "Dorian Gray," a weird sensational romance, complete in one number of _Lippincott's Magazine_. The Baron recommends any body who revels in _diablerie_, to begin it about half-past ten, and to finish it at one sitting up; but those who do not so revel he advises either not to read it at all, or to choose the daytime, and take it in h.o.m.oeopathic doses.

The portrait represents the soul of the beautiful Ganymede-like Dorian Gray, whose youth and beauty last to the end, while his soul, like John Brown's, "goes marching on," into the Wilderness of Sin. It becomes at last a devilled soul. And then Dorian sticks a knife into it, as any ordinary mortal might do, and a fork also, and next morning

"Lifeless but 'hideous,' he lay," while the portrait has recovered the perfect beauty which it possessed when it first left the artist's easel.

If Oscar intended an allegory, the finish is dreadfully wrong. Does he mean that, by sacrificing his earthly life, Dorian Gray atones for his infernal sins, and so purifies his soul by suicide? "Heavens! I am no preacher," says the Baron, "and perhaps Oscar didn't mean anything at all, except to give us a sensation, to show how like Bulwer Lytton's old-world style he could make his descriptions and his dialogue, and what an easy thing it is to frighten the respectable Mrs. Grundy with a Bogie." The style is decidedly Lyttonerary. His aphorisms are Wilde, yet forced. Mr. Oscar Wilde says of his story, "it is poisonous if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at."[27] Perhaps, but "we artists" do not always. .h.i.t what we aim at, and despite his confident claim to unerring marksmanship, one must hazard the opinion, that in this case Mr. Wilde has "shot wide."

There is indeed more of "poison" than of "perfection" in "Dorian Gray."

The central idea is an excellent, if not exactly a novel, one; and a finer art, say that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, would have made a striking and satisfying story of it. "Dorian Gray" is striking enough, in a sense, but it is not "satisfying" artistically, any more than it is so ethically. Mr. Wilde has preferred the senuous and hyperdecorative manner of "Mademoiselle de Maupin," and without Gautier's power, has spoilt a promising conception by clumsy unideal treatment.

His "decoration" (upon which he plumes himself) is indeed "laid on with a trowel." The luxuriously elaborate details of his "artistic hedonism,"

are too suggestive of South Kensington Museum and aesthetic Encyclopaedias. A truer art would have avoided both the glittering conceits, which bedeck the body of the story, and the unsavoury suggestiveness which lurks in its spirit.

Poisonous! Yes. But the loathly "leperous distilment" taints and spoils, without in any way subserving "perfection," artistic or otherwise. If Mrs. Grundy doesn't read it, the younger Grundies do; that is, the Grundies who belong to Clubs, and who care to shine in certain sets wherein this story will be much discussed. "I have read it, and, except for the ingenious idea, I wish to forget it," says the Baron.

[27] See letter to _Daily Chronicle_ page 61.

_The note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of "Dorian Gray."_

A REVULSION FROM REALISM.[28]

By ANNE H. WHARTON.

In all ages and climes mankind has found delight in romances based upon the mystic, the improbable and the impossible, from the days when the Norse poets sang their Sagas through long Northern nights, and the fair Scheherezade, under Southern moon, charmed her bloodthirsty lord by her tales of wonder, to our own day, when Stevenson and Crawford and Haggard hold fancy spellbound by their entirely improbable stories. Scott and Bulwer played with master hands upon the love of the mysterious and supernatural inherent in mankind; d.i.c.kens and others have essayed to gratify its demands, but with less daring, and, having an eye always on the moorings of the actual, their success has been less marked. With the elder Hawthorne such romance-writing seemed the natural growth of an exquisitely sensitive and spiritual nature, while among later French writers Theophile Gautier and Edmond About have entered into the domain of the impossible as into the natural heritage of their genius, sporting in its impalpable ether with the tuneful _abandon_ of a fish in the sea, or a bird in the air, hampered by no bond of the actual, weighted by no enc.u.mbrance of the material.

It is not strange that the great influx of realistic novels that has flowed in upon the last decade should be followed by a revulsion to the impossible in fiction. Men and women, wearied with meeting the same characters and events in so-called romance that they encounter in every-day life, or saddened by the depressing, if dramatic, pictures of Tolstoi and the cool vivisection of humanity presented by Ibsen, turn with a sense of rest and refreshment to the guidance of those who, like Robert Louis Stevenson and Rider Haggard, lead them suddenly into the mystic land of wonder, or, like Marion Crawford and Mrs. Oliphant, delight to draw them, by gentle and easy stages, from the midst of a well-appointed setting of every-day life into the shadowy borderland that lies between the real and the unreal. Much of the success of such romance writing rests upon the rebound, natural to humanity, from intense realism to extreme ideality; more, perhaps, upon the fact that this age which is grossly material is also deeply spiritual. With these two facts well in view, Mr. Oscar Wilde has fallen into line, and entered the lists with some of the most successful masters of fiction.

In his novel "The Picture of Dorian Gray," written for the July _Lippincott's_, Mr. Wilde, like Balzac and the authors of "Faust" and "John Inglesant," presents to us the drama of a human soul, while, like Gautier and About, he surrounds his utterly impossible story with a richness and depth of colouring and a grace and airiness of expression that make the perusal of its pages an artistic delight.

If Mr. Wilde's romance resembles the productions of some of the writers of the French school in its reality and tone, it still more strongly resembles Mr. Stevenson's most powerfully wrought fairy tale, "Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," although the moral of the story is brought out even more plainly--as plainly, indeed, as in the drama of "Faust." In both Mr. Stevenson's and Mr. Wilde's stories there is a transformation or subst.i.tution. In one the soul of Dr. Jekyll appears under different exteriors; in the other some fine influence pa.s.ses from the soul of Dorian Gray into his portrait and there works a gradual and subtle change upon the pictured lineaments. Although. Mr. Wilde's extravaganza is far less dramatic than that of Mr. Stevenson, it has the advantage of richer colouring and a more human setting, if we may so express it. The characters in "The Picture of Dorian Gray," enjoy life more than Mr.

Stevenson's creations, who seem to have had so dull a time of it at the best that they might have been expected to welcome a tragedy, as a relief to the tedium of their daily lives. Mr. Utterson, we are told, was good but he was evidently not particularly happy,[29] which was the case with the other personages of the drama, with the exception of those who were signally wretched. On the other hand, Mr. Wilde's characters are happy during their little day. Their world is a luxurious, perfumed land of delight, until sin transforms it, and, even after Lord Henry has corrupted the nature of Dorian Gray with evil books and worldly philosophy, he occasionally drinks of the waters of Lethe and enjoys some fragments of what may be called happiness, while Lord Henry himself seems to derive a certain satisfaction from the practice of his Mephistophelian art and in his entire freedom from the restraints of conscience. In a tale of the impossible it is not required that the writer should be true to life, animate or inanimate, yet in the fact that there are glimpses of light through the clouds that surround his _dramatis personae_, that they inhabit a world in which the laburnum hangs out yellow cl.u.s.ters in June, and the clematis robes itself with purple stars, and the sun sheds gold and the moon silver, despite the tragedy that touches the lives of its inhabitants, is not Mr. Wilde quite as true to nature as to art?

The reader may reasonably question the author's good taste in displaying at such length his knowledge of antique decoration and old-world crime as in Chapter IX,[30] which, besides being somewhat tiresome, clogs the dramatic movement of the story. Yet, on the other hand, it must be admitted that none but an artist and an apostle of the beautiful could have so sympathetically portrayed the glowing hues and perfumes of the garden in which Dorian Gray had first presented to his lips the cup of life, and none other could have so pictured the luxurious surroundings of his home, for whose embellishment the known world had been searched for hangings, ornaments and _bric-a-brac_. Amid such an _entourage_ of modern London life, with its Sybaritic indulgence, its keenness of wit and its subtle intelligence, Mr. Wilde places his characters and works out his miracle.

Viewing his own portrait, just completed by an artist friend, Dorian Gray turns from it filled with envy and dissatisfaction, because it has been whispered in his ear that youth is the supreme possession in life, and that when youth and beauty have fled from his face and form this pictured presentment will live for ever, a perpetual mockery of himself, whom withering age has overtaken. Under the influence of his evil genius, Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian Gray utters a prayer that he may always remain young, and the portrait alone reveal the ravages of time, sin and sorrow. The realization of this idea is the theory of Mr.

Wilde's romance, and the air of probability with which he has endowed the absolutely impossible evidences the artistic and dramatic power of the writer. The portrait of Dorian Gray, painted in days of innocence and loveliness, when his mere presence symbolized to the artist the entire harmony between beauty of body and beauty of soul, changes day by day with the degradation of his nature, while the living Dorian Gray, after years of sin, remorseless cruelty and corruption of thought and action, preserves all the grace and fairness of his Antinous-like youth.

Love in this romance is an incident, not its crowning event, although an important incident as a revelation of the character of Dorian Gray. The reader never meets Sybil Vane; he merely sees her on the stage and hears of her from the lips of her lover; yet even thus she appeals to us as an exquisite personation of maidenhood with all its purity and all its tenderness. As shadowy an outline as the fair child whom Bulwer allows to captivate the imagination of Kenelm Chillingly, who caught b.u.t.terflies, talked philosophy and died young, yet who in her brief transit across his path realized to his poetic soul all the best possibilities of life, spiritual and material, Sibyl Vane comes to us girt about with ideal charm, to fulfil her widely different mission, which was to reveal to Dorian Gray the sad fact that his soul had pa.s.sed beyond her sweet and enn.o.bling influence. His artistic and intellectual senses were touched by her beauty and dramatic power, but to the beauty that made her worthy to be loved, his eyes were blind, his heart was insensible. The tragedy of the story, the climax of the situation, is not the death of Sybil Vane, nor even the pitiless murder of the friend who dared to give Dorian Gray good counsel, but the disclosure that Dorian's soul, once open to all good influences, had, by yielding to the malign domination of his evil genius, pa.s.sed beyond the reach of love, pity or remorse.

It is needless to say that Dorian Gray is not a very substantial character. The most entertaining, though not the most exemplary, personage of the story is Lord Henry Wotton, who by his preaching and practice of the doctrine of hedonism leads Dorian Gray into all known and unknown evil, until finally his darkling shadow outreaches in depravity the imagination of his tempter. When his victim has sunk so low in sin that the world shuns him, Lord Henry still enjoys his gay, conscienceless existence, and continues to utter the persiflage that const.i.tutes much of the attraction of the book as well of his society.

Debonair, witty, learned, giving expression to aphorisms as keen as the sayings of Thackeray's characters, with the moral element eliminated, and as cynical as those of Norris, with exquisite taste and the fascination of a finished man of the world, Lord Henry belongs as truly, on the material side of his nature, to the life of to-day, as he appertains on its spiritual side to the region of Pluto. A gay child of the great London social world, he hovers airily around and about the emotions of life, declaring that death is the only thing that ever terrifies him, and that death and vulgarity are the only facts in the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. The climax of Lord Henry's sardonic worldliness is reached when he becomes the spectator of his own domesticity, if he may be said to have any, and speaks to Dorian of his divorce from his wife as one of the latest sensations of London, remarking _apropos_ of his music, "The man with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely. Poor Victoria! I was very fond of her. The house is rather lonely without her."

Lord Henry is so entirely true to himself and the worst that is in him that towards the close of the book, when Dorian announces that he is "going to be good," and begs his friend not to poison another young life with the book with which he had corrupted his, we find ourselves trembling for Dorian's one remaining ally, especially when he exclaims, "My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will soon be going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use.

You and I are what we are, and we will be what we will be." Had not the hero stabbed himself, or his picture (which was it?) it is only a question of time how soon Dorian Gray, with the slightest obtrusion of conscience, would have ceased to charm him who had welcomed him as a _debutant_ on the Stage of Pleasure, where, to use his favourite saying, "the only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it." Dorian Gray struggling against the temptations of the world would have proved an inartistic and disturbing element in the life of Lord Henry.

All that is needed to complete the tale is Lord Henry's own comment on the highly dramatic taking-off of his friend. This chapter, Mr. Wilde, true to his artistic instinct, has not finished, preferring to leave appet.i.te unappeased, rather than to create satiety by making his Mephistopheles say precisely what one would expect him to say under the circ.u.mstances.

[28] _Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, September, 1890._

[29] "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy."--DORIAN GRAY, chap. vi. (Ed.)

[30] Chapter XI. in the 1891 edition.

THE ROMANCE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE.

By JULIAN HAWTHORNE.[31]

Fiction which flies at all game, has latterly taken to the Impossible as its quarry. The pursuit is interesting and edifying, if one goes properly equipped, and with adequate skill. But if due care is not exercised, the impossible turns upon the hunter and grinds him to powder. It is a very dangerous and treacherous kind of wild-fowl. The conditions of its existence--if existence can be predicated on that which does not exist--are so peculiar and abstruse that only genius is really capable of taming it and leading it captive. But the capture, when it is made, is so delightful and fascinating that every tyro would like to try. One is reminded of the princess of the fairy-tale, who was to be won on certain preposterous terms, and if the terms were not met, the discomfited suitor lost his head. Many misguided or over-weening youths perished; at last the One succeeded. Failure in a romance of the Impossible is apt to be a disastrous failure; on the other hand, success carries great rewards.

Of course, the idea is not a new one. The writings of the alchemists are stories of the Impossible. The fashion has never been entirely extinct.

Balzac wrote the "Peau de Chagrin," and probably this tale is as good a one as was ever written of that kind. The possessor of the Skin may have every thing he wishes for; but each wish causes the Skin to shrink, and when it is all gone the wisher is annihilated with it. By the art of the writer this impossible thing is made to appear quite feasible; by touching the chords of coincidence and fatality, the reader's common-sense is soothed to sleep. We feel that all this might be, and yet no natural law be violated; and yet we know that such a thing never was and never will be. But the vitality of the story, as of all good stories of the sort, is due to the fact that it is the symbol of a spiritual verity: the life of indulgence, the selfish life, destroys the soul. This psychic truth is so deeply felt that its sensible embodiment is rendered plausible. In the case of another famous romance--"Frankenstein"--the technical art is entirely wanting: a worse story from the literary point of view has seldom been written. But the soul of it, so to speak, is so potent and obvious that, although no one actually reads the book nowadays, everybody knows the gist of the idea.

"Frankenstein" has entered into the language, for it utters a perpetual truth of human nature.

At the present moment the most conspicuous success in the line we are considering is Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The author's literary skill, in that awful little parable, is at its best, and makes the most of every point. To my thinking, it is an artistic mistake to describe Hyde's transformation as actually taking place in plain sight of the audience; the sense of spiritual mystery is thereby lost, and a mere brute miracle takes its place. But the tale is strong enough to carry this imperfection, and the moral significance of it is so catholic--it so comes home to every soul that considers it--that it has already made an ineffaceable impression on the public mind. Every man is his own Jekyll and Hyde, only without the magic powder. On the bookshelf of the Impossible, Mr. Stevenson's book may take its place beside Balzac's.

Mr. Oscar Wilde, the apostle of beauty, has in the July number of _Lippincott's Magazine_, a novel, or romance (it partakes of the qualities of both), which everybody will want to read. It is a story strange in conception, strong in interest, and fitted with a tragic and ghastly climax. Like many stories of its cla.s.s, it is open to more than one interpretation; and there are, doubtless, critics who will deny that it has any meaning at all. It is, at all events, a salutary departure from the ordinary English novel, with the hero and heroine of different social stations, the predatory black sheep, the curate, the settlements and Society. Mr. Wilde, as we all know, is a gentleman of an original and audacious turn of mind, and the commonplace is scarcely possible to him. Besides, his advocacy of novel ideas in life, art, dress and demeanour had led us to expect surprising things from him; and in this literary age it is agreed that a man may best show the best there is in him by writing a book. Those who read Mr. Wilde's story in the hope of finding in it some compact and final statement of his theories of life and manners will be satisfied in some respects, and dissatisfied in others; but not many will deny that the book is a remarkable one and would attract attention even had it appeared without the author's name on the t.i.tle-page.

"The Picture of Dorian Gray," begins to show its quality in the opening pages. Mr. Wilde's writing has what is called "colour," the quality that forms the mainstay of many of Ouida's works,--and it appears in the sensuous descriptions of nature and of the decorations and environments of the artistic life. The general aspect of the characters and the tenor of their conversation remind one a little of "Vivian Gray" and a little of "Pelham," but the resemblance does not go far: Mr. Wilde's objects and philosophy are different from those of either Disraeli or Bulwer.

Meanwhile his talent for aphorisms and epigrams may fairly be compared with theirs: some of his clever sayings are more than clever,--they show real insight and a comprehensive grasp. Their wit is generally cynical; but they are put into the mouth of one of the characters, Lord Harry, and Mr. Wilde himself refrains from definitely committing himself to them; though one can not help suspecting that Mr. Wilde regards Lord Harry as being an uncommonly able fellow. Be that as it may, Lord Harry plays the part of Old Harry in the story, and lives to witness the destruction of every other person in it. He may be taken as an imaginative type of all that is most evil and most refined in modern civilization,--a charming, gentle, witty, euphemistic Mephistopheles, who deprecates the vulgarity of goodness, and muses aloud about "those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, and those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin." Upon the whole, Lord Harry is the most ably portrayed character in the book, though not the most original in conception. Dorian Gray himself is as nearly a new idea in fiction as one has now-a-days a right to expect. If he had been adequately realized and worked out, Mr. Wilde's first novel would have been remembered after more meritorious ones were forgotten. But, even as "nemo repente fuit turp.i.s.simus," so no one, or hardly any one, creates a thoroughly original figure at a first essay. Dorian never quite solidifies. In fact, his portrait is rather the more real thing of the two. But this needs explanation.