Summary: The Picture of Dorian Gray presents three intriguing characters, all of whom represent in different ways the relationship between art and life, contemplation and action, beauty and ethics. The worship of art and beauty may have its place, but it proves to be an inadequate guide through the troubled maze of real human experience.
The Picture of Dorian Gray presents three intriguing characters, all of whom represent in different ways the relationship between art and life, contemplation and action, beauty and ethics. But neither Lord Henry Wotton nor Basil Hallward nor Dorian Gray embodies the ideal to which each aspires, and they all fail catastrophically in one way or another. The Picture of Dorian Gray is not a novel for the optimist.
In his attempt, following Lord Henry's dictum, 'to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul,' Dorian succeeds only in satiating the one and corrupting the other.
Lord Henry is often pilloried by critics as a cynic who manipulates Dorian into doing the things that he advocates but is too withdrawn and too frightened to do himself. In this view, Henry is a tired man who wants to live vicariously through a younger, more beautiful specimen who has the ability (or so Lord Henry supposes) to experience life as Lord Henry believes it ought to be experienced.
No doubt all this is true. But Lord Henry certainly has his appeal, since he is the chief vehicle in the novel for Wilde's dazzling epigrammatic wit, and his aesthetic ideal needs to be taken seriously. What, then, does Lord Henry stand for? A clue to his governing aesthetic can be found in the opening scene of the novel, which takes place in Basil's studio. The door of the studio is open, and the rich sights, sounds, and smells of the adjoining garden, as the light summer wind blows, are vividly described. Henry is characteristically taking it easy by lying on the divan, but he is aware of all the sensory life going on around him--the heavy scent of the lilac, the almost unbearable beauty of the laburnum blossoms, the "sullen murmur" of the bees. Just as importantly, he is aware of the shadows cast on the curtains by the flight of birds, which reminds him of Japanese artists, who "through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion."
This passage suggests Lord Henry's ideal, which is to cultivate an intensity of experience whilst paradoxically remaining undisturbed and untroubled by it. This ideal is fully realized through the contemplation of art, which permits the observer the privilege of being at once involved and uninvolved in the experience. It is in this sense that art is superior to life, as Wilde so often claimed, and this is what Henry is driving at when he instructs the malleable mind of Dorian on how to react to the suicide of Sibyl. He must view it, says Lord Henry, from the perspective of art, as a scene from some Jacobean tragedy. What he means is that tragic drama has the power to evoke in the spectator a full and sympathetic response but one that does not engulf him or her in actual grief. Lord Henry is here a spokesman for the position Wilde staked out in his essay, "The Critic as Artist":
Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter.
In this view, art shields people from the harshness of actual existence. It is to be preferred to life because, as Wilde writes earlier in the same essay, life, unlike art, lacks form:
Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it.
Dorian is convinced by Henry's argument. Changing his way of responding to Sibyl's death, he recovers his equanimity (or so he thinks). Of course, Dorian's fatal mistake, according to Lord Henry's philosophy, is to get his emotions tied up with Sibyl in the first place, because that has inflicted a wound on the invisible level of life (the level of soul, or conscience, as reflected in the changing picture) that extracts a bitter price further down the road.
It is to avoid wounds such as these that Wilde argues, in "The Critic as Artist," for the superiority of contemplation over action, being (or more precisely, becoming) over doing. And this is why art, he says, can have nothing to do with ethics, since ethics applies only to the sphere of action. This is why Lord Henry appears to withdraw from life and seek perfection only in art.
And yet there is another side to Lord Henry's philosophy. In contrast to the inward impulse is the push outward, the desire for the sensory world. He advocates a life of passionate personal experience, to be enjoyed most fully in youth, while the senses are at their sharpest. He will have nothing of self-denial. As he tells Dorian, "Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us." Henry's "new Hedonism," in which novel sensations are sought in order to keep the flame of life from going out in the dullness of habit and routine, demands the courage to yield to temptation (another Wildean paradox). "Resist it," he explains to Dorian, "and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful."
To remain a spectator of life and at the same time to fulfill every desire of one's sensual nature is a paradox; it suggests the co-existence of opposite values. It is the art of feeling life without feeling it, the art of touching whilst remaining untouched. Paradoxes such as these lead often to the sphere of mysticism. Indeed, the book that Lord Henry gives Dorian, and which fascinates and influences him so deeply, sometimes seems to him like a work of mystical philosophy. But neither Wilde nor any of his characters were mystics. It is the concrete material form, shaped into beauty, which holds their attention. As Wilde put it, attributing the thought to Walter Pater, in "The Critic as Artist": "Who . . . would exchange the curve of a single rose-leaf for that formless intangible Being which Plato raises so high""
If in his personal life, as opposed to what he advises Dorian, Henry embraces the first rather than the second part of the paradox--detachment rather than involvement--his protg Dorian leans to the other side. Totally under Lord Henry's spell, this refined young man with high ideals adopts his mentor's words to the best of his ability. He tells Basil that he understands what Henry says about art and the "artistic temperament," and he quotes Henry approvingly that "To become the spectator of one's own life . . . is to escape the suffering of life." And even though Dorian has few original thoughts in his head, he still manages to think in lofty terms about the new Hedonism leading to the birth of a new spirituality, dominated by an instinct for beauty.
But Dorian does not succeed in living the paradox. More involved in the world than Lord Henry and giving full rein to his love of beauty and his quest for novel sensations, he allows himself to become a poisonous influence on those around him. He becomes indifferent to the effects of his actions, which not only destroy others (in ways never specified) but also leave him fatally marred, despite the illusion--for that, ultimately is what it is--generated by his unchanging youthful, beautiful appearance. Detached contemplation becomes callous disregard. In his attempt, following Lord Henry's dictum, "to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul," Dorian succeeds only in satiating the one and corrupting the other. In terms of the Art/Life dichotomy, he deserts the calm serenity of art in favor of the sordidness of life. This becomes crystal clear as Dorian takes the hansom cab to the opium den the day after he murders Basil:
Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.
The third main character in the novel, Basil Hallward, can also be analyzed in terms of this dichotomy between art and life, detachment and involvement. He confesses to Dorian in chapter 9 that when he first began to paint portraits of him, he managed to retain the proper artistic distance from his subject: "it had all been what art should be, unconscious, ideal, and remote." But then when he painted Dorian not in classical costume but as himself, his personal feelings entered into the painting; he revealed too much of himself in it. This is why he initially decides he cannot exhibit the painting.
When Basil allows himself to become infatuated with Dorian, he commits the same error (from Lord Henry's perspective, that is) that Dorian does with Sibyl Vane. He allows himself to be drawn out of the sphere of Art into that of Life, and no good results from it. As Dorian later reproaches him, "You met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks." Basil, then, must bear his share of responsibility for encouraging Dorian on the path that proves so destructive for him as well as others. However, Basil, unlike Lord Henry and Dorian, does not divorce his principles as an artist from his moral and ethical awareness. This is what makes him the most sensible, and perhaps also the least interesting, of the three main characters. His is the voice of conscience that speaks to Dorian when the younger man is intent on ignoring his own conscience. Basil is shocked by Dorian's callous demeanor after Sibyl Vane's death, and his moral concern about Dorian's dissolute life is what precipitates Basil's murder, since Dorian cannot bear to listen to Basil's insistence that Dorian should pray for repentance.
It is in this moment, through the agency of Basil, that a thematic framework quite different from the concerns of art and life, contemplation and action, beauty and ethics, enters the novel. This is the Christian scheme of sin, followed by repentance and the possibility of redemption. When Dorian finally does feel remorse and desires to change his life, he moves into a different sphere than Lord Henry, who refuses to take seriously anything Dorian says on that subject. Lord Henry, apparently ignorant of the course that Dorian's life has taken, believes him still to be as perfect as his handsome appearance suggests. This failure of Lord Henry to respond to the events of the real world is presented in extreme form when Dorian all but confesses to the murder of Basil; Lord Henry's response is prompted by his aesthetics, rather than any moral or practical concern. He says that Dorian does not have the vulgarity to commit a murder. This last glance at Lord Henry may be Wilde's way of demonstrating that Lord Henry's detachment involves him in illusions no less damaging than those which Dorian has for long entertained about his own life. The worship of art and beauty may have its place, but it proves to be an inadequate guide through the troubled maze of real human experience.
Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on The Picture of Dorian Gray, in Novels for Students, Vol. 20, Thomson Gale, 2005.
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