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SEMINAR 1. Aestheticism and its best representation in Oscar Wilde’s work.

1. The Pre-Raphaelite school.
2. Decadence as a transition between Romanticism and Modernism: the Aesthetic movement.
3. Oscar Wilde as a poet, novelist, short-story writer, playwright and literary theorist.

1. THE PRE-RAPHAELITE SCHOOL

The first traces of decadent movement in England are connected with the activity of the
Pre-Raphaelite school. It was founded in London in 1848 and claimed against the Victorian
conventions and classical realistic samples.
The Pre-Raphaelite school also united several features which had not been seen before in
combination. These were a fondness for medieval themes treated in an unconventional
manner, a richly coloured pictorial effect, and a studied and melodious simplicity. The Pre-
Raphaelite Brotherhood picked non-canonical, often “eroticized” medieval or literary themes
for their pictures thus shocking the public used to academic painting.
The name “Pre-Raphaelite” was chosen to emphasise spiritual unity with Florentic artists
of early Renaissance, those who created their art before the epoch of Rafael and
Michelangelo. The Pre-Raphaelite strove to resurrect spirituality, moral purity, rejecting
industrial society and culture. They turned to Biblical plots, classical poetry and the works of
Dante and Shakespeare.
The works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina Georgina Rossetti,
William Morris and Algernon Charles Swinburne provide many examples of this
development in poetry.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882)

LIFE. D.G. Rossetti was born in London, the son of an Italian refugee who was professor of Italian
at King’s College, where Rossetti received his early education. He began to compose poetry by the
time he was six, and later studied drawing at the Royal Academy School (1846). Toward the close of
his life he became a chloral addict, and, though he eventually broke himself of the habit, its effect
upon his health was such that in 1872 his sanity was in question. He died near Margate.
Shortly after this (1848) he met Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, and the painter
Millais, with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Ruskin, Swinburne, and
William Morris were among his later friends, and Ruskin was of considerable financial
assistance to him. The eldest of the Pre-Raphaelite school of artists and poets, Rossetti was
himself both painter and poet.
His poetical works are small in bulk, consisting of two slight volumes, Poems (1870) and
Ballads and Sonnets (1881). Of the high quality of these poems there can be little question.
For he had real genius, and in The Blessed Damozel his gifts are fully displayed: a gift for
description of almost uncanny splendour, a brooding and passionate introspection, often of a
religious nature, and a melodious verbal beauty. In his ballads, like Rose Mary and Troy
Town, the same powers are apparent, though in a lesser degree; these have in addition a
power of narrative.
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CHRISTINA GEORGINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894) was a younger sister of the
poet last named, and survived him by some years. Her life was uneventful, like her brother’s, and
was passed chiefly in London.
Her bent was almost entirely lyrical, and was shown in Goblin Market and Other Poems
(1864), The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), A Pageant and Other Poems
(1881), and Verses (1893). Another volume, called New Poems (1896), was published after
her death.
Her poetry, perhaps less impressive than that of her brother in its descriptive passages,
has a purer lyrical note of deep and sustained passion, with a some-what larger command of
humour. The mainspring of her inspiration was religion. On religious themes she writes with
a transparent simplicity of tone and language and a great variety of metrical and melodic
effects.

WILLIAM MORRIS (1834-1896)

LIFE. He was born near London, the son of a wealthy merchant, and was educated at Marlborough
and Oxford. His wealth, freeing him from the drudgery of a profession, permitted him to take a lively
and practical interest in the questions of his day. Upon art, education, politics, and social problems his
great energy and powerful mind led him to take very decided views, sometimes of an original nature.

William Morris produced a great amount of poetry, and was one of the most conspicuous
figures in mid-Victorian literature.
The bulk of Morris’s poetry was written during the first forty-five years of his life.
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858) shows his love of beauty of colour,
sound, and scenery, and his passion for the medieval.
The Life and Death of Jason (1867), a heroic poem on a familiar theme, is told in
smooth, easy couplets, and has the melancholy tone so common in Morris.
The Earthly Paradise (1868-70) is a collection of tales, some classical, some medieval.
In language and the predominance of the couplet they show the influence of Chaucer, though
the languid harmony of Morris contrasts strongly with the racy vitality of his model.
His finest long narrative poem, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the
Niblungs (1877), is based on the Norse sagas, and has great vigour of language and rhythm,
combined with fine descriptive passages.
His verse collection Poems by the Way (1891) contains some good miscellaneous pieces.

Like Rossetti, he had the artist’s passion for beauty, which finds its best expression in his
fine English landscapes and the rich, tapestried descriptions of his narrative poems. In style he
was smoothly melodious, often to the point of monotony, and the dominant mood of his work
is a dreamy melancholy.

The literary production of the second part of Morris’s life consisted mainly of prose
romances, lectures, and articles.
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The best of his lectures are to be found in Hopes and Fears for Art (1882) and Signs
of Change (1888), and his socialist political hopes for the regeneration of English life find
their fullest expression in A Dream of John Ball (1888) and his novel News from Nowhere
(1891).
These same aspirations are always felt in the prose romances to which he devoted the
last years of his life. Among them are A Tale of the House of the Wolfings (1889), The Roots
of the Mountains (1890), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891), and The Sundering
Flood (1898).
Morris’s work reflects several strong influences: the interest in the medieval which drew
him into the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood; his reverence for Chaucer; his love of Icelandic
saga, which combined with Chaucer to give his style an archaic flavour; and his socialist
idealism.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE (1837-1909)

LIFE. Swinburne had a long life, and his poetical work was in proportion to it. Born in London,
of aristocratic lineage, he was educated at Eton and Oxford. He left Oxford (1860) without taking
a degree, and for the rest of his life wrote voluminously. He was a man of quick attachments and
violent antagonisms, and these features of his character did much to vitiate some of his prose
criticisms. A life of dissipation impaired his health, and in his later years, from 1879 onward, he
lived in the care of his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton at Putney Hill, where he died.
Atalanta in Calydon (1865), an attempt at an English version of an ancient Greek
tragedy, was his first considerable effort in poetic form, and it attracted notice at once. At a
bound the young poet had attained to a style of his own: tuneful and impetuous movement, a
cunning metrical craftsmanship, and a mastery of melodious diction.
Poems and Ballads (1866) is a second extraordinary book. In it the Swinburnian features
already mentioned are revealed in a stronger fashion. Some of his shorter poems were
reproduced in two further series of Poems and Ballads in 1878 and 1889.
Only a few of his later poetical works can be mentioned here. These are: a collection of
poems chiefly in praise of Italian liberty Songs before Sunrise (1871); a less successful effort
at Greek tragedy Erechtheus (1876); and a collection Tristram and Other Poems (1882), a
narrative of much passion and force, composed in the heroic couplet.
Swinburne wrote a large number of plays. The most noteworthy are: The Queen Mother
and Rosamond (1860); three plays on the subject of Mary Queen of Scots, called Chastelard
(1865), Bothwell (1874), and Mary Stuart (1881); Locrine (1887); The Sisters (1892).
The gifts of Swinburne are lyrical rather than dramatic.
His blank verse is strongly phrased.
Throughout his life Swinburne produced a steady stream of critical works, which range
over a wide field of literature. He is probably most successful in his studies of the Elizabethan
or Jacobean dramatists or the English lyric poets. Among his most famous books are William
Blake (1868), A Study of Shakespeare (1880), and A Study of Ben Johnson (1889).
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2. DECADENCE: THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT.

The Pre-Raphaelites, led by Swinburne and William Morris, proclaimed no morality but
that of the artist’s regard for his art. This idea as well as the work of the Pre-Raphaelites had a
great impact on symbolism in literature, in particular on Pater and Wilde, and was developed
by Aestheticism.

The Aesthetic Movement encompassed the visual arts, the decorative arts, and literature.
The Aesthetic Movement sought an art that exists for beauty alone. Thus it cultivated the
idea – “art for art’s sake”, treating art as a self-sufficient entity, a closed system of symbols.
Swinburne himself would develop this appeal in his pioneering study of William Blake,
published in 1867, which introduced “art for art’s sake” into English. Blake “had a faith of his
own, made out of art for art’s sake”, and his obscurity was further evidence for Swinburne that
“the sacramental elements of art and poetry are in no wise given for the sustenance or salvation
of men in general, but reserved mainly for the sublime profit and intense pleasure of an elect
body or church” (Swinburne).
In the literature of art for art’s sake – and, more broadly, the cultural movement that
would become known as “aestheticism” – the defense of morally provocative subject matter
was frequently couched in this rhetoric of arcane significance, as an appeal to an elite
audience able to grasp depths of meaning unavailable to a larger public.

WALTER PATER (1839–1894)

The most influential celebration of aesthetic devotion would come from Walter Pater.
In 1868 Pater reviewed for the Westminster two recent volumes of poetry by W. Morris
and found occasion for what became the most famous aestheticist manifesto in English. Yet
the poem, Pater argues, is faithful to medieval worship, not only the baffled longing of courtly
love but also “the whole religion of the middle age”, which in Pater’s subversive phrasing
becomes “but a beautiful disease or disorder of the senses”. “A passion of which the outlets
are sealed, begets a tension of nerve, in which the sensible world comes to one with a
reinforced brilliance and relief – all redness is turned into blood, all water into tears. Hence
a wild, convulsed sensuousness in the poetry of the middle age”. With subtle audacity, Pater
thus aligns the world of Morris and Swinburne with that of the troubadours.
Being literary critic, art theorist and historian, Pater considered that the immediate
personal emotion evoked by each moment of existence is the most important thing in arts,
while the feeling of beauty is the brightest emotion.
In his cult books Studies in the History of the Renaissance and Renaissance. Essays on
Art and Poetry (1873) Pater wrote: „Мистецтво не дає нам нічого крім усвідомлення
кожної миті життя, що збігає, і збереження їх усіх”.
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JOHN RUSKIN (1819-1900)
Among those who championed the Pre-Raphaelite school of art and used his powerful
influence to free art from its conventional fetters one should mention the name of John
Ruskin. His strength lies in his love of the beautiful in nature, stated for the first time in his
book Modern Painters. Ruskin’s next works The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and
The Stones of Venice (1851-53) expound his views on artistic matters.
Ruskin’s theory of art stated that art justifies its own existence through beauty; beauty is
an end in itself and the ultimate goal of great art. Ruskin linked all the existing beauty to God
and the Good, that is why art for him has a didactic value. Among his other ideas was the
theory that Nature, being of higher order and external to Man, can only be interpreted by an
artist. Thus the artist as viewed by Ruskin is a prophet, “using one’s imagination to interpret
nature for the viewer”.
At the same time Ruskin was a great ethical teacher; but he aimed at more definite
results in the reformation of art and of social life. He moralized art and humanized political
economy to mention his series of articles Unto this Last (1860). Prceterita, a kind of
autobiography, was begun in 1885.
LIFE. Ruskin was born in London, of Scottish parentage, and was educated privately before he went to
Oxford. During his boyhood he often travelled with his father, whose business activities involved
journeys both in England and abroad. After leaving the university Ruskin, who did not need to earn a
living, settled down to a literary career. In art he was in particular devoted to the cause of the landscape-
painter Turner, and in social and economic theories he was an advocate of an advanced form of
socialism. Gradually his fame spread as he freely expounded his opinions in lectures and pamphlets, as
well as in his longer books. In 1869 he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. Illness,
however, which was caused by hard work and mental worries, led him to resign in 1879.
John Ruskin. From Modern Painters (1875)
What are the legitimate uses of the imagination, that is to say, of the power of perceiving, or conceiving with the mind,
things which cannot be perceived by the senses? Its first and noblest use is, to enable us to bring sensibly to our sight the things
which are recorded as belonging to our future state, or invisibly surrounding us in this. It is given us, that we may imagine the
cloud of witnesses, in heaven, and earth, and sea, as if they were now present; the souls of the righteous waiting for us; that we
may conceive the great army of the inhabitants of heaven, and discover among them those whom we most desire to be with for
ever; that we may be able to vision forth the ministry of angels beside us, and see the chariots of fire on the mountains that gird
us round; but, above all, to call up the scenes and facts in which we are commanded to believe, and be present, as if in the
body, at every recorded event of the history of the Redeemer. Its second and ordinary use is, to empower us to traverse the
scenes of all other history, and force the facts to become again visible, so as to make upon us the same impression which they
would have made if we had witnessed them; and, in the minor necessities of life, to enable us, out of any present good, to
gather the utmost measure of enjoyment, by investing it with happy associations, and, in any present evil, to lighten it, by
summoning back the images of other hours; and also to give to all mental truths some visible type, in allegory, simile, or
personification, which shall most deeply enforce them; and finally, when the mind is utterly out wearied, to refresh it with such
innocent play as shall be most in harmony with the suggestive voices of natural things, permitting it to possess living
companionship, instead of silent beauty, and create for itself fairies in the grass, and naiads in the wave…
…Imagination is a pilgrim on the earth and her home is in heaven...
…Although in all lovely nature there is, first an excellent degree of simple beauty, addressed to the eye alone, yet often
what impresses us most will form but a very small portion of that visible beauty. That beauty may, for instance, be composed
of lovely flowers, and glittering streams, and blue sky and white clouds; and yet the thing that impresses us most, and which
we should be sorriest to lose, may be a thin grey film on the extreme horizon, not so large, in the space of the scene it occupies,
as a piece of gossamer on a near-at-hand bush, nor in any wise prettier to the eye than the gossamer; but because the gossamer
is known by us for a little bit of spider’s work, and the other grey film is known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet high,
inhabited by a race of noble mountaineers, we are solemnly impressed by the aspect of it, and yet all the while the thoughts and
knowledge which cause us to receive this impression are so obscure that we are not conscious of them.
Examine the nature of your own emotion, (if you feel it,) at the sight of the Alps; and you find all the brightness of that
emotion hanging, like dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and imperfect knowledge.
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3. OSCAR WILDE (1856-1900)

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde’s writing talent is a manifestation of a genius mind of
a brilliant London dandy with an aristocratic Irish origin, a mixture of “sincerity in content
and satire in form” that is deeply rooted in the aesthetic movement of the time.
Wilde’s remark that he had put his genius into his life and only his talent into his art has
provided support to those who regard his life as the primary object of interest.

LIFE. Oscar Wilde, the son of a famous Irish surgeon, was born in Dublin. In his youth he showed
brilliant promise, though his genius was perverse and wayward. He was Queen’s Scholar of Trinity
College, Dublin, and Berkeley Gold Medallist for Greek studies. In 1874 he became a scholar of
Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became an apostle of the aesthetic cult of Pater. He took a First-
class in Classical Moderations and Litterae Humaniores, and his poem Ravenna won the Newdigate Prize
in 1878. From Oxford he went to London where he was the centre of an artificial, decadent society,
famous for his wit and brilliant conversation. He made an American tour in 1882 and was well received.
After that he rose quickly to literary fame, but, when at the height of his powers, he was sentenced at the
Old Bailey to two years’ imprisonment (1895). At the age of forty-four he died in Paris.

At Oxford, Wilde studied under the two great art critics of the Victorian age, Walter
Pater and John Ruskin. Pater’s injunction “to know one’s impression as it really is”
underlies Aestheticism’s guiding principle: the sole function of art is to inspire an emotion
or create a mood.
Pater’s influence on Wilde’s art criticism is strong; “All art is quite useless”, Wilde
asserts in the Preface to Dorian Gray. Besides, in The Decay of Lying: An Observation he
wrote: “Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and
develops purely on its own lines. It is not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age
of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct opposition to it, and the only
history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress. Sometimes it returns upon its footsteps,
and revives some antique form, as happened in the pre-Raphaelite movement of our own day. At other
times it entirely anticipates its age, and produces in one century work that it takes another century to
understand, to appreciate and to enjoy. To pass from the art of a time to the time itself is the great
mistake that all historians commit”.

His view of the Decadence and fin de siècle tendencies that marked the downfall of
English bourgeoisie Wilde lay out in his numerous essays – The Critic As Artist, The Soul of
Man Under Socialism, The Decay of Lying, The English Renaissance of Art etc. A lot of them
initially were lectures that Wilde delivered during his 1882 American tour.
In the essay The Decay of Lying (1889) Wilde makes four statements crucial to
understanding his “new aesthetics”:
1. Art never expresses anything but itself.
2. All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.
3. Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life.
4. Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.
These four statements spring from the opposition to the belief that art should be useful, that
was strongly held in the 18th and 19th centuries.
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In his own work Wilde often used fantasy, symbolism and allegory, and the beauty
and to an extent decorative aspect of the form for him was of no less importance than the
depth of content.

Years 1888-1895 were the pinnacle of Wilde’s creativity. During this period, he tried his
pen in different genres. Oscar Wilde was a poet, short-story writer, novelist, playwright
and great wit. He tried to write the work that should be beautiful in its colour and cadence.
His writing is highly wrought.
In poetry, prose, and drama, Wilde embodies the spirit of the decadent school of the
1890-ies. His literary descent from Pater and the Pre-Raphaelites is clearly seen in his early
poetry. It is far removed in subject from the realities of ordinary life; it lacks emotional depth
and is artistic and ornately decorative in style. But his earlier works, Poems (1881) and
The Sphinx (1894), are overshadowed by the simpler and more powerful The Ballad of
Reading Gaol (1898), intoned with the suffering he experienced during his imprisonment.

Wilde’s prose has the qualities of his early verse. His stories and one novel are typical
products of the aestheticism of his group – ingenious, witty, polished, and ornamental in style.
Their main appeal is intellectual.
Wilde revived the literary tale in his two books The Happy Prince and Other Tales
(1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891). Due to their symbolism and simple language
Wilde’s tales are universal, despite their often pessimistic endings.
Apart from Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1887); The Canterville Ghost (1887); two
books of tales; and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde also wrote De
Profundis (1897). This long introspective work, written while he was in prison, was
published in part in 1905, but the whole was not published until 1949.

As a dramatist Wilde began with two serious pieces of little worth, Vera, or the Nihilists
(printed 1880) and The Duchess of Padua (printed 1883), and they were followed by Salome
(1892), which was used by Richard Strauss as the libretto for his opera of that name.
Then came the four comedies on which his reputation rests: Lady Windermere’s Fan
(1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and, best of them all,
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). They are comedies of manners in the Sheridan
tradition, aristocratic in tone and outlook, and with all the conscious artistic grace and
refinement of his other work. He paints a picture of the elegance and ease of the upper classes
of his day, but, unlike some of his contemporaries, he has no interest in its moral implications.
Again his appeal is largely intellectual; his characters are mere caricatures, often so alike as to
be difficult to distinguish, and they have little human warmth.
The continued popularity of his plays depends on the dialogue, with its hard glitter, its
polish and scintillating wit. His cynicism finds an outlet in the profusion of neat paradoxes
aimed at the Victorian two-faced morality, and the tone suggests a rather insolent
condescension toward his audience.
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Thus, Wilde’s dramatic heritage can be divided into two distinct groups, that of
tragedies (A Florentine Tragedy, Salome, written for the French actress Sarah Bernar, The
Duchess of Padua), the main theme being the destructive force of passion, and comedies (A
Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere’s Fan, The Importance of
Being Earnest).

The Picture of Dorian Gray. His 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray became a
literary manifesto of Aesthetism and made its author notoriously famous because of its
ascribed immorality. It is the only published novel written by Oscar Wilde, first appearing as
the lead story in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine on the 20th of June in 1890.
The central image of the novel is paradoxically a moralising work of art (a portrait) that
depicts the immoral life of Dorian Gray.
This novel is the ideal example of the paradoxical plot. It tells of a young man Dorian
Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward who is greatly impressed by Dorian’s
physical beauty and becomes strongly infatuated with him, believing that his beauty is
responsible for a new mode in his art. Talking in Basil’s garden, Dorian meets Lord Henry
Wotton, a friend of Basil’s, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry’s world view. Espousing a
new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only thing worth pursuing in life is
beauty, and the fulfilment of the senses. Realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian
cries out, wishing that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age instead of himself. His
wish is fulfilled, plunging him into a series of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a
reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin being displayed as a
disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging. Due to Dorian’s request the fantastic,
unusual phenomenon takes place: depicted Dorian Gray ages physically, his painted face get
covered with wrinkles, his beauty dies, while real Dorian remains young and handsome.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered to be a model of the intellectual novel of the
end of the 19th c. Wilde embodied his most valuable thoughts about life, which defined his
own life style. The Picture of Dorian Gray is also considered one of the last works of classic
gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme. It deals with the artistic movement of the
decadents, which caused some controversy when the book was first published.
“To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim”, - is said in the author’s preface to the
novel. Though a powerful spring of autobiographical elements can be noticed in this piece of
art and this subjectivity adds psychological authenticity. In a letter, Wilde stated that the main
characters of The Picture of Dorian Gray are in different ways reflections of himself: “Basil
Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would
like to be — in other ages, perhaps”.
The most famous version of the novel creation was the fact of Wilde’s getting acquainted
with the model of one painter who amazed him by his perfect beauty. That event led to the
conversation which later was depicted in the house of Basil Hallward and touched one of the
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eternal problems of the art – relationship between life and art, and combined with this one
– moral and art, ethical and aesthetic in life:
“How sad it is!” murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait.
“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always
young. It will never be older than this particular day of June... If it were only the other way! If it
were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that – for that – I
would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my
soul for that!”
Under the influence of Lord Henry, Dorian begins an exploration of his senses. He
discovers an actress, Sibyl Vane, who performs in Shakespeare plays in a dingy theatre.
Dorian approaches her, and soon proposes marriage. Sibyl, who falls in love with him, rushes
home to tell her skeptical mother and brother. Her protective brother, James, tells her that if
her love ever harms her, he will kill him.
Dorian then invites Basil and Lord Henry to see Sibyl perform in Romeo and Juliet.
Sibyl, whose only previous knowledge of love was through the love of theatre, suddenly loses
her acting abilities through the experience of true love with Dorian, and performs very badly.
Dorian rejects her, saying that: “Yes,” he cried, “you have killed my love. You used to stir my
imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you
because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the
dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all
away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been!
You are nothing to me now.” When he returns home, Dorian notices that Basil’s portrait of him
has changed. After examining the painting, Dorian realizes that his wish has come true – the
portrait’s expression now bears a subtle sneer, and will age with each sin he commits, while
his own outward appearance remains unchanged: “In the dim arrested light that struggled
through the cream-coloured silk blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The
expression looked different. One would have said that there was a touch of cruelty in the mouth.
It was certainly strange”. He decides to reconcile with Sibyl, but Lord Henry arrives in the
morning to say that Sibyl has killed herself by swallowing prussic acid. Over the next
eighteen years, Dorian experiments with every vice, mostly under the influence of a
“poisonous” French novel, a present from Lord Henry. Wilde never reveals the title but his
inspiration was possibly drawn from Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (Against Nature) due
to the likenesses that exist between the two novels.
One night, before he leaves for Paris, Basil arrives to question Dorian about the rumours
of his indulgences. Dorian does not deny his debauchery. He takes Basil to the portrait, which
is revealed to have become as hideous as Dorian’s sins: “An exclamation of horror broke from
the painter’s lips as he saw in the dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There
was something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing. Good heavens! it was
Dorian Gray’s own face that he was looking at! The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely
spoiled that marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and some scarlet
on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something of the loveliness of their blue, the
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noble curves had not yet completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic
throat. Yes, it was Dorian himself”.
In a fit of anger, Dorian blames the artist for his fate, and stabs Basil to death. He then
blackmails an old friend named Alan Campbell, who is a chemist, into destroying Basil’s
body. Wishing to escape his crime, Dorian travels to an opium den. James Vane is nearby,
and hears someone refer to Dorian as “Prince Charming”. He follows Dorian outside and
attempts to shoot him, but he is deceived when Dorian asks James to look at him in the light,
saying that he is too young to have been involved with Sibyl eighteen years ago. James
releases Dorian, but is approached by a woman from the opium den, who chastises him for
not killing Dorian and tells him that Dorian has not aged for the past eighteen years.
While at dinner one night, Dorian sees Sibyl Vane’s brother stalking the grounds and
fears for his life. However, during a game-shooting party the next day, James is accidentally
shot and killed by one of the hunters. After returning to London, Dorian informs Lord Henry
that he will be good from now on, and has started by not breaking the heart of his latest
innocent conquest, a vicar’s daughter in a country town, named Hetty Merton. At his
apartment, Dorian wonders if the portrait has begun to change back, losing its senile, sinful
appearance, now that he has changed his immoral ways. He unveils the portrait to find that it
has become worse: “A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change,
save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the
hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome – more loathsome, if possible, than before – and the
scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he
trembled. Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire for a
new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part
that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these?”.
Deciding that only a full confession would truly absolve him, but lacking any feelings of
guilt and fearing the consequences, time comes and he decides to destroy his portrait – the
witness of his dishonour and insidiousness. In a fit of rage, he picks up the knife that killed
Basil Hallward, and plunges it into the painting. His servants hear a cry from inside the locked
room and send for the police. “When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid
portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and
beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was
withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they
recognized who it was”.

Aestheticism in the novel

Aestheticism is a strong theme in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and is tied in with the
concepts of the double life and of paradox. The aesthetic program of O. Wilde is represented
in two bright statements of his own. Firstly, “Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an
art”, - art doesn’t have and mustn’t have anything in common with the truth, shown via fate
of Dorian Gray. Secondly, art exists by itself and often it forestalls its epoch, and this epoch’s
moral: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or
 11
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.”
Each sin of Dorian Gray mars the beauty of his portrait. As Richard Ellmann, Wilde’s
main biographer, remarked with respect to the contradictions in this novel: “The Picture of
Dorian Gray is a critique of aestheticism, which is shown to bring Dorian to ruin; yet readers
have been won by Dorian’s beauty and regretful, rather than horrified, at his waste of it, so
that he has something of the glamour of a Faust rather than the foulness of a murderer and
drug-addict. And Wilde, feeling that the book had too much moral, subverts it with a preface
which expounds sympathetically some of that aesthetic creed by which the book shows
Dorian corrupted.”
In The Decay of Lying, Wilde explored the relation between art and truth. He concluded
that, “although art consists of beautiful lies, it may confront someone with hidden sides of his
or her personality”. Likewise, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is art which brings to light
Dorian Gray’s decadent nature. This happens when he identifies himself with the hero of a
decadent novel which Lord Henry gave to him: “For years, Dorian Gray could not free
himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he
never sought to free himself from it. ... The hero, the wonderful young Parisian, in whom the
romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of
prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of
his own life written before he had lived it”.
Wilde, for instance, wrote about Dorian Gray: “He used to wonder at the shallow
psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and
of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex
multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose
very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead”.
The opposition of art and life, art and moral generates further oppositions that overfill the
novel. Everything that is bright, glossy, wonderful is connected with art, everything grey and
prosaic – with life. Dorian loves even his bride until he can imagine her as a literary heroine –
Juliet, Ophelia, Rosalind, Beatrice, Cordelia:
“To-night she is Imogen,” he answered, “and to-morrow night she will be Juliet.”
“When is she Sibyl Vane?”
“Never.”
As soon as Sibyl Vane is really in love she ceased living the imaginery life of her
characters on stage, Dorian’s love passes away. When Sibyl tragically finished her life,
Dorian didn’t spill a single tear аnd confessed to his friend: “How extraordinarily dramatic life
is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it
has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears”.
Also in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward’s affection for Dorian Gray is
idealised as a source of inspiration for a new art. This discrepancy between high ideals and
brute reality can also be found in the character of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray attempts to
 12
transform his life into a refined work of art for which he rejects all conventional
morality, but he ends leading a life of utter debauchery. As Dorian Gray used his personal
beauty as mask in order to indulge certain forbidden appetites, Wilde seems to have used his
aestheticism as a smoke screen. Furthermore, Dorian’s invisible degeneracy secretly infects
his companions as a disease does.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, the discussion of whether art is sterile or “infectious”
continues. Dorian Gray blames Lord Henry of having poisoned him with a book: “Yet you
poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never
lend that book to anyone. It does harm.” Yet, Lord Henry stresses the sterility of art and
replies: “As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence
upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls
immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.”
Richard Ellmann comments on this: “Wilde thought that his art moves its audience to
self-recognition, but this does not mean that his art urges its public to reproach and to reform
the world. Dorian Gray, for example, discovers his beauty through Basil Hallward’s portrait,
but the knowledge of his beauty awakens his vanity. This does not mean that the painting
makes him vain, but that the painting confronts him with his beauty and his reaction reveals
his innate narcissism. If Dorian Gray had not been vain from the outset, he would have
reacted to the discovery of his beauty in a more sound way”. As one of the maxims in the
Preface states: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” In The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Wilde exposes the demonic side of art as he shows that its moral effects depend
on the moral standards of its spectator. Art may refine someone but also further corrupt weak
people like Dorian Gray.
Because Wilde viewed art as potentially moral and immoral in its effects, it is hard to
maintain that he believed in reforming his audience through his art. It is true that Wilde urges
his readers to live up to the beauty of art, but he, at the same time, acknowledges that every
form of beauty (in life and in art) is founded on evil and suffering. When Lord Henry has
heard about Dorian Gray’s unhappy childhood, he, for instance, concludes: “The mother
snatched away by death, the boy left in solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. ... It
posed the lad, made him more perfect as it were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there
was something tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow”. Wilde
urges his readers to recognise that both evil and good belong to human nature and that both
are necessary to enjoy life. Whereas the decadent like Dorian Gray decides to yield totally to
his evil impulse and tries to find pleasure and beauty in evil and corruption, Wilde insists that
one should keep one’s good and bad side in balance.
Although Dorian is hedonistic, when Basil accuses him of making Lord Henry’s sister’s
name a “by-word”, Dorian replies: “Take care, Basil. You go too far”, suggesting that Dorian
still cares about his outward image and standing within Victorian society. Wilde highlights
Dorian’s pleasure of living a double life. Not only does Dorian enjoy this sensation in private,
 13
but he also feels: “keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life” when attending a society
gathering just 24 hours after committing a murder.
This duplicity and indulgence is most evident in Dorian’s visits to the opium dens of
London. Wilde conflates the images of the upper class and lower class by having the
supposedly upright Dorian visit the impoverished districts of London. Lord Henry asserts that:
“crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders...I should fancy that crime was to them what
art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations”, which suggests that
Dorian is both the criminal and the aesthete combined in one man. This is a recurring theme
in many of the Gothic novels of which The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of the last.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a third person narrative with neutral or godlike
omniscience. For example, in the first chapter, when the narrator presents the characters to the
reader, he already predicts the disappearance of Basil Hallward in order to create suspense:
“...Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public
excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures”. In spite of this, Wilde, sometimes,
restricts his godlike omniscience and invites the reader to interpret the blanks. The secret,
with which Dorian Gray blackmails Alan Campbell, is only suggested by Campbell’s fear to
be disgraced: “A groan broke from Campbell’s lips, and he shivered all over. The ticking of
the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing time into separate atoms of agony,
each of which was too terrible to be borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly
tightened round his forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already
come upon him”.
Except for the rejection of Sibyl Vane, the murder of Basil Hallward and a visit to an
opium den, Dorian Gray’s vices are never specified, but only exhibited by the deformity of his
portrait and hinted at by vague rumours that he ruined the reputations of many women and
corrupted various young noblemen. These various interpretations indicate that The Picture of
Dorian Gray tries to reflect the different ideological views of the readers instead of proposing
a new system of norms: “To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim”.
Not only does aestheticism affect the narrative strategies of The Picture of Dorian Gray,
but also its subject matter. Wilde’s novel treats the downfall of a decadent aesthete. This has
important consequences for the nature of Dorian Gray’s vices. A decadent aesthete does not
just yield to the temptations of sin, but he is determined to find beauty and pleasure in sin and
corruption. Dorian Gray tells about his quest for new sensations in different spheres of art,
like perfume, music, jewels, tapestries and embroideries.
The Picture of Dorian Gray actually corrupts the Greek principle of that beauty is
necessarily good and that evil is disgusting. Dorian Gray disrupts this classical principle about
beauty by using his personal charms as a mask and by finding pleasure in the decay of his
soul. Dorian Gray summarises his immorality in the last chapter: “He knew that he had
tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been
an evil influence to others and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives he
 14
had crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought
to shame”.
Dorian Gray’s portrait aestheticises his moral conscience. Morality becomes a matter of
aesthetics. Dorian Gray is only concerned with his sins insofar as they mar the beauty of his
portrait. Lord Henry is fascinated by Dorian’s artistic amorality. When Dorian Gray cries: “I
can’t bear the idea of my soul being hideous.” Lord Henry replies: “A very charming artistic
basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you on it!”
The novel is saturated with the detailed descriptions of refined parlours, house and rooms
of Dorian Gray. The hero admits: “I love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old
brocades, green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings, luxury, pomp –
there is much to be got from all these”. The sceneries in the novel hava a shade of artificiality
and polishness: “The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like silver
against it”. As for the natures’ beauty Wilde paid attention to the flowers’ depiction, mostly
one can notice orchids and tulips on the pages of the novel: “The studio was filled with the
rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden,
there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of
the pink-flowering thorn”.
The Picture of Dorian Gray conveys Wilde’s aesthetism to its fullest in the system of
mail characters of the novel and their behaviour, portraying thoughts and beliefs of the author.
That’s perhaps why critics stressed many times that lord Henry Wotton – the counterpart of
Oscar Wilde. Indeed, this hero airs the dearest thoughts of the novelist. The reader meets
salon dweller, preacher of pleasure and luxury like the author used to be. The image of Dorian
Gray, a person with strong artistic temperament, persuades in reality of the conflict between
art and life, art and nature, art and moral.
In the meantime, the protagonists of the novel – Dorian, lord Henry, the painter Basil
Hallward – can be treated as the elements of the theoretical-aesthetical scheme, inticately
created by Oscar Wilde in his philosofical-symbolic novel. Their personality and character
reveal themselves in many dialogues which cover almost every page of the book, showing the
specific philosophy of life of each one and in total – of the author himself. They show
different attitude towards life.
Lord Henry – is the embodiment of the philosophyof delectation. He is refined aesthete,
enamoured of the Beauty and marked off evrything ugly and plain in life. This aspiration for
ignoring everything but beauty made him not only listless but also cynic. Awaking Dorian’s
desire to enjoy life at any cost, he didn’t muse at all upon the possible consequences of this
behaviour for the lad and other people. Lord Henry’s egoism – is the egoism of the aesthete
who appreciates the existence of the real life but doesn’t care about it. Even Sibyl’s suicide
was estimated by Lord Henry not from the ethical point of view, but from the aesthetic one.
The death of the young actress was the tragedy that could please tastes of the both aesthetes.
Being a gifted disciple of Lord Henry, Dorian only at first was embarrassed over the
event. Only little time would pass and he would say the following: “It seems to me to be simply
 15
like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible beauty of a Greek
tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but by which I have not been wounded”. Dorian
and Henry replaced moral feelings with the beauty endearment. They don’t want to accept
that in reality every action definitely wears its ethical meaning. The guilt for Sibyl’s death
remains the guilt, Basil’s murder – is a murder. Though Lord Henry doesn’t act amoral, his
cynicism is all words and posing, which are his real self. He is annoyed by everything natural
and appears to be a thertician and a preacher of that philosophy, which leads Dorian’s life.
Basil Hallward, the painter is the incarnation of the idea of the art serfdom. He creates
beauty and there’s nothing more for him but his art, but he’s kind, has good, caring, loving
heart, which is in his every painting. Dorian Gray’s portrait was his masterpiece. That is why
from the very beginning Basil doesn’t want to exhibit it, as it would mean to uncover his soul,
its deepest motions to everyone who decides to have alook at it. Basil admired his own
masterpiece to such extent that he already couldn’t differentiate it from the original, from real
Dorian. He divinizes the lad, became his goodfriend and found his muse. For him ethical and
aesthetic are indivisible like beauty and goodness. His tragic death was inevitable as he
sacrificed himself to art. He suffered as he felt dreadful disparity between ideal content laid in
hiscreation and life that had broken his dreams about harmony.
Wilde as a critic insisted that art does not reflect reality or its author, but mirrors the
reader or the critic who interprets the work of art: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art
really mirrors”. Since art has no existence in itself, it can express nothing but itself. It is only
through the imagination and interpretation of the reader that art is made alive. Wilde, the
novelist, deliberately played with different allusions about Dorian’s sins in The Picture of
Dorian Gray in order to invite the readers to interpret the novel in their way.

Oscar Wilde. The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Preface
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who
can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in
beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the
elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. 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. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has
ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever
morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and
virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the
musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the
spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. 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.