Eng 324: Wilde, Dorian Gray
Dr. Chris Koenig-Woodyard
1] “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at stars.” - Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891).
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2] (57):
Lord Henry looked at him [Dorian]. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue
eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as
all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.
3] (92)
“Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder
when I told her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious of her power. …[The “Old Jew” at the theatre]
would insist on calling me ‘My Lord,’ so I had to assure Sibyl that I was not anything of the kind. She said quite simply to me, ‘You look
more like a prince. I must call you Prince Charming.’“
“Upon my word, Dorian, Miss Sibyl knows how to pay compliments.”
“You don’t understand her, Harry. She regarded me merely as a person in a play. She knows nothing of life. She lives with
her mother, a faded tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta dressing-wrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had
seen better days.”
4] (123-24)
“Dorian, Dorian,” she [Sibyl] cried, “before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I
lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of
Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted
scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came—oh, my beautiful love!—and you freed my
soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the
silliness of the empty pageant in which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous,
and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were
unreal, were not my words, were not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a
reflection. You had made me understand what love really is. My love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life! I have grown sick of
shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play? When I came on to-night, I could
not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. I thought that I was going to be wonderful. I found that I could do
nothing. Suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard them hissing, and I smiled. What
could they know of love such as ours? Take me away, Dorian—take me away with you, where we can be quite alone. I hate the stage. I
might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that burns me like fire. Oh, Dorian, Dorian, you understand now what it
signifies? Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to play at being in love. You have made me see that.”
He flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face. “You have killed my love,” he muttered.
She looked at him in wonder and laughed. He made no answer. She came across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his
hair. She knelt down and pressed his hands to her lips.
He drew them away, and a shudder ran through him.
Then he leaped up and went to the door. “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 marvelous, 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. I will never
see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once . . . Oh, I
can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of
love, if you say it mars your art! Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. The world
would have worshipped you, and you would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.”
The girl grew white, and trembled. She clenched her hands together, and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. “You are not
serious, Dorian?” she murmured. “You are acting.”
“Acting! I leave that to you. You do it so well,” he answered bitterly.
5] (126)
Eng 324: Wilde, Dorian Gray
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Dr. Chris Koenig-Woodyard
As he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if
in surprise. Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he had taken the button-hole out of his coat, he
seemed to hesitate. Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. 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 turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic
shadows into dusky corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to
linger there, to be more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he
had been looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory Cupids, one of Lord Henry’s many presents to him, glanced
hurriedly into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?
He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into
the actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was
horribly apparent.
6] Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, November 1893. [also in volume 2B of
Longman Anthology of British Literature: 2078-79]
The latest movement in European literature has been called by many names, none of them quite exact or comprehensive—
Decadence, Symbolism, Impressionism, for instance.1 It is easy to dispute over words, and we shall find that Verlaine objects to being
called a Decadent, Maeterlinck to being called a Symbolist, Huysmans to being called an Impressionist. 2 These terms, as it happens, have
been adopted as the badge of little separate cliques, noisy, brainsick young people who haunt the brasseries of the Boulevard Saint-Michel,3
and exhaust their ingenuities in theorizing over the works they cannot write. But, taken frankly as epithets which express their own
meaning, both Impressionism and Symbolism convey some notion of that new kind of literature which is perhaps more broadly
characterized by the word Decadence. The most representative literature of the day—the writing which appeals to, which has done so
much to form, the younger generation—is certainly not classic, nor has it any relation with that old antithesis of the Classic, the
Romantic. After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in
the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon
refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity, if what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art - those qualities of perfect simplicity,
perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities - then this representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful as it is, is
really a new and beautiful and interesting disease.
Healthy we cannot call it, and healthy it does not wish to be considered. The Goncourts, in their prefaces, in their Journal, are
always insisting on their own pet malady, la névrose [the neurosis]. lt is in their work, too, that Huysmans notes with delight “le style
tacheté et faisandé”—high-flavored and spotted with corruption—which he himself possesses in the highest degree. “Having desire
without light, curiosity without wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, by ways traced by the hands of men; offering rash incense upon the
high places to an unknown God, who is the God of darkness”—that how Ernest Hello, in one of his apocalyptic moments, characterizes
the nineteenth century. And thus unreason of the soul—of which Hello himself is so curious a victim - this unstable equilibrium, which
has overbalanced so many brilliant intelligences into one form or another of spiritual confusion, is but another form of the maladie fin de
siècle [end of the century illness]. For its very disease of form, this literature is certainly typical of a civilization grown over-luxurious,
over-inquiring, too languid for the relief of action, too uncertain for any emphasis in opinion or in conduct. It reflects all the
moods, all the manners, of a sophisticated society; its very artificiality is a way of being true to nature: simplicity, sanity,
proportion—the classic qualities—how much do we possess them in our life, our surroundings, that we should look to find
them in our literature—so evidently the literature of a decadence?
Taking the word Decadence, then, as most precisely expressing the general sense of the newest movement in literature, we find
that the terms Impressionism and Symbolism define correctly enough the two main branches of that movement. Now Impressionist and
Symbolist have more in common than either supposes; both are really working on the same hypothesis, applied in different directions.
What both seek is not general truths merely, but la vérité vraie, the very essence of truth—the truth of appearances to the senses,
of the visible world to the eyes that see it; and the truth of spiritual things to the spiritual vision. The impressionist, in literature as
in painting, would flash upon you in a new, sudden way so exact an image of what you have just seen, just as you have seen it, that you may
say, as a young American sculptor, a pupil of Rodin, said to me on seeing for the first time a picture of Whistler’s, ‘‘Whistler seems to think
his picture upon canvas—and there it is!” Or you may find, with Sainte-Beuve, writing of Goncourt, the “soul of the landscape”—the
soul of whatever corner of the visible world has to he realized. The Symbolist, in this new, sudden way, would flash upon you the
‘‘soul” of that which can be apprehended only by the soul—the finer sense of things unseen, the deeper meaning of things evident. And
naturally, necessarily, this endeavor after a perfect truth to one’s impression, to one’s intuition—perhaps an impossible endeavor—has
brought with it, in its revolt from ready-made impressions and conclusions, a revolt from the ready-made of language, from the
bondage of traditional form, of a form become rigid. In France, where this movement began and has mainly flourished, it is Goncourt
who was the first to invent a style in prose really new, impressionistic, a style which was itself almost sensation. It is Verlaine who has
invented such another new style in verse.
Decadence, Symbolism, Impressionism: Three artistic or aesthetic movements: Decadence—late 19th century artistic movement that emphasized art and
artistry over the Romantic valorization of nature; French Symbolism reacted against Naturalism and Realism, emphasizing symbolic constructions and
sensory perception; Impresisonism—19th century, Paris-based artistic movement in the 1860’s, including, among others, Claude Monet and Pierre Auguste
Renoir, that emphasizes visible brushstrokes, light colors (and emphasis on light as it changes, to convey passing time), open composition, and unusual
points of view and visual angles.
2 Verlaine: Paul Verlaine, French poet (1844-1896), famously declared “I am the Empire at the end of its decadent era”; Maeterlink: Count Maurice
Maeterlink (1862-1949), Belgian writer and dramatist; Husymans: Joris-Karl Husymans (1848-1907), French novelist—whose novel Rebours (Against the
Grain) is a key document to the Decadent movement (see Appendix E in our broadview edition, page 262)
3 Famous literary and intellectual district in Paris.
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