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Paradox and the Preface to "Dorian Gray"
Author(s): ERIC PUDNEY
Source: The Wildean, No. 41 (July 2012), pp. 118-123
Published by: Oscar Wilde Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/45270321
Accessed: 24-10-2020 15:59 UTC

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 ERIC PUDNEY

Paradox and the

Preface to Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in the July 1890 edition of
Lippincott's Monthly Magazine , and immediately attracted a great deal of
hostile attention from the London press. Many of the original reviewers
were outraged by what they regarded as the immoral stance of the novella.
Wilde defended his work with wit and eloquence in letters to his harshest
critics, but even before the first version of the story was published he had
begun work on a revised and extended version, which was published in
1891. The new version introduced a number of important scenes such as
the visit to the opium den and the character of James Vane, but also toned
down some of the suggestive dialogue between the three main characters.
Just before the 1891 edition was published, a series of twenty-three
aphorisms appeared in The Fortnightly Review under the title 'A Preface
to "Dorian Gray"'. Many of these maxims were taken, in some cases word
for word, from letters he had written to his critics. The Preface was also
included in the 1891 edition.
Clearly, one key purpose of the Preface was to defend the work from
previous criticism and to pre-empt new attacks on it. But the Preface also
deals with ideas that are among the major concerns of the novel; its bold
Aestheticist statements serve to highlight the fact that Dorian Gray is a
novel about art. The question is just how seriously we should take the
Preface as a statement of its author's beliefs. Two recent editors of the
novel seem content to assume that the Preface can be taken at face value1.
Wilde's biographer, the late Richard Ellmann, did not share this view,
pointing to contradictions between the Preface's statements and the events
of the novel, and described Dorian Gray as the 'tragedy' of Aestheticism.2
So what is the Preface saying, and what is the novel saying, about art and
artists? A few of the more famous aphorisms, śeen in relation to the events
of the novel, serve to illustrate the central place of paradox in Wilde's
aesthetic thought - a point reinforced by Wilde's explicitly theoretical
writings. Paradox in Dorian Gray , I will argue, is not limited to the

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 PARADOX AND THE PREFACE TO DORIAN GRAY'

witticisms of Lord Henry; it is built into the plot and structure of the novel
itself.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art 's aim.

By arguing that art is what matters, rather than the character of the artist,
Wilde anticipated some of the more personal criticism of his work. The
reader should be focusing on the book itself, the aphorism suggests, rather
than attacking the author. It also implies that Wilde remains hidden: the
novel cannot be seen as self-revelatory. This is a convenient position for
Wilde to take, since some of his angrier critics came as close to explicitly
condemning the book for its homoerotic elements as was possible in late
Victorian public discourse. But the statement is more than just an
expedient way of defending its author. There is a serious point here, and
as Isaac Elimimian points out in a short article on the subject, this point is
repeated in Wilde's essays The Truth of Masks and The Decay of Lying.
Elimimian argues that it represents a recurring theme in Wilde's work.3
The novel itself also engages with the idea of art concealing the artist in
a variety of ways. Most clearly, in the very first chapter, Basil Hallward
tells Lord Henry that he will not exhibit the picture because T have put too
much of myself into it' (p. 9).4 This could be taken as echoing the idea
that art should conceal the artist - which would imply that Basil's attempt
to create art has failed. On this view, the novel is a cautionary tale for the
artist, in which Basil's failure to hide himself, and his artistic imposition
on Dorian, lead to disaster.5 But in other passages, Basil's view of art is
explicitly and strikingly at odds with the one expressed in the Preface:

'Harry,' said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, 'every
portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the
sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is
revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured
canvas, reveals himself.' (pp. 11-12)

Although Elimimian is right to point out that the idea of the artist's
concealment is a recurrent theme in Wilde's essays, there is also support
for exactly the opposite view in the same writings. For example, in The
Decay of Lying we are told that ' [t]he justification of a character in a novel
is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is.
Otherwise the novel is not a work of art'. In The Soul of Man , 'A work of
art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the
fact that the author is what he is.'7 It is difficult to square this view with
the idea that the finished artwork should somehow 'conceal' the artist,
since art here is presented as being entirely dependent on the character and

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 THE WILDEAN

personality of its creator. The clearest opposition to the Preface's view

arises in The Critic as Artist , in which Gilbert says

All artistic creation is absolutely subjective. The very landscape that

Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind;
and those great figures of Greek or English drama that seem to us to
possess an actual existence of their own, apart from the poets who
shaped and fashioned them, are, in their ultimate analysis, simply the
poets themselves.8

A writer, according to this, simply is his characters - and of course, Wilde

famously claimed that there was much of himself in all three of the main
characters in Dorian Gray.
The distinction between art and the artist is blurred even further by the
character of Dorian himself. His abandonment of Sybil, and her
subsequent suicide, is Dorian's first step along the road to damnation. But
it is also represented as a moment of artistic beauty, as Lord Henry
explains:

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

The use of the word 'tragedy' - which of course can denote a theatrical
genre as well as an event in real life - hints at something interesting: the
idea that life can itself become a form of art. Lord Henry suggests that a
person can be both actor and audience; this is certainly the case with
Dorian himself. Dorian is a devotee of the arts in all their forms
(audience). But it is also suggested that he is himself an artist (actor), a
man for whom 'Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts.' (p. 149).
As Lord Henry points out towards the end of the novel, Dorian has turned
his own life into a work of art: 'Life has been your art. You have set
yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets' (p. 248). Dorian Gray's
status as both artist and artwork, is both exemplified and confused by his
relationship with his portrait. The beautiful, 'real' Dorian does not reflect
the sinful reality of his existence - instead, the painting does. The novel
also effects an almost farcical reversal of the Preface's dictum about art
concealing the artist, as Dorian, the artist, quite literally conceals art, by
locking it up in his attic. Perhaps significantly, the painting's other creator,
Basil Hallward, also intended to hide it from public view. As we will see,
this is not the only point at which the novel appears consciously and subtly
to mock the opinions expressed in the Preface. At the same time it should

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 PARADOX AND THE PREFACE TO DORIAN GRAY'

also be pointed out that the painting also, in an unusual but very real sense,
conceals Dorian, by taking the consequences of his sins on itself, and
leaving him 'the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the
world' (p. 148). The statement of the Preface is in this sense confirmed by
the novel - but so, of course, is the reverse.
Another major concern of the Preface, and the novel, is the relation of
morality to art. The publication of Dorian Gray provoked a storm of
criticism, much of it couched in highly moralistic terms. The Preface, by
way of response, asserted that

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well

written, or badly written. That is all.

The maxim above is perhaps the most famous and frequently-discussed of

the statements in the Preface. Its meaning is fairly clear: it asserts that
works of art - books - are to be judged by aesthetic standards, not by
moral standards. As Wilde put it in a letter to the St James 's Gazette , 'the
sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate'.9
It is worth emphasising that this part of the Preface is at least in part a
defence against accusations of immorality from some of the book's
reviewers. Moralistic reactions, according to these maxims, are beside the
point and reveal that the reviewers are not really qualified to judge the
book. The Preface goes further than this, too: in suggesting that '[i]t is the
spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors', it implies that the outraged
critics themselves are degraded - not the novel.
Apart from its function as a defence of the author, can the Preface's
statement on morality be taken at face value? One interesting aspect of the
novel with regard to this question is the fact that it features a novel that
might well be described as 'immoral' as part of the plot. The little yellow
book given to him by Lord Henry has a corrupting effect on Dorian: 'It
was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about
its pages and to trouble the brain .... For years, Dorian Gray could not
free himself from the influence of this book' (pp. 146-7). The word
'influence' is critical here. Leaving aside the common-sense idea of what
an immoral book might be - one with a pernicious influence on the morals
of the reader - the word is significant within the novel itself. Lord Henry
explains why to Dorian early on:

All influence is immoral - immoral from the scientific point of view.

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

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 THE WILDE AN

Lord Henry's view, which sounds very much in line with Wilde's own
ideas as developed in The Soul of Man Under Socialism , implies that
influence over another is necessarily 'immoral'. This, by implication,
flatly contradicts the claim made in die Preface that there can be no such
thing as a moral or immoral book, and it does this very clearly and
unambiguously by depicting a book that is immoral 'from the scientific
point of view'. Wilde himself, in letters to his critics, described his own
book as 'poisonous' - precisely the same adjective used to describe the
little yellow book in the novel.10 In likening Dorian Gray to the little
yellow book while defending it from accusations of immorality, Wilde was
perhaps enjoying a private joke at the expense of his critics.
What, then, are we to make of the Preface? Is it no more than a
convenient defence against the unpleasant insinuations of hostile critics, or
a joke that Wilde shared with himself? It is both of these things in part, but
as always with Wilde there is more to it than that. The Preface, and its
complex and contradictory relationship with the rest of the novel, is part of
an intellectual commitment on Wilde's part which runs much deeper than
his attachment to Aestheticism. As he put it in The Truth of Masks :

Not that I agree with everything I have said in this essay. There is much
with which I entirely disagree... For in art there is no such thing as a
universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.11

This seemingly whimsical statement, I would contend, is one that can for
once be taken with absolute seriousness. Seen in the context of the novel
as a whole, and Wilde's aesthetic thought in general, the Preface underlines
Wilde's profound love of paradox, one that always tempered his apparent
embrace of Aestheticism.

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 PARADOX AND THE PREFACE TO DORIAN GRAY'

Notes

1. See J Bristow's introduction to The 6. O Wilde, Complete Works, Vol. 4, Ed. J

Complete Works of Oscar Wilde , Vol. 3,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005,
lvi, and M Gillespie (ed.), The Picture of
Dorian Gray , 2nd ed, (New York:
Norton, 2007), footnote to p. 3.
Guy, Oxford University Press, Oxford,
2007, p. 79
7. Complete Works, Vol. 4, p. 248.
8. Complete Works, Vol. 4, p. 184.

2. R Ellmann, Oscar Wilde , Penguin, 9. K Beckson (ed.) Oscar Wilde: The

London, 1987.
3. I Elimimian, "'Preface' to The Picture
of Dorian Gray in Light of Wilde's
Literary Criticism", Modem Fiction
Studies 26 (1980):3.
4. This and all other reference to the novel
are to the 1994 Penguin edition.
5. This view is argued for by Houston A
Baker in "A Tragedy of the Artist: The
Picture of Dorian Gray", Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 24 (1969): p. 3.
Critical Heritage, (London, Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1970) p. 67.
10. The letter in question is to the Editor
of the Daily Chronicle (30 June 1890).
'My story ... is poisonous if you like, but
you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and
perfection is what we artists aim at.' The
Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde Ed.
Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis.
(London: Fourth Estate, 2000) p. 435.
1 1. Complete Works, Vol. 4, p. 228.

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