<h2><SPAN name="WALTER_PATER" id="WALTER_PATER"></SPAN>WALTER PATER ON "DORIAN GRAY."</h2>
<p>There is always something of an excellent talker about the writing of
Mr. Oscar Wilde, (wrote Pater, in reviewing "Dorian Gray" for <i>The
Bookman</i><SPAN name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</SPAN>) and in his hands, as happens so rarely with those who
practise it, the form of dialogue is justified by its being really
alive. His genial, laughter-loving sense of life and its enjoyable
intercourse, goes far to obviate any crudity there may be in the
paradox, with which, as with the bright and shining truth which often
underlies it, Mr. Wilde, startling his "countrymen," carries on, more
perhaps than any other writer, the brilliant critical work of Mathew
Arnold. <i>The Decay of Lying</i>, for instance, is all but unique in its
half-humorous, yet wholly convinced, presentment of certain valuable
truths of criticism. Conversational ease, the fluidity of life,
felicitous expression, are qualities which have a natural alliance to
the successful writing of fiction; and side by side with Mr. Wilde's
<i>Intentions</i> (so he entitles his critical efforts) comes a novel,
certainly original, and affording the reader a fair opportunity of
comparing his practice as a creative artist with many a precept he has
enounced as critic concerning it.</p>
<p>A wholesome dislike of the common-place, rightly or wrongly identified
by him with the <i>bourgeois</i>, with our middle-class—its habits and
tastes—leads him to protest emphatically against so-called "realism" in
art; life, as he argues, with much plausibility, as a matter of fact,
when it is really awake, following art—the fashion of an effective
artist sets; while art, on the other hand, influential and effective
art, has taken its cue from actual life. In "Dorian Gray" he is true,
certainly, on the whole, to the �sthetic philosophy of his <i>Intentions</i>;
yet not infallibly, even on this point: there is a certain amount of the
intrusion of real life and its sordid aspects—the low theatre, the
pleasures and griefs, the faces of some very unrefined people, managed,
of course, cleverly enough. The interlude of Jim Vane, his half-sullen
but wholly faithful care for his sister's honour, is as good as perhaps
anything of the kind, marked by a homely but real pathos, sufficiently
proving a versatility in the writer's talent, which should make his
books popular. Clever always, this book, however, seems intended to set
forth anything but a homely philosophy of life for the middle-class—a
kind of dainty Epicurean theory, rather—yet fails, to some degree in
this; and one can see why. A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though
harmonious development of man's entire organism. To lose the moral sense
therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr.
Wilde's hero—his heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely as
they can, is to lose, or lower, organisation, to become less complex, to
pass from a higher to a lower degree of development. As a story,
however, a partly supernatural story, it is first-rate in artistic
management; those Epicurean niceties only adding to the decorative
colour of its central figure, like so many exotic flowers, like the
charming scenery and the perpetual, epigrammatic, surprising, yet so
natural, conversations, like an atmosphere all about it. All that
pleasant accessory detail, taken straight from the culture, the
intellectual and social interests, the conventionalities, of the moment,
have, in fact, after all, the effect of the better sort of realism,
throwing into relief the adroitly-devised supernatural element after the
manner of Poe, but with a grace he never reached, which supersedes that
earlier didactic purpose, and makes the quite sufficing interest of an
excellent story.</p>
<p>We like the hero and, spite of his somewhat unsociable, devotion to his
art, Hallward, better than Lord Henry Wotton. He has too much of a not
very really refined world in him and about him, and his somewhat cynic
opinions, which seem sometimes to be those of the writer, who may,
however, have intended Lord Henry as a satiric sketch. Mr. Wilde can
hardly have intended him, with his cynic amity of mind and temper, any
more than the miserable end of Dorian himself, to figure the motive and
tendency of a true Cyrenaic or Epicurean doctrine of life. In contrast
with Hallward the artist, whose sensibilities idealise the world around
him, the personality of Dorian Gray, above all, into something
magnificent and strange, we might say that Lord Henry, and even more
the, from the first, suicidal hero, loses too much in life to be a true
Epicurean—loses so much in the way of impressions, of pleasant
memories, and subsequent hopes, which Hallward, by a really Epicurean
economy, manages to secure. It should be said, however, in fairness,
that the writer is impersonal; seems not to have identified himself
entirely with any one of his characters; and Wotton's cynicism, or
whatever it be, at least makes a very clever story possible. He becomes
the spoiler of the fair young man, whose bodily form remains un-aged;
while his picture, the <i>chef d'oeuvre</i> of the artist Hallward, changes
miraculously with the gradual corruption of his soul. How true, what a
light on the artistic nature, is the following on actual personalities
and their revealing influence in art. We quote it as an example of Mr.
Wilde's more serious style.</p>
<blockquote><p>"I sometimes think that there are only two eras of any importance
in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium
for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for
art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians,
the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of
Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint
from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course I have done all
that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't
tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or
that his beauty is such that Art cannot express it. There is
nothing that Art cannot express, and I know that the work I have
done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my
life. But in some curious way ... his personality has suggested to
me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I
see things differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was
hidden from me before."<SPAN name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</SPAN></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dorian himself, though certainly a quite unsuccessful experiment in
Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward spoiling takes
visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of his story) a
beautiful creation. But his story is also a vivid, though carefully
considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a very plain
moral, pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse
and ugly. General readers, nevertheless, will probably care less for
this moral, less for the fine, varied, largely appreciative culture of
the writer, in evidence from page to page, than for the story itself,
with its adroitly managed supernatural incidents, its almost equally
wonderful applications of natural science; impossible, surely, in fact,
but plausible enough in fiction. Its interest turns on that very old
theme; old because based on some inherent experience or fancy of the
human brain, of a double life: of D�ppelg�nger—not of two <i>persons</i>, in
this case, but of the man and his portrait; the latter of which, as we
hinted above, changes, decays, is spoiled, while the former, through a
long course of corruption, remains, to the outward eye, unchanged, still
in all the beauty of a seemingly immaculate youth—"the devil's
bargain." But it would be a pity to spoil the reader's enjoyment by
further detail. We need only emphasise once more, the skill, the real
subtlety of art, the ease and fluidity withal of one telling a story by
word of mouth, with which the consciousness of the supernatural is
introduced into, and maintained amid, the elaborately conventional,
sophisticated, disabused world Mr. Wilde depicts so cleverly, so
mercilessly. The special fascination of the piece is, of course, just
there—at that point of contrast. Mr. Wilde's work may fairly claim to
go with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same
kind, done, probably, in more or less conscious imitation of it.</p>
<hr style="width: 45%;" />
<p><i>The <SPAN name="Athenaeum" id="Athenaeum"></SPAN>Athen�um</i> in reviewing "The Picture of Dorian Gray," in its issue
of June 27th, 1891, under the heading of "Novels of the Week," said:—</p>
<blockquote><p>Mr. Oscar Wilde's paradoxes are less wearisome when introduced into
the chatter of society than when he rolls them off in the course of
his narrative. Some of the conversation in his novel is very smart,
and while reading it one has the pleasant feeling, not often to be
enjoyed in the company of modern novelists, of being entertained by
a person of decided ability. The idea of the book may have been
suggested by Balzac's "Peau de Chagrin," and it is none the worse
for that. So much may be said for "The Picture of Dorian Gray," but
no more, except, perhaps, that the author does not appear to be in
earnest. For the rest, the book is unmanly, sickening, vicious
(though not exactly what is called "improper"), and tedious.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mr. R.H. Sherard, in his recently published "Life of Oscar Wilde"
(Werner Laurie, 1906), gives some interesting particulars as to the
reasons which induced Wilde to write the book, while the views of a
French <i>litt�rateur</i> on "Dorian Gray" may be read in M. Andr� Gide's
"Study," a translation of which, by the present editor, was issued from
the Holywell Press, Oxford, in 1905.</p>
<div class="footnote"><p><SPAN name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></SPAN> November 1891.</p>
</div>
<div class="footnote"><p><SPAN name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></SPAN><SPAN href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></SPAN> Pp. 14, 15 (1891 edition).</p>
</div>
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<p><i>A critic cannot be fair in the ordinary sense of the word.</i></p>
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