New York Diary

Wilde about art

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
    To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

So was Oscar Wilde a proponent of Aestheticism, or was he not?

I mean, those two lines--the first two lines of the preface to Wilde's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey--argue strongly in the affirmative. And, certainly, during his lifetime, Wilde was known as a man who privileged art over all else. He was a dandy and a wit, and he concerned himself with being interesting and clever, and with creating art and beauty and amusement. He strongly rejected the Victorian (and Platonic) notion that art should serve a social or moral purpose: "Vice and virtue are to the artist [merely] materials for an art," he tells us, and, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."

But if this is the case, then what on earth is Wilde doing with The Picture of Dorian Grey? I mean, Wilde creates a character that seems to embody his aesthetic ideal. Dorian is a "fascinating," "beautiful," and "perpetually young" member of English society. He is seduced by the promise of a life of beauty and sensuality, and he indulges himself in any number of pleasures. He is able to look upon the most horrific scenes with a kind of amoral (not necessarily immoral, mind) aesthetic satisfaction; in his first major exploit of this sort, he dismisses his deadly cruelty towards (the ominously named) Sybil Vane as merely "the 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.... It has been a marvelous experience. That is all." (It is, perhaps, worth noting that Dorian's cruelty in this case was caused by aesthetic agonies, too: "I was bored," he tells Sybil after watching her final performance. "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." When Sybil acts poorly, though--because, she says, she cannot act the mere shadows of a love that now she understands in its true glory--Dorian responds not by understanding love but rather by falling out of love with her. Sybil is nothing to him without her acting, without her art. True love is grotesque to him; its masterfully-executed artistic representation is beautiful.) When Dorian comes to view Sybil's death as the realization of an aesthetic ideal, instead of as the horrific result of his own moral failings, we see that he has himself become a particular kind of aesthetic ideal. He is the perfect realization of the pure Aesthete, a man who lives for enjoyment and passion, for beauty and youth and a perpetually interesting life.

We might expect Wilde to idealize Dorian's life, since in his own life he seems to have idealized the aesthetic principles that drive his character. Yet the moral of Dorian Grey seems to be the rather Aristotelian idea that man in fact cannot succeed in living the beautiful life separate from the good life. If this is unexpected, it is also surprisingly refreshing; it is pleasant to reflect that beauty alone does not atone for one's sins (though that may be a highly problematic conflation of aesthetic and moral sense!).

To be sure, Dorian tries to separate soul and body, morality and sensuality. He wants to live an aesthetic life, to privilege only the latter of each of those pairs. And, indeed, he nearly succeeds in separating the two, in acting for sensuous reasons while disregarding morality. Dorian never quite manages the disaggregation, though, and he goes through several periods of anger, fear, unhappiness, guilt, and conscience when he remembers (or is shown) his moral failings. If Dorian is trying to live a purely aesthetic and therefore conscience-free life, he is in the end a miserable failure.

But what about the message from members of "society?" Sure, Dorian fails by his own lights, but in social circles he is constantly held up as a kind of ideal. He truly is perpetually interesting, always lovely, a splendid pianist and delightful flirt. Yet Dorian's social acceptance is based on naive misunderstanding; others--Lord Henry excepted, perhaps (but perhaps not)--think not that Dorian has succeeded in pushing morality aside, but rather that he represents the perfect melding of beauty and goodness. If they hold him up as a kind of ideal, then, it is only because they are deluded by his beauty and their own conviction that such outward delicacy could not hide so horrible a soul.

There is an interesting thematic tangle here. On the one hand, Wilde's novel questions the authenticity of appearances, and suggests that members of society are naive to judge Dorian's character by his looks. After all, Lady Narborough's pronouncement to Dorian that "you are made to be good--you look so good" rings obviously false for those of us who know the vices of Dorian's day-to-day existence. Her equation of beauty and virtue, we realize, is clearly misguided. Yet on the other hand, A Picture of Dorian Grey simultaneously reaffirms the idea that, for most of us, appearance does betray morality. After all, while Dorian's face never turns savage, nor cruel, nor grotesque, this is only due to his extraordinary (and unbelievable) circumstances. When it comes to everybody else, however, Wilde seems to imply that we in fact can judge by appearance. We wear the burdens of our souls upon our faces, and the ugly is the bedfellow of the immoral. Only when one's soul becomes, like Dorian's, a feature of a painting (instead of a feature of our person) is this not true.

This is a tangle that is never resolved. Is Wilde truly suggesting that, for the non-Dorian Greys in the world, beauty and goodness are practically interchangeable, and that one is a stand-in for the other? This is the implication, but it seems to be belied by the rest of the novel. Perhaps the only resolution (and a weak one at that) is that the two are linked, if not precisely the same thing. Just as Dorian cannot live an aesthetic life while removing himself completely from the cares of morality and virtue, then, others cannot privilege morality without showing it in their carriage, in their expressions, and on their faces.

If on the one hand The Picture of Dorian Grey is a book about the impossibility of the purely aesthetic life, though, it is also a book about the terrible consequences of putting too much reality into art. Just as man is inherently a moral creature, Wilde seems to be saying, art is an inherently aesthetic endeavor. And since the artist's goal is to create "beautiful things," to "reveal art and conceal the artist," then Hallowell's picture of Dorian Grey is a grand artistic failure. It is a technical masterwork, to be sure, but even Hallowell knows from the first that he has committed an offense against art; before ever seeing the picture with its grotesque changes, he is aware that he has put "too much of himself" into the painting, that it is too expressive, too Romantic, too emotionally connected. It was painted to express a kind of joy and inspiration felt by the artist, and not to amuse others or to show them unadulterated beauty. This is too personal, Hallowell knows; though the painting is beautiful, its object is not beauty, and so it is not what art should be. And this becomes all the more true as the painting changes to reveal Dorian in all his truthful perversion. In representing Dorian this way, the work becomes itself a grotesque object, if an accurate portrayal of what Dorian should look like. But art is not meant to be accurate; it is meant to be beautiful. Such a picture, it is clear, is a failure.

We see, then, a neat reversal in this book. The painting is the possessor of a conscience or soul, and its appearance reflects a moral instead of aesthetic state. Dorian, on the other hand, is the possessor of eternal beauty, a man who is neither moral nor immoral but who is unfailingly sensual, interesting, beautiful, and "well-written" (an apt description for a literary character). Neither artwork nor man succeeds in this reversed function, however. The painting appears ugly and so it is horrific; the man acts immorally and so he is horrific. While good art is amoral and good men may be ugly, neither painting nor person is any good at all in Dorian Grey. In the end, then, we are left with the conviction that one cannot--ought not--live life as art (though we may be less convinced that art should be merely beautiful, or at least interesting). To be sure, we, like Dorian, can base our actions primarily on aesthetic considerations--but this is inhuman, degrading, and ugly in a man. Dorian indulges in hedonism and aesthetic pleasure left and right; he justifies cruelty and immorality (as well as kindness and friendship) by their beauty and the sensual joys he derives from them--but in the end even he cannot escape his conscience. Indeed, one last desperate attempt to do so is his undoing: he tries to ruin the painting that has served as the repository of all his sins, the reminder of his moral failings and the embodiment of his spiritual hideousness--but in doing so, he only ruins himself. Those moral failings are his own, and if he destroys them he destroys himself.

Having written this veritable tome (well, not a tome, and so not veritable: a complete misuse of language), I find that I emerge with no good sense of Wilde's ideal life. Is it primarily aesthetic? That would jibe with my conception of Wilde's own life and his self-professed affinity for the Aestheticist movement. But clearly Dorian Grey, the aesthete extraordinaire, lives a contemptible and unhappy life, and dies a horrible death. Wilde's own life aside, that seems a near-impossible reading of this particular text.

Perhaps, though, Wilde is advocating a kind of tempered aestheticism, a vaguely moral (if only for practical purposes?), primarily indulgent life. This seems to describe the life the Wilde actually lived (as opposed to the one that he theoretically advocated, above), and it is not without a grounding in the novel: for those readers who object to my bringing Wilde-the-author into the discussion of a text which may have little or nothing to do with his personal beliefs, I point to Lord Henry Wotton as a textual example of this ideal. Lord Henry is a wit and a charmer, and it is he who in many ways leads Dorian down his hedonistic and sensual path. Henry is enamored of the aesthetic, and propounds radical theories of art, morality, and truth. Yet he is largely playing an intellectual game with these theories; he is most certainly not living by them. Though Henry says he is a hedonist (and he indeed may believe in hedonistic ideals), and though he purports to dismiss morality as an acceptable justification for action (preferring to justify things by their beauty or interest value), he leads a relatively conventional and unexciting life. Where Dorian finds pleasure in the practice of his hedonism, Lord Henry finds pleasure in its theory. Under this reading, then, Wilde may simply be cautioning us not to go too far in our pursuit of the aesthetic, even as he urges us to privilege the sensual and the beautiful. The problem is, Lord Henry is never made out as an impressive character; indeed, he is hardly even a well-rounded character. Henry doesn't develop, and he doesn't seem to understand the moral and practical implications of his ideals. If in fact Wilde means to suggest a tempered aestheticism, then, he manages do so only weakly. It is not the obvious message to take home from this book.

Alternatively, and in many ways far more plausibly, The Picture of Dorian Grey is written as an argument against a life lived in pursuit primarily of the beautiful. After all, Dorian's own life is a failure, and he dies enraged, unhappy, guilt-racked, and painfully. Even were we to accept his life on his own (aesthetic) terms and so not be horrified by Dorian's many terrible actions, we cannot escape the fact that Dorian is several times dreadfully unhappy, and that he dies an unhappy man in the end. Is the novel then reserving the aesthetic as the exclusive sphere of art, and suggesting that it is rather morality that is natural to man and necessary for man's happiness? Does the book ultimately extol virtue? But that seems at odds with Wilde's own life, and I am not of the school that thinks his life to be wholly irrelevant to the work that he has produced. Moreover, the book itself certainly implies that a moral life lacking aesthetic consideration would be boring and unpleasurable at best, and worthless at worst.

The final possibility, of course, is that the book suggests that we embrace a happy medium that exists somewhere in the space between the aesthetic and the moral. But then why condemn Dorian so emphatically? Merely as a lesson against his extreme aestheticism? There is no equally strong lesson against living an extreme moral life, however, even if there is the hint that such a life would be boring and therefore unexciting for one's friends. If this is where Dorian Grey leaves us, it does so uninspiringly.

So what are we to learn from Dorian Grey and his sad existence? Was Wilde a proponent of the hedonistic, passionate, sensuous life, or of a kind of considered, intellectual Aestheticism? Or was he recanting these ideals (which seems both the most obvious reading of the novel and the most unlikely explanation of it)? Or could it have been that Wilde was merely tempering his formerly strong statements about the primacy and desirability of a life lived for art's sake, suggesting that morality has an important role, too? (I might point out that this last option could have served as a kind of hedge against public sentiment that was turning against his own "immorality"--and which led to a trial in which A Picture of Dorian Grey was ultimately used as evidence for Wilde's "gross indecency" (read: homosexuality).)

Of course, Wilde himself would probably tell us--art for art's sake, forget the interpretation and the attempts to draw moralizing ideals, and just enjoy the book, damn it!

Still, it seems disingenuous to simply dismiss the questions that Wilde so explicitly raises. If nothing else, how are we to be interesting, witty, and intellectual, if we are not supposed to think?

posted by Skay @ 9:10 PM