“All art is at once surface and symbol,” Wilde says in the preface of his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril.” It is precisely this richly layered text, with its multiplicity of meaning, that differentiated Wilde from his predecessors. Then, there is the paradox as serious sphere of thought, from which Wilde’s words are woven. “In matters of grave importance,” he says in an aphorism he seems to have applied both to his life and literature, “style, not sincerity is the vital thing.”

In Dorian Gray, Dorian marvels as he describes the effect of Lord Henry Wotton’s words:

Words, mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel. One could not escape from them — And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things… Mere words! Was there anything so real as words?

Real or unreal, Wilde’s words possess a life of their own, and with it the power to move us. There is a Socratic aspect to Wilde’s conversational practice, conducted in Victorian drawing rooms versus the Greek marketplace, in his rigorous questioning of unexamined beliefs or widely held assumptions. Using the Socratic method of making the reader aware of their own contradictions, no truth is a given; none that cannot be turned upside down, then inside out, and summarized in an inverted epigram. “I had put my genius into my life and only my talent into my writing,” Wilde famously pronounced to André Gide, shortly before his death. Perhaps it would have been apt had he said he had put his genius into his conversation, for conversation was his life. Wilde was an inspired talker, and the best of his writing carries the fleet wit, or scent of his conversation.

A gifted conversationalist and raconteur, he made quite an impression on his audience, with a voice described as alluring and his sentences as mellifluous. Poet William Butler Yeats writes: “My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he’d written them all overnight with labor and yet all spontaneous.” Writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm sketches him thus: “…the vitality of twenty men, magnetism — authority. Deeper than repute or wit, hypnotic.”

Wilde could be hypnotizing in his writing as well, what Nietzsche calls “seduction by grammar,” to the extent that the enraptured readers may find themselves oblivious to the danger of the ideas put forth or the irresponsibility of the speaker. Here, again, from Dorian Gray, is Lord Henry’s personification of a Wildean “performance,” at a dinner party:

He played with the idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and Philosophy herself became young — Facts fled before her like frightened forest things.

Nonetheless, this is all effect and effective style, the magic of “mere words.” What is more disturbing, to the extent that it is more real, is the relation of Wilde’s life to his art, particularly in Dorian Gray. It is no secret that Wilde’s world revolved around Wilde, that his character dominated his every work, reducing all else to shadow. What is surprising, however, are the hints and warnings to himself which equally infiltrated his œuvre, also vying for center stage.