Oscar Wilde, full-length portrait, standing
with hands behind back, facing front,
leaning against a wall, c. 1882
BY Napoleon Sarony
1 photographic print on card mount: albumen.
Library of Congress
Prints & Photographs Division
LOT 12385

Stanley Weintraub says, “It was through more than critical uniformity that Wilde’s essays, stories, and plays talked of masks and lying, and pivoted cleverly upon deception and double lives.” The Picture of Dorian Gray is exceptional in the concentration of (unconscious) honesty and prophecy that lay in its folds. Or, as Wilde put it: “…the note of Doom that like a purple thread runs through the gold cloth of Dorian Gray.” In a sense, this novel is Wilde’s first apologia, his first De Profundis, at once hinting to the world at what he was and warning himself of what he might become.

“It almost seems as if Wilde were warning himself throughout the book that as long as he kept his aesthetic theories (i.e. his homosexuality) to the realm of pure Platonism and idealistic art, he was safe; but that as soon as he transferred them to the sphere of action he was courting disaster… Lord Henry Wotton is Wilde as he hoped to remain, Dorian Gray as he feared he might become,” writes Aldington in his introduction to The Portable Oscar Wilde (Penguin, 1981).

Whether or not this is what Wilde thought, it is not what he said. His identification with the three central characters of Dorian Gray was much more telling, and damning: “Basil Halward is what I think I am, Lord Henry is what the world thinks me, and Dorian Gray is how I’d like to be.”

No one can disagree that Lord Henry was what the world thought of Wilde, but that he should think himself Basil and like to be Dorian is less obvious. In the novel, Basil Halward is the rooted, reserved artist with an ethical core the size of Lord Henry’s corrosive ego and of Dorian’s corruption. Elsewhere in conversation Wilde had also said: “I am certain that I have three separate souls… for in addition to the counterurges, there is a third urge to contemplate the other two.”

What is certain is that Wilde had much more substance than he cared to admit. For, just as he was a creature in opposition to the Victorian culture, he was a creature in opposition to himself. Maddened by his own music, Wilde was too clever to not know that he only told half-truths, only he no longer knew when. He ceased to be a magician when he began to believe in his magic and, lionized as he was in literary London, he forgot his own maxim: “In a temple everyone should be serious, except the thing that is worshipped.”

In his prison memoirs, De Profundis, which in addition to containing his most searing self-analysis contains his finest prose poetry, Wilde admits that he had “treated art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction.” The confusion of the two forces and their limitations are ultimately what destroys Dorian Gray; that and the accumulated price of having to return to a private viewing of his increasingly corrupted soul, the portrait in the attic.