Dorian’s initial resistance to Lord Henry’s “poisonous” views, and Basil’s convictions, marked a struggle Wilde was slowly losing with the passing of every day. A war waged within himself against what he believed to be good and evil. So that when Dorian kills Basil, he has in effect killed his own conscience, and Dorian’s suicide is simply a matter of time. “As a wicked man I am a complete failure,” Wilde wrote; but it is when he began to doubt this that he self-destructed. The artist with no ethical sympathies and the person who maintained them could no longer coexist.

In the Platonic dialogue, “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde dwells on the idea that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. Whether or not it does so “far more” is questionable, but once again Wilde had illuminated the other side, showing that “a truth in art is that whose contradiction is true.” But was The Picture of Dorian simply an instance of Life imitating Art, or was it more complexly an instance of an artist so enamored with his artwork that he sought to actualize it? Whatever the case, it is uncanny how interwoven Wilde’s life and art are, and judging by his prolific output after Dorian, it is as though Wilde knew the end was near. At the time of his arrest for “gross indecency’”with young men, two of his plays were showing to packed houses.

“In London, one should never make one’s debut with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an interest to one’s old age,” Lord Henry quips in Dorian Gray. It would take Wilde less than five years to “give an interest” to his middle age. In the end, it was his lack of balance that caused him to topple: his hubris, his over-indulgence, his superficiality. Namely, the very same qualities in lesser quantities, which had permitted him to scale the stairs of success. Frank Harris offers these words of wisdom in his sympathetic and masterful biography of Wilde:^[1]

…the frailties of man tend to become master-vices…. life tries all of us, tests every weak point to breaking, and sets off and exaggerates our powers… whoever yields to a weakness habitually, someday goes further than he ever intended, and comes to worse grief than he deserved.

No discussion of Wilde’s works is complete without a discussion of Wilde’s life or personality. His was a character composed of contradictions: at once worldly and naive, who idealized languor yet was consistently productive; who trivialized seriousness and yet treated the trivial with studied seriousness. Publicly, he declared style over substance and aesthetics over ethics but privately he struggled with these conflicting values, in a life full of fiction and in fiction full of fact. As a poet he sang the praises of nature, as a critic he rejected it for art, and as an artist he returned to it. He was a man who needed to enter society to satirize it, the snob who secretly wanted the acceptance of the mob. In comparison to an analysis of Wilde, then, an appraisal of his writing seems considerably less complicated.

Wilde was a lord of language, declared Max Beerbohm. W.H. Auden would write, that he had created, “a verbal universe in which the characters are determined by the kind of things they say, and the plot is nothing but a succession of opportunities to say them.” Even Shaw is uncharacteristically charitable: “In a certain sense Mr. Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre.” Richard Aldington’s critique of Wilde’s dialogues, at once fair and generous, may as well apply to his entire body of work:^[2]

Certainly, in these dialogues there are faults of affectation, of paradox not more than half true, of exuberance — but surely we may forgive the paradoxes for their wit, the exuberances for their beauty, and even the affectations for their harmlessness.

It seems only fair, however, that the person who loved Wilde best should have the last word:

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age… I made art a philosophy and philosophy an art… I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

— De Profundis