The Picture Of Dorian Gray (30 page)

5
In the huge gilt Venetian lantern… It was certainly strange
: Wilde greatly extended and embellished this passage in 1891, significantly heightening the dramatic effect of this key moment in the narrative.

1
Was there some subtle affinity… what that soul thought, they realized
: The speculations found in this passage had originally been statements. The typescript had originally stated that ‘there was some subtle affinity’ and ‘what the soul thought, they realized’, but Wilde adopted this more speculative tone when he amended the typescript in 1890.

2
Patti
: Adelina Patti (1843–1919), a famous singer.

3
Imust sow poppies in my garden… I had buried my romance in abed of asphodel
: Both flowers are associated with death and the underworld of Greek mythology. Asphodels were planted on graves, and the groves of Hades were known as the plains of Asphodel. Poppies were associated with Ceres, corn goddess, but also mother of Persephone, reluctant wife of the king of the underworld. Dorian’s claim that he will sow poppies in his garden may point to the fact that he later turns to opium (made from poppies) in pursuit of forgetfulness.

4
Conscience makes egotists of us all
: An adaptation of Hamlet’s line, ‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all’
(Hamlet
, III. i).

5
Webster… Ford… Tourneur
: John Webster (1578?–1632?), John Ford (1586?–1639) and Cyril Tourneur (1575?–1626) were tragedians who flourished at the time of James I. Their plays are characterized by violent plots, usually centring on revenge by the most elaborate means.

6
Poor Sibyl!… and looked again at the picture
: Wilde added this paragraph to the typescript in 1890.

7
For a moment he thought of praying… Why inquire too closely into it?
: Wilde added
this paragraph to the typescript in 1890, introducing one of the many passages of ‘scientific’ speculation which increased with the various revisions to his novel.

1
Gautier
: Theophile Gautier (1811–72), poet and novelist, whose Preface to his novel
Mademoiselle de Maupin
(a highly ornate tale of lesbianism and cross-dressing, published in 1834) articulated the principle of ‘art for art’s sake’, providing a rallying cry for writers from Baudelaire to Wilde. Wilde greatly admired Gautier, and often referred to his works.

2
Marlow
: Wilde had originally spelt this town in Buckinghamshire ‘Marlowe’, perhaps after the homosexual poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe (1564–93). This may of course be merely a typo, missed by Wilde and his editor, and corrected in 1891. However, the reference to the two men being ‘down at Marlowe together’ does seem somewhat gratuitous in this context, and may be a sly homoerotic reference.

3
The painter felt strangely moved
: Wilde had originally written ‘Hallward felt strangely moved. Rugged and straightforward as he was, there was something in his nature that was purely feminine in its tenderness’, but deleted these lines in 1891.

4
Georges Petit… Rue de Sèze
: A Parisian gallery opened in 1882 which promoted painters like Renoir, Sisley, Boudin and Whistler.

5
Dorian, from the moment I met you…
: In the 1890 version this confession began, ‘It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend.’ Wilde had added ‘of feeling’, and his editor changed ‘should ever give’ to ‘usually’ at typescript stage. See the Introduction for a discussion of the changes Wilde made to this passage.

6
I had drawn you as Paris… the marvel of your own face
: This passage originally appeared in a different form in the first chapter of the 1890 edition, when Basil tells Lord Henry about his new model. Paris was the son of Priam, king of Troy, and carried off Helen, the wife of Menelaus, thus causing the Trojan war, narrated in Homer’s
Iliad.
In Greek mythology Adonis was a youth of exceptional beauty, beloved of Aphrodite, goddess of love; he was killed by a boar while hunting. Antinou¨s, a favourite of the emperor Hadrian, drowned in the Nile. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection in a woodland pool.

7
every flake and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret
: Wilde’s editor at
Lippincott’s
deleted the sentence ‘There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion’ that originally followed here.
But that was all
: Wilde cancelled the line ‘He felt no romance for him’ which followed here in the typescript.

8
But that was all
: Wilde cancelled the line ‘He felt no romance for him’ which followed here in the typescript.

9
really influenced my art
: Wilde had originally written ‘You have been the one person in my life of whom I have been really fond. I don’t suppose I shall often see you again. No, there is no use our meeting.’ He cancelled the last sentence in 1890, and amended the first part in 1891.

10
in a friendship so coloured by romance
: Wilde’s editor at
Lippincott’s
cancelled the line ‘something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and so sterile’ in 1890.

1
It seemed to him… Or was that merely his own fancy?
: Wilde added these lines to the typescript, introducing the first signs of the ‘paranoia’ that starts to develop in Dorian, which Wilde heightened as he revised the book in 1891. In 1891 he also cut some comic business with the housekeeper Leaf, which had shown a more human side to Dorian.

2
Michael Angelo… and Shakespeare himself
: Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), French essayist; Johann Winckelmann (1717–68), an art historian who influenced the Classicism of Goethe and Schiller. Wilde made a similar connection between these figures and their supposed adoption of an idealized form of homosexual love in his second trial at the Old Bailey in April 1895. The prosecution used some letters Wilde had written to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, and some poems the latter had published in a journal called the
Chameleon
, fastening on a line of a poem called ‘Two Loves’ which referred to ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’. Asked if this meant ‘unnatural love’, Wilde replied:

‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name’, and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.
That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.’ This speech was met with loud applause, mingled with some hisses. (Hyde,
The Trials of Oscar Wilde
(1948), 236.)

3
Fonthill
: Fonthill Abbey was the ambitious, if not outrageous, Gothic architectural fantasy of William Beckford, which was built in 1796 and collapsed (under the sheer weight of its extravagance) in 1825, although most of the extraordinary collection of
objets d’arthad
been sold off in 1822. Beckford’s life of scandalous homosexual extravagance compelled him to live in seclusion and exile.

4
I don’t go in much at present for religious art
: Understandably, for a man who had just seen his own soul staring at him from a canvas.

5
I am afraid it is rather heavy
: This had originally been the occasion for a rather poor joke about modern art. Wilde changed it at typescript to a more serious reference to the psychological burden that the painted conscience forced Dorian to carry around with him: ‘a terrible load to carry’; but in 1891 he changed the tone again to the matter-of-fact statement retained here.

6
or found beneath a pillow a withered flower or a shred of crumpled lace
: Wilde added this final sentence to the typescript, introducing a heterosexual suggestion to what might otherwise have been too ambiguous.

7
It was the strangest book that he had ever read
: This book is sometimes identified as Joris Karl Huysmans’s
A Rebours
(‘against nature’, or ‘against the grain’; 1884). In 1892 Wilde wrote that the book was ‘partly suggested by Huysmans’s
A Rebours
… It is a fantastic variation on Huysmans’s over-realistic study of the artistic temperament in our inartistic age’ (letter to E. W. Pratt, in Hart-Davies,
Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde
(1979), 116), and repeated this suggestion when he stood in the Old Bailey in April 1895 (see Hyde,
Trials
, 130). Wilde greatly admired Huysmans’s novel, which recorded the strange hedonistic, aesthetic and sexual experiments, and eventual physical collapse, of an aristocratic Parisian recluse. Many of Dorian’s own experiments in pleasure and art are modelled on Des Esseintes, the hero of Huysmans’s novel, as is the ‘scientific’ and experimental approach Lord Henry adopts to experience. However, the book is only partly modelled on Huysmans’s ‘breviary of Decadence’. Wilde had originally given this book a fictitious title and author,
Le Secret de Raoulpar Catulle Sarrazin
, but cancelled this in the typescript, wisely shrouding the book in mystery, hinting at rather than specifying a number of likely candidates.

8
finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes
: Symbolism in poetry was never organized into a ‘school’ as such, but centred around the work of Paul Verlaine (1844–96) and Stephane Mallarme (1842–98), and the dramatist Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838–89). It was characterized by formal and linguistic experiment, mysticism and the evocation of moods and feelings through the
concentration on objects or natural phenomena. Many of the poets and painters identified as ‘Symbolists’ were admired by Des Esseintes, and analysed in Huysmans’s book. Originally Wilde had characterized the work as
‘Deca-dent
, but changed this to ‘
Symboliste
’ in 1891, perhaps in response to the review that accused
Dorian Gray
of being ‘spawned from the leprous literature of the French
Decadents-
a poisonous book’ (Mason, 65). The terms associated with this curious book –jewelled, monstrous, morbid, poisonous, malady – evoke the key tones from the ‘Decadent’ palette. Arthur Symons, the poet and critic, published a study of these poets in 1893 entitled ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, which he, like Wilde, changed to ‘Symbolist’ when he revised it in 1898, perhaps as a consequence of Wilde’s downfall, when he was called the ‘high priest of the Decadents’.

1
to ‘make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty’
: A line quoted by the art critic Walter Pater in his novel
Marius the Epicurean
(1885), which does not in fact come from Dante (Ackroyd).

2
Dandyism
: Dandyism as a code of dress and conduct derived from Regency days, and the extraordinary influence of George ‘Beau’ Brummell (1778– 184.0), companion and sartorial adviser to George IV when Regent. Wilde’s description of Dorian’s influence on young men who would copy his style and seek guidance on the wearing of a jewel or a necktie is modelled on Brummell’s own function in his heyday. Dandyism survived in the bohemian circles of Paris, and was typified by the attitude of Charles Baudelaire, who adopted dandyism in his revolt against bourgeois mediocrity. The dandy’s clothes betoken his contempt for conformity. As a young man Wilde often cultivated dandyism, seeking to cause a sensation with some of the outfits he designed for some of his public appearances.

3
the author of the ‘Satyricon’
: Petronius Arbiter, who acted as Nero’s ‘judge of taste’. The
Satyricon
is a Latin novel which has survived in a fragment and which is attributed to him. Petronius is Des Esseintes’ favourite Latin author.

4
element of strangeness that is so essential to romance
: Echoes Walter Pater’s claim that ‘It is the addition of strangeness to beauty, that constitutes the romantic character in art’ (‘Romanticism’, 1876).

5
antinomianism
: Being exempt from the law of God.

6
Darwinismus movement in Germany
: Versions of Darwin’s theories were highly influential in Germany, where scientists like Ernst Haeckel elaborated on his theories and applied them to diverse areas of physiology. This reference
reinforces the theme of physiological determinism that is prevalent in the novel; here Dorian is his own psychologist.

7
And so he would now study perfumes
: Dorian’s various enthusiasms delineated at great length and detail in this chapter owe much to Huysmans’s novel, where Des Esseintes pursues similar, and even more elaborate, schemes and experiments.