The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

 

This was a surprising treatise on beauty, and the manner in which it is distorted by sin. 

The opening preface included a few nuggets that captured my interest immediately, and caused me to choose this book over a few others I was debating reading at the moment:

• The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
• Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
• There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.  Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
• No artist desires to prove anything.
• No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
• It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. 
• The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

The more I read, the more I find that I’m trying less to understand if I think the writer or the book is ‘right’, and I’m endeavouring more to simply look intelligently at what is written and glean some new light, or new perspective, on my own thoughts and life.  (There are some books that are sordid or ugly, and they poison the mind even in a small way. Those I set aside the moment the realisation comes upon me, because there will be no good or beauty to be gleaned from something that has set itself out to destroy, or to describe destruction in an ugly way.)

The rough story of Dorian Gray is that of a beautiful, almost a young Greek god of a man, whose portrait is painted.  He stands before it and utters the wish that he might always be so beautiful, and that only the portrait itself would reflect the passing of the years.  “For that – for that – I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” the young Dorian cries.

And over the years it is so.  What fascinates me is the resulting effect on those who relate to this young man.  They cannot believe any atrocities of him, any sins, because one look at his young, glorious, untroubled face, and their minds are soothed.  “Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them.”  Sin and evil are always, eventually, reflected in the face.  Even just a cruel twist of the lips, or a ‘something’ in the eyes, but those whose souls are cruel cannot reflect a purity and innocence to the world – truly the soul shines out of the eyes, and the face.  Dorian cheats this rule, but as always with rule exceptions, there are effects he did not imagine.  He longs to be pure and beautiful inside, but when he makes brave resolutions, he is falsely comforted by his own visage and beauty. 

The portrait, as he wished, takes on all the ugliness of his own soul, and Dorian has a lifelong fascination with it – going days or months hardly thinking of it, and then suddenly possessed with a fierce desire to see it, in a vain hope that the beauty will, somehow, return.  Even when he makes a noble sacrifice and rushes to the painting with a desire to see change, he is horrified to discover that there is “no change, save that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome – more loathsome, if possible, than before.” 

I was struck by the constant references to art and beauty – the author has a true passion for it, and a real understanding that true beauty cannot exist hand in hand with evil, or with sin.  There are passages without number detailing Dorian Gray’s search for beauty in the world around him – in jewelry, and tapestries, and music, and perfumes.  You feel swept away reading about “the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates, and stitched over with iridescent beetles’ wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from their transparency are known in the east as ‘woven air’.”  His descriptions are like few I’ve read before – here are just a few of the phrases that caught at the edge of my mind:

“The light shook and splintered in the puddles.”

“The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl.”

“Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. The colours faded wearily out of things.”

There are more, many more…but to go on would prevent the need for you to read the book in its entirety, and there is nothing like reading the fullness of a book to come away with a real understanding of its heart and soul.  Be aware as you read it that you may be holding a mirror up to your own soul.