So art and morality, a few days after Wilde was convicted of being, quote, the centre of a circle of extensive corruption amongst young men of the most hideous kind, the following diatribe was printed against walls and artists of his kind in the Daily Telegraph. A nation prospers and profits by precisely those national qualities which these innovators deride and abjure.
It goes swiftly to wreck and decay by precisely that brilliant corruption of which we have just had the exposure and demonstration. All the good literature and the noble art in our and other countries has been saying moral and serious in its object.
Nor can life be wholesomely lived under the guidance of brilliant paradoxes and corrosive epigrams to those who know how to observe this man, Wild and the act of his defence condemned himself and his system by his vanity, egotism, artificiality and distorted perceptions before the judge and jury had pronounced upon him the indirect sentence which eliminates him from the society he has disgraced.
We shall have purchased the pain and shame of such an exhibition at a price perhaps not too high if it lead the youth of our generation, on the one hand, to grave thoughts of duty and propriety and the public on the other, to a sterner impatience with those who, under the name of art or some other pretence, insidiously poisoned our stage, our literature, our drama and the outskirts of our press.
If you note that the danger that Wilde and artists of his ilk are described as posing to the public is not here their sexuality or their sexual practises, but rather the danger of a literary style that is not saying a moral and serious in its object, but rather consists of brilliant epigrams and corrosive paradoxes and this particular voice of moral outrage and a moral outrage about literary style and approach.
It was first loudly raised in response to the first publication, the Lippincott publication of The Picture of Dorian Grey, which appeared in Lipin Cuts monthly magazine in 1890. And again, the objections were not just to the subject matter, but very importantly to the style in which the book was written. So the following appeared in the Daily Chronicle, dullness and other features of Lippincott.
This month, the element in it that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr. Oscar Wilde Story of the Picture of Dorian Grey. It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadence, a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction, a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be horrible and fascinating.
But for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophising and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity, which is all over Mr. Wald's elaborate Wall Street aestheticism and intrusively cheap scholarship.
So in both cases, what you have is an attack upon the style, the literary style and texture and approach of both works flippancy, frivolity, insincerity, theatricality are what are being objected to, the sense in which there is not a moral and serious tone being adopted, that you can't read them in this clear, directed way.
Now that this idea of purpose is a serious purpose of style as something dangerous and corrosive, it's actually there all the way through to the trials in nineteen ninety five. So in the first trial, which was not a trial of wild, but rather the trial of the Marquis of Queensbury.
Prosecuted by Wilde for libel when he left the card addressed to Oscar Wilde, posing fundamental posing as sodomite and wild, ended up being rather than it being Queensberry under trial because the evidence that Queensborough and his lawyers brought forward, it was much more wild on the trial in that first trial already. And part of what Wilde was tried on was not just what he did, what perhaps happened in hotel rooms and restaurants and all sorts of things.
But about his writings, most specifically the aphorisms and epigrams collected as phrases and philosophies for the use of the young and picture of Dorian Grey, both of which were used that Sir Edward Kosten Democracy Queen's defence lawyer tried to use these as evidence of wild. Having a project of trying to corrupt the young so that his literature was immoral. Was the argument within the court case just in the same way as he himself was supposedly going out to corrupt the corrupt, the young?
So while trying to corrupt the young reader, and while the way in which Wilde fought back against these accusations are hugely useful, the transcripts of the trial, the collected together of that first trial under the fantastic title title of the Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquis, put together by Merlin Holland. And I'm going to give you a few snippets from that trial as an indication of how well fought back against these accusations of immorality,
the grounds and the logic of what he was saying. So when asked about the possibility that his work might have an immoral effect on the reader, Wilde responded, I do my own work in writing a plot, a book and a thing. I am concerned entirely with literature, that is with art. The aim is not to do good or to do evil, but to try and make a thing that will have some quality of beauty that is to be attained or in the form of beauty or of wit or amount of wit or emotion.
Now, and Carson, the prosecuting the defence attorney, goes on to ask him about his aphorisms in the face and philosophy. The young, such as wickedness, is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others and wealth in question.
Do you think this is true while dancers? I rarely think that anything I write is true costs and says nothing you write is ever true and wild respons not true in the sense of correspondence to fact, to represent wilful moods, a paradox of fun, nonsense of anything at all, but not true in the actual sense of correspondence to actual facts of life. Certainly not. I should be very sorry to think it. And Coxsone carries on, he pushes.
And it's very it's also useful for looking at the quality that what I said about Wilde compressing ideas into epigrams or using paradoxes while very precisely responds to different of these aphorisms in different ways. So challenged on religions die when they prove to be true. Waltz's I hold to that and says it is a suggestion towards the philosophy of the absorption of religion into science. It is too big a question to go into now.
So that's an example of one where he's compressed the entire system of thought into one kind of witty epigram he's then challenged on. Do you think that was a safe axiom to put forward as a phrase and philosophy for the use of the young, to which Wilde replies, most stimulating of thought, I should say, if one tells the truth, one is sure, sure, sooner or later to be found out, which well describes as a very pleasing paradox.
But I don't set any store by it as an axiom. And Carson pushes, do you think it was a good educational axiom for the young? And while replies, anything that stimulates thought in people of any age is good for them and nothing that stimulates thought, yes, anything whether moral or immoral thought is never either one or the other responds world. So very, very importantly, what he's doing here is separating what he separates throughout.
For example, the preface to Dorian Grey, the aesthetic and the ethical. So the aesthetic is the therapeutic sphere. Beauty for art. Ethics is a sphere of morality and the two are different. They may overlap, but they are distinct. And you're not meant to use the standards of one to apply to the other. And very importantly, thought is different from action. You do not have morality in thought. Morality belongs to actions and possibly emotions, but not to thwart.
Free range of thought is not in itself moral or immoral. And in that sense, while under cross-examination stands absolutely by the the axiom set forth in the preface to Dorian Grey, where, for example, he argues that there is no such thing as an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. In other words, you judge them by aesthetic, not by ethical standards.
So similarly, Carlson again challenges him, saying a well-written book putting forth sort of mystical views might be a good book and wild replies. No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists. There are no views in the work of art.
And Carson Carrison tried to argue that picture of Dorian Grey could be seen as a sort of mythical book and Wild responds, well, the views of Philistines, people who are ignorant on art are utterly unaccountable and they may misinterpret things. And that's absolutely not my concern whatsoever, he says. What concerns me in my art is my view and my feeling and why I made it. I don't care to pentz what other people think about it.
And Carson continues saying, The affection and love that is pictured of the artist towards Dorian Grey in this book of yours might lead an ordinary individual to believe it had a sort of mythical tendency, might it not, to which rather responds, I have no knowledge of the ordinary individual and Carson. Oh, I see. But you do. But you do not prevent the ordinary individual from buying your book and wild replies. I have never discouraged them of what you have impotently here throughout that.
There's a kind of clear pattern, both the division of the aesthetic and the ethic ethical, but also the emphasis upon art being created by the artist for the artist, not with an intention upon the reader, not with the ability that the interpretation put upon. The work of art is entirely incalculable and reasonably random and not the concern of the artist the artist is creating for themselves. In that sense, that moral judgements, good, bad, corrupting, improving, ennobling, educative.
And so while this is not valid criteria for art, they're not a way of judging it or or approaching it or valuing it. Exactly as he says in the preface. No artist has ethical sympathy's and ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. And very importantly, he separates himself with authorial responsibility for how a book is read. Now, on the basis of all of that, it might make the mistake of trying to type while very much as Carson did or the trials did,
as an immoral or an amoral writer. Whereas actually, well, this hugely interested in morality. You could see his works as kind of debates around morality. But remember that what wild means by morality is not obedience. So the idea that morality means being obedient to the rules that have been established for your culture, for your society, for your tribe, world sees that as a form, as he has some. That's a very neat sort of description of this from Lord Henry Watson and Dorian Grey.
Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man to accept the standard of his age is a form of the greatest immorality. In other words, morality as well tends to put it forward in an active sense.
Morality is the ability to think things through for yourself. To debate them to take an active interest in world where obedience is merely a form of passivity and again where Wilde is saying so much of his society is corrupt, to be obedient to that society is not necessarily to be good or to be moral. So, again, think of there are many societies you can probably think of where obedience towards them. Israeli collusion with another form of immorality.
Now, how well does this this idea that what he does with his writings, debate on morality, is to destabilise moral certainties, to unsettle the reader, to challenge tradition's absolutes, precepts and so on, leaving the reader disoriented and forced to think for themselves?
In this sense, world is very, very close, I think, to the method used by George Bernard Shaw, his kind of Irish contemporary, who, again, is very clearly seen as somebody who's trying to provoke a kind of active moral and political sense in his readers and audiences.
While this is a whole range of different methods to achieve this one is writing a tale or a seed or a moment that seems to offer a very, very clear moral and then setting up another tale or scene that completely destabilises, that undermines and challenges it. So in that sense, you get tails with contradictory tales set up against them.
Another is to couch his his essays and his plays and so on in dialogue form, one voice arguing against another, and where it's impossible to establish where authority lies, be very, very wary of finding an authorial voice in world works. It's no accident that he's using the dialogue form in that sense.
Another one is where he doesn't use multiple voices, but he uses a very, very unstable voice, a very playful, provocative, exaggerated comic, ironic, satiric, shifting voice, which again makes it very hard to work out purpose. Exactly that voice that's condemned in those quotes I gave you earlier as theatrical, insincere, say, a frivolous insult.
Another one he does is using this lack of closure look very significantly at the end of his works, the number of times they destabilise what seems to have been established already or they offer no kind of closure at all, a kind of lack of direction, a lack of sense of how you're meant to conclude upon it. And very importantly, the ways in which he undermines orthodoxy very often done through undermining genre and genre expectations,
leaving you unclear on how you're meant to interpret. Now the works as well as the most often looked at as offering some kind of moral precepts. And, you know, clearly being moral tales tend to be the fairy tales, often with the idea that because they're written for children, they must be educative and they must be relatively simple and wild. Certainly described as fairy tales at different points as being written for children or being written, quote, for child like people from 18 to 80.
Now, with world, I wouldn't take it from his version of children and sons and what he's seen of children, that writing for children means that it's simple and there are predictable interpretations. So one of my favourite tales from him is when he talks about his son Cyril at the age of something like eight, came up to him and said, what do you dream of? And well thought this was a moment for.
So he sort of took a deep breath and he said, I dream of giants who live in castles and dragons with green scales and diamonds for eyes and legs. And he carried on like this. And the more extravagant he grew, the more uninterested Sarah looked so well, became more extravagant. The Dragons are quite green and gold claws, and that until Cyril was looking openly bored, which point well turned around and said, Well, what do you dream of?
And Cyril got this beatific expression of pure revelation on his face and he said, I dream of pigs. And while this is a tale against himself, that thing about the unpredictability of what a child values, that kind of deflation called keep that in mind. As you look at the fairy tales, I think it's a kind of useful tale to bring in bringing contact with them.
So what you get this idea of the child audience in one side or the childlike audience, what you've got within, for example, that first collection, The Happy Prince and other tales.
There are various tales there which seem to tell an absolutely straightforward moral, a moral of self-sacrifice, a moral of the inequality of wealth in that society and the importance of Christian self-sacrifice, of self-sacrifice and the rich giving up what they have or giving up some of what they have to help the poor and being rewarded in heaven.
It works perfectly for essentially socialist [INAUDIBLE] in the Happy Prince, the title story, it works for The Selfish Giant, probably the tale of Wealth that's the most anthologised, its most straightforward. It's most like to be in in just about any anthology of world writings. But then look at some of the other tales next to those in that collection.
So in the Nightengale in the rose, a young student is in love with a woman who won't take any notice of her love of him, and who says they will only listen to you if you can give me the most perfect rose and the nightingale hears this and feels very sorry for the lovelorn student and finds out the only way to make a perfect rose is to sing while piercing her her heart on the thorn.
So the nightingale does that and produces, as she dies, produces the most perfect rose ever and the student finds this rose not realising it has anything to do with dead birds over there and presents it to his lover. And his lover goes, What do I want with a rose? This other love is offering me diamonds. I don't want it. It when Stephen goes, Oh God, women love, who cares? Back to my books and that the dead nightingale. So that makes self-sacrifice really worth it, doesn't it?
And then you get another tale in that collection. The devoted friend in which little Hans gives up everything he has to the Rich Miller. He's completely selfless and gives up all his money and all these earnings and everything else. And he ends up dying of cold and starvation and all the rest of it and sacrificing himself to the miller. And not only does the mill not appreciate it, but the mill actually complains about little, hence its selfishness.
And then just to further complicate the story, it's framed by the fact that it's been told by animals about humans. So in fairy tales are humans tell anthropomorphise stories about animals with wild instead has animals telling anthurium well, anthropomorphise, whatever the animal is telling stories about humans and the animal's responses are so the water rat. So the story's been told by the linnet and well said the wolf rat after a long pause.
Well, that's the end, said the linnet. Well, what became of the Miller Ausable threat? Oh, I really don't know, replied the Linnett. I'm sure I don't care. It is quite evident that you have no sympathy in your nature, said the water rat. I'm afraid you don't quite see the moral of the story. Remarkable to limit what screen the water at the moral. Do you mean to say that story had a moral certainly set the limit.
Well, really, said the water rat in a very angry manner. I think you should have told me that before you began. If you had done so, I would certainly not have listened to you. In fact, I should have said poo like the critic. However, I can say it now. So he shouted out poo at the top of his voice, gave a whisker of his tail and went back into his hole. And how do you like water rat? Ask the duck who came paddling up some minutes afterwards.
He has a great many good points, but for my own part I have a mother's feelings and I can never look at a confirmed bachelor without tears coming into my eyes. I'm afraid I'm rather annoyed him answer the limit. The fact is, I told him a story with a moral. Ah, that is a very dangerous thing to do, said the duck, and I quite agree with her. That framed by the author that comes in at the end and says so, so what is the moral of that tale?
So in that set and then you have right on the end, you've got then you've got the whole the remarkable rocket attack, which has such a sort of irony, satirical voice. Absolutely unclear what you're meant to gather from this and where the point of view is.
So in that sense, if you look at all those stories together of a pro self-sacrifice or are they satirising self-sacrifice, some of them are framed where those who sacrifice for someone else are rewarded and if not on earth and in heaven, others, it seems to be about the foolishness and the emptiness of that and that sense. You can't you can read individual stories perhaps of the moral, but certainly not within a collection.
And even reading them individually, different things within the tales can destabilise that. So, for example, one of the standard forms in which the tales are told is characters are relatively flat. They've got names like the Happy Prince, the young king, the devoted friend, the remarkable rocket.
And otherwise they each get one adjective. They're pretty much uninterest interest, whereas the prose spends a huge amount of time, very often giving a very kind of jewelled, aesthetic sized, highly textured description of objects or things or moments. They're not built into some kind of psychologise deep feeling in that sense. So there's a difficulty on reading those stories with a sense of beauty coming in any sense, coming together with a sense of morality and a sense of human sympathy.
Put that in contrast with, say, George Eliot or Dickens's ways in which he develops models where very, very closely a human sympathy fit in with the politics being advocated and aesthetic qualities of beauty and attractiveness and all the rest of it are very often brought together with how you're meant to be feeling in different ways. So, by contrast, often the aestheticism and wild stories is a kind of further complicating factor.
So, for example, when the nightingale dies, so the nightingale creates this beautiful rose through self-sacrifice and the moment when the nightingale sings just as she dies. There's a moment when the nightingale gives out this gorgeous song which produces as she dies. And then she gave one last burst of music. The White Moon heard it and she forgot the dawn and lingered on in the sky. The red rose heard it, and it trembled all over with ecstasy and opened its petals to the cold.
Morning air echo bore it to her purple cavern in the hills and woke the sleeping shepherds from their dreams. It floated through the reeds of the river, and they carried its message out to the sea. So wonderful. So in that sense, that moment, it's not ionised. It's actually almost kind of orgasmically beautiful. So that moment of self for all the creation of the roads, becomes an incredibly beautiful moment in that tale, but not to any clear purpose within the rest of the framework of the tale.
In other words, there are all sorts of different styles not working together towards one point, but working to produce the kind of very a huge unevenness and indeterminacy of tone. Similarly, if you look and once you get to the second collection of tales, when you get to the House of Pomegranates gets even more complicated. So House of Pomegranates was sold much more as an aesthetic work, much less with illustrations in book form and cover and so on to look like a work for children.
Much more a kind of aesthetic work of a kind of expensive high end of the art market. And within those the tales collected there, some of them have a far more complex and almost sort of labyrinthine structure. So, for example, the fisherman and his soul, I mean, it breaks all those ideas of soul selling or doing a deal to lose your soul in the fisherman's soul is cut from him with the help of the witch because he's in love with the mermaid and can't,
you know, go and join her with a soul. And then the soul having been cut loose, the soul goes off and has adventures and comes back and tries to corrupt the fisherman who cut the soul off from him. Have you ever come across that before? In other words, it kind of it doesn't fit with any of those kind of precepts and morals that you're used to within that genre of of separating soul from body or selling of soul or anything like that.
Similarly, within those stories, there's a sense in which the Christianity and the magic, the paganism, the values of sympathy and human emotion, none of those come in to any kind of play, a combination at any point. That's sort of several value systems working in that tale, not directly against each other, but never joining together. So again, what moral scheme, what system of moral or sympathetic political human values argument to read that story within.
Then on the destabilizer ending, you have a wonderful tale like the Starchild, which seems to have an absolutely clear moral. So the Starchild starts off mean beautiful. I mean, and then sort of. Which then turns the child ugly and, well, it's ugly, it learns to be more generous and kind and help everybody, and then it gets to be beautiful again and then it becomes king and and king. There is peace and plenty in the land. Yet he ruled not long.
So great had been his suffering and so bitter, the fire of his testing for after the space of three years he died and he who came after ruled evely what's so what you've got is something where it's gone from the fairytale. OK, he's now he's beautiful. He's learnt to be good, everything's fine. But of course that seriously takes its toll on its constitution and therefore he dies early and then the next day his uncle or whatever comes in and completely messes it up.
Do you see what I mean, and that comes right in the last sentence of the whole tale and it just leaves, are we working within a fairy tale world of the good things happening, the bad home happily? Or are we living in a working in a realistic genre of naturalistic cause and effect and physiological damage caused by early life suffering the two? Yeah. So he suddenly hops from one genre to another. And that destabilises all the assumptions you're working on as you're reading within one genre.
He does this constantly. So particularly when you come to that's what a collected together is, the stories rather than fairy tales in particular. Look at Lord Arthur Savile's crime, which is subtitled A Study of Duty Now Within Law that assembles crime. What happens is young Lord Arthur Saville, who is engaged to a beautiful Sybil Merton, goes to a party and has his Palm read, and Pooja's the artist who reads his palm sees in it that he is destined to commit murder.
And being a very noble and self sacrificing an honourable young man, he realises that it is his duty to commit this murder before he marries Sybil because it would be utterly unfair to marry her with this hanging over him so it might ruin her life or might ruin their marriage. So he is he knuckle down and selects a victim as a good young man and selects his ancient aunt, ancient second cousin or whatever, Lady Clare, and he goes to a poison.
He finds out all about poison and he gets a little bonbon made. It looks like a little capsule, the gelatine capsule that will poison her and gives it to her in a little bonnier, little sweet box and tells of the next time she has heartburn, she should take it and he goes away and he kind of breaks off. He says his fiancee, the marriage must wait and he goes off and he waits and reads all the newspapers waiting to hear of his aunt's death.
And finally, news of his death comes and he's greatly relieved and he's done his duty and all the rest of it and he comes back. But as he goes through and chief and gives him some money and her will and he feels very bad. But when he goes to visit her house, he finds the Bombadier with the sweet still in it. And he didn't kill her. She died of natural causes. So he has a terrible, terrible, you know, the world against him and all the rest of it.
But being a really good young man, he nuckols down again and selects another victim and he decides it should be the dean of Chichester, another distant relative of his. And he goes off, he talks to some anarchist Russian friends of his and gets the address of a revolution, a maker of bombs. And he goes to see this maker of bombs and the maker of bombs asked him about his having cookoff is the name of this manufacture of explosives,
and he asked him what his political causes and so on. And I assure you, said Lord Usera, there is nothing to do with the police at all. In fact, the clock he wants an explosive clock is intended for the dean of Chichester, the Army. I had no idea you felt so strongly about religion, Lord Arthur. Few young people do nowadays. I'm afraid you overrate me having Cookoff, said Lord Arthur blushing. The fact is, I know nothing about theology.
It is a purely private matter, then a purely private having. Callcott shrugged his shoulders and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a cake of dynamite about the size of a penny and a pretty little French clock, surmounted by normally a figure of liberty trampling on the hydra of despotism. And he explains how the mechanism works and talked to him and all the rest of it. And then and now, said Lord Arthur, rising from his seat. Pray let me know how much I am in.
Your debt is a small matter, Lord Arthur, that I do not care to make any charge. The dynamite comes to seven and sixpence. The clock will be three pounds ten and the carriage about five shillings. I am only too pleased to oblige a friend of movil off, but your trouble having cloth eyes is nothing. It is a pleasure to me. I do not work for money. I live entirely for art. Lord Arthur lay down four pounds, two and six on the table and thank the little German for its kindness.
And having succeeded in declining an invitation to meet some anarchists at to meet tea on the following Saturday left the house and went off to the park. So once again, he waits for a long time to sit here. Is this. The Dean has exploded as proper and he has committed this crime as he is meant to. But after. Well, there's no news in the papers at all. No news of explosions in Chichester and Lord of the Felt, the attempt must have failed.
It was a terrible blow to him. And for a time he was quite unnerved. Having Cookoff, whom he went to see the next day, was full of elaborate apologies and offered to supply him with another clock free of charge or with a case of nitroglycerine at cost price. But he had lost all faith in explosives and having cooked himself, acknowledged that everything is so adulterated nowadays that even dynamite can hardly be got in a pure condition.
The little German, however, while admitting that something must have gone wrong with machinery, was not without hope that the clock might still go off. And in the case of a barometer he had once sent to the military governor at Odessa, which though time to explode in ten days, had not done so for something like three months, it was quite true that when it did go off, it merely succeeded in blowing a housemaid to Athens. The governor having gone out of town six weeks before.
But at least it showed that dynamite as a destructive force was when under the control of machinery, a powerful, though somewhat unpunctual agent. Lord Arthur was a little consoled by this reflection, but even here he was destined to disappointment. And a few days later. He received a letter from one of his cousins, the daughter of this dean of Chichester, which contains the following account, we have had great fun of a clock that an unknown admirer and papa.
Last Thursday, it arrived in a wooden box from London, carriage paid and papa feels it must have been sent by someone who has read his remarkable servant. So Serban is Licence Liberty four on the top of the clock was a figure of a woman with what Papa said was a cap of liberty on her head. I didn't think it very becoming myself, but papa said it was historical. So I suppose it's all right.
Parker unpacked it and Papa put it on the mantelpiece in the library and we were all sitting there on Friday morning when just this clock struck 12:00. We had a whirring noise, a little puff of smoke came out from the pedestal. The figure and the goddess liberty fell off a broken nose on the fender. Maria was quite alarmed, but it looked so ridiculous that James and I went off in fits of laughter.
And even papa was amused. When we examined it, we found a sort of alarm clock and that if you set it to a particular hour and put some gunpowder in the cap under a little hammer, it went off whenever we wanted, Papa said. It must not remain in the library. It made a noise. So Reggie carried it away to the school room and does nothing but have small explosions all day long. Do you think Arthur would like one for a wedding present? I suppose they're quite fashionable in London.
Papa said they should do a great deal of good as they show that liberty can't last and must fall down. Papa says liberty was invented at the time of the French Revolution. How terrible that seems and which point Arthur is completely devastated by this. All his good intentions coming to nothing. He got upstairs. He flung himself on the sofa, his eyes filled with tears. He had done his best to commit this murder, but on both occasions he had failed.
And through no fault of his own, he had tried to do his duty. But it seemed as if destiny herself had turned traitor. He was oppressed with a sense of the business, of good intentions, of the futility of trying to be fine. And he then goes wandering alone through the night of London and all the rest of it until he bumped into the Carment Podger beside the embankment.
It was Mr Pooja's the Kahraman artist. No one could mistake the fat, flabby face, the golden spectacles, the sickly feeble smile, the sensual mouth. Lord Arthur stopped. A brilliant idea flashed across him, and he still softly up behind. In a moment he had seised Mr Podger by the legs and flung him into the Thames. That was a course, a heavy splash, and all was still Lord.
Arthur looked anxiously over but could see nothing of the car omontys but a tall hat pirouetting and an eddy of moonlit water. And there we are. The murder was committed, Lord Arthur Murray is simple matter and all ends happily. What you get from quoting him at length, you get that sense of how all that it moves from satire to human beings matter. Does that matter or not? Is a matter for comedy. Is there any sort of serious irony happening in the museum?
And again, the sort of aesthetic qualities come in the ugly car is tends to destroy the beautiful eddy of water in the pirouetting cap. And that sense is an incredibly just excerpting for that and fantastically unstable narrative. Voice and fantasy unsayable the modes, the genres. It's moving between in that sense and that kind of close reading you could do with all of wild stories in that way.
Look at the cannibal ghost again. It's a tale of the ghost who can't sleep, who's forever tortured but for the crime he committed in killing his wife. And yet all of the and it's a story in which materialism, spirituality is set up against each other. Virginia, the young American Puritan girl who commits some kind of sacrifice to redeem the ghost, who now goes to die to get finally get eternal peace again.
What form this sacrifice takes kind of destabilises the story because she's always blushing at the mention of it and she can't tell her husband there's a kind of weirdly slight sexual kind of all around it. But there's also the fact that to try and read it as a Christian story, a story about sacrifice and Christian redemption and evil versus spirituality and things like that, all of the evil is presented in a kind of heightened theatrical way.
So there's a point where the ghost thinks back on all the different people he's scared to death and all the rest of it. And it's absolutely in the language of nineteenth century theatre.
So with the fantastically enthusiastic egotism of the great artist, he recalled to mind his last appearances, appearances, Red Ribbon or the strangled Babe, his debut as Gaunt Gibson, the bloodsucker of Blakesley Moore and the furore hit Excited When lovely June evening by merely playing ninepins with his own bones on the lawn tennis lawn. And again when he confesses to what he's done, the crime he's committed to Virginia.
The young Puritan responds like this It is very wrong to kill anyone, said Virginia, who at times had a sweet Puritan gravity caught from some old New England ancestor. Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics response. The ghost. My wife was very plain, never had my roof properly starched. I knew nothing about cookery. So you've got that sense in which the narrative voice is distancing itself from Virginia's condemnation of the crime.
There's a kind of satirising of her very moral seriousness in comparison to the ghosts aesthetic values, which they become kind of dehumanised values. So where's your point of view? What framework you meant to be reading this story within? Not keep that in mind when you move to Dorian Grey, because Dorian Grey is doing a lot of the same kind of destabilising,
a lot of the same kind of multiple voices moving together. And a lot of the condemnation, as I said, of Dorian Grey was in the same terms as that, which greeted a lot of wild other writing, the idea that it was insincere, too theatrical, however wild. When he met this kind of criticism, he wrote, for example, the following letter, St James's Gazette, refuting the idea that the that the novel was immoral and instead by arguing that its flaw was it had too much morality.
So he wrote the poor public hearing from the authority so high as your own that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory government will no doubt rush out to it and read it. But alas, they will find it is a story with a moral and the moral. Is this all access as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment.
The painter Basil Hollywood worshipping physical beauty far too much as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Grey, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Watson seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.
Yes, there is a terrible moral injury and Dorian Grey, a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but which will be revealed to those whose minds are healthy. It is. Is it an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book. So there you have the strong moral to Dorian Grey Basil who would wash Ortolan alone and dies by the hand of one whose who to whom he's given this exaggerated sense of the value of beauty dies by the one he's misled by his idolatry.
Dorian Grey dies, trying to escape the consequences. In other words, consequences are inescapable and will come and get him in the end. And the idea that crimes leave this indelible mark somewhere. Then eventually are inscribed on Dorian Grey himself, so in that sense, he could read the book straightforwardly as having several moral frameworks and a very clear delivery of the bad end, unhappily.
But I think a real problem in trying to read that novel morally in that it sets up a sequence of moral expectations and familiar moral frameworks, which it then collapses. So, for example, the whole thing with Sybil Bain and her family, the actress that he falls in love with and her brother, who promises that anybody who lies a finger on who makes her unhappy will die for it.
And sure enough, Sybil Merton die, Sybil Bain dies, at which point the brother seems to turn into this kind of angel of vengeance, this kind of force. And it's very much within a melodramatic framework where that's the expectation. And then he got shot by mistake by somebody thinks he's a rabbit because that one goes.
And then you have another expectation, another kind of framework of expected sort of justice coming, which is where Battle Hollywood finds out, sees the picture, finds out what Dorian's been doing and begs him to repent and says, let us kneel and say the Lord's Prayer. And it's in the schoolroom, you know, so we can think back on the young person he was and all the rest of it and then stabs him in the neck and gets rid of him. So that's another kind of framework of expectation. Then collapsed.
And in that sense, you've got a sequence of those and then the expectation of repentance that comes at the end where Dorian goes off and says, no, I shall spare this young woman and I shall become good and all the rest of it. And you're thinking, oh, yeah, there's just space at the end of the novel for him to now make up for everything. And then he lets the woman off and goes back and sees the picture and it kind of looks cynical and calculating so that for a lot too.
And that one goes. So in that sense, all of those familiar frameworks for sin and redemption or punishment and consequence, all of them are raised and then almost comically collapsed suddenly within the novel, which complicates that kind of a moral reading in that sense. And another sense, the other way, think about the difference between reading for a moral and reading morally. So if you're reading morally, you're reading with a set of sort of moral expectations or a moral framework in mind.
Whereas Dorian Grey, the novel, there is no moral narrative through it. There's no narrative voice that says and then he does a dreadful thing, an awful thing, a horrible thing. Oh, it's it's nearly all from Darren's point of view. And it's morally neutral throughout, not only morally neutral, it actually asks the only way you can read that novel and enjoy it. It's actually kind of to enjoy the descriptions for their own sake.
There's long passages about jewels and carpets and tapestries and everything else which readers objected to in the Lippincott version, and while then added in vast amounts more in the 1891 novel version. So I took it totally the opposite direction. You can't read those passages without enjoying them for their own sake. You can only, in a sense, read that novel aesthetically, not morally. And in that sense, think about that, that idea of how you're reading a world place on that. Absolutely.
So one of its challenges that together with the idea of claiming there's this incredible moral to the book, he also one of his other counters. And it's really worth looking at these letters back to the press. One of the ways to read Dorian Grey, the two versions of Dorian Grey, and the preface is to read them as in a sense, a series of arguments with the provocations and responses on the subject of what is morality in literature.
So you've got the first Lippincott version, followed by an exchange of letters with the press and the endlessly writes letters going, I'm writing this letter because I'm terribly, terribly, terribly busy and I've only got time for one quick letter. And he writes about five hundred, which begin like that. So he's kind of stirring up as much stuff as he's responding to.
So you see him doing the letters to the press and then the preface, which is published individually and then more letters and then the 1891 version and then more letters. And in that sense, it's a kind of you know, it's like as soon as anything gets quiet, he prods them back into activity again. So he's one of Wald's responses in a letter to the editor of The Scots Observer.
Your review as well, admitting that the story in question is, quote, plainly the work of a man of letters, the work of one who has brains and art and style, yet suggests and apparently in all seriousness, that I have written the work in order that it should be read by the most depraved members of the criminal and illiterate classes now. So I do not suppose that the criminal and the literate classes ever read anything except newspapers.
And on the broad question of why a man of letters writes at all, let me say this. The pleasure one has in creating a work of art is a purely personal pleasure. And it is for the sake of this pleasure that one creates the artist's works with his eye on the object. Nothing else interests him. What people are likely to say does not even occur to him. He is fascinated by what he has in hand. He is indifferent to others. I write because it gives me the greatest possible artistic.
Pleasure to write, if my workplace is the few, I am gratified, if it does not, it causes me no pain. As for the mob, I have no desire to be a popular novelist. It is far too easy. It was necessary, sir, for the dramatic development of the story to surround Dorian Grey with an atmosphere of moral corruption. Otherwise, the story would have had no meaning. And the plot no issue. To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story.
I claim that he has succeeded. Each man sees his own crime and Dorian Grey what Dorian Grey sins are. No one knows he who finds them has brought them. It's a once again, just as he does in the trials and so on, he denies and importantly, as he does in the critics artist, the idea that a book if you've got a sequence, which is author, work, audience reader, there's not the idea that the author is working upon through that work of art,
trying to do something to the audience. He severs that connexion. The author works the artist's works on that work for purely for their own satisfaction. And it's a completely separate equation, that of consumption interpretation, it's an utterly arbitrary one in many ways, it's separate from the author. The author has no intention upon the reader or audience, but, well, takes it even further than that.
So it's not only that reception of the work of art is not determined by the author, the artist, but rather by the audience themselves. It's not only the reception, but actually the work of art itself. While God is it's the audience or the reader that is actually writing the content of the novel. So the more corrupt you think Dorian Grey is, the more disgusting you think his crimes are, the nastier your mind is. It's you, the drink.
And think of the way that, say, Conrad's Heart of Darkness is constructed, the way they're what Kurtz has done and why Kurtz has done it. What is the Heart of Darkness is very much about you as a reader and what you're putting there. Again, it's wild writing. It's only four years, four or five years before sorry, nine years before Heart of Darkness. But there's a similar kind of way in which it becomes self reflective upon the reader.
It's a kind of trap for the reader in the sense that while it's constructed and in that sense, where the morality is, where the moral lies, it's right back on the reader in that sense and a huge instability to the text. And that problem of how do you read Dorian Grey without letting go of your moral judgement and what framework do you read it in? And again, think about that huge number of readers who want to turn it into a more conventional novel than it is.
So I've had so many people talk about the idea that Dorian repent at the end or that there's a sort of act of suicide involved in stabbing the painting. That is not prefigured in any shape or form. It's utterly arbitrary that stabbing the painting equals stabbing himself and it all switches around. And again, think of the Starchild, that story where in the very last few seconds it flips around in the same way it's the same proportion to Dorian Grey.
No repentance, no punishment, no consequences. Dead bodies disappear as nothing more than a smell. And this is the same time. This is exactly consonant with the times that the Sherlock Holmes detective stories are coming out. So the first Holmes detective story from the fall comes out. And Lippincott, in addition, right next to Dorian Grey, that kind of constantly each other. And in Sherlock Holmes, it's all about consequences, traces.
Everything has recurrences. Nothing has in Dorian Grey until that very, very last second. So is that enough to make it a moral book? Where's the connexion between what's a do you proportion you can also different ways in which you can try and read the novel morally, you could read it as a lesson on the dangers with the aestheticism.
So it can seem to be a response to, for example, Peter's conclusion to studies in the history of the Renaissance, which Peter saw as potentially very dangerous and actually took off the second edition of studies and history and put it back on. It's the famous passage about to burn always with a gem like flame. Is success in life about cramming as much into your moments as they go in the short day before darkness and midnight?
The idea that you live intensely, you cram everything into every moment, you experience everything. Now, you could read that as a version of the kind of moral that the dangerous doctrine that's preached by Lord Henry Watson. And he can read Darrion as an aesthete. So the idea that he gets taught to only appreciate life is in terms of beauty and ugliness, to treat real life as though it's a work of art.
And he fails in seeing consequences and seeing things within a Christian framework or within a more serious framework or whatever else. That's one way you could try reading the novel. But then this problem is Dorrian, a failed aesthete. How far? He doesn't appreciate art for its intensity of moment, but he kind of collects it, like taking it off a list. How far? He's not a moral original. He's not a Morrisson. He's actually morally very conventional.
It just he goes through all the good things and then does all the wicked things according to a sort of conventional list of have done all the good and that will do all the wicked. So there's a sense in which you could see him as a flawed aesthete, not as an aesthete at all.
So it's very complex and how you might relate it in relation to aestheticism, just as there's a very close consonance between, for example, what Lord Henry Watson preaches to Dorrian and a number of things that Wilde writes about in Souleyman on socialism. But again, Lord Henry preaches one doctrine about self realisation and so on, but then doesn't follow it through in the sense of he very deliberately influences Dorien.
So self individualism is about self realisation, then influencing another and moulding them as Lord Henry does this about the greatest crime you can commit against individualism because it's refusing to let an individual be themselves, it's moulding them instead. So in that sense, there's a and then take this idea that the crime that's committed is seeing real life.
Is art the failure to see Sybil Vaine as a real human being and instead only seeing her as a kind of life as art, and this kind of turned her into an artistic work and appreciate her as an artistic work? All sounds very fine, except for the fact that throughout the novel it's incredibly difficult to separate art and life.
Right from the opening description, the very first paragraph, you have a description, for example, of the heavy perfumes and so on from the garden, the perfume from real flowers coming in in a kind of highly stylised, artificial way. Further, you then got a flock of birds flies past with the sun behind them, producing a shadow on the curtains. That looks exactly like a Japanese art design.
So right from the beginning, it's not just stylised prose, but art and life design and the natural a kind of blending seamlessly. Then there's the fact that Sybil Vaine is frankly utterly uninteresting. She's only interesting when she's acting not only Dorian, but actually, frankly, to the reader, she and her family, they're straight out of some kind of Victorian melodrama.
So her brother, James Bain is nothing, but he could have stepped off the Black-Eyed Susan or one of those other Victorian nautical melodramas. So to see him as real life, in contrast to Dorian's version of an aesthetic, it's very, very, very hard to do. So you can falsify the novel trying to assert the real against the artificial, but actually the whole novel is about that artificial itself.
So then also lots of questions about how you judge exactly what Wild's emphasising in the trials about the idea that thought and art are completely different from life. That it's about the free reign of thought within those genres, which is different from what you may or may not do within life and the consequences of it, and in that sense, the novel is destabilising all sorts of assumptions. It's challenging them.
It's putting back on the reader on how you're meant to interpret, how you're meant to read it, how you're meant to understand it. I want to leave you with just one example, an example of what I'd say is Wilde's ultimate sort of moral writing in the sense of writing that's about more or less is writing.
That's absolutely seriously about questioning, undermining, destabilising, looking at if you say moral writing, in essence, what Wilde throws back on you, it's a question of is something moral because it is written with a moral intent. Is it moral because you read it in a moral way or is it moral because it carries a moral as a message, or is it moral because it makes you act in a certain way afterwards because of its consequences?
Now, all of those are not necessarily the same thing they might be, but what tends to emphasise in this arbitrariness of interpretation and consequences that he plays with so often that they can be very different things. So the doer of good, I'll just give you the good as very obviously intention with certain. Biblical texts and again, in day profundity, he refers to the Bible as those poems in prose.
That's how he describes the New Testament, the Gospels, and he's always talking about the Bible in these kind of aesthetic terms so that they will have good it was Night-Time and he was alone and he saw a fire off the walls of around city and went towards the city. And when he came there, he heard within the city the tread of the feet of joy and the laughter of the mouth of gladness and the loud noise of many loots. And he knocked at the gate.
And certainly the gatekeepers opened to him, and he beheld a house that was of marble and had four pillars of marble before it. The pillars were hung with garlands and within and without. There were torches of Seada and he entered the house. And when he has passed through the whole of Charleston the day and the whole of Jasper and reach the long hall of feasting he saw lying on a couch of Sea Purple, one whose hair was crowned with red roses and whose lips were red with wine.
And he went behind him and touched him on the shoulder and said to him, Why do you live like this? And the young man turned around and recognised him and made answer and said, But I was a leper once and you healed me. How else should I live? And he passed out of the house and went again into the street. And after a little while he saw one whose face and Raymont were painted and his feet were shot with pearls, and behind her came slowly as a hunter, a young man who wore a cloak of two colours.
Now the face of the woman was as the fair face of an idol, and the eyes of the young man were bright with lust. And he followed swiftly and touched the hand of a young man and said to him, Why do you look at this woman? And in such wise? And the young man turned around and recognised him and said, But I was blind once and you gave me sight. What else should I look?
And he ran forward and touched the painted raiment of the woman and said to her, Is there no other way in which to walk safe the way of sin? And the woman turned around and recognised him and laughed and said, But you forgive me, my sins. And the way is a pleasant way. And he passed out of the city. And when he had passed out of the city, he saw seated by the roadside a young man who was weeping. And he went towards him and touched the long locks of his hair and said to him, Why are you weeping?
And the young man looked up and recognised him and made answer. But I was dead once and you raised me from the dead. What else should I do but weep? It takes moral certainty and renders it uncertain. It doesn't reject the morality, it unsettles it. It offers an interrupt between intention and effect. It raises problems of responsibility, questions of intention and consequences, you can't commit an immoral tale.
But it's rather deeply moral, it's in some ways deeply serious, but not in a delivering a serious message, but asking serious questions, it leaves it's up to you as readers to work out what it's doing, what it means, how you put it, just like, as I said, those paradoxes and precepts that are in conversation and debate and tension with cliche, with established tales, with established romance in the same way it's in tension, in debate with its biblical original.
And in that sense, what it does, just like the paradoxes and those misquotation three quotations, it doesn't destroy the original. It reveals the assumptions underlying it and offers alternative possibilities. It makes you aware of the frameworks within which you're working. It makes you aware of your moral assumptions and your moral values, and then asks you to decide actively where to resettle having been unsettled.
And in that sense, that's what I'd offer you as the kind of way in which world is working in morality. That idea of stimulating thought, it stimulates thought in the young. And in that sense, look back at wild and look at the ways that the structures work, the debates work, all the rest of it. Not as immoral, not as amoral, but as morally engaged in that sense. I mean, your problem is to work out what moral, if at all, you think the writings offer.
Now, obviously, what I've kind of elided here, what I've left on the side is with Dorian Grey in particular, is Wilde's treatment of sexuality and the role that's playing. And that's what I'll be talking about next week. Cheers.