The Picture of Dorian Gray (29 page)

3
a hero to his valet
: Madame Cornuel claimed that ‘no man is a hero to his valet'
(Lettres de Mlle Aisse
, XII, 1728); but Byron changed the emphasis, which Wilde follows, in stanza 33 of his
Beppo
, which declares: ‘In short, he was a perfect cavaliero, / And to his very valet seem'd a hero.'

4
Blue-book
: Official parliamentary reports were thus designated on account of their blue wrappers.

5
jarvies
: Cab-drivers.

6
There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence
: Influence is an important theme in the novel and takes a number of forms. There is the influence which Dorian has on Basil's art, the influence Lord Henry exerts on the impressionable Dorian, the corresponding ‘fatal' influence which Dorian has on young men, the influence that heredity and ‘race-instinct' have on various individuals, the influence of real life on Sibyl Vane's acting, the influence that Dorian's actions have on his portrait, and the influence of certain books on their readers. Once again, Wilde is reflecting concerns that were conspicuous at the time. The quasi-scientific tenor of Henry's musings, and the idea that a person's ‘soul' could be projected into another individual, points to ideas of ‘mesmeric' influence and metempsychosis which were then preoccupying such bodies as the Institute for Psychic Research and which found their way into sensational fictions such as H. Rider Haggard's
She
(1886), Arthur Conan Doyle's
The Parasite
(1894), George du Maurier's
Trilby
(1894) and Richard Marsh's
The Beetle (1897).

7
Buonarotti
: Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), the Florentine painter famous for his decoration of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, was also a poet, whose love poems celebrate male beauty. Wilde followed others in identifying Michelangelo as homosexual, and included him among those who knew ‘the love that dare not speak its name' in his famous apologia for idealized male love at his second trial at the Old Bailey in 1895. A version of this justification is also found in Chapter X of
Dorian Gray
; see below.

8
Bacchante
: A follower of Bacchus, the god of wine.

9
Omar
: Omar Khayyam, a twelfth-century Persian poet, whose
Rubaiyat
was made popular by the translation of Edward Fitzgerald in 1859.

10
Athenæum
: One of the most imposing gentlemen's clubs, situated in Pall Mall. Founded in 1824, it became associated with the arts.

1
Clodion… Les Cent Nouvelles… Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve
: The decorative details and specific references here find Wilde embellishing his narrative with indicators of opulence and rarefied taste.

2
Manon Lescaut
: A highly popular novel published in 1731 by the Abbé Antoine-François Prévost.

3
Wagner's music
: Richard Wagner (1813–83), German composer and dramatist, whose theories (principally in
The Art-work of the Future
, 1850) and operas were highly controversial at this time. To favour Wagner indicated advanced tastes; Swinburne championed him, Aubrey Beardsley drew ‘The Wagnerians', and Max Nordau stigmatized Wagner as the
consummate fin-de-siècle
musician, ‘in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together' (Nordau,
Degeneration
, 1892). Dorian and Lord Henry therefore naturally favoured Wagner.

4
the price of everything, and the value of nothing
: Wilde re-used this line (added at typescript stage) in the third act of his play
Lady Windermere's Fan
(1892).

5
the search for beauty being the real secret of life
: Wilde inserted the adjective ‘poisonous' at typescript stage, but changed this to ‘real' when he revised the novel in 1891. This may have been in response to the condemnation of his ‘poisonous book', ‘spawned from the literature of the French
Décadents'
(Mason, 65). To search for a ‘poisonous beauty' encapsulates the very idea of ‘Decadence', and Wilde perhaps wished to tone this element down. He certainly changed a reference to ‘the French school of
Décadents
' to ‘
Symbolistes
' in 1891; see note
8
to Chapter X, below.

6
a labyrinth of grimy streets
: This was a common, if not cliched, trope for representing the topography of poorer and criminalized districts of the capital at this time. Oliver Twist finds himself lost in ‘a labyrinth of dark and narrow courts' in the ‘low neighbourhood' of Saffron Hill, in Dickens's novel (1838), indicating that he is now in serious danger; while a journalist described the infamous ‘Rookery' of St Giles in 1842 as ‘one great maze of narrow crooked paths crossing and intersecting in labyrinthine convulsions' (W. Weir, ‘St Giles, Past and Present', in Flint (ed.),
The Victorian Novelist
(1987), 132–4. St Giles,
albeit decidedly diminished by the time Wilde was writing, is a likely candidate for the area through which Dorian passes. A trip eastward from Piccadilly, at
flâneur
pace, eventually bringing Dorian to the theatre in Holborn, would take him through St Giles, and possibly Seven Dials, another ‘labyrinth' described by Charles Dickens in one of his
Sketches by Boz
in 1837.

7
The Idiot Boy, or Dumb but Innocent
: Sentimental and melodramatic pieces popular with lower-class audiences at the time.

8
hautbois
: Oboe.

9
One evening she is Rosalind… reed-like throat
: Referring to some of Shakespeare's heroines. Rosalind is a character in
As You Like It
, in which she wanders through the forest of Arden disguised as a boy. Imogen appears in
Cymbeline
, Juliet in
Romeo and Juliet
poisons herself in this manner. Ophelia in
Hamlet
is driven mad, and Desdemona is strangled by the Moor in
Othello.

10
Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces
: Henry is subscribing to the Aesthetic and ‘Decadent' celebration of artifice. Charles Baudelaire wrote ‘In Praise of Cosmetics' (1863), and Max Beerbohm followed with ‘A Defence of Cosmetics' in the infamous
Yellow Book
(1894).

11
what are your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?
: Wilde had originally written ‘– tell me, is Sybil [
sic
] Vane your mistress?', and a few lines later, ‘I suppose she will be your mistress some day', but his editor at
Lippincott's
altered these to ‘what are your relations', and ‘she will be yours some day'. Wilde added ‘actual', and made this ‘belong to you' in 1891.

12
The Bristol
: A hotel on Piccadilly.

13
People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves
: Wilde had originally had Dorian ask Henry if ‘ “Basil has got a passion for somebody?” “Yes, he has. Has he never told you?” ', but he altered this on the typescript to the slightly less explicit: ‘ “You don't mean to say that Basil has got any passion or any romance in him?” “I don't know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance,” said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes. “Has he never let you know that?” ' He removed these lines in 1891.

14
He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science
: Despite his antipathy to the Naturalism of Emile Zola, Wilde's description of Lord Henry's interests comes close to describing that novelist's fictional methods. Wilde made fun of Zola's ‘tedious
document humain
' (a phrase from Zola's manifesto, ‘The Experimental Novel', where he advocated a ‘scientific' approach to character and incident in fiction) in ‘The Decay of Lying' (1889). And yet such a ‘vivisection' of human psychology, the application of the ‘experimental method' to an analysis of the ‘passions' is just what Lord Henry advocates here. Wilde was himself fascinated by science, as the numerous references to
various physical phenomena and the schools of psychologists in his novel testify. His emphasis on the role of heredity in the characterization of Dorian and James Vane even comes close to Zola's methods in this respect.

(Added in 1891, this chapter introduces the characters of James Vane and his mother, adding intrigue, melodrama and comic elements to the narrative.)

1
bismuth-whitened hands
: A cosmetic preparation, suggesting that Sibyl's mother was one of the ‘painted' actresses whom Dorian disparages a few pages before.

2
tableau
: This was a common spectacle in the popular theatre at the time, whereby elaborate (and often
risque)
scenes were staged as ‘living paintings'. Each act of popular plays would often end with a tableau, which froze the action at its most intense and melodramatic heights. The melodramatic art was basically gestural, relying on a repertoire of striking stances to convey passions. Wilde had little sympathy with the sentimentality of the melodrama, but would have appreciated its artifice.

3
Euston Road
: A poor area, where Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross railway termini serve the North and Midlands.

4
hated him through some curious race-instinctfor which he could not account
: Here Wilde reinforces the importance of heredity in the novel, making James something of a counterpart to Dorian, whose ancestry is also his destiny. As is revealed shortly, the ‘instinct' that causes James to hate gentlemen is a consequence of the fact that his father came from this class. Dorian is similarly constituted, as his aristocratic mother married beneath her. The reference to James's response to the whispered sneer about his origins – ‘He remembered it as if it had been the lash of a hunting-crop across his face' – further hints at this. Intriguingly and (it would appear) coincidentally, Thomas Hardy had used a similar image for a similar purpose in Chapter
XLVII
of
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(1891), where Tess slaps Alec round the face with her leather glove: ‘It was heavy and thick as a warrior's, and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy might have regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which her mailed progenitors were not unpractised.' The narrator is suggesting that this action recalls Tess's own ‘race instinct', a throw back to her long-buried aristocratic ancestry, which reverts to feudal type in action. Wilde's use of this image appeared for the first time in April 1891, and Hardy had finished with the proofs of his novel by February, making this shared reference to behavioural atavisms by two authors equally fascinated by heredity coincidental. Hardy's novel also features
ancestral portraits, which suggests the re-emergence of moral character in physical appearance similar to that found in Chapter IX
of Dorian Gray (Tess of the D'Urbervilles
, Chapter XXXIV, developed in the second edition). On Hardy and heredity, see Greenslade,
Degeneration, Culture and the Novel, 1880–1940
(1994).

5
Achilles Statue
: This twenty-foot-high bronze statue, which stands in Park Lane, was cast from French guns in 1822 in honour of the victorious Duke of Wellington. Erected by the ‘women of England', it was the first public nude statue displayed in England.

1
Hallward started, and then frowned
: In 1890 Hallward ‘turned perfectly pale, and a curious look flashed for a moment into his eyes, and then passed away, leaving them dull'. Wilde tones down Basil's obvious dismay at learning he has a ‘romantic' rival in Sibyl.

2
Messalina
: Wife of the emperor Claudius, she was a byword for adulterous conduct.

3
to be highly organized is, I should fancy, the object of man's existence
: Wilde added this line in 1891. ‘Organization' carries a scientific connotation referring to the ability of life forms to adapt and thrive. The philosopher Herbert Spencer laid down that the first principles of evolutionary development consist in the movement from homogeneity to heterogeneity, or from simple to complex forms.

1
Miranda… Caliban
: Characters from Shakespeare's
The Tempest.
Miranda is the beautiful daughter of Prospero, the enchanter who keeps the monster Caliban as his abject slave. Wilde uses Caliban to exemplify ugliness in the Preface to his novel. Robert Browning did, however, give Shakespeare's tormented creature a degree of pathos and humanity in his dramatic mono logue ‘Caliban on Setebos' (1862).

2
Rosalind… Cordelia
: Heroines in Shakespeare's plays
As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing
and
King Lear
respectively.

3
I have grown sick of shadows
: These lines echo Tennyson's poem ‘The Lady of Shalott', where the Lady complains: ‘I am half sick of shadows'. This reference is appropriate here, as Tennyson also describes a woman trapped in an
artificial world, forced to view life through a mirror. When she breaks from her bonds in pursuit of Sir Lancelot, a ‘curse' is effected which kills her. This theme was popular with artists at the time, and many paintings were produced in the Pre-Raphaelite style depicting Tennyson's tragic figure and often carrying the refrain which Wilde borrows here.