THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
The picture of Dorian Gray, with A rebours and Il piacere, is one of the three most important novels of decadentism. Published in 1891, it deals with the story of a dandy, Dorian Gray, who expresses the desire non to loose his beauty and youth. He dedicates himself to pleasure, as Andrea Sperelli and Des Esseints, living without any morality, just following aesthetic tastes. Because of the desire he has expressed, he's always youg and beautiful, while his friends become older and older. He also commits several crimes, but he always keeps his external perfection. His portrait, painted when he expressed the desire, that brings the signs of his sins, acts like a conscience for him. While he remains beautiful and young, his portrait becomes more and more loathsome and wrinkled. At the end, after killing the painter, Dorian stabs the picture itself. When his servant comes finds the portrait of his master young and still beautiful, and the corpse of an old man. They discover who he is just thaks to hir ring: he's Dorian Gray.
Main themes are clearly presented in the novel, such as the lack of morality, the importance of appearance, the final decadence. But where the aestheticism is best shown by Wilde is in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth-century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.