Wilde’s Marginal Philosophy:
Tracing Intellectual Enthusiasm from 'Notebook on Philosophy' to
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Bridget Bergin
In Robert Ross’ introduction to the 1912 John Lane reprint of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé, Ross recalls a conversation between himself and Wilde: “‘My dear fellow,’ [Wilde] said, with his usual drawling emphasis, ‘when I see a monstrous tulip with four petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals’” (Ross xviii). In this quotation, Ross emphasizes Wilde’s longstanding interest in the beauty of productive mutation; the layering of new “petals” to create increasingly “monstrous” concepts. The idea of the monstrous tulip echoes through many of Wilde’s texts; we find layered ideas that function as a means of productive mutation in his philosophical essays “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist” published in 1891 in the collection Intentions and likewise in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1). In each text, Wilde’s fictional characters push the tenets of commonly explored schools of thought to extreme conclusions and therefore arrive at original ideas found in the combination distinct of philosophies.
Moreover, the image of a private garden wherein ideas take shape echoes through these texts; Wilde’s novel and essays demonstrate his intellectual interest in exploring jarring philosophical ideas exchanged between fictional characters who occupy private, utopic spaces. The image of the monstrous tulip relies upon the existence of intellectual gardens in which the monstrous tulips are able to grow and mutate. Dorian Gray listens intently to Lord Henry Wotton’s declaration of hedonistic values as Basil Hallward paints Dorian’s portrait in his small art studio in Dorian Gray. In “Decay,” Vivian lectures Cyril on the tenets of The Tired Hedonists in his private library, claiming that nature’s discomfort caused the invention of indoor spaces, and that “egotism, itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life” (Decay 6). In the essay “Critic,” Gilbert and Ernest converse about art criticism in the library of Gilbert’s house in Piccadilly. In addition to all taking place within private, enclosed spaces, the conversations between characters in these texts all blend philosophical ideas. The novel charts the effect of layering Hallward and Wotton’s two distinct concepts of morality with Dorian’s youth and energy. The two essays follow the classic dialogic form, featuring one character who represents more traditional philosophical position and one who pushes a more jarring idea on his companion. This focus on conversations, occurring within private and utopic intellectual gardens in which philosophical ideas are first explored and then pushed beyond the realm of traditional academic discussion, can be traced back to an origin much earlier than Wilde’s 1891 texts.
This focus also appears in Wilde’s undergraduate philosophy notebook, composed in 1876. At the time, Wilde was studying for his upcoming examinations in philosophy at the Magdalene College at Oxford. The journal where he copied quotes and explored concepts that would appear on his examinations is a large, hardback volume. While his blocks of quotes and analysis of philosophical ideas fill the lined pages, Wilde’s own ideas branch out in different angles in the margins of the pages. Also scattered throughout the pages, alongside Wilde’s handwriting, are doodles and sketches. In his article describing the notebook, Simon Reader draws our attention to these sketches and provides a short list—“a top hat over the words ‘logical mean,’ a snake uncoiling beside the heading ‘Mind and Matter,’ a man’s face, and a vase are among the more distinct” (Reader 23)—but does not mention the most notable aspect of the drawings. Although Wilde’s subjects change, he repeatedly illustrates his notes with imaginary
creatures that combine parts from various animals. Pictured are photographs of two images from “Notebook on Philosophy”; [fig 1] shows a reptilian creature in a doglike pose with a bizarre funnel tail, and [fig 2], a hairy snake with what appear to be wings. These curious amalgamations are visible representations of many ideas coming together and blending; Wilde borrows familiar traits taken from existing animals, but turns them into new and jarring images using the pages of his private notebook as a garden in which to produce these monstrous images. Wilde also blends ideas through languages in his journal; he combines English with Latin with Greek, sometimes switching languages in the middle of a sentence. His interest in the Greek alphabet continues throughout the notebook as he substitutes the Roman alphabet lower-case “a” with the lower- case alpha. Through the amalgamations present in both his doodling and use of language, Wilde’s notebook reflects a habit of blending multiple ideas together to present a unified and
unique concept. Each physical page functions in layers of philosophers’ words and Wilde’s germinal ideas, both visually and verbally scribbled at angles in the margins. In his private journal, Wilde demonstrated an early interest in unlikely mash-ups and palimpsestic layers, in which converging influences give rise to entirely new ideas. An examination of this unique aspect of the notebook yields a larger argument about Wilde’s later body of work: Wilde grew monstrous tulips in gardens in Dorian Gray, “Decay,” and “Critic.” The content of the journal informs the rest of Wilde’s later work and reveals the origin of a thread that runs throughout Wilde’s career: his work repeats scenes in which characters gather in private spaces to layer ideas, push those ideas to the extreme, and produce an entirely new art.
Since the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA acquired the notebook in 2004, numerous scholars have worked with it. However, few have written about it or been able to use the manuscript in scholarship. Approaching Wilde’s notebook as an illumination of the artist’s evolving philosophical thought reveals the importance to Wilde studies of working with juvenilia. Juvenilia is difficult for scholars to assess; should it be dismissed as a trivial artifact from a writer’s past, or should it be considered a part of the author’s body of work? If it is to be considered a part of the body of work, how does it fit in, what does it contribute, and what new light does it shed on later, published work? Juvenilia often remains unpublished, and therefore archival research is required before a scholar can begin investigating the importance of such texts. Scholars like Simon Reader have started working with Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy,” but are unsure of how exactly to use the text. Reader claims that it “offers a valuable picture of Wilde’s education, early intellectual interests, and notational practices” (Reader 21) and that its value is that it provides a “richer understanding of Wilde’s engagement with evolution, the history of empiricism and idealism, and Hegelian philosophy” (Reader 23). The notebook certainly does offer scholars a valuable key to further understanding Wilde’s philosophical interests. But the journal’s real value is larger than this: Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy” is a rich example of physical aesthetic form. Its amalgamations and marginal commentary both visually and verbally explore ideas through layering, borrowing, and blending. This 1876 notebook reveals a tonal consistency in Wilde’s work that begins extraordinarily early in the writer’s adult life; from his college years, Wilde’s approach to philosophy was playful, complex, and immersed in layers of other schools of thought and theories.
How can this unpublished journal provide insight into some of the philosophy at work in Wilde’s canonical writing? As an unpublished record of some of his earliest thoughts on beauty, pleasure, happiness, and the pursuit of the good, this manuscript illuminates ideas later explored through his literary and critical writing. However, the notebook is a clue to not only what Wilde was thinking, but also how he was thinking; Wilde’s career as a writer and philosopher produced later texts, including Dorian Gray, “Decay,” and “Critic,” which explore concepts of beauty through the same methods of blending and layering ideas within private, utopic spaces. Appearing within the private space of a scholar’s notebook, Wilde’s doodles illustrate a blending of distinct creatures. A similar illustration occurs in Dorian Gray, where the portrait acts as a visible amalgamation of Hallward’s traditional aestheticism, Wotton’s hedonism, and Dorian’s youthful vulnerability blending together onto the canvas to create an original monstrosity. And just as Wilde creates imaginary conversations between schools of thought in his journal, he does similar work in the critical dialogues. In “Decay,” Vivian’s argument for the danger of representative or realistic art collides with Cyril’s intellectual approach and leads to Vivian’s dangerous and original assertion that the country of Japan does not exist. The conversation in “Critic” between the traditional Ernest and the individualist Gilbert results in Gilbert’s claim that all art is immoral and, fittingly, that all worthwhile ideas are dangerous. The original work of Dorian’s portrait and Vivian and Gilbert’s claims all emerge within private spheres—art studios, gardens, and libraries. This connection between the notebook and Wilde’s later work demonstrates that from his days as an enthusiastic undergraduate student onward, Wilde 1) performs thought experiments by growing monstrous ideas in his imagined utopic gardens and 2) figures these ideas through a process of blending, either visually or verbally.
“A Universe of Innumerable Sciences”
Through the process of borrowing concepts from established schools of thought to create new ideas in “Notebook on Philosophy,” Wilde plays with the question: what could possibly happen if people lived by the philosophies they posed? His marginal contributions to the conversations of canonical philosophers are sometimes jarring, partly because they draw on unsavory implications of established schools of thought and bring them to their ultimate logical conclusions if applied to society. At one point very early in the journal, Wilde writes: "what does social science not include. The destiny of society is affected by [a] universe of innumerable sciences—mechanics. Chemistry. Results. If one was ever to regrow society as a mechanism where a lot of things [act] on one another it [would] be difficult to estimate the things: their number and their complexity. They first grow and change organically—i.e. I love interconnection." This last comment is an extremely rare moment in the notebook; it is a moment in which Wilde has just explored an idea and then commented on the method through which he explored it. He draws back and sees himself connecting social science with the hard sciences, then comments on his own love of interconnection. This moment, in which Wilde comments on his method of thinking and his source of intellectual enthusiasm, provides a hint of Wilde’s thinking in his later works. This comment is visibly represented through the drawings of combined creatures and verbally represented through his marginal commentary, which sets up imaginary dialogues between disparate schools of thought. This interconnection ultimately leads to original ideas in the notebook.
The monstrous idea in the above quote explores what might happen if it were possible to “regrow society as a mechanism.” This moment is significant because in the 1891 texts, Wilde “regrows society” over and over as utopic spaces in which thought experiments can occur. While he does not act out the thought experiment of re-growing society in a fictional sense in the 1876 manuscript, Wilde suggests creating an imaginary world as a test case. His comment at the end— “I love interconnection”—is a moment of intellectual enthusiasm at the connection between the study of society and the sciences he sees governing society, the complexity of the system, and the changes he can play with by imagining unreal societies. Later on this same page, he continues to describe the complexity of society: "There always seem to remain certain things the operation of which is mysterious: such things as great men, or the existence of evil. And exceptional occurrences such as we allow “special providences”, which are its difficulty: human free will too: yet we must not confuse free will with capricious will: a good man’s actions can be predicted, a bad man’s capricious...that of a science is its agreement with facts. Social science is a science of the decay: the legislation [would] know the general drift." Wilde’s proposition that there are aspects of society that we cannot understand is interesting, because his list of social mysteries are great men, the existence of evil, exceptional occurrences, and human free will. Despite this complexity and potentially interesting thought experiment that could come from re-growing society, Wilde perhaps becomes bored and dismisses social science entirely as “a science of decay.”
The text on the page ends here, and on the back of the same page, Wilde scribbles at the top, “We ought to use our prisons and Lunatic asylums as means of experiment.” Here is another monstrous idea in the journal. Wilde expands on his idea of re-growing a mechanized society by applying hard science (experiments) to society (people in asylums and prisons) in a deliberate and concrete way. He borrows from the tenets of “mechanics. Chemistry. Results” from his previous comment, from the basic concept of the scientific method, and from the social issue of members of society who cannot contribute because they are in prisons or asylums. By combining these concepts, Wilde adds an extra petal to the tulip borrowed from established ideas within the private intellectual garden of his notebook. Just as when Wilde proposes re-growing society and comments on his love of interconnection, after Wilde’s test case of experimenting on people in prisons and asylums, he provides insight to his method of reasoning. He writes: “difficulty of method: 1) experiments practically infinite. We can only look out for them and not create them...So method not experimental. A) the abstract method, B) the historical method.” Here we see Wilde actually sketching out an approach to his thought experiment. He concludes quickly that the experiments are “practically infinite” and that therefore the method cannot be experimental. Wilde thus concludes, “we can only look out for them and not create them.” This implies that the information he can glean from his interest in connecting scientific experimentation to prisons and asylums cannot come from his own thought experiments or real experiments, because these experiments are “practically infinite.” Because he cannot “create” the information, he must “look for” the information in an “abstract method” or “historical method.”
While the specific thought experiment of re-growing a mechanized society ends here, Wilde remains interested in layering social and hard sciences throughout the notebook. He writes on the same page, “Political economy is treated as a separate science.” He goes on to write: "The English Political Economy holds that political economy can be treated separately, and so it’s a real science. On the other hand Conte says that because it has been treated as a separate science it is not so, it is dogmatism. Both start from belief in the complexity of society. The one says society being complex we can only deal with the complexity through the instrument of abstraction...proves to be useful in other spheres as physics and mathematics." Wilde returns to the “abstract method” by referring to the “instrument of abstraction” and briefly borrows the idea that abstraction is the only method through which to explore the complexity of society. We see Wilde return to established thinkers and the idea of the complexity of society. Throughout these pages, Wilde blends various concepts, borrows from his knowledge of both social and scientific systems, and laments that these two spheres cannot go hand in hand.
Along with social and scientific systems, Wilde works with other established schools of philosophy in “Notebook on Philosophy.” An example of one of Wilde’s additions to the philosophical conversation occurring within his notebook occurs amongst definitions of hedonism and utilitarianism. Wilde’s angled scrawl reads “So Hedonism is really more ethical than Utilitarianism: the objection to Utilitarianism is that it confuses ethics and politics. Do the ‘results’ of the Utilitarians affect us? If so, it is really an attempt to retain the results of Hedonism.” Here Wilde adds his own commentary to the ethics of utilitarianism and hedonism. Both schools of philosophy seek the good through happiness or pleasure. To possibly recreate the context in which Wilde wrote this, John Stuart Mill defines utilitarianism as: "Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.... pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain" (Mill). Hedonism can be simply defined as “the view that pleasure is the basic ethical or normative value” (Mendola 441), which appears to align with the aims of utilitarianism. The resurgence in the interest of Ancient Greek philosophical thought along the lines of utilitarianism and hedonism with the 18th and 19th century arguments of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill led to new branches, definitions, and distinctions for the two schools of thought. How then, did Wilde differentiate between these two schools and define them in the context of his notebook?
The evidence by which one could approach an answer to this question is scattered throughout Wilde’s notebook as commentary to other topics. In a separate section of the notebook where Wilde takes notes on Aristotle, he writes, “the highest happiness must be the unimpeded energy of the highest faculty.” The word highest here is interesting, because Wilde was familiar with both Bentham’s argument for a quantitative measure for happiness, termed the “most happiness,” and with Mill’s argument for a qualitative measure for happiness, termed the “greatest happiness.” By using a term that avoids the language associated with either main branch of the contemporary debate on Utilitarianism, this highest could be a reference to Hedonistic happiness. Wilde here focuses on the “unimpeded energy of the highest faculty,” which sounds more like a call for individual intellectual and creative vigor instead of a quest to maximize humanity’s happiness. Later in the notebook, Wilde remarks that “utilitarianism is a reaction against the exaggeration of feeling,” pegging it as a practical and utility-based method for processing and defining the human emotion of happiness. However Wilde differentiates the two schools of philosophy founded in the virtue of pleasure, at this moment in his undergraduate career he makes a bold claim that echoes throughout his later work and is acted out by Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray: pleasure is good, and it comes directly as a result of seeking the good.
When exploring these various established schools of thought within his notebook, Wilde is supposed to be studying for his philosophy examinations at Oxford. This is Wilde’s private text, written purely for his personal use and in his personal space. The quotes, notes, and commentary were presumably composed while Wilde was alone. In a chapter of Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde entitled “Wilde at Oxford,” Ellmann explains “However passionately he read in philosophy, the history of science, and literature, the reputation Wilde sought was of being brilliant without zeal...One of his friends, David Hunter Blair, was convinced that Wilde plugged away secretly in the small hours so as to keep up his air of insouciance” (Ellmann 43). While writing about imagined utopic spaces wherein one might experiment on society, Wilde was working at night, in private, surrounded by philosophy texts at Oxford in a sort of intellectual utopia. Along with the canonical philosophers on whose texts Wilde was tested, Wilde was also drawn to contemporary philosophy outside of his studies. Upon entering Oxford, Wilde was attracted to many thinkers, and “much of his time went into reading in other fields” (Ellmann 41) because “Wilde was too much of an intellectual buccaneer to confine himself to the requirements of the Greats” (Ellmann 43). Ellmann notes: "While at Oxford [Wilde] kept a Commonplace Book in which the range of reference is wide. He read Herbert Spencer and the philosopher of science William Kingdon Clifford; he was on easy terms not only with Plato and Aristotle, as required by his course, but with Kant, Hegel, Jacobi, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Mill...he characteristically draws together contemporary and classical concerns" (Ellmann 41).
Wilde’s interests were wide-ranging, but even at an early age he was drawn to the philosophy of aesthetics. Although Wilde was interested in numerous subjects, John Ruskin and Walter Pater were “the inevitable poles of attraction” (Ellmann 47) and “for Wilde the two stood like heralds beckoning him in opposite directions” (Ellmann 51). Ruskin was a professor and Pater was a fellow at Oxford during Wilde’s career as a student. The source of their philosophical disparity emerged from differing ideas of beauty: “though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, for Pater it might have just a touch of evil...Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism...Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination” (Ellmann 49). Wilde admired both men and was attracted to both schools of thought, but was particularly intrigued by Pater. Ellmann describes how Wilde “came under the spell” of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance and “never ceased to speak of it as ‘[his] golden book’” and “described Pater’s work as the ‘book which has had such a strange influence over my life’” (Ellmann 47). This image of Wilde as an impressionable young man torn between his immense admirations for two diverging aesthetic philosophers that Ellmann paints in this section of his biography recalls the character Dorian Gray, a young man caught between Hallward and Wotton’s competing thoughts. Wilde’s “golden book” bears similarities to the mysterious untitled yellow book given by Wotton to Dorian Gray which “was the strangest book [Dorian] had ever read” and “a poisonous book” that “for years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of” (Wilde 104-5). Ellmann even points to a moment in Dorian Gray when “Dorian quotes [Pater] without acknowledgement” and “Lord Henry Wotton [talks] this kind of Paterese to Dorian Gray” (Ellmann 48). Ellmann does not suggest a direct parallel between Wilde and the character of Dorian Gray, and I do not wish to suggest this either. Rather, the connection demonstrates that Wilde’s own experience with influence and intellectual enthusiasm was possibly a point of curiosity and interest he explored in later works. The notebook was composed during a rich time in Wilde’s life where he was surrounded by schools of thought and their major contributors. Wilde’s career at Oxford was a time when he could discuss aesthetics with his heroes and fall under the influence of their ideas, and in Dorian Gray he explores the results of a similar cycle of influence and blended ideas.
“Man was a being with...myriad sensations, a complex multi-form creature”
In Wilde’s private space at Oxford, he fell under the influence of philosophers, stitched together doodled creatures comprised of various borrowed parts, orchestrated imaginary conversations between schools of thought through his marginal commentary, and performed thought experiments by pushing ideas to their logical extremes. In the utopic intellectual garden of his private journal, Wilde was able to cultivate monstrous ideas. The layering of ideas in Wilde’s notebook finds an echo in the symbolic blending of philosophies on canvas that becomes Dorian’s portrait in Dorian Gray. This portrait operates as an image of Hallward, Wotton, and Dorian influencing each other’s philosophies. The final layer, created through Dorian’s actions, catalyzes the inception of a monstrous creation—one that emerges only through such a complex combination. The magical painting is a symbol which represents a question first posed in Wilde’s notebook: what happens when philosophies of hedonism or aestheticism are acted out to their logical ends in society? After Dorian sees the beautiful portrait of himself, he begins to live a life of pleasure and beauty, loses sight of the Victorian moral code; and eventually commits the act of murder. Wilde includes a moment in Dorian Gray before Wotton delivers his philosophy to Dorian in which Hallward questions whether Wotton lives out the hedonism he preaches; Hallward says to Wotton, “‘you are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose’” (Wilde 8). While Wotton is apparently unable or unwilling to live by his own tenants, his hedonistic philosophy and the beauty of Hallward’s painting awaken thoughts in Dorian that allow him to act according to the blend of ideas. Wotton himself is ultimately harmless although he provides dangerous ideas to the monstrous new idea represented by the portrait. Wotton’s ideas are perhaps simply a monstrous tulip with only four petals; Dorian borrows these four to create a monstrous tulip with five petals.
The portrait, the new and terrifying creation, emerges from Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wotton, and Dorian Gray, who all participate in a cycle of influence. Hallward tells Wotton that when he first saw Dorian, “‘A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life’” (Wilde 10). After the portrait is complete and Wotton and Dorian become friends, Wotton determines that he “would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him...would make that wonderful spirit his own” (Wilde 35). This cycle informs the painting, as Wotton awakens an aspect of Dorian which appears on Hallward’s canvas as the three men socialize in Hallward’s studio. This cycle of influence continues to unfold long after the painting is complete, informing Dorian’s actions later in the novel. Michael Buma discusses this influence in terms of the Genesis story; “Lord Henry’s moral position in Dorian Gray is akin to that of the devil; he is the initial serpent in the Garden, and continues to coax Dorian to evil throughout the novel...From the moment they are alone in the Garden, Lord Henry goes to work enthralling Dorian with his theories” (Buma 20). While I agree with Buma’s assessment that Wotton’s influence over Dorian partly dictates Dorian’s actions throughout the novel, I do not read Dorian as a blank canvas onto which Wotton inscribes his theories. Dorian’s actions, as the final layer of paint, both illuminate the ideas discussed at the heart of the circle of influence and create a new image distinct from Hallward’s original masterpiece of Dorian’s expression, captured during Wotton’s speech. Just as Wilde was not a blank canvas onto which the ideas of Pater and Ruskin were blended, Dorian’s intellectual enthusiasm for the ideas of Hallward and Wotton is an essential aspect of this philosophic layering.
Wilde’s marginal commentary articulates the writer’s enthusiasm for the inspiration and influence of the surrounding philosophies and Wilde’s own interests and beliefs. The painting holds a portion of each of these influences within it and physically reflects an amalgamation of philosophies. Therefore, it is fitting that Hallward feels physically connected to the portrait; Wotton “must have it” (Wilde 25), and Dorian is magically linked to it. Hallward tells Wotton, “‘I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself in it’” (Wilde 7) and reveals that he believes “‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter...It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul’” (Wilde 9). The secret of Hallward’s soul could be his devotion to art and beauty and how this causes him to be taken in by Dorian’s physical beauty. The use of the portrait as a physical representation of secret thoughts and feelings echoes Wilde’s own private notebook. Hallward cannot show the painting because it contains too much of himself; it stands as evidence of his most private thoughts experienced in his most private space—his studio. Wilde’s undergraduate journal, composed in private and never published, contains a similarly intimate and private record.
Wotton and Dorian give the painting some bit of themselves. Wotton’s contribution to the painting is that he causes a peculiar expression to appear on Dorian’s face when inspiring Dorian with his ideas of new hedonism. Dorian, of course, is the subject of the painting and adds the final layer of paint to the canvas through his actions. Hallward anticipates the danger of Wotton’s influence and begs Wotton, “‘don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad...don’t take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him’” (Wilde 16). Wotton’s influence, however, adds another layer, which contributes to the masterpiece of Hallward’s painting. But what exactly is the nature of these overlapping ideas? Dorian shapes both Hallward’s and Wotton’s ideas. Hallward tells Wotton of Dorian that “‘unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of the soul and body...we in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void’” (Wilde 13). Through Dorian, Hallward explores his devotion to the aesthetic and reimagines the notion of beauty, claiming that it does not come from realism or ideality, but from bringing together the soul and body. Dorian similarly shapes Wotton’s philosophy. Wotton clearly defines his mission as one aligned with hedonism, and he sees Dorian as more than just the figurehead of his hedonistic revival: “‘a new Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do’” (Wilde 23). Wotton borrows from Dorian’s already influential personality and contributes the philosophy behind Dorian’s actions. This cycle of borrowing and blending creates a painting, which physically bears the evidence of each man’s contribution, as each page of Wilde’s notebook contains ideas layered upon each other along with Wilde’s own interpretation.
Wilde, while inspired by the philosophers he studied, contributes his own personality and ideas to his notes. Similarly, while Dorian accepts Hallward’s flattery and Wotton’s influence, some part of Dorian is present in the blend of ideas that creates the portrait. Wotton delivers his stirring speech to Dorian; “with his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him” and sees that his words are merely awakening a natural passion that lay dormant in Dorian’s mind. Dorian, posing for Hallward’s painting and listening to Wotton’s speech, suddenly becomes dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words...had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses...Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now. Life suddenly became fiery-colored to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. Why had he not known it? (Wilde 20). Wotton sees that Dorian is not simply accepting Wotton’s soul, thoughts, passions, and virtues, and he is “amazed at the sudden impression that he words had produced...how fascinating the lad was!” (Wilde 20). Not only does Wilde here suggest that the secret chord already existed within Dorian, he also implies that the chord had never been touched before his encounter with Wotton. This, along with the serendipitous timing of Hallward’s “marvelous bold touch” (Wilde 21), produces an original and monstrous portrait. On the canvas of the notebook’s blank pages, Wilde similarly sets up a moment in which disparate ideas can collide and combine. Wilde’s own intellectual enthusiasm and his youthful excitement at embracing new ideas allows him to see interconnections between ideas, add his own unique commentary, and create opportunities for original thought.
A man of twenty at the outset of the novel, Dorian is so easily taken in because of his youth and excitement. While Wotton originally proposes that “‘all influence is immoral— immoral from the scientific point of view...to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him’” (Wilde 19), Wotton recognizes that the effect he has had on Dorian is entirely different. He admits that the side of Dorian that emerges after the portrait “‘is the real Dorian Gray’” (Wilde 26). A friendship between Wotton and Dorian begins shortly after they meet in the studio, and Wotton is able to recognize what it is that Dorian contributes: “there was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth” (Wilde 34). Dorian’s addition, the original layer that he brings to the friendship and to the painting, is not only his beauty. Dorian brings an energy that Wotton and Hallward have lost to age, and a passion that allows him to live out what his friends merely speak of; his energy makes him the ideal fictional subject to act upon the original conclusions that occur when philosophical schools blend and are pushed to their most extreme positions. This moment transposes into fiction the material conditions of Wilde’s notebook: Dorian is a surface upon which Hallward and Wotton can sketch their ideas, just as Wilde sketches established philosophical ideas onto the blank pages of his journal. But the role of the individual—Dorian in the novel and the young scholar Wilde at Oxford—is what pushes ideas to their extreme. The notebook is a blank canvas for Wilde’s ideas and influences to blend, and Dorian is an example of a canvas that is not entirely blank when the ideas begin to blend. In the fictional Victorian society of Wilde’s novel, Dorian is able to act out a social experiment: what would a man do if his actions would not leave traces upon his appearance? Through the portrait which both awakens Dorian’s obsession with his own beauty and absorbs the visible consequences of life, Wilde writes out the thought experiment of how a man’s behavior could change if he could preserve his youth forever. The monstrous idea that emerges in this imagined utopic garden for experimentation is the idea that humans do not choose but are driven to follow the rules of society out of vanity, shame, and fear.
“The whole of Japan is a pure invention”
Wilde creates fictional utopic spaces for experimentation within his critical works, as well. The imagined space wherein hyperbole and extreme experimentation flourish is present in the pages of Wilde’s private notebook, the parlors and studios of Dorian Gray, and the private libraries and gardens of “Decay” and “Critic.” These spaces are imagined as partitioned from society; they are safe and exciting spaces because they allow experimentation with imagined and hyperbolic aesthetic utopias. These utopias are imagined spaces, and therefore the worship of realism or reality is oppositional to the utopia’s existence. In “Decay,” the character Vivian proclaims to his conversation partner Cyril that “all bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals” (Wilde 49) and that drawing on encyclopedic information and personal experience for artistic inspiration is the “false ideal of our time” (Wilde 8). Similarly, Gilbert in “The Critic As Artist” claims “we may not realize [the principles of life, as laid down by the Greeks] in an age so marred by false ideals as our own” (Wilde 102). The current moment is so hopeless that a utopian vision is necessary. In fact, a potential artistic utopia, far from Victorian England and obsession with realistic representation, is dismissed: Vivian refers to America as a place with a “lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals” (Wilde 25) because George Washington was “incapable of telling a lie” (Wilde 25). Imagination and unattainable ideals are equated here, and America is dismissed as a possible artistic and individualistic utopia because it lacks both of these elements. Artistic ideality is unachievable in Vivian and Cyril’s world, and therefore the philosophical ideas suggested and debated by Vivian and Cyril thus must be tested in an imagined place.
While Wilde’s imagined utopia for proper philosophical experimentation cannot exist in a physical place, he frequently uses Ancient Greece as a stand-in for a land of beauty, art, and intellectual freedom. As Wotton is interested in a “new Hedonism,” the Hellenism present in the notebook, novel, and essays is a sort of “new Hellenism” based on an idealized and imagined utopic version of Hellenism. The beauty of Ancient Greece is best exemplified through Dorian— in Dorian Gray, Wotton discusses the “return to the Hellenic ideal” (Wilde 19) and describes Dorian’s beauty as like “Adonis” and “Narcissus” (Wilde 7). Similarly, Gilbert in “Critic,” asserts, “the Greeks were a nation of art-critics” (Wilde 102) and claims that Plato stirred “the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos” (Wilde 106). Plato appears more than almost any other philosopher in Wilde’s Oxford journal, Wilde frequently lapses into Greek when commenting on Plato or Aristotle’s philosophy, and both “Critic” and “Decay” are written in the Platonic dialogic form.
This interest carries over to “Decay,” where the character Vivian asserts that “the Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct...knew that Life gains from Art not merely spirituality” (Wilde 30), and uses the Greeks to symbolize a utopian community that values art as the source of life. The utopian community of the Greeks reappears in the last few sentences of another of Wilde’s 1891 essays, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” where Wilde describes his ideal socialism: “the new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realize completely...the new Individualism is the new Hellenism.” James Sloan Allen describes Wilde’s invented new Hellenistic utopia thus; “Wilde’s socialism was, to be sure, his own idiosyncratic invention. Geared not toward promoting socioeconomic equality but to nurturing individual personality, this socialism would, above all, enable people to cultivate themselves through art” (Allen 400). The invented socialism that Wilde describes for his ideal community is based on the concept of individualism; individualism provides the freedom to experiment that is necessary for the utopia to exist. This individualism is the key to the freedom and the route to utopia in “Soul,” “Decay,” and “Critic.” The individualism in “Soul” is not “the misconceived individualism of capitalist acquisitiveness, then gaining ascendency in Europe. It must be the true humanistic individualism of a cultivated personality” (Allen 400). The cultivated personality that fuels humanistic individualism in “Soul” is political in nature, but not dissimilar to the aesthetic individualism explored in “Critic,” “Decay,” and Dorian Gray. Experimentation is based on a philosophy of individualism, and the ability to grow monstrous ideas depends upon the existence of a private, individual space in which to perform thought experiments.
The monstrous idea in Dorian Gray is represented visually through the portrait, and the drawings of combinations of creatures in the notebook are also visual representations. However, the journal also features imagined conversations between diverse schools of thought with Wilde’s commentary serving as a connection between the two, and his critical essays demonstrate the blending of ides through verbal representation as well. The dialogic form of both “Decay” and “Critic” allows for a conversation between two characters—one representing a more traditional idea and the other a more original idea—in which we ultimately find disparate ideas blended together that result in a jarring new idea. Just as Wilde repeatedly uses the phrase “new Hellenism” to separate this concept from the actual nation of Greece or the actual values of Ancient Hellenistic philosophies, in “Decay,” the character Vivian reasons that the nation of Japan is entirely a figment of artistic representation and therefore does not actually exist. Vivian tells Cyril:
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists... In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. The Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art" (Wilde 47). The monstrous idea that emerges from a conversation about the value of representative art is the rejection of the entire country of Japan. The assertion that Japan does not exist is a blend of Vivian’s belief that representations of reality through art do not reflect reality itself, but rather, the artist and the values of the artist’s own time, and the widespread Victorian interest, personified through Cyril, in the Japanese aesthetic. The blend, pushed to the extreme, is Wilde’s deliberately hyperbolic and provocative statement that the country and people of Japan as represented through art are an invention.
The outspoken Vivian’s claims and his conversation partner Cyril’s questions form an imagined conversation where thought experiments can play out without repercussion. In “Critic,” the characters Gilbert and Ernest form a similar pair, and their dialogue similarly allows their opinions to blend and produce new and dangerous statements. The most dangerous idea produced in “Critic” is, fittingly, that all worthwhile ideas are dangerous. Ernest sums up their conversation by saying: "You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert...you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer" (Wilde 195). His conclusion that all thought is dangerous is not merely Gilbert’s assertion, however. Gilbert arrives that the conclusion through the conversation with Ernest, and, just as Cyril poses questions that lead Vivian to make certain claims, Gilbert’s claims answer to Ernest’s inquires. Gilbert first claims, “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all” (Wilde 163), to which Ernest replies: “Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all art is, in its essence, immoral. Are you going to tell me now that all thought is, in its essence, dangerous?” (Wilde 163). Gilbert’s answer of “Yes, is the practical sphere it is so” (Wilde 164). Therefore, the essay’s assertion that all thought is dangerous must be read as a product of the dialogue which blends the two men’s beliefs and ideas and pushes them to original and dangerous claims.
In addition to blending the two men’s disparate points of view—the traditional Ernest with the provocative Gilbert—Wilde blends tenets of established schools of thought. Just as Wotton’s New Hedonism stems from commonly understood aspects of utilitarianism and hedonism, and Vivian contests the widespread Victorian obsession with Orientalism, Gilbert’s ideas are grounded in a provocative take on Darwinism. Darwin’s On the Origin of The Species was published in 1859, and Wilde would have at least been familiar with its foundational ideas. In “Critic,” Gilbert borrows from the concept of natural selection and blends it with his understanding of aesthetic philosophy: "Aesthetics are higher than ethics...Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress and variety and change" (Wilde 194). Also present in Gilbert’s analysis is the concept of Ethics, and his belief that “even a colour- sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong” (Wilde 194). The cultivation of an individual personality, therefore, relies upon a devotion to aesthetics and beauty and the very progress of the world depends upon aesthetic creation. Gilbert’s mention of “new forms” is self-referential, because the very idea he arrives at is a new form that emerges from the collision of multiple established schools of thought. While “aesthetics is higher than ethics” may be an original and provocative idea, Gilbert arrives at another related concept that Victorian society may have found to be truly monstrous. Gilbert says: "What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics" (Wilde 118).
Here, Wilde pushes the idea that “aesthetics is higher than ethics” to its logical conclusion. If the focus on ethics were removed from society, the evaluation of right from wrong would disappear as well. The resulting Sin may be monstrous to the Victorian moral code, but here Gilbert places great value on Sin as the foundation of progress. Again he returns to the idea of individualism, and claims that the current notions of morality are in opposition to the “higher form of ethics.” The existence of a “higher form of ethics” rooted in Sin echoes the moment in Wilde’s notebook where he discusses utilitarianism and hedonism. Wilde ideas in the notebook that “So Hedonism is really more ethical than Utilitarianism” and “the highest happiness must be the unimpeded energy of the highest faculty” relates to Wilde’s much later ideas that “aesthetics is higher than ethics” and Sin is a “higher form of ethics” than the “current notions of morality” through a privileging of individual intellectual and creative experimentation over the more widely accepted interests of the larger society. Gilbert’s statement that “Sin increases the experience of the race” perfectly describes Dorian Gray’s existence after the creation of the portrait which allows him to pursue experiences without repercussions to his personal aesthetic value. These statements in “Critic” echo ideas found in explorations of Darwinism, utilitarianism, hedonism, aestheticism, individualism, and ethics, and this blend reappears in Wilde’s notebook and novel as well as his dialogic essays.
Wilde’s use of the dialogic form in his critical essays is a method not only for blending together existing ideas, but also for producing new ones. Herbert Sussman, in “Criticism as Art: Form in Oscar Wilde’s Critical Writings,” argues that “Wilde is consciously working to create new forms of critical discourse through which he can adequately express his ‘new views’” (Sussman 109). Sussman’s exploration of Wilde’s dialogic form posits that by using dialogue, Wilde subverts expectations and expands the meaning of philosophical criticism; Sussman argues that in “Critic,” “the self-reflexive comments are forceful in reminding the reader that a critical discourse is a work of art, a coherent fiction, rather than the typically Victorian statement of the speaker’s beliefs” (110). The essays resemble Wilde’s Oxford notebook in their emphasis on conversation; by commenting in the margins of the journal next to a few selected statements, Wilde creates a series of mock-debates between followers of utilitarianism and hedonism, and with his provocative commentary he fuels the intellectual fire and adds his own mind to the mix. In the notebook, Wilde never reaches philosophical conclusions, but rather posits suggestions through imagined conversations. The same occurs in the dialogic essays. By refusing to write a conclusive philosophical agreement or assign a “winner,” by simply ending the discussion as soon as the characters themselves lose intellectual interest in the topic, Wilde highlights the moments of provocative interconnection as the most interesting aspects of discourse.
“i.e.: I love interconnection”
My experience with Wilde’s undergraduate notebook revealed that many of his most interesting and complex ideas are not found in his oft-quoted paradoxical witticisms and aphorisms, but rather in the provocative, dangerous, and hyperbolic statements and thought experiments. These provocative and huge ideas are represented visually and verbally through the monstrous doodles and marginal commentary of Wilde’s notebook, the image of the portrait of Dorian Gray, and the Platonic dialogue form of his critical essays. They are hidden in the margins of his personal notebook or in the words of fictional characters uttered in enclosed and private spaces and their content is based on borrowed tenets from numerous established schools of thought. For example, in a notebook steeped in quotes from many of Western philosophy’s most influential thinkers, Wilde blends the utilitarian concern with maximum human happiness with the scientific method of experimentation when he explores what could happen if one could perform experiments on prisoners or re-grow a mechanized society. In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde blends Paterian aestheticism with hedonistic individualism to explore what could happen if one could experience life as he pleased without physical repercussions. His dialogic essays borrow from similar established ideas to arrive at original, hyperbolic, and provocative declarations such as “the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” “all thought is dangerous,” “aesthetics are higher than ethics,” and “sin is an essential element of progress.” The logical result of these new ideas are then tested; Wilde tests how a man’s behavior will change if he is promised a perfect appearance forever in Dorian Gray, the idea that representative art leads to the invention of an entire country and people in “Decay,” and the idea that worthwhile ideas are dangerous and therefore thought itself must be dangerous in “Critic.” This pattern of repeatedly demonstrating the method of blending competing ideas together unites the private notebook from 1876 with the novel and essays from the early 1890s. Wilde’s love of interconnection and his interest in growing monstrous ideas are clear in his pattern of borrowing ideas, blending them, reaching new suggestions, and imagining a utopic space in which to act out the wildest possibilities.
The proposed thought experiments and drawings within Wilde’s undergraduate journal do not merely illuminate what schools of thought or ideas Wilde found interesting early in his career. The doodles that illustrate the pages, the marginal commentaries that connect diverse ideas and engage them in conversation with each other, and the moment in the notebook where Wilde confesses that he “loves interconnection” provide insight to how Wilde thought. The mapping of his ideas and the moments of obvious enthusiasm reveal a common thread that Wilde continued exploring in his novel and essays. By highlighting moments of apparent intellectual enthusiasm in an example of Wilde’s juvenilia and searching for related moments in later, published texts, I hoped to glimpse into Wilde’s thought process and uncover something new about the unique approach that Wilde revisits throughout his career. From his undergraduate notebook to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his essays “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic As Artist,” Wilde roots his ideas in aspects of established schools of thought, twists and layers these ideas together, and creates something new and provocative through this process of interconnection. The margins of Wilde’s undergraduate philosophy notebook reveal an early intellectual excitement for creating private, utopic spaces and adding an original, provocative, wonderful petal to the monstrous tulip budding within.
Works Cited
Allen, James Sloan. “Nietzsche and Wilde: An Ethics of Style.” The Sewanee Review 114.3 (Summer 2006): 386-402.
Buma, Michael. “The Picture of Dorian Gray, or the Embarrassing Orthodoxy of Oscar Wilde.” Victorian Newsletter 107 (2005): 18-25.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 2007. Print.
Mendola, Joseph. “Intuitive Hedonism.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 128.2 (2006): 441-447.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 2007.
Reader, Simon. “Oscar Wilde’s Notebook on Philosophy.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 36.2 (2010): 21-31.
Sussman, Herbert. “Criticism as Art: Form in Oscar Wilde’s Critical Writings.” Studies in Philology 70.1 (1973): 108-122.
Wilde, Oscar. Intentions: The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison, the Critic as Artist, the Truth of Masks. New York: Brentano's, 1905. Web http://books.google.com.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1987. Print.
Wilde, Oscar, Aubrey Beardsley, and Alfred Bruce Douglas. Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. New York: Dover Publications, 1967. Print.
Moreover, the image of a private garden wherein ideas take shape echoes through these texts; Wilde’s novel and essays demonstrate his intellectual interest in exploring jarring philosophical ideas exchanged between fictional characters who occupy private, utopic spaces. The image of the monstrous tulip relies upon the existence of intellectual gardens in which the monstrous tulips are able to grow and mutate. Dorian Gray listens intently to Lord Henry Wotton’s declaration of hedonistic values as Basil Hallward paints Dorian’s portrait in his small art studio in Dorian Gray. In “Decay,” Vivian lectures Cyril on the tenets of The Tired Hedonists in his private library, claiming that nature’s discomfort caused the invention of indoor spaces, and that “egotism, itself, which is so necessary to a proper sense of human dignity, is entirely the result of indoor life” (Decay 6). In the essay “Critic,” Gilbert and Ernest converse about art criticism in the library of Gilbert’s house in Piccadilly. In addition to all taking place within private, enclosed spaces, the conversations between characters in these texts all blend philosophical ideas. The novel charts the effect of layering Hallward and Wotton’s two distinct concepts of morality with Dorian’s youth and energy. The two essays follow the classic dialogic form, featuring one character who represents more traditional philosophical position and one who pushes a more jarring idea on his companion. This focus on conversations, occurring within private and utopic intellectual gardens in which philosophical ideas are first explored and then pushed beyond the realm of traditional academic discussion, can be traced back to an origin much earlier than Wilde’s 1891 texts.
This focus also appears in Wilde’s undergraduate philosophy notebook, composed in 1876. At the time, Wilde was studying for his upcoming examinations in philosophy at the Magdalene College at Oxford. The journal where he copied quotes and explored concepts that would appear on his examinations is a large, hardback volume. While his blocks of quotes and analysis of philosophical ideas fill the lined pages, Wilde’s own ideas branch out in different angles in the margins of the pages. Also scattered throughout the pages, alongside Wilde’s handwriting, are doodles and sketches. In his article describing the notebook, Simon Reader draws our attention to these sketches and provides a short list—“a top hat over the words ‘logical mean,’ a snake uncoiling beside the heading ‘Mind and Matter,’ a man’s face, and a vase are among the more distinct” (Reader 23)—but does not mention the most notable aspect of the drawings. Although Wilde’s subjects change, he repeatedly illustrates his notes with imaginary
creatures that combine parts from various animals. Pictured are photographs of two images from “Notebook on Philosophy”; [fig 1] shows a reptilian creature in a doglike pose with a bizarre funnel tail, and [fig 2], a hairy snake with what appear to be wings. These curious amalgamations are visible representations of many ideas coming together and blending; Wilde borrows familiar traits taken from existing animals, but turns them into new and jarring images using the pages of his private notebook as a garden in which to produce these monstrous images. Wilde also blends ideas through languages in his journal; he combines English with Latin with Greek, sometimes switching languages in the middle of a sentence. His interest in the Greek alphabet continues throughout the notebook as he substitutes the Roman alphabet lower-case “a” with the lower- case alpha. Through the amalgamations present in both his doodling and use of language, Wilde’s notebook reflects a habit of blending multiple ideas together to present a unified and
unique concept. Each physical page functions in layers of philosophers’ words and Wilde’s germinal ideas, both visually and verbally scribbled at angles in the margins. In his private journal, Wilde demonstrated an early interest in unlikely mash-ups and palimpsestic layers, in which converging influences give rise to entirely new ideas. An examination of this unique aspect of the notebook yields a larger argument about Wilde’s later body of work: Wilde grew monstrous tulips in gardens in Dorian Gray, “Decay,” and “Critic.” The content of the journal informs the rest of Wilde’s later work and reveals the origin of a thread that runs throughout Wilde’s career: his work repeats scenes in which characters gather in private spaces to layer ideas, push those ideas to the extreme, and produce an entirely new art.
Since the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA acquired the notebook in 2004, numerous scholars have worked with it. However, few have written about it or been able to use the manuscript in scholarship. Approaching Wilde’s notebook as an illumination of the artist’s evolving philosophical thought reveals the importance to Wilde studies of working with juvenilia. Juvenilia is difficult for scholars to assess; should it be dismissed as a trivial artifact from a writer’s past, or should it be considered a part of the author’s body of work? If it is to be considered a part of the body of work, how does it fit in, what does it contribute, and what new light does it shed on later, published work? Juvenilia often remains unpublished, and therefore archival research is required before a scholar can begin investigating the importance of such texts. Scholars like Simon Reader have started working with Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy,” but are unsure of how exactly to use the text. Reader claims that it “offers a valuable picture of Wilde’s education, early intellectual interests, and notational practices” (Reader 21) and that its value is that it provides a “richer understanding of Wilde’s engagement with evolution, the history of empiricism and idealism, and Hegelian philosophy” (Reader 23). The notebook certainly does offer scholars a valuable key to further understanding Wilde’s philosophical interests. But the journal’s real value is larger than this: Wilde’s “Notebook on Philosophy” is a rich example of physical aesthetic form. Its amalgamations and marginal commentary both visually and verbally explore ideas through layering, borrowing, and blending. This 1876 notebook reveals a tonal consistency in Wilde’s work that begins extraordinarily early in the writer’s adult life; from his college years, Wilde’s approach to philosophy was playful, complex, and immersed in layers of other schools of thought and theories.
How can this unpublished journal provide insight into some of the philosophy at work in Wilde’s canonical writing? As an unpublished record of some of his earliest thoughts on beauty, pleasure, happiness, and the pursuit of the good, this manuscript illuminates ideas later explored through his literary and critical writing. However, the notebook is a clue to not only what Wilde was thinking, but also how he was thinking; Wilde’s career as a writer and philosopher produced later texts, including Dorian Gray, “Decay,” and “Critic,” which explore concepts of beauty through the same methods of blending and layering ideas within private, utopic spaces. Appearing within the private space of a scholar’s notebook, Wilde’s doodles illustrate a blending of distinct creatures. A similar illustration occurs in Dorian Gray, where the portrait acts as a visible amalgamation of Hallward’s traditional aestheticism, Wotton’s hedonism, and Dorian’s youthful vulnerability blending together onto the canvas to create an original monstrosity. And just as Wilde creates imaginary conversations between schools of thought in his journal, he does similar work in the critical dialogues. In “Decay,” Vivian’s argument for the danger of representative or realistic art collides with Cyril’s intellectual approach and leads to Vivian’s dangerous and original assertion that the country of Japan does not exist. The conversation in “Critic” between the traditional Ernest and the individualist Gilbert results in Gilbert’s claim that all art is immoral and, fittingly, that all worthwhile ideas are dangerous. The original work of Dorian’s portrait and Vivian and Gilbert’s claims all emerge within private spheres—art studios, gardens, and libraries. This connection between the notebook and Wilde’s later work demonstrates that from his days as an enthusiastic undergraduate student onward, Wilde 1) performs thought experiments by growing monstrous ideas in his imagined utopic gardens and 2) figures these ideas through a process of blending, either visually or verbally.
“A Universe of Innumerable Sciences”
Through the process of borrowing concepts from established schools of thought to create new ideas in “Notebook on Philosophy,” Wilde plays with the question: what could possibly happen if people lived by the philosophies they posed? His marginal contributions to the conversations of canonical philosophers are sometimes jarring, partly because they draw on unsavory implications of established schools of thought and bring them to their ultimate logical conclusions if applied to society. At one point very early in the journal, Wilde writes: "what does social science not include. The destiny of society is affected by [a] universe of innumerable sciences—mechanics. Chemistry. Results. If one was ever to regrow society as a mechanism where a lot of things [act] on one another it [would] be difficult to estimate the things: their number and their complexity. They first grow and change organically—i.e. I love interconnection." This last comment is an extremely rare moment in the notebook; it is a moment in which Wilde has just explored an idea and then commented on the method through which he explored it. He draws back and sees himself connecting social science with the hard sciences, then comments on his own love of interconnection. This moment, in which Wilde comments on his method of thinking and his source of intellectual enthusiasm, provides a hint of Wilde’s thinking in his later works. This comment is visibly represented through the drawings of combined creatures and verbally represented through his marginal commentary, which sets up imaginary dialogues between disparate schools of thought. This interconnection ultimately leads to original ideas in the notebook.
The monstrous idea in the above quote explores what might happen if it were possible to “regrow society as a mechanism.” This moment is significant because in the 1891 texts, Wilde “regrows society” over and over as utopic spaces in which thought experiments can occur. While he does not act out the thought experiment of re-growing society in a fictional sense in the 1876 manuscript, Wilde suggests creating an imaginary world as a test case. His comment at the end— “I love interconnection”—is a moment of intellectual enthusiasm at the connection between the study of society and the sciences he sees governing society, the complexity of the system, and the changes he can play with by imagining unreal societies. Later on this same page, he continues to describe the complexity of society: "There always seem to remain certain things the operation of which is mysterious: such things as great men, or the existence of evil. And exceptional occurrences such as we allow “special providences”, which are its difficulty: human free will too: yet we must not confuse free will with capricious will: a good man’s actions can be predicted, a bad man’s capricious...that of a science is its agreement with facts. Social science is a science of the decay: the legislation [would] know the general drift." Wilde’s proposition that there are aspects of society that we cannot understand is interesting, because his list of social mysteries are great men, the existence of evil, exceptional occurrences, and human free will. Despite this complexity and potentially interesting thought experiment that could come from re-growing society, Wilde perhaps becomes bored and dismisses social science entirely as “a science of decay.”
The text on the page ends here, and on the back of the same page, Wilde scribbles at the top, “We ought to use our prisons and Lunatic asylums as means of experiment.” Here is another monstrous idea in the journal. Wilde expands on his idea of re-growing a mechanized society by applying hard science (experiments) to society (people in asylums and prisons) in a deliberate and concrete way. He borrows from the tenets of “mechanics. Chemistry. Results” from his previous comment, from the basic concept of the scientific method, and from the social issue of members of society who cannot contribute because they are in prisons or asylums. By combining these concepts, Wilde adds an extra petal to the tulip borrowed from established ideas within the private intellectual garden of his notebook. Just as when Wilde proposes re-growing society and comments on his love of interconnection, after Wilde’s test case of experimenting on people in prisons and asylums, he provides insight to his method of reasoning. He writes: “difficulty of method: 1) experiments practically infinite. We can only look out for them and not create them...So method not experimental. A) the abstract method, B) the historical method.” Here we see Wilde actually sketching out an approach to his thought experiment. He concludes quickly that the experiments are “practically infinite” and that therefore the method cannot be experimental. Wilde thus concludes, “we can only look out for them and not create them.” This implies that the information he can glean from his interest in connecting scientific experimentation to prisons and asylums cannot come from his own thought experiments or real experiments, because these experiments are “practically infinite.” Because he cannot “create” the information, he must “look for” the information in an “abstract method” or “historical method.”
While the specific thought experiment of re-growing a mechanized society ends here, Wilde remains interested in layering social and hard sciences throughout the notebook. He writes on the same page, “Political economy is treated as a separate science.” He goes on to write: "The English Political Economy holds that political economy can be treated separately, and so it’s a real science. On the other hand Conte says that because it has been treated as a separate science it is not so, it is dogmatism. Both start from belief in the complexity of society. The one says society being complex we can only deal with the complexity through the instrument of abstraction...proves to be useful in other spheres as physics and mathematics." Wilde returns to the “abstract method” by referring to the “instrument of abstraction” and briefly borrows the idea that abstraction is the only method through which to explore the complexity of society. We see Wilde return to established thinkers and the idea of the complexity of society. Throughout these pages, Wilde blends various concepts, borrows from his knowledge of both social and scientific systems, and laments that these two spheres cannot go hand in hand.
Along with social and scientific systems, Wilde works with other established schools of philosophy in “Notebook on Philosophy.” An example of one of Wilde’s additions to the philosophical conversation occurring within his notebook occurs amongst definitions of hedonism and utilitarianism. Wilde’s angled scrawl reads “So Hedonism is really more ethical than Utilitarianism: the objection to Utilitarianism is that it confuses ethics and politics. Do the ‘results’ of the Utilitarians affect us? If so, it is really an attempt to retain the results of Hedonism.” Here Wilde adds his own commentary to the ethics of utilitarianism and hedonism. Both schools of philosophy seek the good through happiness or pleasure. To possibly recreate the context in which Wilde wrote this, John Stuart Mill defines utilitarianism as: "Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure.... pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain" (Mill). Hedonism can be simply defined as “the view that pleasure is the basic ethical or normative value” (Mendola 441), which appears to align with the aims of utilitarianism. The resurgence in the interest of Ancient Greek philosophical thought along the lines of utilitarianism and hedonism with the 18th and 19th century arguments of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill led to new branches, definitions, and distinctions for the two schools of thought. How then, did Wilde differentiate between these two schools and define them in the context of his notebook?
The evidence by which one could approach an answer to this question is scattered throughout Wilde’s notebook as commentary to other topics. In a separate section of the notebook where Wilde takes notes on Aristotle, he writes, “the highest happiness must be the unimpeded energy of the highest faculty.” The word highest here is interesting, because Wilde was familiar with both Bentham’s argument for a quantitative measure for happiness, termed the “most happiness,” and with Mill’s argument for a qualitative measure for happiness, termed the “greatest happiness.” By using a term that avoids the language associated with either main branch of the contemporary debate on Utilitarianism, this highest could be a reference to Hedonistic happiness. Wilde here focuses on the “unimpeded energy of the highest faculty,” which sounds more like a call for individual intellectual and creative vigor instead of a quest to maximize humanity’s happiness. Later in the notebook, Wilde remarks that “utilitarianism is a reaction against the exaggeration of feeling,” pegging it as a practical and utility-based method for processing and defining the human emotion of happiness. However Wilde differentiates the two schools of philosophy founded in the virtue of pleasure, at this moment in his undergraduate career he makes a bold claim that echoes throughout his later work and is acted out by Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray: pleasure is good, and it comes directly as a result of seeking the good.
When exploring these various established schools of thought within his notebook, Wilde is supposed to be studying for his philosophy examinations at Oxford. This is Wilde’s private text, written purely for his personal use and in his personal space. The quotes, notes, and commentary were presumably composed while Wilde was alone. In a chapter of Richard Ellmann’s biography Oscar Wilde entitled “Wilde at Oxford,” Ellmann explains “However passionately he read in philosophy, the history of science, and literature, the reputation Wilde sought was of being brilliant without zeal...One of his friends, David Hunter Blair, was convinced that Wilde plugged away secretly in the small hours so as to keep up his air of insouciance” (Ellmann 43). While writing about imagined utopic spaces wherein one might experiment on society, Wilde was working at night, in private, surrounded by philosophy texts at Oxford in a sort of intellectual utopia. Along with the canonical philosophers on whose texts Wilde was tested, Wilde was also drawn to contemporary philosophy outside of his studies. Upon entering Oxford, Wilde was attracted to many thinkers, and “much of his time went into reading in other fields” (Ellmann 41) because “Wilde was too much of an intellectual buccaneer to confine himself to the requirements of the Greats” (Ellmann 43). Ellmann notes: "While at Oxford [Wilde] kept a Commonplace Book in which the range of reference is wide. He read Herbert Spencer and the philosopher of science William Kingdon Clifford; he was on easy terms not only with Plato and Aristotle, as required by his course, but with Kant, Hegel, Jacobi, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Mill...he characteristically draws together contemporary and classical concerns" (Ellmann 41).
Wilde’s interests were wide-ranging, but even at an early age he was drawn to the philosophy of aesthetics. Although Wilde was interested in numerous subjects, John Ruskin and Walter Pater were “the inevitable poles of attraction” (Ellmann 47) and “for Wilde the two stood like heralds beckoning him in opposite directions” (Ellmann 51). Ruskin was a professor and Pater was a fellow at Oxford during Wilde’s career as a student. The source of their philosophical disparity emerged from differing ideas of beauty: “though both Ruskin and Pater welcomed beauty, for Ruskin it had to be allied with good, for Pater it might have just a touch of evil...Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism...Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination” (Ellmann 49). Wilde admired both men and was attracted to both schools of thought, but was particularly intrigued by Pater. Ellmann describes how Wilde “came under the spell” of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance and “never ceased to speak of it as ‘[his] golden book’” and “described Pater’s work as the ‘book which has had such a strange influence over my life’” (Ellmann 47). This image of Wilde as an impressionable young man torn between his immense admirations for two diverging aesthetic philosophers that Ellmann paints in this section of his biography recalls the character Dorian Gray, a young man caught between Hallward and Wotton’s competing thoughts. Wilde’s “golden book” bears similarities to the mysterious untitled yellow book given by Wotton to Dorian Gray which “was the strangest book [Dorian] had ever read” and “a poisonous book” that “for years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of” (Wilde 104-5). Ellmann even points to a moment in Dorian Gray when “Dorian quotes [Pater] without acknowledgement” and “Lord Henry Wotton [talks] this kind of Paterese to Dorian Gray” (Ellmann 48). Ellmann does not suggest a direct parallel between Wilde and the character of Dorian Gray, and I do not wish to suggest this either. Rather, the connection demonstrates that Wilde’s own experience with influence and intellectual enthusiasm was possibly a point of curiosity and interest he explored in later works. The notebook was composed during a rich time in Wilde’s life where he was surrounded by schools of thought and their major contributors. Wilde’s career at Oxford was a time when he could discuss aesthetics with his heroes and fall under the influence of their ideas, and in Dorian Gray he explores the results of a similar cycle of influence and blended ideas.
“Man was a being with...myriad sensations, a complex multi-form creature”
In Wilde’s private space at Oxford, he fell under the influence of philosophers, stitched together doodled creatures comprised of various borrowed parts, orchestrated imaginary conversations between schools of thought through his marginal commentary, and performed thought experiments by pushing ideas to their logical extremes. In the utopic intellectual garden of his private journal, Wilde was able to cultivate monstrous ideas. The layering of ideas in Wilde’s notebook finds an echo in the symbolic blending of philosophies on canvas that becomes Dorian’s portrait in Dorian Gray. This portrait operates as an image of Hallward, Wotton, and Dorian influencing each other’s philosophies. The final layer, created through Dorian’s actions, catalyzes the inception of a monstrous creation—one that emerges only through such a complex combination. The magical painting is a symbol which represents a question first posed in Wilde’s notebook: what happens when philosophies of hedonism or aestheticism are acted out to their logical ends in society? After Dorian sees the beautiful portrait of himself, he begins to live a life of pleasure and beauty, loses sight of the Victorian moral code; and eventually commits the act of murder. Wilde includes a moment in Dorian Gray before Wotton delivers his philosophy to Dorian in which Hallward questions whether Wotton lives out the hedonism he preaches; Hallward says to Wotton, “‘you are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose’” (Wilde 8). While Wotton is apparently unable or unwilling to live by his own tenants, his hedonistic philosophy and the beauty of Hallward’s painting awaken thoughts in Dorian that allow him to act according to the blend of ideas. Wotton himself is ultimately harmless although he provides dangerous ideas to the monstrous new idea represented by the portrait. Wotton’s ideas are perhaps simply a monstrous tulip with only four petals; Dorian borrows these four to create a monstrous tulip with five petals.
The portrait, the new and terrifying creation, emerges from Basil Hallward, Lord Henry Wotton, and Dorian Gray, who all participate in a cycle of influence. Hallward tells Wotton that when he first saw Dorian, “‘A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life’” (Wilde 10). After the portrait is complete and Wotton and Dorian become friends, Wotton determines that he “would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him...would make that wonderful spirit his own” (Wilde 35). This cycle informs the painting, as Wotton awakens an aspect of Dorian which appears on Hallward’s canvas as the three men socialize in Hallward’s studio. This cycle of influence continues to unfold long after the painting is complete, informing Dorian’s actions later in the novel. Michael Buma discusses this influence in terms of the Genesis story; “Lord Henry’s moral position in Dorian Gray is akin to that of the devil; he is the initial serpent in the Garden, and continues to coax Dorian to evil throughout the novel...From the moment they are alone in the Garden, Lord Henry goes to work enthralling Dorian with his theories” (Buma 20). While I agree with Buma’s assessment that Wotton’s influence over Dorian partly dictates Dorian’s actions throughout the novel, I do not read Dorian as a blank canvas onto which Wotton inscribes his theories. Dorian’s actions, as the final layer of paint, both illuminate the ideas discussed at the heart of the circle of influence and create a new image distinct from Hallward’s original masterpiece of Dorian’s expression, captured during Wotton’s speech. Just as Wilde was not a blank canvas onto which the ideas of Pater and Ruskin were blended, Dorian’s intellectual enthusiasm for the ideas of Hallward and Wotton is an essential aspect of this philosophic layering.
Wilde’s marginal commentary articulates the writer’s enthusiasm for the inspiration and influence of the surrounding philosophies and Wilde’s own interests and beliefs. The painting holds a portion of each of these influences within it and physically reflects an amalgamation of philosophies. Therefore, it is fitting that Hallward feels physically connected to the portrait; Wotton “must have it” (Wilde 25), and Dorian is magically linked to it. Hallward tells Wotton, “‘I really can’t exhibit it. I have put too much of myself in it’” (Wilde 7) and reveals that he believes “‘every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter...It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul’” (Wilde 9). The secret of Hallward’s soul could be his devotion to art and beauty and how this causes him to be taken in by Dorian’s physical beauty. The use of the portrait as a physical representation of secret thoughts and feelings echoes Wilde’s own private notebook. Hallward cannot show the painting because it contains too much of himself; it stands as evidence of his most private thoughts experienced in his most private space—his studio. Wilde’s undergraduate journal, composed in private and never published, contains a similarly intimate and private record.
Wotton and Dorian give the painting some bit of themselves. Wotton’s contribution to the painting is that he causes a peculiar expression to appear on Dorian’s face when inspiring Dorian with his ideas of new hedonism. Dorian, of course, is the subject of the painting and adds the final layer of paint to the canvas through his actions. Hallward anticipates the danger of Wotton’s influence and begs Wotton, “‘don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad...don’t take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an artist depends on him’” (Wilde 16). Wotton’s influence, however, adds another layer, which contributes to the masterpiece of Hallward’s painting. But what exactly is the nature of these overlapping ideas? Dorian shapes both Hallward’s and Wotton’s ideas. Hallward tells Wotton of Dorian that “‘unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of the soul and body...we in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void’” (Wilde 13). Through Dorian, Hallward explores his devotion to the aesthetic and reimagines the notion of beauty, claiming that it does not come from realism or ideality, but from bringing together the soul and body. Dorian similarly shapes Wotton’s philosophy. Wotton clearly defines his mission as one aligned with hedonism, and he sees Dorian as more than just the figurehead of his hedonistic revival: “‘a new Hedonism—that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do’” (Wilde 23). Wotton borrows from Dorian’s already influential personality and contributes the philosophy behind Dorian’s actions. This cycle of borrowing and blending creates a painting, which physically bears the evidence of each man’s contribution, as each page of Wilde’s notebook contains ideas layered upon each other along with Wilde’s own interpretation.
Wilde, while inspired by the philosophers he studied, contributes his own personality and ideas to his notes. Similarly, while Dorian accepts Hallward’s flattery and Wotton’s influence, some part of Dorian is present in the blend of ideas that creates the portrait. Wotton delivers his stirring speech to Dorian; “with his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him” and sees that his words are merely awakening a natural passion that lay dormant in Dorian’s mind. Dorian, posing for Hallward’s painting and listening to Wotton’s speech, suddenly becomes dimly conscious that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have come really from himself. The few words...had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses...Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood. He understood them now. Life suddenly became fiery-colored to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. Why had he not known it? (Wilde 20). Wotton sees that Dorian is not simply accepting Wotton’s soul, thoughts, passions, and virtues, and he is “amazed at the sudden impression that he words had produced...how fascinating the lad was!” (Wilde 20). Not only does Wilde here suggest that the secret chord already existed within Dorian, he also implies that the chord had never been touched before his encounter with Wotton. This, along with the serendipitous timing of Hallward’s “marvelous bold touch” (Wilde 21), produces an original and monstrous portrait. On the canvas of the notebook’s blank pages, Wilde similarly sets up a moment in which disparate ideas can collide and combine. Wilde’s own intellectual enthusiasm and his youthful excitement at embracing new ideas allows him to see interconnections between ideas, add his own unique commentary, and create opportunities for original thought.
A man of twenty at the outset of the novel, Dorian is so easily taken in because of his youth and excitement. While Wotton originally proposes that “‘all influence is immoral— immoral from the scientific point of view...to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him’” (Wilde 19), Wotton recognizes that the effect he has had on Dorian is entirely different. He admits that the side of Dorian that emerges after the portrait “‘is the real Dorian Gray’” (Wilde 26). A friendship between Wotton and Dorian begins shortly after they meet in the studio, and Wotton is able to recognize what it is that Dorian contributes: “there was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth” (Wilde 34). Dorian’s addition, the original layer that he brings to the friendship and to the painting, is not only his beauty. Dorian brings an energy that Wotton and Hallward have lost to age, and a passion that allows him to live out what his friends merely speak of; his energy makes him the ideal fictional subject to act upon the original conclusions that occur when philosophical schools blend and are pushed to their most extreme positions. This moment transposes into fiction the material conditions of Wilde’s notebook: Dorian is a surface upon which Hallward and Wotton can sketch their ideas, just as Wilde sketches established philosophical ideas onto the blank pages of his journal. But the role of the individual—Dorian in the novel and the young scholar Wilde at Oxford—is what pushes ideas to their extreme. The notebook is a blank canvas for Wilde’s ideas and influences to blend, and Dorian is an example of a canvas that is not entirely blank when the ideas begin to blend. In the fictional Victorian society of Wilde’s novel, Dorian is able to act out a social experiment: what would a man do if his actions would not leave traces upon his appearance? Through the portrait which both awakens Dorian’s obsession with his own beauty and absorbs the visible consequences of life, Wilde writes out the thought experiment of how a man’s behavior could change if he could preserve his youth forever. The monstrous idea that emerges in this imagined utopic garden for experimentation is the idea that humans do not choose but are driven to follow the rules of society out of vanity, shame, and fear.
“The whole of Japan is a pure invention”
Wilde creates fictional utopic spaces for experimentation within his critical works, as well. The imagined space wherein hyperbole and extreme experimentation flourish is present in the pages of Wilde’s private notebook, the parlors and studios of Dorian Gray, and the private libraries and gardens of “Decay” and “Critic.” These spaces are imagined as partitioned from society; they are safe and exciting spaces because they allow experimentation with imagined and hyperbolic aesthetic utopias. These utopias are imagined spaces, and therefore the worship of realism or reality is oppositional to the utopia’s existence. In “Decay,” the character Vivian proclaims to his conversation partner Cyril that “all bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals” (Wilde 49) and that drawing on encyclopedic information and personal experience for artistic inspiration is the “false ideal of our time” (Wilde 8). Similarly, Gilbert in “The Critic As Artist” claims “we may not realize [the principles of life, as laid down by the Greeks] in an age so marred by false ideals as our own” (Wilde 102). The current moment is so hopeless that a utopian vision is necessary. In fact, a potential artistic utopia, far from Victorian England and obsession with realistic representation, is dismissed: Vivian refers to America as a place with a “lack of imagination and of high unattainable ideals” (Wilde 25) because George Washington was “incapable of telling a lie” (Wilde 25). Imagination and unattainable ideals are equated here, and America is dismissed as a possible artistic and individualistic utopia because it lacks both of these elements. Artistic ideality is unachievable in Vivian and Cyril’s world, and therefore the philosophical ideas suggested and debated by Vivian and Cyril thus must be tested in an imagined place.
While Wilde’s imagined utopia for proper philosophical experimentation cannot exist in a physical place, he frequently uses Ancient Greece as a stand-in for a land of beauty, art, and intellectual freedom. As Wotton is interested in a “new Hedonism,” the Hellenism present in the notebook, novel, and essays is a sort of “new Hellenism” based on an idealized and imagined utopic version of Hellenism. The beauty of Ancient Greece is best exemplified through Dorian— in Dorian Gray, Wotton discusses the “return to the Hellenic ideal” (Wilde 19) and describes Dorian’s beauty as like “Adonis” and “Narcissus” (Wilde 7). Similarly, Gilbert in “Critic,” asserts, “the Greeks were a nation of art-critics” (Wilde 102) and claims that Plato stirred “the desire to know the connection between Beauty and Truth, and the place of Beauty in the moral and intellectual order of the Kosmos” (Wilde 106). Plato appears more than almost any other philosopher in Wilde’s Oxford journal, Wilde frequently lapses into Greek when commenting on Plato or Aristotle’s philosophy, and both “Critic” and “Decay” are written in the Platonic dialogic form.
This interest carries over to “Decay,” where the character Vivian asserts that “the Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct...knew that Life gains from Art not merely spirituality” (Wilde 30), and uses the Greeks to symbolize a utopian community that values art as the source of life. The utopian community of the Greeks reappears in the last few sentences of another of Wilde’s 1891 essays, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” where Wilde describes his ideal socialism: “the new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realize completely...the new Individualism is the new Hellenism.” James Sloan Allen describes Wilde’s invented new Hellenistic utopia thus; “Wilde’s socialism was, to be sure, his own idiosyncratic invention. Geared not toward promoting socioeconomic equality but to nurturing individual personality, this socialism would, above all, enable people to cultivate themselves through art” (Allen 400). The invented socialism that Wilde describes for his ideal community is based on the concept of individualism; individualism provides the freedom to experiment that is necessary for the utopia to exist. This individualism is the key to the freedom and the route to utopia in “Soul,” “Decay,” and “Critic.” The individualism in “Soul” is not “the misconceived individualism of capitalist acquisitiveness, then gaining ascendency in Europe. It must be the true humanistic individualism of a cultivated personality” (Allen 400). The cultivated personality that fuels humanistic individualism in “Soul” is political in nature, but not dissimilar to the aesthetic individualism explored in “Critic,” “Decay,” and Dorian Gray. Experimentation is based on a philosophy of individualism, and the ability to grow monstrous ideas depends upon the existence of a private, individual space in which to perform thought experiments.
The monstrous idea in Dorian Gray is represented visually through the portrait, and the drawings of combinations of creatures in the notebook are also visual representations. However, the journal also features imagined conversations between diverse schools of thought with Wilde’s commentary serving as a connection between the two, and his critical essays demonstrate the blending of ides through verbal representation as well. The dialogic form of both “Decay” and “Critic” allows for a conversation between two characters—one representing a more traditional idea and the other a more original idea—in which we ultimately find disparate ideas blended together that result in a jarring new idea. Just as Wilde repeatedly uses the phrase “new Hellenism” to separate this concept from the actual nation of Greece or the actual values of Ancient Hellenistic philosophies, in “Decay,” the character Vivian reasons that the nation of Japan is entirely a figment of artistic representation and therefore does not actually exist. Vivian tells Cyril:
"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. Take an example from our own day. I know that you are fond of Japanese things. Now, do you really imagine that the Japanese people, as they are presented to us in art, have any existence? If you do, you have never understood Japanese art at all. The Japanese people are the deliberate self-conscious creation of certain individual artists... In fact the whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people. The Japanese people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an exquisite fancy of art" (Wilde 47). The monstrous idea that emerges from a conversation about the value of representative art is the rejection of the entire country of Japan. The assertion that Japan does not exist is a blend of Vivian’s belief that representations of reality through art do not reflect reality itself, but rather, the artist and the values of the artist’s own time, and the widespread Victorian interest, personified through Cyril, in the Japanese aesthetic. The blend, pushed to the extreme, is Wilde’s deliberately hyperbolic and provocative statement that the country and people of Japan as represented through art are an invention.
The outspoken Vivian’s claims and his conversation partner Cyril’s questions form an imagined conversation where thought experiments can play out without repercussion. In “Critic,” the characters Gilbert and Ernest form a similar pair, and their dialogue similarly allows their opinions to blend and produce new and dangerous statements. The most dangerous idea produced in “Critic” is, fittingly, that all worthwhile ideas are dangerous. Ernest sums up their conversation by saying: "You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert...you have told me that all Art is immoral, and all thought dangerous; that criticism is more creative than creation, and that the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer" (Wilde 195). His conclusion that all thought is dangerous is not merely Gilbert’s assertion, however. Gilbert arrives that the conclusion through the conversation with Ernest, and, just as Cyril poses questions that lead Vivian to make certain claims, Gilbert’s claims answer to Ernest’s inquires. Gilbert first claims, “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all” (Wilde 163), to which Ernest replies: “Gilbert, you bewilder me. You have told me that all art is, in its essence, immoral. Are you going to tell me now that all thought is, in its essence, dangerous?” (Wilde 163). Gilbert’s answer of “Yes, is the practical sphere it is so” (Wilde 164). Therefore, the essay’s assertion that all thought is dangerous must be read as a product of the dialogue which blends the two men’s beliefs and ideas and pushes them to original and dangerous claims.
In addition to blending the two men’s disparate points of view—the traditional Ernest with the provocative Gilbert—Wilde blends tenets of established schools of thought. Just as Wotton’s New Hedonism stems from commonly understood aspects of utilitarianism and hedonism, and Vivian contests the widespread Victorian obsession with Orientalism, Gilbert’s ideas are grounded in a provocative take on Darwinism. Darwin’s On the Origin of The Species was published in 1859, and Wilde would have at least been familiar with its foundational ideas. In “Critic,” Gilbert borrows from the concept of natural selection and blends it with his understanding of aesthetic philosophy: "Aesthetics are higher than ethics...Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress and variety and change" (Wilde 194). Also present in Gilbert’s analysis is the concept of Ethics, and his belief that “even a colour- sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong” (Wilde 194). The cultivation of an individual personality, therefore, relies upon a devotion to aesthetics and beauty and the very progress of the world depends upon aesthetic creation. Gilbert’s mention of “new forms” is self-referential, because the very idea he arrives at is a new form that emerges from the collision of multiple established schools of thought. While “aesthetics is higher than ethics” may be an original and provocative idea, Gilbert arrives at another related concept that Victorian society may have found to be truly monstrous. Gilbert says: "What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity, Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics" (Wilde 118).
Here, Wilde pushes the idea that “aesthetics is higher than ethics” to its logical conclusion. If the focus on ethics were removed from society, the evaluation of right from wrong would disappear as well. The resulting Sin may be monstrous to the Victorian moral code, but here Gilbert places great value on Sin as the foundation of progress. Again he returns to the idea of individualism, and claims that the current notions of morality are in opposition to the “higher form of ethics.” The existence of a “higher form of ethics” rooted in Sin echoes the moment in Wilde’s notebook where he discusses utilitarianism and hedonism. Wilde ideas in the notebook that “So Hedonism is really more ethical than Utilitarianism” and “the highest happiness must be the unimpeded energy of the highest faculty” relates to Wilde’s much later ideas that “aesthetics is higher than ethics” and Sin is a “higher form of ethics” than the “current notions of morality” through a privileging of individual intellectual and creative experimentation over the more widely accepted interests of the larger society. Gilbert’s statement that “Sin increases the experience of the race” perfectly describes Dorian Gray’s existence after the creation of the portrait which allows him to pursue experiences without repercussions to his personal aesthetic value. These statements in “Critic” echo ideas found in explorations of Darwinism, utilitarianism, hedonism, aestheticism, individualism, and ethics, and this blend reappears in Wilde’s notebook and novel as well as his dialogic essays.
Wilde’s use of the dialogic form in his critical essays is a method not only for blending together existing ideas, but also for producing new ones. Herbert Sussman, in “Criticism as Art: Form in Oscar Wilde’s Critical Writings,” argues that “Wilde is consciously working to create new forms of critical discourse through which he can adequately express his ‘new views’” (Sussman 109). Sussman’s exploration of Wilde’s dialogic form posits that by using dialogue, Wilde subverts expectations and expands the meaning of philosophical criticism; Sussman argues that in “Critic,” “the self-reflexive comments are forceful in reminding the reader that a critical discourse is a work of art, a coherent fiction, rather than the typically Victorian statement of the speaker’s beliefs” (110). The essays resemble Wilde’s Oxford notebook in their emphasis on conversation; by commenting in the margins of the journal next to a few selected statements, Wilde creates a series of mock-debates between followers of utilitarianism and hedonism, and with his provocative commentary he fuels the intellectual fire and adds his own mind to the mix. In the notebook, Wilde never reaches philosophical conclusions, but rather posits suggestions through imagined conversations. The same occurs in the dialogic essays. By refusing to write a conclusive philosophical agreement or assign a “winner,” by simply ending the discussion as soon as the characters themselves lose intellectual interest in the topic, Wilde highlights the moments of provocative interconnection as the most interesting aspects of discourse.
“i.e.: I love interconnection”
My experience with Wilde’s undergraduate notebook revealed that many of his most interesting and complex ideas are not found in his oft-quoted paradoxical witticisms and aphorisms, but rather in the provocative, dangerous, and hyperbolic statements and thought experiments. These provocative and huge ideas are represented visually and verbally through the monstrous doodles and marginal commentary of Wilde’s notebook, the image of the portrait of Dorian Gray, and the Platonic dialogue form of his critical essays. They are hidden in the margins of his personal notebook or in the words of fictional characters uttered in enclosed and private spaces and their content is based on borrowed tenets from numerous established schools of thought. For example, in a notebook steeped in quotes from many of Western philosophy’s most influential thinkers, Wilde blends the utilitarian concern with maximum human happiness with the scientific method of experimentation when he explores what could happen if one could perform experiments on prisoners or re-grow a mechanized society. In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde blends Paterian aestheticism with hedonistic individualism to explore what could happen if one could experience life as he pleased without physical repercussions. His dialogic essays borrow from similar established ideas to arrive at original, hyperbolic, and provocative declarations such as “the whole of Japan is a pure invention,” “all thought is dangerous,” “aesthetics are higher than ethics,” and “sin is an essential element of progress.” The logical result of these new ideas are then tested; Wilde tests how a man’s behavior will change if he is promised a perfect appearance forever in Dorian Gray, the idea that representative art leads to the invention of an entire country and people in “Decay,” and the idea that worthwhile ideas are dangerous and therefore thought itself must be dangerous in “Critic.” This pattern of repeatedly demonstrating the method of blending competing ideas together unites the private notebook from 1876 with the novel and essays from the early 1890s. Wilde’s love of interconnection and his interest in growing monstrous ideas are clear in his pattern of borrowing ideas, blending them, reaching new suggestions, and imagining a utopic space in which to act out the wildest possibilities.
The proposed thought experiments and drawings within Wilde’s undergraduate journal do not merely illuminate what schools of thought or ideas Wilde found interesting early in his career. The doodles that illustrate the pages, the marginal commentaries that connect diverse ideas and engage them in conversation with each other, and the moment in the notebook where Wilde confesses that he “loves interconnection” provide insight to how Wilde thought. The mapping of his ideas and the moments of obvious enthusiasm reveal a common thread that Wilde continued exploring in his novel and essays. By highlighting moments of apparent intellectual enthusiasm in an example of Wilde’s juvenilia and searching for related moments in later, published texts, I hoped to glimpse into Wilde’s thought process and uncover something new about the unique approach that Wilde revisits throughout his career. From his undergraduate notebook to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his essays “The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic As Artist,” Wilde roots his ideas in aspects of established schools of thought, twists and layers these ideas together, and creates something new and provocative through this process of interconnection. The margins of Wilde’s undergraduate philosophy notebook reveal an early intellectual excitement for creating private, utopic spaces and adding an original, provocative, wonderful petal to the monstrous tulip budding within.
Works Cited
Allen, James Sloan. “Nietzsche and Wilde: An Ethics of Style.” The Sewanee Review 114.3 (Summer 2006): 386-402.
Buma, Michael. “The Picture of Dorian Gray, or the Embarrassing Orthodoxy of Oscar Wilde.” Victorian Newsletter 107 (2005): 18-25.
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 2007. Print.
Mendola, Joseph. “Intuitive Hedonism.” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 128.2 (2006): 441-447.
Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism. New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 2007.
Reader, Simon. “Oscar Wilde’s Notebook on Philosophy.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 36.2 (2010): 21-31.
Sussman, Herbert. “Criticism as Art: Form in Oscar Wilde’s Critical Writings.” Studies in Philology 70.1 (1973): 108-122.
Wilde, Oscar. Intentions: The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison, the Critic as Artist, the Truth of Masks. New York: Brentano's, 1905. Web http://books.google.com.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1987. Print.
Wilde, Oscar, Aubrey Beardsley, and Alfred Bruce Douglas. Salome: A Tragedy in One Act. New York: Dover Publications, 1967. Print.