Octave Mirbeau’s fierce 1895 defense of Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray. A passionate essay on art, morality, and society’s hypocrisy, written during Wilde’s imprisonment.
Reading The Picture of Dorian Gray, I have never felt more keenly the horror of society’s repressions, that “dangerous madness for punishment” that possesses mankind. The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde’s latest work, now offered to our curiosity—dare I say our delight?—by shrewd and faithful translators. And now that I have read it, I cannot think without renewed fury and revolt that the consummate artist who wrote it has been torn from life and subjected to hideous torment for acts that are neither crimes nor offences; regrettable acts, certainly, but acts he was free to commit and for which no one had the right to call him to account. For I shall never tire of saying it: these matters concern only his conscience and our disgust.
The Picture of Dorian Gray reveals in the unfortunate Oscar Wilde a brilliant and exquisite art, coupled with a profound and rare intelligence—rare in both senses of the word. Well then, from these pages of philosophy and sensuality that characterise this work—superior to our very conception of aestheticism—there remains an impression of delightful, moving charm, where strength of mind and inventive elegance of thought combine with a dose of poison that sharpens their violent and subtle fragrances. The mannerism isn’t tiresome; on the contrary, it’s almost always pretty, sometimes exquisitely graceful, showing impeccable taste. And there aren’t “too many lilies,” as one might have feared from a man who so abused them in life. I will admit this book isn’t written for young ladies and that it exhales that impure odour Monsieur Marcel Prévost speaks of. But it’s immoral! they will cry. So what? What is immorality? I would very much like someone to define it properly for once, since we can hardly agree on the matter, and for many worthy folk I could name, immorality is everything beautiful. For the toad, immorality is the bird that flies through the air and sings in the branches; for the woodlouse, ignobly condemned to the slimy walls of cellars, it’s the bees rolling in flower pollen. “A book is neither moral nor immoral, it is well or badly written: that’s all.” I will stick to this definition that Oscar Wilde inscribed in his book’s preface, and I will add: “Immorality is whatever offends intelligence and beauty.”
One must read The Picture of Dorian Gray without dwelling too much on the plot, which is sometimes beautiful but often indifferent and rather conventionally romantic. One should focus instead on the ingenious ideas it teems with, the very particular sensations it analyses, the multiple problems of individual morality it raises. From this perspective, it’s a singular and powerful work containing truly admirable passages. No reader of good faith and reflection—however severe—can deny its fascinating interest and strange novelty. It casts troubling and mesmerising lights into the darkness of conscience.
It’s been said that Oscar Wilde’s art derives from Huysmans. I don’t get that impression at all. Even in subjects that call for pure abstraction, Huysmans never goes beyond the externality of things and beings, which he colours and distorts according to the angle of his very particular but limited vision. With as much picturesqueness and a similar taste for artificial spectacles, Oscar Wilde seems to me more speculative, more intellectually curious, more at home with general ideas. He manipulates the complicated mechanism of human actions and passions with greater dexterity. In the acuity of his thought, the boldness and breadth of his observation, he seems closer to Baudelaire. As far as I can judge from a translation, this wretched galley slave is one of the finest literary temperaments I know.
And isn’t it a sign of the times that the translators of this remarkable work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, should have feared to put their names alongside that of the man who had the power to create it, lest they invite unpleasant interpretations? And that I myself, in praising it, expose myself to marked disapproval, no less than to sage and virtuous invectives, perhaps. But if we had to guard against what those who don’t think might think, against what those who never understand anything might understand, we would never experience the sweet and powerful joy of confessing how a work of art enchanted us one day, one hour, one minute.
⁂
Much has been said of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxes on art, beauty, conscience, life! Paradoxes, granted! Some were indeed excessive and crossed with nimble foot the threshold of the Forbidden. But what is a paradox if not, most often, the striking and superior form, the exaltation of an idea? As soon as an idea rises above the low level of vulgar understanding, as soon as it no longer drags its stumps through the swamps of bourgeois morality and boldly takes wing toward the heights of philosophy, literature or art, we call it a paradox because we cannot follow it to those regions inaccessible to our feeble organs, and we think we have condemned it forever by branding it with this term of blame and contempt.
Yet progress comes only through paradox, and it’s common sense—virtue of fools—that perpetuates routine. The truth is we cannot bear anyone violating our intellectual inertia, our ready-made morality, the stupid security of our sheep-like conceptions. And fundamentally, that’s where Oscar Wilde’s real crime lies, in the minds of those who judged him. He had another: speaking ill of England in his book and lifting a corner of the puritanical veil that covers its moral gangrene. Had he been a mediocre and enthusiastic cockney, a wealthy breeder of racehorses, crooked and loyalist, or a drunken lord, or a prince who whips children, they would have been indulgent toward his vices. They haven’t forgiven him for being the man of thought and superior mind—therefore dangerous—that he truly is. And the supposedly philosophical motives in whose name society punishes him are nothing but hypocrisy and lies. For really, if we had to condemn to hard labour all human beings who don’t conform to nature’s ill-defined prescriptions, to society’s ever-changing and contradictory laws, we would probably condemn everyone. Do all the seeds the wind scatters on the ground germinate and flower? Where is the person who, even in regular marriage, hasn’t sinned against the reproduction of the species? And the priest? The priest, morally mutilated, voluntarily sterile, who proclaims his sexual renunciation a virtue and says, “I want the world to end with me!”—isn’t he socially as guilty as Oscar Wilde? Don’t his revolts against life’s order have a more violently protesting character than carnal aberrations that at least retain the simulacrum of procreation and don’t break the habit of love?
We feed on nothing but words and lead our lives in the wake of the basest sentimentalities and most tortuous contradictions. In England, as we know, Oscar Wilde’s works were virtually destroyed after the trial’s sensation. Everyone wanted to hide them or burned them to avoid contamination. You would have thought the contagion was violent and fatal. His plays were shamefully driven from theatres where, just the day before, they had been enthusiastically applauded. No one considered what impersonal and inviolable beauty they might contain; in this idiotic execution, people saw only the need to dissociate themselves from a man whose individual corruption “might cast a dubious light on an entire country.”
And admire the inconsistency!
England recognises itself, admires itself, exalts itself, purifies itself in Shakespeare, who sang of that infamous vice and committed it. One mustn’t touch his glory, which each year grows broader and stronger with new brilliances. His work survives, admirably pure, beyond his sin, and either ignores or absolves it. Who knows if it isn’t in sin that most great men found the secret of their strength, the expression of their beauty, the tremor of their sorrows? Isn’t there, in the most sordid debauchery, a mysterious minute when the crudest man reaches life’s highest summit and conceives the infinite?
You will tell me: “You can’t compare Wilde to Shakespeare, or to any of those geniuses who made humanity’s joy and excuse.” Very well. But Wilde is young, he has a whole future before him, and he has proved through charming and powerful works that he could do much for beauty and art. Isn’t it abominable that to repress acts not punishable in themselves, we risk killing something superior to laws, to morality, to everything: beauty! For laws change, morals transform; and beauty remains, immaculate, across the centuries it alone illuminates.
⁂
There’s only rot and dung, only impurity at the origin of all life. Spread on the path under the sun, carrion swells with splendid life; droppings in dried grass conceal future realisations, marvellous ones. It’s in the infection of pus and the venom of corrupted blood that forms blossom, through which our dream sings and enchants itself. Let’s not ask where they come from, or why the flower is so beautiful that plunges its roots into abject filth.
1895.
This is one of 50+ rare French literary texts translated into English for the first time on this site.
Léon Hennique Novel 