Masks and Selves

When man becomes mask

The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde, and The Happy Hypocrite by Max Beerbohm

I was talking about Dorian Gray the other day to someone and we both agreed that, when we were both separately young teenagers, it was the most exciting possible book — revelatory, beautiful, fascinating. But that now we had got to our present ages, the memory of it had faded a little, and we no longer thought about it all that much.

That made me wonder. What was it about the book that was so magical, so different, such a perfect read for someone of that age, at that time? What makes a classic ripe for a particular time of life, and not for others? And, of course, had I made a mistake in judging the book too harshly and finding it, if not forgettable and wanting, a little pale in comparison to memory?

I ought first to say that all of Wilde’s works have at the very least some wit and at their very best some brilliance. I cannot read Wilde’s story ‘The Selfish Giant’ without being moved to the brink of tears. I cannot see the play An Ideal Husband without being delighted again as if for the first time. Those I love for their contents and the efficient, meaningful way they are carried along by style, which is at the service of something if not real then at least plausibly akin to the real. Even The Sphinx, which is shallow and in content vulgar, is still formally inventive. Wilde’s idea of merging his couplets into single lines, so that they have powerful interior rhymes, is very pleasant. It is a good read. It is still a good read.

But of Dorian Gray, it’s easy to see style and flash without necessarily granting any point, without conceding a single thing to the truth. The most quotable, the most quoted, the most referred to, the most ripped off, of all of the book has nothing to do with Dorian and Lord Henry. Instead, it’s the preface: that damn preface. That all art is quite useless: every schoolboy used to learn that. And he used to forget, if he was annoying his art teacher at the time, everything that had preceded it. That art is Caliban’s rage at the glass. All of it. One might be tired out by the book’s preface, done with quoting it, by the time one is fifteen. And then the whole thing might be forgotten, put away with other childish things. But that is not reasonable. Of course, it’s gayer Faust; of course, it’s fashionable reckoning with the absurd rich person’s hope to remain youthful unto death; of course, it’s about the racing clock, the sins of the past, the incapability of responsibility for all we have done. And it is also ripe for parody.

We can learn much about a literary work from its literary adaptations. Dorian Gray, because it is stylish and gay and faux-satanic, is endlessly adapted. We can learn just as much, I believe, from a work’s imitators and from those things that satirise it. Max Beerbohm’s book The Happy Hypocrite is one of those. In many ways, it’s an extremely straightforward work. From its first sentence, ‘None, it is said, of all who revelled with the Regent, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell,’ to its last, we know precisely what we are in for. It is like Dorian Gray’s social scene crossed with a fairy story. The central premise being that Lord George finds out that despite having an evil and debauched face himself, there is a mask-maker in town who can make him so convincing a wax mask that he can pretend to be a kind and noble man, so that he can court fair madame. What happens next, of course, I will leave to your no doubt correct predictions. This is a ‘fairy tale for tired men,’ after all: not a gothic horror. It is an enjoyable little read, even though you know how it will end.

It’s witty, very witty. When describing how Lord George’s gambling brought him great success, Beerbohm writes, ‘After this, we can hardly be surprised when we read that he "seldom sat down to the fashionable game of Limbo [cards] with less than four, and sometimes with as many as seven aces up his sleeve."’ The fictitious quote there is from a fake reference book, Regency Bucks. which is footnoted. As a fan of formats, of fake citations, of writing fiction as though it is non-, I can only applaud.

It’s odd to think that a single dinner in London with the editor of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine gave rise to both The Sign of the Four by Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorian Gray. Both Wilde and Doyle were there, were courted by the editor (who wanted more substantial, while still sensational, fiction), and eventually left and — when enough time had passed — turned in their novellas. One wonders which meetings between Wilde and Beerbohm gave rise to the younger man’s imitation of the elder. Beerbohm was a great comic essayist in his own right. His Works were published when he was 24. What did he have to learn from the older man, from Caliban, from the mirror?