Will Witt: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde | Book Club

All art, says Oscar Wilde, is quite useless. So I guess there's no reason to do this show. Goodbye, everybody. I'm just joking. I think art is quite useful. And I think maybe Oscar Wilde does too. But we'll dig into exactly what he means in the picture of Dorian Gray. I am joined by a man who loves this book and who should be very, very familiar to all PragerU viewers. That would be Will Witt, the author of Do Not Comply and a familiar face around these halls. Will, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you. Appreciate it, man. I'm glad to be here. Since you were here, the PragerU has expanded and your hair has expanded as well. I really, I'm digging the flow. Yeah, no, no. So there's a graph that you can find with both PragerU and my hair growth and they go hand in hand exponentially. Proportions. Yeah, directly correlated. You love the picture of Dorian Gray. I do. I had never read this book. It's one of those books I always meant to. It slipped through for 33 years of my life. I had not read it until my flight out here. Luckily, it's a short book. I like to see you prepare for this kind of thing. Naturally. Exactly. It was, the flight was exactly long enough to read this book. But since you've been reading it for some years longer, can you give us a 60 second summary? Yeah, so the picture of Dorian Gray, oh, we can get into why I love it, but essentially you have this beautiful young man who is kind of enticed by this other guy named Lord Henry. And so Lord Henry comes in and tells them all about how beauty is fleeting and you have to hold onto these things like youth and it's much more important than intelligence and live your life to the fullest. This is what life is all about. And there's a painter named Basel who is painting a portrait of Dorian Gray. And after he's kind of, Dorian is corrupted by Henry, he essentially starts to curse this painting. And eventually it's kind of Faustian and he's making a deal with the devil and says, you know, I hope that the painting would grow old and I would never grow old and be this beautiful forever because he's corrupted. And that's exactly what happens. And so I can give away the ending? You can. Okay. And in the end, eventually he finds that he does all these hedonistic things and lives very immorally. And he finds that the painting has turned into this disgusting wretch of, you know, of what it originally looked like, even though he stayed young, he ends up stabbing the painting and then his friends and people find him later. He is now the old man that was in the painting destroyed and the painting is back to normal. Okay. That's what happens. What's very strange about all that is that this book has a very famous preface. And in the preface, which I've dog-eared somewhere, it's a series of epigrams. Really what most people I think would know about Oscar Wilde, what I knew about Oscar Wilde, not having read this book, not having read The Importance of Being Earnest, was all these little pithy phrases. He's one of the most quotable authors in the English language. And it's just a bunch of epigrams. He says, the artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest is the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written. That is all. Blah, blah, blah. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable manner. Mannerism of style. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All art is quite useless. So he says all these things. And then he spends the next 220 pages making the exact opposite argument in the actual story. Yeah, he's very cheeky. That's kind of almost the point of some of the stuff, at least I feel like that he's doing, is that he's almost trying to be hypocritical to a fault to showcase that all of this art and all these different things are very up for interpretation with people. You know what I mean? He says all art is quite useless and obviously people are going to disagree with that. And obviously he's creating art in the words that he does and himself in his own personal life loved art. He says no artist has ethical sympathies. I think he clearly does. He says there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. One of the key plot points here in the story for Dorian Gray is that Lord Henry gives Dorian a book. He says, I was corrupted by this book. But then in the preface he says there's no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. So what's he saying? I think in a way that he's trying to say that, okay, you have received this book. It's like someone receives a picture of Dorian Gray. They read it. Now, does that person go and live an immoral life or a very moral life or something like that from hearing it? Or is it, and they do that, is it the book's fault for doing it? Or is it the person making those choices going and doing that because they've been influenced by something? I think someone who reads the picture of Dorian Gray would be more inclined to live a moral life because I think unambiguously, sure, the characters delude themselves. Some of them, Dorian and Lord Henry, they delude themselves into thinking that they can just live a hedonistic, Epicurean at best kind of esthete lifestyle and they can do whatever they want to anyone and it won't matter. But clearly by the end, the painting is disfigured and then this leads to the death of the actual character, Dorian. So their presuppositions weren't true. The more moral character, Basil, he's the one who says, hey, stop being such a degenerate, be a good guy. He's proven right in the end. And actually, I shouldn't even lump in Dorian Gray, the beautiful young man, and Lord Henry, who's the corrupting figure, because the painter, Basil, makes a very interesting observation at the beginning. He says, Lord Henry, you always say the most immoral things, but you never do an immoral thing. You don't practice what you preach. Your preaching is much worse than your actual habits of living. Yeah, it's like when he talks about, when Lord Henry's talking about his wife. He says, oh, I never see my wife and we lie to each other all the time and things like that. And Basil's like, no, you're a good husband. But he says all these things and I think Lord Henry is very based off of Oscar Wilde himself when he's writing that preface and things, is that he wanted to be this type of, it's almost like an art of making yourself into a character that is unsolvable by people. Now, that's part of what he wanted to do, but when you're talking about the immorality and how people would become more moral after reading this book, that's what happened to me. I mean, I picked up this book when I was in college, not because I had to for school or anything. I never went to class, but I got it just to read it. Well, you had to do something while you were skipping class. Oh, exactly. Might as well read the book when I'm waking up at 11 a.m. and then start reading. But I got this book because it just looked interesting and this book changed my life, which is why I love it so much. Because when I was during that time, a young man, as many young men in this day and age are, I was living a hedonistic lifestyle. I was being immoral. I was doing things that were a complete waste of time and very nihilistic about what life was going to be. And then you read this book where you find that, hey, the main character, in the end, it doesn't turn out well for him. When he's living this type of lifestyle, it ends up corrupting his soul and he doesn't really have that type of happiness. And so it was so influential for me to say, wow, the things that I'm doing now is going to lead me down a path of destruction. What are the things that I can do better to live a better life and achieve happiness? So the book had a moral effect on you, as is alluded to in the book and contradicted by the preface. We see this in other parts of great literature. Dante famously, you know, in the canto of Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers, it's a book that leads them to commit adultery, the Prince Galahad book. So in what's actually being presented in the story, it seems that that's what Oscar Wilde believes. And if Oscar Wilde views himself as Lord Henry, you know, the character who talks a lot worse than he actually behaves, then how do we make sense of the fact that Oscar Wilde was notoriously a libertine and was actually prosecuted and jailed for obscene homosexual behavior? Yeah, I mean, that's why he says in the book, you know, Lord Henry says to Dorian, he says, the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. You know, I think this is very, that's what I'm saying. It's very Oscar Wilde-esque to have those kinds of thing in here, but it's almost like at the end of the day, he doesn't actually even believe these things. You know, he says them and he has Lord Henry kind of act this out for himself and say these things, but he doesn't actually do them. And then when he sees a culture, a lot of people come after him for, you know, the obscene acts and the things that he did. I think it's why he's often viewed so many times as such a cynical person, because he views the world that's very against him, even though he's not necessarily the type of cynical person that he puts himself out to be. It's kind of like a defense mechanism from the world to be the cynical person. Yeah, I could see that. It's like when teenagers are overly sarcastic. It's some kind of a social defense. Like an insecurity almost. Right, yeah. What does Oscar Wilde think about love and beauty? You know, the whole book is about beauty, right? It's about this beautiful young man who is posing, he's sitting for this painter, and he's the subject of the greatest work that this painter has ever made. And there's all sorts of homoerotic admiration of this guy. And yet the beauty never seems to lead anywhere. It just leads to a long series of affairs and degradation, you know, that leads him to an opium den and he becomes a murderer eventually. He, you know, all sorts of degradations, but there's no culmination of it. You know, one would hope that you find a beautiful woman, you marry her, you have some kids, you live a good long life together, then they get married and they have kids. And that's, but for these guys, it's just beauty for beauty's sake. And it goes nowhere. Yeah, so there's a line also in the preface that I think answers that a lot, where he says, I'm paraphrasing, but he says, those who find ugly meanings and beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. Those who, and then he says, those who find beautiful meanings and beautiful things are the cultivated. For them, there is hope. And so I think he's talking about here in the sense that there are actual beautiful things that you can see, that you can feel. I think there's a lot of mentions about flowers in Dorian Gray because a flower is fleeting. It's not always going to be there, but it's beautiful for a time. And so it's compared a lot to Dorian and all of that. But there are objectively beautiful things that are out there that you can see. And those who find those types of things beautiful and can recognize that they're beautiful, according to Oscar Wilde, are the people who have hope in this world. The people who are actually the elect that he says. Isn't that depressing? That part really depresses me, you know? Which is why he's so cynical with these things. Yes, but though, as we were discussing earlier, you can't quite tell if the cynicism is put on, you know, is it ironic or not? But even when Dorian falls in love with the young actress and he goes and he sees her every single night, he buys her roses and she's a much lower station, but he's a very wealthy young man and he proposes marriage to her. And he brings his buddies, the painter and the corrupting lord, and they come watch and she gives a terrible performance. But she's actually happy that she gave a terrible performance. Because she's so in love. She says, Dorian, I can't profess my love for Romeo. I can't pretend anymore. I got the real thing. Isn't that so wonderful, Dorian? I don't need to be an actress anymore. This love is the real thing. He's disgusted by that. So disgusted that he says, no, if you can't be an actress, if we're going to get the real thing now, we're not going to get the show and the performance. You're dead to me. And she goes off and kills herself. How perverse that is. I mean, this philosophy of art for art's sake, this aesthetic philosophy that's... We use that phrase now in popular culture. As though it were some profound bit of wisdom or some ideal worth pursuing. I think it's a joke. I think it's totally ridiculous. I mean, I guess it's the MGM motto. But no, you want art for the sake of the good and the true and the beautiful, the transcendentals. But you want there to be a purpose to something. You want to go somewhere. You want to be edified. You want to be sanctified. For goodness sakes, you want to go to heaven. You don't want to just languish around in parlors all day, pitching banal trivialities to one another, do you? No, of course not. But part of the point of that is, I think that why it's so weird with the whole preface and who Oscar Wilde is in the book, is that he believes in those beautiful things. He believes in that you should be able to read a book with beautiful language. Because obviously he writes in what some would say a very almost pretentious way. Yeah, it's very tweet. Very much that type of language. And so he's obviously trying to convey a sort of, you know, even just a beauty of the poetry of the words, like Nietzsche, you know, or something like that with how they write. And so he knows that there is that beauty there. And that's why it's, I don't know, it just stirs up something inside of me, where it's like, how can it be so contradictory to what you're saying, but then actually represent everything that you're against at the same time? It's funny you mentioned Nietzsche too, because Nietzsche specifically hated the notion of art for art's sake. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Probably my favorite line in the book, you mentioned there are all these funny little couplets and epigrams and, you know, that are all charming. My favorite line is not one of those though. It's a point that maybe gave Oscar Wilde a little bit of pause in his own personal life. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There were no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the molding of his hands even. Somebody, I won't mention his name, but you know him, came to me last year to have his portrait done. And this is Basil, the painter, describing this. We do that today. And not just on the radical left or the atheists, but even on the right. People talk about, oh, well, they're private vices. And then there's our public behavior. And, you know, stop concerning yourself with what people do in the bedroom or whatever. This whole book, ironically, is written by Oscar Wilde, lived a wild life. This whole book is about how what you do in the bedroom affects what happens in the streets. There is no such thing as a secret vice. You're going to wear it on your face. You're going to wear it in your demeanor. It's going to warp your soul. It's going to turn you ultimately into a degenerate, potentially drug-addicted murderer. That happens every time. Every time. What's the libertarian answer for that? But he's exactly right. And I think you're exactly right there in that these things do leak out. And if we're not careful and we keep saying that, oh, it's someone else's problem, we can do it wherever we want, just as long as I'm not involving someone else. Well, eventually, that's how you have the place that we are in the world today, where you have all of these degenerate and horrible things happening in the world because it's a slippery slope of saying, well, this is okay here. This is okay here. But, oh, no, that's not okay. And now you keep saying one little thing is okay. Over a period of time, you're going to have this culture that views hedonism and immorality as new gods almost. When this came out, it caused a big stir and there were accusations that the book itself was obscene. If the plot of the story bears out that books can have real moral consequences, then what do we make of the fact that the first publisher takes out 500 words, then they put some words back in, and then Oscar Wilde rewrites it. And then just about 10, 15 years ago, there was an original edition that was discovered that was even more, I think it was more homoerotic, I think that was specifically what was taken out, than the published version. So they put that back in. There must be five different versions of this book out there. Why do people still read Oscar Wilde 100 years later, 120 years later now? You know, he has a way of writing that I think really just makes you say, wow, the English language is really actually incredible. It feels like poetry reading it. And having the, like you read the dialogue that they have between the characters and you say, people don't talk like this at all anymore. You know, and maybe they didn't even talk like that then, but he's making it into almost like a drama with how they talk. And it's just, it's gorgeous in the things that you read. So there's something profound about that when you get to the plot of the story, which is, you were enchanted by the beauty of the art. And the message, edifying or corrupting, we can debate that, seeped in that way, much as all of these men were enchanted by the beauty of Dorian Gray. And these women whose lives were ruined, who became ruined women, who ended up at, you know, whorehouses and opium dens. Yeah, exactly. But that was, so the beauty, by the end of the story, Dorian Gray says, oh, that I had never been so beautiful. You know, oh, that I had never made this request that I could stay perpetually young and the painting could age. Oh, that if only I weren't so damn beautiful, my life would have turned out a lot better. You could say it every morning, right into the mirror. That's right. But there is a real danger there because you're enchanted with those words on the page. Well, what if the message really were obscene? What if, instead of this book having had the effect of edifying you, what if it had actually just encouraged you to be a hedonist? Yeah. And there's plenty of books and all sorts of, I mean, you have these movies and stuff that come out today are these women who are in the mainstream, who are beautiful women in many respects, but are not women who are to be heralded as what we should be looking for, as the pinnacle of beauty or a standard for females. A lot of people point to Oscar Wilde as an example of why we need a total defense of absolute free speech, you know, no censorship whatsoever. The irony though, of course, is the reason Oscar Wilde got prosecuted for obscene behavior is because he sued a man for defamation, for insinuating that he was a little light in the loafers, which then it turned out he was and prosecuted for it. But Oscar Wilde was not for absolute, total free speech to say whatever you want. And the book went through a lot of revisions and bouts of censorship. Well, that's how it goes a lot of the time. I mean, even think about you're in the conservative movement talking about the news, I'm talking about the news. There are things that we have to almost censor ourselves on and sometimes for our audience and things like that, you know, occasionally. And the transgenders you're talking about. Exactly. You can't say it. No, you got to dance around it. They get too mad. It might seem when you're looking at it from above, just that humanity in general, that these things seem very ethical and it should just be all freedom and everything like this. But people have responsibilities, people have standards, people have things that shouldn't be out there for certain things. And Oscar Wilde understood that even though he wouldn't write it. I liked it. I had a lovely flight out here today. I enjoyed the book. Didn't change my life. I found it perfectly fine and I would read it again. You're a pinnacle of morality. Well, I've said it for years. I'm very proud of my humility. Yeah, exactly. Is it a great book? I think it's a great book. I think it has its issues. I think the cynicism in it and the irony almost in it can be off-putting to people when they're trying to make sense of what it actually all means. Or attractive. I don't know. I find it very attractive. I do as well. I'd love to go get a drink with Oscar Wilde. It'd probably be a charming evening. Yeah. I think it's a great book for people to read in a time today where hedonism and immorality are seen as the answers to a meaningless life. Where people today in the West do not have meaning. They do not have purpose. It's why all these girlfriends are asking young men, do you think about ancient Rome? And they all say yes because where else are they deriving any sort of meaning or inspiration or a quest adventure in their lives? They have nothing. They're answering emails all day and living in some urban city and they're living hedonistic lives just like everyone else. You read a book like Dorian Gray, which it was for me, when you're living in this sort of very stale and immoral lifestyle, it says, hey, that's not worth it. Maybe there's another answer. So it shows you what not to do. But then, okay, we're told and I think reasonable readers would come to the conclusion, hedonism, no good. Epicureanism, no good. Aestheticism, no good. But what about religion? The book does finally touch up on religion, right? Why don't you just, it's not too late. Just confess your sins, Dorian. It's not too late. Just ask forgiveness. Your sins are scarlet red, but they'll be washed away from you. Basil pleading with his muse, please don't. And Dorian says, it's too late. Reminded me of people who cynically and glibly will say, well, Michael, look, if Christianity is true, I can just have a deathbed confession. So I can live it up now, go do whatever I want. Very hedonistic lifestyle. Then when I'm on my deathbed, I'm guaranteed to get that, right? And there's no way I'll ever die suddenly or anything. And I'm gonna lie there and I'll just convert at the very last minute. And then I'll be all good. I'll go to heaven. Maybe. But what happened to Dorian Gray here is he was so hardened. He said, I just can't. I am so hardened. My soul and behavior have been so shaped by my hedonism because man is a habitual creature. Sorry, Basil, can't happen. I once heard that the trick of the devil is first to convince you that sin is no big deal. And then immediately once you commit the sin to convince you that it's such a big deal, it can never be forgiven. That's what Dorian Gray gets to at the end. Yeah. I mean, he thinks that there is no hope for him. Unfortunately, Dorian Gray believes that there is no hope for him because of all the things that he did. But that's not the way that people should be looking at lives themselves, especially if they're looking at it from a place from God coming and saving people. I don't believe in the deathbed confession. I don't think you can just say that, oh, I believe in God now, and you're going to be saved because you're not the one who is really doing that. Jesus is the one who died for your sins to save you, and he's the one who knows your heart. If it's sincere, though, you would believe in it. Well, if the person is actually sincere, but how can a person be sincere, really, in that type of moment like that? It's unlikely in a lot of cases. And in a way, it's like even Dorian Gray in that moment is being very sincere in what he's saying. I think he believes that he really can't be saved. He sincerely is despairing. And it's like, but who knows what God's plan is for Dorian in that sense. But that is not something that's brought up in the book in that I don't think it's really... I don't think this book has much of a compass when it comes to religion in terms of savior or anything like that. I think the fate of Dorian at the end being this disfigured, disgusting man that the painting had then turned into is really the ending moral of the story. Right, there's no happy end. No, no, no, it's gothic. It ends with this message of, hey, here's what you shouldn't do. Here's the fast track to a bad life. I remember, not to tell tales out of school, but in a little more licentious periods of my life, I bought all of the liberal claptrap that, oh, there's no such thing as morality. God doesn't exist. It's no big deal. Just do whatever you want. And that's very sophisticated. And that's how everyone lives now. And it never works out in the end. Maybe it works out in the short run, but you can see people be disfigured by that. They look, even the picture of him becomes like a satyr, like a demon-possessed kind of monster. That happened because of his behavior. Oscar Wilde focuses on the physical. He said, no, we all think that the physical is trivial and the metaphysical is what really matters. That's the astonishing thing. Only shallow people don't judge based on looks. And it was so brilliant because it occurs to me, we live in this very Gnostic age where we think the true self has nothing to do with the body and we're all just spirits vibing, man. It's very new agey. That's not what our civilization traditionally believes. Christianity, in fact, hinges on the incarnation. The flesh is very, very important to our civilization and the religion that animates. It's so much so that Tertullian, one of the early great Christian writers, says the flesh is the hinge of salvation. And if you seriously believe that you can totally divorce the flesh, the physical world, from the soul, the metaphysical world, you're in for a bad surprise and you can read about it at the end of this book. Yeah, now you have all these movements that are like these fat positivity movements and fat con and stuff like that that say, you know, these things don't matter. Being unhealthy doesn't matter. Objective standards of beauty don't matter. Let me just go throw some paint on the Mona Lisa real quick. And you live in a world where if you don't value the things that traditionally, throughout human history, have been valued and that God valued and put these types of standards on, then you have a society that doesn't know where to go forward. And if society doesn't know where to go forward, then they only go backwards, but they call it progressivism. I even, I saw an interview back in the 60s or 70s with Hugh Hefner living the playboy lifestyle, living this lifestyle, the hedonistic lifestyle. And it was a debate between him and William F. Buckley Jr. as the traditional conservative guy. And the first thing you notice about it is Buckley is sitting there in his very Buckley way, you know, kind of splayed out on the chair. But he seems, you know, totally perfectly at ease, very confident, you know, blah, blah, blah. And you look at Hefner and he looks really nervous. You know, he's really, like his eyes are twitching and he looks like he's jonesing for something, like a drug or sex or he seems very appetitive. And by the end of the book, Dorian Gray, he's paranoid. He thinks everyone's trying to get him and kill him. He's locking himself up in his room. He's, you know, this is a man who all he was pursuing was pleasure, not happiness. That's another point made several times in the book. No, no, the best thing in life is not happiness. That's something Aristotle might talk about, eudaimonia, you know, human flourishing. Pleasure, just pure sensual pleasure. And so he should be totally relaxed, right? And yet he's not. He's completely discomforted. He's completely disfigured. And he's agitated to the point of madness. And he kills himself at the end by stabbing the painting. Well, where does pleasure get you in a society? What does pleasure mean in the end? You're going to live a life and say, how much pleasure did I have? These young men in there with many of the video games that they play nowadays. And they have these online avatars, you know what I'm talking about? And they build them up with clothes and levels and all sorts of stuff. They're heroes that they have. And it's like at the end of your life, this pleasure that you had making this character, does that matter at all in the long run of what you're doing versus setting your life going towards something good? It's almost like, I think there's also a thing with happiness, that happiness isn't always the meter that we should be measuring lives on either. You know, that it's not just pleasure, not just happiness, but it's almost like, how much suffering do you go through in a way that helps you learn, in a way that helps you be a good person? And I think that that is somewhat missing from the book and asking for my review of it, but, and is also missing in the lives of so many young men today in America. Yeah, you know, he laments, storying Ray by the end after he's lived, he's 38 years old or so. This all started when he was about 20. And he says, you know, now when I walk into a room, like people leave. And it's not just, they leave because, you know, he speaks truth or something. It's like, they leave because, you know, he slept with this one sister, attacked this one, he robbed this guy, he did, you know, he just, they all had very legitimate, personal beef with him. And so he looked so beautiful, but it's probably a mark against a man if the people closest to you who know you the best are the ones who have the lowest opinion of you. The opinions of these other people who you're trying to impress is not the importance of living life, you know, some follower that I have, or you have living somewhere around the world. You know, of course you want to do good and inspire people, but the life that you live on what's important to you, you're living for the people who are supposed to be close to you, who care for you. And Dorian had no one like that. He had no one to be that person. The one person he had, he murdered. Yeah, exactly. And he is trying to live a life that was only for himself. And when you live a life that is only for yourself, you find in the end, you're the only one left. A man wrapped up in himself makes a small package indeed. Not quite as witty and pithy as something Oscar Wilde would write, but it's the best I can muster. Will, thank you so much. Thank you, man. Good to see you. You too. Good to see all of you. We will see you next month on The Book Club. Until then, I am Michael Knowles. Happy reading. Thank you so much for watching this episode of The Book Club on PragerU. PragerU is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, so we rely on donations from viewers like you to keep this content on the air. Please consider making a tax-deductible contribution today to help keep this content coming. Thank you very much.