“Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.”
“The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going.”
As a third steam age science fiction, we turn to The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Dorian Gray is a young man with everything going for him; he is young, handsome, charismatic, in the flower of manhood. He is also convinced that beauty and pleasure are the highest goods, that “the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality.”
As is pointed out early in the novel, however, all that will fade with time: as he ages he will lose his beauty, and with it his social prestige and his status. So Dorian makes a Faustian bargain: his portrait will age and wither while he remains fresh and young, unblemished by a life of sordid activities.
The book is in some ways a classic tale of a deal with the devil, in which the protagonist goes from bad to worse. It is different, however, in the way that many of Wilde’s tales are different: it is not always obvious what Wilde himself believes. Unlike in Faust, where we can generally assume that Goethe is anti-devil though sympathetic to Faust, Wilde sounds at times actively supportive of Dorian’s ideas, giving the tale a very different slant.
At root, the story itself is perhaps not the most compelling: it can feel long where it should have been short. It is saved though by Wilde’s ability to turn a phrase: it is full of memorable quotes and lines, many of which persist today in comments like the world knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’ or that ‘it is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.’
“All sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.”
“There was romance in every place. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.”