Art of the Quip

Wilde’s forte was “The Quip.” He was a manufacturer of one-liners; indeed his only rivals in that form might be Mark Twain and Dorothy Parker. Accounts of his performances, and that is the right word, at dinner parties were the stuff of legends.

Alas, “The Quip” is not a very marketable literary form. It can easily, however, be incorporated into a play, and Wilde wrote a few good plays. But, if you a Master of Quips, how do you write a novel? The first step is to write yourself into the novel. You can give yourself another name, and if you are going to do that, might as well make yourself a Lord! Therein lies the real secret of The Picture of Dorian Gray; it would be more accurately entitled Admiring the Quips of Lord Henry Wotten. So much of the novel is simply setting up excuses for Lord Henry Wotten to make clever remarks in the presence of dull-witted figures.

There is, of course a plot, but the whole of the plot is easily summarized. Dorian Gray, young and beautiful, has his portrait painted. He then notices that as he commits immoral acts, the effects of that immorality show up on the portrait instead of on his own visage. Knowing that he can stay young and beautiful no matter how depraved he acts, he indulges himself. It’s not hard to imagine the effects.

A story like that can generate a great deal of discussion about virtue. This is a book well worth reading. But, taken as a whole, it is really obvious that the things about the plot which might attract our attention are not the reason Wilde wrote the book. Lord Henry Wotten and his endless quips occupy a vast amount of space, but are terribly unrelated to the story of Dorian Gray. Indeed, the connection between the two is that Wotten exhibits what can best be described as a dispassionate lust for the young and beautiful Dorian. (Inserting Freudian psychoanalysis of Wilde is child’s play.)

What did Wilde think he was doing with this novel? There is a rather bizarre Preface to the novel. It begins “The artist is the creator of beautiful things” and it is not a leap of faith to think Wilde is talking about himself in that line. He has created a beautiful thing, this book you are about to read. But, the Preface ends with the line “All art is quite useless.”

The last line is puzzling. Is it an indication that Wilde realizes how utterly useless he is, that all those clever quips amount to nothing? Not exactly, the immediately preceding sentence is “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.”

Bernulf Clegg (presumably named after Saint Bernulf!) was puzzled enough about that last line to write Wilde and ask what it meant. In reply, Wilde sent an extraordinary letter. Here it is in its entirety.

Art is useless because its aim is simply to create a mood. It is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way. It is superbly sterile, and the note of its pleasure is sterility. If the contemplation of a work of art is followed by activity of any kind, the work is either of a very second-rate order, or the spectator has failed to realise the complete artistic impression.
A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure. But the subject is a long one.

If Wilde is right, what then? You read The Picture of Dorian Gray and your sole response is to admire it. But what exactly would you admire? The cleverness of Wilde’s stand in? Do you have toward this book the same sort of crypto-erotic joy that Wilde feels toward Gray? Put the whole work of a pedestal, don’t overthink it, just worship the creator? That is not the sort of response this novel engenders.

Look again at the letter above, though, and replace “Art” with “Quip.” It is a perfect description. Quips create a mood, are sterile, are not to be pondered, and have no use at all beyond the momentary pleasure of hearing them. The real point of The Picture of Dorian Gray is to provide the platform for elevating Wilde’s Quips into High Art.

Another fun parlor game is to decide on who was the most conceited figure in history. Lots of candidates. My favorite is Dante, who meets Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil in the Inferno and notes, “And then they showed me greater horn still,/ for they made me one of their company,/ so that I became the sixth amidst such wisdom.” (Hollanders’ translation) But, then again, maybe this isn’t so conceited. Dante is obviously superior to Horace, Ovid, and Lucan, and I don’t think may people would rate him below either Homer or Virgil. Maybe Dante is being modest there.

Wilde, however, is not in that pantheon. He said a very many clever things. (Asked by a customs agent if he had anything to declare, he replied “I have nothing to declare but my genius.”) A surfeit of quips deserves our admiration. We can even go as far as to say that a great quip is a work of art. But, to compare a quip by Wilde to a play by Shakespeare or a novel by Dickens or a poem by Eliot is, quite literally, laughable.