Anthony Burgess

LITERATURA EN LENGUA INGLESA :

(...) The literature produced from about 1880 to 1914 (in Britain) is characterised either by an attempt to find substitutes for a religion which seems dead, or by a kind of spiritual emptiness –a sense of the hopelessness of trying to believe in anything.

There were many possible substitutes for religion. One was Art, and Walter Pater (1839-1894) was its prophet. ‘Art for art’s sake’ (...) was the theme of books like Marius the Epicurean and Studies in the History of the Renaissance. It was one’s duty, said Pater (...), to cultivate pleasure, to drink deep from the fountains of natural and created beauty. In other words, he advocated hedonism as a way of life.

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Hedonism was the thesis of some of Oscar Wilde’s witty essays, as also of his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde (...) seem, in the latter book, however, to be concerned with showing the dangers of asking too much from life. The beautiful Dorian Gray –Faustus-like– wishes that he should remain eternally young and handsome, while his picture, painted in the finest flush of his beauty, should grow old in his stead. The wish is granted: Dorian remains ever-young, but his portrait shows signs of ever-increasing age and, moreover, the scars of the crimes attendant on asking for too much (a murder, the ruining of many women, unnameable debauchery). Dorian, repentant, tries to destroy his portrait, symbolically quelling his sins, but –magically– it is he himself who dies, monstruous with age and ugliness, and his portrait that reverts to its former perfection of youthful beauty. The sense of guilt –as much mediaeval as Victorian– intrudes into Wilde’s bright godless world unexpectedly, and this book prepares us for those later works of his –written under the shadow and shame of his prison-sentence– which lack the old wit and contain a sombre seriousness –The Ballad of Reading Gaol and De Profundis.

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“The Coming of the Modern Age” in English Literature, Anthony Burgess, Harlow, Longman, 1995.