Today is the anniversary of the 1854 birth of brilliant Irish satirist and dramatist Oscar Wilde, whose most famous work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, highlights so many of the evil ideologies and besetting sins of modernity, including the hatred of conscience and shame.
Modern people nearly always treat the shame rather than the sin as the problem. We are encouraged not to form our consciences or obey them, but rather to try to force our consciences to approve whatever perverse pleasures are most popular now. The modern world celebrates sin and violently attacks anyone who condemns the evil. Charlie Kirk was assassinated in fact for speaking truths about modern sins that leftists did not want to hear.
Basil Hallward, a character in Wilde’s famous novel and the artist who painted Dorian Gray’s portrait, is certainly not as great or good man as Charlie Kirk was, nor does Basil always speak the truths he ought to speak throughout the whole story. But it is clear more than once in the earlier part of the novel that Basil in a sense acts as a conscience both for Dorian and for their mutual and very corrupt friend Lord Henry. While Lord Henry has no conscience at all — he is the epitome of the worst of modernity — and always laughs at Basil’s attempts to make him better, Dorian still has just enough conscience left that he is always bothered when Basil rebukes him, as when Basil tries to awaken remorse in Dorian for driving an innocent young girl to suicide.
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Indeed, Basil ends up sharing the same fate in the fictional work as Charlie Kirk did in real life. The horrible secret of Dorian’s life is that as he grows older and commits ever more heinous sins, his angelic beauty and external youth remain totally unmarred. But the portrait of him not only ages, on it appear traces of all the lust, cruelty, and violence in which its original indulges.When Basil finally finds out about this, he is horrified. He begs God for forgiveness for his role in painting the portrait and encouraging Dorian‘s vanity, and he urges Dorian to repent as well, beg God for mercy, and totally transform his life. Instead of taking Basil‘s advice, Dorian is infuriated at his criticisms and scripture verses. In a wave of rage, Dorian stabs Basil to death. But killing his friend does not kill his conscience. The hands of his painted self in the portrait are now spattered in blood, and the portrait itself has become so hideous and evil that even Dorian cannot bear to look at it anymore.
Not long after Basil‘s death, goaded by Lord Henry’s advice and wracked by guilt and fear, Dorian makes one final effort to kill his conscience by stabbing the portrait. But when his servants enter the room, they find the portrait as beautiful as the day Basil finished painting it and Dorian lying dead on the ground.
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There are autobiographical elements in Wilde’s novel, since the author himself abandoned his wife and children for a homosexual lover and years of indulgent and sinful living. But unlike Dorian, before his death, Wilde repented and converted to Catholicism. He admitted what his fictional creation could not admit — the charity of Basil’s urges to repentance, the justice of suffering for one’s sins, and the truths revealed by one’s guilty conscience.
As Dorian Gray discovered too late, and as our modern world has yet to confess, a man can never hide from the consequences of his sin by repudiating shame, and if he tries to kill his conscience, he will only end by destroying himself.
