Christa Giles

Wilde’s and Huysmans’ perception of the hermetic
nature of art thereby allowed for evil and vice as
appropriate subject matter. Indeed, after Baudelaire, evil
was positively identified with beauty. In The Picture of
Dorian Gray, Wilde transforms this idea so that under Lord
Henry’s tutelage, Dorian not only sees beauty in sin but
˝looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could
realize his conception of the beautiful.˝ 38 Further, in the
wake of Huysmans and Baudelaire, Wilde would adopt sin,
vice, and perversion as subject matter simply because their
artificiality, their departure from normality, validated
them, in his view. His postulate was that we can learn
more from the sinner than from the saint, 39 and that we can
find great beauty in the bizarre and unnatural. ˝The artist is
never morbid,˝ according to Wilde, because he ˝expresses
everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its
medium produces incomparable and artistic effects.˝ 40 By
extension, Wilde believes that the creative individual is
antinomian. ˝To be good, according to the vulgar standard
of goodness, is obviously quite easy,˝ Wilde concludes. ˝It
merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain
lack of imaginative thought and a certain low passion for
middle-class respectability.˝ 41 And Huysmans even goes so
far as to define diabolism as an ˝execration of impotence˝
and a ˝hatred of the mediocre.˝ 42
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