Christa Giles

spiritual pole to pole. 212 Arthur Symons saw a similar
impulse exhibited in Beardsley’s drawings. In Symons’
view Beardsley’s characters
desire more pleasure than there is in the
world, fiercer and more exquisite pains, a
more intolerable suspense . . . Here we have a
sort of abstract spiritual corruption revealed
in beautiful form, sin transfigured by
beauty… 213
The positive identification of sin with beauty is evident in
The Picture of Dorian Gray, but the emphasis is upon the
senses as servants to the intellect. In an obvious echo of
Huysmans, Wilde’s Lord Henry reiterates the idea of a
kind of ˝cerebral onanism˝: ˝It is in the brain, and in the
brain only, that the great sins of the world take place…˝ 214
This is an idea which subsumes Wilde’s depiction of
Salomé. Her virginity still allows for cerebral lechery –
indeed, her cerebral perversity is only facilitated by her
continence. As Huysmans pointed out in his essay on Rops,
˝Les Sataniques,˝ ˝il n’y a de reéllement obcènes que les
gens chastes.˝ 215
What Baudelaire called ˝la double postulation
humaine˝ (towards God or Satan) becomes at the fin de
siècle a blurring of the lines between good and evil, a
search for intense passion to fill a void. ˝From lofty
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