Oscar Wilde is the talk of both his Fin de Siecle and ours; according to one reviewer, "the hottest dead playwright this side of Shakespeare."

Wilde's epigrammatic wit, showcased in the epigram above and in all of his plays, essays, fairy stories, his novel, and his poetry are reason enough for talking about this multi-dimensioned personality a century after his death. Much of the recent talk about Wilde, however, has had less to do with his art than his ascension to the position of "the first gay saint" -- as he is called in an article by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. Gopnik, however, demonstrates how this hasty canonization, as with most such idealizations, depends on stretching the facts of Oscar Wilde to fit the myth: "The truth is odder, more interesting, and more human than the cardboard Saint."

Clearly a downside of being multi-dimensioned is that so many dimensions must be left out if one is to be reduced to icon-sized status. Wilde's life -- he would be the first to admit -- wasn't nearly so polished as his art. His musings on art, for example, make for a meandering and contradictory aesthetic, evidence for the charge that Oscar would say just about anything to get attention. Indeed, for someone in supposed revolt against bourgeois morality, Wilde was feverish in his pursuit of social acceptance. His suicidal lawsuit and doubleminded testimony at his own trial fall short of the Socratic ideal of martyrdom to the conventions of a narrow society. In fact, it is conventional morality that one finds everywhere in the fairy tales of this author who shocked his age with the assertion that "there is no such thing as immoral book." The final shock Wilde leaves with those who would make him a pagan Saint is his own deathbed conversion to Catholicism.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," says an editor who truly knows what it takes to sell newspapers in John Ford's 1962 classic Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. The legend of Saint Oscar Wilde likewise requires a certain editing of the facts. For those who, like the proto-postmodernist Wilde, claim to prefer artful illusion to what seems a rather unaesthetic alternative, the facts may not matter much anyway. But for those who prefer the facts -- even when they aren't so pretty -- there's more to Oscar Wilde than meets the public eye. Just as Wilde himself suggested in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, one's public face may be entirely at odds with a private picture that won't give way to the legend.

One may actually view Dorian Gray (1891) itself as a sort of vortex of the multi-dimensions of Oscar Wilde. This two-faced novel paradoxically presents a Decadent's judgment upon Decadence, and raises the fundamental question of which of Wilde's many faces was the one that stared back at him in the privacy of his own thoughts. Was Oscar Wilde a sucker himself for a good legend, his own or any another? Or was he ultimately unable to let his own legend make a sucker out of him?

For those not familiar with the novel, the story of Dorian Gray is set in motion when the title character sits for a portrait painted by an artist named Basil Hallward. This fixing onto canvas of the subject's striking youth and unearthly beauty serves to draw attention to the transience of these qualities. As Dorian views his painted reflection taking form, he muses on the cruel injustice that is human mortality --

If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that -- for that -- I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"

But the devil is already on the scene. For if Basil Hallward is a Creator of perfection -- in this case, the portrait of Dorian Gray -- than Hallward's cynical friend, Lord Henry Wotton, is the Serpent. It is Lord Henry who draws Dorian's attention to the young man's otherworldly beauty and soon-to-vanish youth: "Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly..." As Dorian realizes the truth of this prophecy, he gazes at his youthful visage fixed permanently in the portrait and makes the wish quoted above, which, of course, turns out to come true. While Dorian the man remains young, handsome -- and seemingly innocent -- the painted Dorian suffers horribly with the passing of both years and sins.

Long before the wretched painting must be banished to a hidden closet, though, Lord Henry has already urged Dorian not to squander his youth on things common or vulgar, such as chasing ideals, but to "Live!" -- to grab for all the gusto he can. "Be always searching for new sensations," Lord Henry advises. "A new Hedonism -- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol." So, indeed, has Dorian Gray come down to us as the symbol for a particular brand of 19th century Hedonism -- though not exactly in the sense that Lord Henry might have meant.

And here we must pause to move back our easel (considerably, as it turns out), since our portrait of Oscar and Dorian will not be complete without including some background of the era against which they played out their stories. Any hope of understanding either Mssrs. Gray or Wilde requires painting in a certain amount of the Western social and literary landscape.

The attempt to glimpse the larger picture necessarily moves us back to a period of Western history known as the Enlightenment, a time depicted in the "print the legend" version as a cultural awakening from what in that version are called "the Dark Ages". During this period, the settled -- some say "stagnant" -- civilization of the Middle Ages gave way to a lively new era of Modern Times, driven by new discoveries in the natural sciences, and new emphases in the philosophy of Science. The rise of the machine, and a mechanistic science, seemed to transfer the control of the cosmos from God above to man himself. At its most optimistic, the Enlightenment was a time when Science seemed ready to grant the deepest of human wishes, the longing of Dorian Gray himself, a power against the ravages of time itself.

And yet, as in the case of Dorian Gray, there was a price to be paid for the powerful new knowledge and abilities so suddenly acquired by Western man following his Enlightenment. Even as it propelled forward the explosive growth of English industrialism, the scientific worldview left in its wake a spiritual vacuum. For many a sensitive and thoughtful soul, the priorities of the emerging industrial society threatened those human values which could not be reduced to scientific measure. The ongoing Romantic reaction to the cold materialism of the Enlightenment found in the Victorian era a prophetic voice in English author and critic John Ruskin (1819-1900). Ruskin beguiled entire subsequent generations with his vision of a more wholistic life, one where art, nature, and social values balanced the materialistic values of science and industrialism to make for a truly human culture. [See our posting of Ruskin's "The Nature of Gothic".]

Among those inspired by Ruskin was a group of painters and poets known as "the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood" (founded in 1848), who sought escape from Victorian industrialism into, of all places, the Medieval world over which the Enlightenment claimed to triumph. While the backward-looking and communal atmosphere of this proto-hippie counterculture was charged with Catholicism, and while there were several true Christian believers among their number, the real faith of most Pre-Raphaelites was purely aesthetic: the religion the P.R.B. is most associated with today has been called "the Cult of Beauty."

Somewhat less mystical than the Pre-Raphaelites was Victorian critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) who nevertheless preached what amounted to a theology of culture as a replacement for the vanishing Christian foundations of Western civilization. Arnold's effort to utilize "Art" (which, like "Science," now becomes capitalized) as a social glue was, however, shown to be inadequate: his detractors were right in pointing out that what Arnold identified as "the best that has been thought and said" merely represented his own preferences; the only thing that was self-evident was this truth: Since "Beauty" had been raised to the status of moral guide, all ethical judgments now became relative to "the eye of the beholder".

In Oscar Wilde's novel, young Dorian Gray is set free from the traditional moral standards of society by what he refers to as a "poisonous book," one given him by his corrupter, Lord Henry. This notorious book is left unnamed in the novel, though several likely candidates have been put forward by various commentators.

One of these is Studies in the History of the Renaissance, by yet another Victorian art critic, Walter Pater (1839-1894), who might be described as "the anti-Ruskin." Pater actually applauded his era's loss of certitudes and the onrush of metaphysical flux. Where both Ruskin and Arnold tried to save morality by moving it from religion to safekeeping in "Culture", Pater's fight was to sever aesthetic experience from any obligations. "Art for art's sake", and experience for experience's sake, was the Paterian credo. The The Renaissance climaxes with a carpe diem call that was to inspire many a Victorian rebel: "To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."

Ruskin and Pater represent splits in the religion of Art more sharply divided even than Luther and Rome. Though both of these prophets sought to escape from a suffocating materialism into experience and beauty, for Ruskin such things had to be allied with good; for Pater both might include a touch of evil. Pater rather liked the Borgias, for example. Ruskin spoke of faith, Pater of mysticism, as if for him religion became bearable only when it flowed into excess. Ruskin appealed to conscience, Pater to imagination. Ruskin invoked restraint, Pater allowed for a pleasant drift. What Ruskin reviled as vice, Pater caressed as wantonness. [Ellmann, 49]

As a teenager, the sensitive Oscar Wilde fell in love with the mystic Pre-Raphaelite religion of beauty. As an Oxford undergraduate, Wilde was drawn toward the more moralistic branch of that religion preached by the Oxford art prof, Ruskin. Yet it was the amoral and sensuous vision of Pater, then a tutor at Oxford, which ultimately won a convert in Wilde. During his first year at the university, Wilde read Pater's Renaissance, a book which, he said later, exerted "a strange influence" over him. Pater was to find Oscar too wild, even vulgar, and Wilde, in return, was disappointed that Pater was not as bold in life as in prose. Indeed, when Pater first read The Picture of Dorian Gray in manuscript, he realized the obvious fact that he had been the model for Lord Henry. Mortified, Pater urged Wilde to tone down some of the amoral views put into the mouth of Lord Henry. Wilde allowed himself to be persuaded to do so, but apparently not enough for Pater, who further distanced himself in a review he wrote of the novel.

But while the cautious hedonist Walter Pater may have been the model for Lord Henry, a more likely candidate for the "poisonous book" which so corrupted Dorian Gray would be found on the far side of the Channel.

Indeed, the French stream of the Romantic Movement had been following a darker course all along. Both the Enlightenment and the Romantic reaction had produced key figures in France, and the French Romantics' quest for Something beyond scientific certainties was by this time leading them away from the conventional toward the forbidden, the strange, and the perverse.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) broke with French Classical poetic tradition by introducing sensuous descriptions of less- than-classical subject matter, often tending toward the seamier side of life. His volume Le Fleurs du mal ("The Flowers of Evil") blooms with the bizarre, the sordid, the morbid, with crimes, violence, erotica and satanism. The poet was much influenced by Edgar Allen Poe, whom he'd championed and translated for his countrymen. Yet despite a style akin to the creepy freakshow of the Grand Guignol, Baudelaire's poetry was not simply an exercise in shock and rebellion: it was a manifestation of a tortured spiritual concern. He was a Catholic torn between faith and doubt, sin and guilt, and over the question of whether beauty came from heaven or hell. Baudelaire's poetic agonies inspired a generation of poets who followed his confused lead even further into the darkness. And so the Romantic attraction to whatever produced the sharpest sensation became a cult of perversity and degeneration: we name those artists most influenced by this mood and outlook, the Decadents.

The Decadent spirit, however trendy, cast a shadow of death and despair across the last years of the 19th century, a shadow that taints and makes omnious still the French phrase fin de siecle -- the "end of the century."

A generation after Baudelaire, that poet's dark world was novelized in what became the Bible of the Decadent generation, a work most critics have identified with the "poisonous book" of Dorian Gray. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) turned Baudelaire's (and via him, Poe's) demonic obsessions into a sensuous biography in A Rebours (Against the Grain, 1884). Here was told the story of one "Duke Jean des Esseintes", a French aristocrat who more boldly than Pater takes the Paterian ideal of sensuality to its logical and perverted conclusion. The book is less a matter of plot than atmosphere, the meticulous attention to luxurious detail a means for inflaming the reader's lust for indulging the senses. It is an atmosphere Wilde consciously imitated a few years later in his Picture of Dorian Gray.

Oscar Wilde was a key figure among those who introduced French Decadent literature and poetry into England. Yet the English Decadents seemed to be drawn less to substance than to style: they seemed less interested than their counterparts across the Channel in breaking free of Enlightenment materialism and than in escaping Victorian moral conventions; less in agonizing over the problem of Evil than in having a good time.

Wilde quickly found his place amid the London social whirl. A friend of both the up-and-coming and the already celebrated, Oscar became renowned in Society as a raconteur without peer, the life of every party, the one who could be counted on for the last and cleverest word. Indeed, Wilde supported his social habit with his clever words in more ways than one, packaging his wit in a series of enormously successful plays. And like his own character Dorian Gray, as he moved among the Upper reaches of society, Wilde simultaneously sampled the vices of the Victorian underworld.

And the parallels here with a certain infamous portrait are striking, parallels on a number of levels. Victorian Society itself, for example, like Dorian Gray, sported a glossy public face, but all but the most blind or ignorant also knew about the darker underbelly of the Age. The pomp of Empire was a sheen on a tradition of greedy expansion and violent repression of subject races. The Upper Class world of parties and conspicuous consumption by the idle rich was but a glittering distraction from truly Dickensian urban squalor and Industrial ugliness. Society sanctioned institutionalized hypocrisy: gentlemen were expected to have mistresses and patronize prostitutes; ladies took lovers. Everything was permitted, including homosexuality and pederasty, but only within the peculiar code of the Victorian Upper Class: the worst sin was exposing secrets of a fellow member of Society.

The era was named for an aging, morbidly secluded Monarch who would rather hang on bitterly to her rule than turn the Empire over to her playboy heir. With nothing else to do, the Prince of Wales became the model of Upper Class "morality", both a stickler for appearances and proper form, but also maintaining the most beautiful mistresses in Society. Among these was Mrs. Alice Keppel, the great-grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, the mistress of the present Prince of Wales -- another playboy heir to whom his Monarch mother is reluctant to pass the throne. Another of Prince Edward's mistresses was the "Professional Beauty" and actress Lillie Langtry, a much-sought after subject for the painters of the day, and a friend of Oscar Wilde. Surely "the Jersey Lillie", with her oft-painted beauty, helped inspire Oscar to his musings on the transience of such beauty ("Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies...). And Mrs. Langtry's status as "Royal Mistress" may have contributed to Wilde's understanding of how external beauty can cover behavior a more traditional morality views as corrupt.

But unlike Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde had no hidden portrait to bear his own sins, nor was he especially good at keeping them hidden. When the father of his aristocratic lover Lord Alfred Douglass broke the code by making a public accusation, Wilde ill-advisedly sued, and so began a very public race down the path of professional and personal ruin. Eventually Wilde was tried and found guilty of "committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons" and sentenced to two years hard labor. He left prison a broken man, lost his place in society, and degenerated rapidly like Dorian Gray at the end of his own book, after he'd stabbed his own enchanted portrait.

The legend of Saint Oscar Wilde plays his final conflict as a black-and-white battle of "Us" against "Them" -- his sudden downfall is depicted as a martyrdom to hypocritical Victorian morality -- which, in the telling of the tale, usually comes to be equated with any morality, Victorian, hypocritical, or otherwise. The facts tend to detract from the beauty of that tragic and admittedly compelling picture. Wilde's defense at his trial lacks the moral surety of a Socrates: he seems confused, now defending, now denying the behavior he was accused of. In this, Wilde embodied in life the very confusion one might expect of the author of Dorian Gray, that strange rebuke of Decadence written by the most notorious Decadent in England. Indeed, the novel was used against Wilde at his trial, held up like his own guilty conscience -- or like a painted portrait of morality that hung in his closet while his public face proclaimed the Paternian gospel of amorality.

And just as Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray put the author in an awkward position at his own trial, so the novel makes for awkward moments today among those who would hold up Wilde as the Patron Saint of Decadence. It has been argued, of course, that Dorian is but the purest example of Wilde's sensualism, a story which is moralistic only in so much as the moralism adds to the piercing sense of tragedy. Moralism as a pose, for the sake of effect. "In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing," says a character in The Importance of Being Earnest, summing up both the theme of the play and also Oscar Wilde's theories about life and art.

Meanwhile, it should come as no surprise that those who would take such a position would also apply the same argument to Wilde's conversion to Catholicism at the very end of his broken, tragic life. Indeed, some would argue, it would be strange if a martyred sensualist could help himself from being deeply affected by the beauty in the story of the martyrdom of Christ.

But if a deathbed conversion to Christianity was merely the final pose among a lifetime of posing for Oscar Wilde, then such a last line shows a disappointing lack of the originality one has come to expect from his utterly uncommon wit. That is to say, Oscar Wilde was only one of an astonishing number of the Decadent generation who followed their relentless and terrible lust for beauty and sensual experience right through the doors of the Church.

"I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy."

-- Oscar Wilde

Back when Wilde was just a poet and a dandy, an unsuccessful playwright, newly married and still looking for his own story, a French writer named Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808-1889) wrote a review of the novel that would soon come to captivate Oscar Wilde and serve as an inspiration for Dorian Gray. D'Aurevilly was one of those Frenchmen who'd found themselves turned by the violence of official atheism during the Revolution back to conservative Catholicism. In his review of Joris-Karl Huysmans' scandalous A Rebours, d'Aurevilly teasingly compared the author of what would become the Decadent "bible" to an equally notorious predecessor:

Baudelaire, the satanic Baudelaire, who died a Christian, must surely be one of M. Huysmans' favorite authors, for one can feel his presence, like a glowing fire, behind the finest pages M. Huysmans has written. Well, one day, I defied Baudelaire to begin Les Fleurs du mal over again, or to go any further in his blasphemies. I might well offer the same challenge to the author of A Rebours. "After Les Fleurs du mal," I told Baudelaire, 'it only remains for you to choose between the muzzle of a pistol and the foot of the Cross.' Baudelaire chose the foot of the Cross. But will the author of A Rebours make the same choice? (Ridge, 21)

Perhaps this phenomenon is not so extraordinary after all. T.S. Eliot may have hit upon the explanation in his own essay on the Baudelaire, where he made the seemingly obvious observation that the prerequisite to blasphemy is belief: "[T]he sense of Evil," he wrote, "implies a sense of good." Indeed, Baudelaire himself traced among even the perversities of Poe a discordant but persistent strain of spiritual aspiration. (Hanson, 4). And so, with some qualifications, Elliot came to conclude that Baudelaire's satanism was "an attempt to get into Christianity by the back door." Catholic novelist Francois Mauriac was even more welcoming of this notorious Prodigal: "No matter how often Baudelaire denies, his denial turns always to blasphemy, in other words to the act of faith." By this analysis, it would seem only logical that a movement known for perversity, obsession with death, decay and self, might also come to be known -- though less widely -- for Christian converts.

Aubrey Beardsley, the Decadent author and illustrator of the notorious Yellow Book was a young men who came to feel he had been corrupted by Oscar Wilde as Dorian Gray been corrupted by Lord Henry. Beardsley's career was certainly tarred by proximity to Wilde and his scandal -- and not without reason. Not long afterward, under a sentence of death from tuberculosis, Beardsley converted to Catholicism. He struggled with his faith as he had struggled for life, but held on to the former if not the latter, begging his friends "in my death agony" to destroy as many as they could find of his old obscene drawings. [Benkovitz, 193] Beardsley was urged into the Catholic Church by the conversion of his sister and friends, including poet John Gray, another literary disciple (and possibly lover) of Wilde who some said was the model for Dorian Gray (though he denied this and sued a newspaper for suggesting it.) In any case, Gray converted, and went on to seminary to become a priest.

Perhaps the most famous and influential among the Decadent converts was -- just as d'Aurevilly had prophesied -- Joris-Karl Huysmans. The Decadent "bible", A Rebours , in fact, turned out to be merely one stage in its author's journey -- one which led down into satanism, but then up through that "back door" into Christian faith. Huysmans saw his own decadence as an essentially Catholic revolt against the materialism of the age. In his so-called "poisonous book," the main character is shown to be drawn toward the Church, and A Rebours ends with a prayer. After Huysmans' conversion, he wrote a series of autobiographical novels which are known as his "Catholic works", tracking the further progress of his pilgrimage. One of these, En Route, Mauriac treasured as one of his favorite novels. Like most of the Decadent converts, Huysmans struggled with his faith, yet he eventually became a Benadictine oblate, an "associate" member of a monastery.

These are just a few of those whose fame as Decadents has actually obscured their renunciation of their former lives in Christian conversion. This astonishingly long roll call also includes Oscar Wilde's lover Alfred Douglass, French poets Rimbaud and Verlaine, and English poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson. It could well be that even more of this once seemingly-damned generation who almost converted, including Walter Pater. Doubleminded to the end, Pater's spiritual gropings kept leading him back to the threshold of faith, like the title character in his novel Marius the Epicurian, like Huysmans' Des Esseintes, and even like Dorian Gray:

It was rumoured of [Dorian Gray] that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had a great attraction for him... But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in trevail... no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

As far back as Oxford, even as Wilde had been falling under the spell of Paterian sensualism, he was anxious for the state of his soul. Oxford was still in the throes of the Catholic revival led by John Henry Newman, and Wilde read with interest Newman's books, along with those of other religious writers. According to biographer Richard Ellman, it was after contracting syphilis during college that Wilde was moved to have a conversation with a priest, who wrote the young man a letter as a summary of their discussion:

Let me then repeat to you as solemnly as I can what I said yesterday, you have like everyone else an evil nature and this in your case has become more corrupt by bad influences mental and moral, and by positive sin; hence, you speak as a dreamer and sceptic with no faith in anything and no purpose in life. On the other hand, God in His mercy has not let you remain contented in this state. He has proved to you the hollowness of this world in the unexpected loss of your fortune and has removed thereby a great obstacle to your conversion; He allows you to feel the sting of conscience and the yearnings for a holy, pure, and earnest life. It depends therefore on your own free will which life you will lead... [Ellman/94]

Where Wilde's life led in the short run was to a decision against conversion, at least to Catholicism. Instead, Wilde plunged into Paterian sensualism. A lifetime later, during his post-prison exile, Wilde visited Rome and received a blessing from the Pope. Friends reported that they had seen Wilde "kneel like a real Roman" before priests at churches in cities across Italy. Wilde claimed, like any good sensualist, to take an aesthetic delight in the pomp and tradition of religious experience. That Wilde went through the motions of a religious pilgrimage with no let up of his droll and dismissive remarks has led some to question whether his interest -- and, ultimately, his conversion -- were in fact simply more poses in the life of an expert poser. How the story is told depends upon the biographer. Phillipe Juliean maintains that, after his release from prison "Oscar was so weak that he could even be tempted by virtue" [360] and that "he was to end his short life a conscience-stricken Roman Catholic." [258] Richard Ellman downplays the conversion, describing the Last Rites over Wilde and his deathbed entry into Church as being virtually forced on sick man whose free will was no longer operative.

But perhaps the depth of the religious yearnings of the tall, gangling Oscar Wilde may be glimpsed in his tale The Selfish Giant. Indeed, Wilde's fellow Irishman C.S. Lewis maintained that "sometimes fairy stories may say best what's to be said." A summary of Wilde's fairy story goes like this:

Once there was a Giant who forbade children from playing in his garden, so it was Winter there and never Spring. One day the children sneaked into the garden to play and Spring returned -- except for one corner, and one tree, where a little boy too small to reach the branches wept. This melted the Giant's heart, and seeing how selfish he'd been, he decided to help child into tree and make the garden a playground.

But when the giant appeared, the children ran away -- all except for the little boy who was crying and so didn't see. When the Giant raised the boy into the tree, the child kissed him in gratitude. The other children saw this and returned to play in the garden. Meanwhile, the child whom the Giant had placed in the tree vanished, and the other children did not know who he was, or where he had gone.

The children returned often to play in garden, but the Giant looked in vain for his special friend. Years passed, and the Giant was old. It was Winter again in the garden, except in one corner, where he saw the little boy playing. The Giant greeted his long lost friend, but was angered to find child had been wounded on his hands and feet. The Giant demanded to know what had happened so he could avenge such a terrible crime.

Nay!" answered the child; "but these are the wounds of Love." The Giant, feeling a strange awe, asked the child who he was.

"And the child smiled on the Giant, and said to him, "You let me play once in your garden, to-day you shall come with me to my garden, which is Paradise."

When children came into garden that day to play, they found the Giant, once upon a time known as "selfish", was dead.

In the eyes of some beholders, no doubt, the facts of this story may be even more beautiful than the legend. And that would be the ultimate irony for Oscar Wilde: that he attained Sainthood, not because of his own martyrdom, but because the original Christ figure welcomed him into heaven's back door.

SOURCES
- Banks, Brian R., The Image of Huysmans (New York: AMS Press, 1990)
- Benkovitz, Miriam J., Aubrey Beardsley: An Account of His Life (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981)
- Brough, James The Prince and the Lily (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc, 1975)
- Donoghue, Denis, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
- Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays, Harcourt, Brace and World
- Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988)
- Ericksen, Donald H., Oscar Wilde (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977)
- Gopnik, Adam, "The Invention of Oscar Wilde," The New Yorker, May 18, 1998, pp. 78-88
- Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1997)
- Hough, Graham, The Last Romantics (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1947)
- Juliean, Philippe, Oscar Wilde (New York: Viking, 1968)
- Mauriac, Francois, Memoires Interieurs (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959)
- Ridge, George Ross, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Twayne Publishers, Inc., NY, 1968
- Ruff, Marcel A., Baudelaire, translated by Agnes Kertesz (New York: New York University Press, 1966)
- Weir, David, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusettes Press, 1995)