Lord Henry (called Harry by Basil and Dorian) is an upper class married man. He is middle age and in the first six chapters appears as Basil’s friend.
If I had to describe him in a few words, those may be: cynic, arrogant, immoral, independent, intelligent, self-confident and critic. I’ll discuss this while talking about his views and behavior during the chapters.
First of all, we can see that he doesn’t care about his marriage and wife:
10 – ‘I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet–we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s–we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces.’
And we can also see this careless in the relation he has with his wife, when she tells him:
57 – ‘You are dining our, I suppose? So am I. I shall see you at Lady Thornbury’s’
This shows that, as Lord Henry says in the first chapter, they only see each other from time to time and that their marriage is just appearance.
Related to marriage, we can talk about Lord Henry’s thoughts about women, which show his arrogance by considering women mere objects or stupid human beings, that cannot even appreciate beauty correctly:
58 – “My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.”
21 – “Women have no appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not.”
31 – “Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever.”
And, by the next example, he definitely shows that, for him, women are only elements for him to use them in order to achieve his objectives (in the example: gain reputation or have a good time):
58 – “I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That is all over now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. As for conversation, there are only five women in London worth talking to, and two of these can’t be admitted into decent society.”
But it is not only about women that he has an immoral view (from our modern point of view). More than unethical, I would rather say that he lacks of ethics. He is only concerned about himself and his “experiments” and, as we can perfectly see in the next example, he raises individualism as the only possible moral value:
92 – “To be good is to be in harmony with one’s self,” he replied, touching the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers. “Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One’s own life–that is the important thing. As for the lives of one’s neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt one’s moral views about them, but they are not one’s concern. Besides, individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality”
We also can see this careless about moral values in the following quotes:
87 – “I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do.”
16 – “…I like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no principles better than anything else in the world.”
And also here, where the narrator shows us his thoughts, and we see how he does not bother himself with poverty or other current moral and social issues:
20 – One’s own soul, and the passions of one’s friends–those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had he gone to his aunt’s, he would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift, and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was charming to have escaped all that!
In the same way that he doesn’t seem to care about his wife, we can see how he doesn’t care either about Basil, who is supposed to be his friend. And we can imagine that, in certain point, he won’t care about Dorian either when he stops being a useful or interesting experiment to watch (actually he calls him silly boy on page 36, when he is saying hi doesn’t want the picture). We can see this when in the page 86 he tells Basil that Dorian is engaged to be married with a completely coldness, although he is very conscious of the feeling from Basil towards the lad. We can also notice this in the following example, when Lord Henry interrupts Basil, who was starting to say to Dorian that he didn’t want to forgive him the fact that he didn’t tell him about the engagement:
89 – “And I don’t forgive you for being late for dinner,” broke in Lord Henry, putting his hand on the lad’s shoulder and smiling as he spoke.
We can see there how he ignores Basil, who just started to say something really emotional, and changes the thread of the conversation to what he is interested in. As a last point, I’ll mention another quote, in the end of chapter six, where Lord Henry stands Basil up without remorse:
94 – “I love acting. It is so much more real than life. Let us go. Dorian, you will come with me. I am so sorry, Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. You must follow us in a hansom”
Lord Henry’s aesthetical views are quite simple: beauty is the only thing worth, and it is usually not compatible with intelligence. We can see this from the following quotes
9 – ‘But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid.’
29,30 – “And beauty is a form of genius– is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation.” “To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible….”
50 – “I can sympathize with everything except suffering,” said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders. “I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores, the better.”
87 – “Oh, she is better than good–she is beautiful”
And, finally, one of the most important things is the influence that he exerts upon Dorian. And that we can see throw the following quotes:
45,46 – Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow…. There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that. – he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him–had already, indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own. There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.
56 – Lady Henry: “I always hear Harry’s views from his friends. Is the only way I get to know of them”
63 – “You could not have helped telling me, Dorian. All through your life you will tell me everything you do.”
68 – Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as Dorian Gray, and yet the lad’s mad adoration of some one else caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. He was pleased by it. It made him a more interesting study.
93 – “You will always like me, Dorian [...] A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit”
From this last quote we can also notice Lord Henry’s overconfidence and arrogance, which is present all over the six chapters as we can see in the next examples:
92 – “Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,” he answered in his slow melodious voice. “But I am afraid I cannot claim my theory as my own. It belongs to Nature, not to me. Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy”
Here he shows his theories as if they were the only possible truth.
31 – “You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray,”
Here he assumes that everybody is glad to meet such an intelligent and distinguished person as him.
32 – “That is entirely due to me,” broke in Lord Henry. “Isn’t it, Mr. Gray?”
Here he takes all the merit when Basil says to Dorian that he never sat that quiet and perfectly.
The only left thing to say about Lord Henry is comment two last quotes that emphasize his lack of care about if the things he say are correct or not:
51,52 – He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy [...]He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him …
53 – “I quite forget what I said,” smiled Lord Henry. “Was it all very bad?”
Neus Giner
