Dear Oscar Wilde...

So after being told that I need to read The Picture of Dorian Grey, umpteen million times, I finally have started the story, not because someone told me to read it, but because I happened past it in the library. Its good, I'm just at the point when Grey figures out that the painting is changing. And although I know the basics of the story, I feel its interesting to try and follow his character.

Its hard to decide, at this point if Grey's horrible character stems from the fact that he has bad influences or because he is beautiful. Perhaps it will be both, I have to finish to decide. I was very intrigued by one thing that Lord Henry says about artist.
"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common-sense. The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poets, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets, are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible."

I wonder what this can tell us about dear Oscar Wilde. Was he a very good 'poet' and thus a 'boring person' or did he view himself as second rate and thus very interesting. I do feel that all writers put their views in the months of their characters, or at least a bit of themselves on the page. I feel that Oscar must have felt the same, or at least wrote that thought into the character of Basil, as he is fearful of how much of himself is in the painting of Grey.

I'm also intrigued by the darkness that I can see coming. There is some kind of inevitability about the whole thing. I know that Grey is a vane, proud man who can not die. I'm a little a feared to see what he will become. I'm also intrigued because I fear so often my own writing takes a similar bent towards the dark. Well back to Oscar Wilde and Dear Grey.