Portraits and rings

I just finished Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time. I've been meaning to read it for years; we actually had a Sunday school lesson on it once, of all things. It's a hard book, because it's not much fun to watch a soul sink into final depravity. Also, the author seems to have a creepy affinity for the sins he discusses in such luscious and vivid phrases.

So after I finish, I turn to the Afterward. It (no author listed) opined,

[I]t is clearly not a conventional morality tale. Just as the sins of his life have no consequence on his body, any potential punishment for Dorian's crimes seems simply to bounce off him. ...Even his eventual death is not a conventional 'comeuppance.' When he stabs the picture, he does so because he is sick of being reminded of his hideous crimes, not because he feels any remorse for them. However, despite all this, the book does have a 'moral,' deeply buried in its beautiful prose. It concerns the interplay of art and morality, and deals with how life loses its meaning when lived in a moral vacuum.

Eh? It's not conventionally moral because he doesn't have external consequences and he never repents? I beg to differ. The entire point is how sin and guilt weigh down and eventually destroy the soul. Wilde's portrait-mechanism was brilliant because it did what the Ring of Gyges did, and lets us watch the character run amok and destroy his soul without the usual earthly consequences interfering. It's quite a remarkably moral story.

And yes, Picture does talk about "the interplay of art and morality" in beautiful prose, though the discussion is not particularly buried. Harry, Dorian's sort of devil-on-the-shoulder, tries to argue that art is nonproductive of any action; but the whole book proves that utter nonsense.