Nothing is Serious

Nothing is Serious is a recurring philosophical attitude and conversational principle adopted by Dorian Gray under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, which holds that no subject, event, or emotion is weighty enough to warrant earnest engagement. It functions as a defense mechanism against guilt, a tool for emotional detachment, and a marker of Dorian's moral transformation, ultimately enabling him to dismiss murder, suicide, and his own corruption as trivial matters.

Origins and Lord Henry's Influence

The principle emerges from Lord Henry's systematic cultivation of Dorian's mind. In their first extended conversation in Basil Hallward's garden, Lord Henry's words touch "some secret chord, that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses." Dorian becomes dimly conscious that "entirely fresh impulses were at work within him, and they seemed to him to have come really from himself." The experience is overwhelming: "Life suddenly became fiery-colored to him. It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire." Lord Henry's paradoxical, emotionally deflating aphorisms—such as "the only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer"—provide the intellectual framework for treating all passions as transient and therefore unserious. Dorian later explicitly adopts this stance, telling Basil Hallward after Sibyl Vane's suicide, "If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things."

Application to Tragedy and Guilt

Dorian applies the "nothing is serious" doctrine most strikingly to the deaths that surround him. When Basil confronts him about Sibyl Vane's suicide, Dorian dismisses the tragedy: "What is done is done. What is past is past." He claims that "a man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure" and declares, "I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them." Later, when Basil Hallward himself lies dead in the locked room, Dorian's first thought is practical: he must dispose of the body. He feels "strangely calm" after the murder, and when he later discusses Basil's disappearance with Lord Henry, he wonders "how it was that he could discuss the matter so calmly." The principle allows him to treat even his own murder of his closest friend as a manageable inconvenience rather than a moral catastrophe.

The Limits of the Doctrine

The doctrine proves fragile when tested against Dorian's own conscience. After sparing Hetty Merton, he goes to check the portrait, hoping to see a sign of redemption. Instead, he finds the face unchanged except for "a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite." The portrait's continued degradation forces him to confront the possibility that his "good action" was merely vanity or "the desire of a new sensation." In a moment of genuine moral crisis, he considers confession: "Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement." But he immediately recoils, laughing at the idea as "monstrous." The doctrine of nothing being serious ultimately fails to provide genuine absolution, leaving Dorian trapped between his need to believe in his own reformation and the evidence of his soul's corruption.

The Final Rejection

In the novel's climax, Dorian explicitly rejects the principle. He seizes the knife that killed Basil Hallward and stabs the portrait, intending to destroy the evidence of his sins and "kill the past." The act is a desperate attempt to make something serious—to take decisive action that will free him from the burden of his conscience. But the doctrine has its final revenge: the servants find "a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." Dorian's attempt to treat the portrait as a mere object to be destroyed results in his own death, proving that some things—the soul, conscience, the consequences of one's actions—are indeed serious, no matter how strenuously one denies it.