Beauty=Truth?

In his emphasis on the fleeting nature of beauty, Wilde’s Lord Henry overtly challenges many assumptions his audience, in both the readers and in Dorian, have about aging and truth. This dramatic monologue from chapter two of the novel steers the title character towards a predetermined destination, thus emphasizing the power of the critic’s language.
At the outset of the speech, Henry, by negatively connoting thought and passion, prepares the soil of Dorian for the seed of his argument. Writing, “When you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines” (28), Wilde, through Lord Henry, insinuates that the final destination of any life is ugliness. In short, by making ugliness a foregone conclusion of any life that’s not youthful, Lord Henry paints an unflattering picture that conflicts directly with the idea that old age brings wisdom. Or, if it does, wisdom, which necessarily corresponds with thinking, “sear[s]” the thinker's face with wrinkles. The idea that thought is dangerous, that it can burn, undermines the conventional wisdom that a lack of thinking is dangerous. In essence, Lord Henry takes to the extreme the idea that ignorance is bliss. He essentially states that young and beautiful ignorance is not only blissful, but is “the wonder of wonders” (28). This, according to the novel, is not explored on the symbolic level; it is on the superficial as Henry makes clear, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” (28).
By not having the audience interject, Wilde creates, much like Browning’s Duke, a persona in Lord Henry who is trying to control every aspect of his environment. When he anticipates, or informs Dorian, of why he reacts to his speech in a particular manner, Henry is also anticipating the reader’s counterarguments. There are no pauses in the monologue to allow for debate. He then, in his praise of Dorian’s beauty, erects the character as a hero, who’s fighting against the personification of Time. By putting the battle on a mythical plain, Henry builds Dorian’s confidence while encouraging the rest of the audience to side with the promethean hero that is Dorian Gray. He is a human who is fighting against the gods that made him, and this makes him, to an extent, an everyman. His beauty is human, and the tragedy of our existence is that, in the words of Bob Dylan, “He not busy being born is busy dying.”