(Henceforth, because I am talking about the translation, I will use not the French but the English spelling of the name.)

No reader or viewer today is likely to be shocked by the mere fact that a Biblical episode is dramatized, but Wilde did indeed add to the story a shocking episode: Wilde’s Salome kisses the decapitated head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist). There is nothing of this in the Biblical sources, Matthew and Mark, or even in any of the later written versions, such as those by Flaubert, Huysmans, Heine, and Laforgue. In most of these versions, Salome (who is not even named in the Gospels) is a minor figure, the tool of her mother, Herodias. It is Herodias who orders Salome to ask for the head of John (he had denounced Herodias because after the death of her husband she had married her brother-in-law, Herod) and—in some versions—it is Herodias who kisses the head. Only in Wilde’s version does Salome kill John out of frustrated love and then kiss the decapitated head. J. K. Huysmans, however, in A Rebours (Against the Grain, 1884), had called attention to the sketchiness of the figure in the Gospels and suggested that she could be understood only by “brains shakened and sharpened, made visionary as it were by hysteria.” According to the central figure of Huysmans’s book, only the painter Gustave Moreau had “realized” Salome, had revealed her as “a monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning ... all who came near her, all who see her, all who touch her.” Wilde’s sustained interest in perversity, or monstrosity, or criminality can scarcely be traced to any specific beginning, but he surely found in A Rebours some confirmation of this interest.

It is worth looking very briefly at a few of Wilde’s remarks about the relation of crime to art. In an essay entitled “Pen, Pencil and Poison” (1889), about a man who poisoned several people, Wilde suggests that an artist of genius is scarcely subject to our ethical judgments. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) an aristocrat remarks that “crime” is to the lower classes “what art is to us, simply a method of procuring sensations.” And one can turn to a letter, undated but probably of 1885 or 1886, in which Wilde says:

I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all.... Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. To be master of these moods is exquisite, to be mastered by them more exquisite still.... There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.

Or this, from an essay entitled “The Critic as Artist” (1891):

People sometimes say that fiction is getting too morbid. As far as psychology is concerned, it has never been morbid enough. We have merely touched the surface of the soul, that is all. In one single ivory cell of the brain there are stored away things more marvellous and more terrible than even they have dreamed of who, like the author of Le Rouge et Le Noir, have sought to track the soul into its most secret places, and to make life confess its dearest sins.

These, and many other comments, relate Wilde to the hundred-year-old romantic tradition of men who, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words, “venture at times into the twilight realms of consciousness, and ... feel a deep interest in modes of inmost being,” but the writer who especially influenced Wilde was Walter Horatio Pater, and it is therefore Pater to whom we should briefly return.

Of Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873, retitled The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry in the second edition, 1877), Wilde said, according to W. B. Yeats, “It is my golden book; I never travel anywhere without it.” As we have seen, Wilde read it in his first months at Oxford, and he could hardly have missed the celebrated Conclusion, in which Pater argues that external reality, apparently so solid, so evidently there, is utterly elusive and is perceived differently by each of us—and which in fact each of us perceives differently at different moments:

At first sight, experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality.... But when reflection begins to play upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence, ... loosed into a group of impressions—color, odor, texture—in the mind of the observer.... Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.

Wilde echoes this view in many writings, for example in an essay called “The Decay of Lying” when he says, “Try as we may, we cannot get behind the appearance of things to reality,” and in De Profundis, the long letter that he wrote to Alfred Douglas from prison in 1896:

It is in the brain that everything takes place. We know now that we do not see with the eyes or hear with the ears. They are really channels for the transmission, adequate or inadequate, of sense impressions. It is in the brain that the poppy is red, that the apple is odorous, that the skylark sings.

What has this to do with Salome? One notices almost immediately that the moon in this play is perceived differently by the different characters. For Herodias’s page, the moon (in the second speech of the play) “is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman.” For the Young Syrian, to whom the page speaks, the moon “is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver.... You would fancy she was dancing.” For Salome, the moon “is like a little piece of money, you would think she was a little silver flower.” For Herod, the moon “is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers.” But for Herod’s wife, Herodias, “the moon is like the moon, that is all.” Similarly, when Salome sees Jokanaan, she says:

Thy body is white like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed.