--- /dev/null
+The Picture of Dorian Gray
+
+by
+
+Oscar Wilde
+
+
+
+
+THE PREFACE
+
+The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and
+conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate
+into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful
+things.
+
+The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
+Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
+being charming. This is a fault.
+
+Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
+cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom
+beautiful things mean only beauty.
+
+There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
+written, or badly written. That is all.
+
+The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing
+his own face in a glass.
+
+The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban
+not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part
+of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists
+in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove
+anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has
+ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an
+unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist
+can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist
+instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for
+an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is
+the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the
+actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol.
+Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read
+the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life,
+that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art
+shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree,
+the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making
+a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for
+making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
+
+ All art is quite useless.
+
+ OSCAR WILDE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 1
+
+The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light
+summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through
+the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate
+perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
+
+From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was
+lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry
+Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured
+blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to
+bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then
+the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long
+tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window,
+producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of
+those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of
+an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of
+swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their
+way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous
+insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine,
+seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London
+was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
+
+In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
+full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
+and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist
+himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago
+caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many
+strange conjectures.
+
+As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so
+skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his
+face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up,
+and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he
+sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he
+feared he might awake.
+
+"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said
+Lord Henry languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the
+Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have
+gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been
+able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that
+I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor
+is really the only place."
+
+"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head
+back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at
+Oxford. "No, I won't send it anywhere."
+
+Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through
+the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls
+from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My
+dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters
+are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as
+you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you,
+for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
+and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you
+far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite
+jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."
+
+"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit
+it. I have put too much of myself into it."
+
+Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.
+
+"Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same."
+
+"Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you
+were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with
+your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young
+Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why,
+my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an
+intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends
+where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode
+of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one
+sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something
+horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.
+How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But
+then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the
+age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen,
+and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.
+Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but
+whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of
+that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always
+here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in
+summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter
+yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him."
+
+"You don't understand me, Harry," answered the artist. "Of course I am
+not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry
+to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the
+truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual
+distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the
+faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's
+fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.
+They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing
+of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They
+live as we all should live--undisturbed, indifferent, and without
+disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it
+from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they
+are--my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks--we
+shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly."
+
+"Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across the
+studio towards Basil Hallward.
+
+"Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you."
+
+"But why not?"
+
+"Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely, I never tell their
+names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have
+grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make
+modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is
+delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my
+people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It
+is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great
+deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully
+foolish about it?"
+
+"Not at all," answered Lord Henry, "not at all, my dear Basil. You
+seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that
+it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I
+never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing.
+When we meet--we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go
+down to the Duke's--we tell each other the most absurd stories with the
+most serious faces. My wife is very good at it--much better, in fact,
+than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do.
+But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes
+wish she would; but she merely laughs at me."
+
+"I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry," said Basil
+Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "I
+believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are
+thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary
+fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing.
+Your cynicism is simply a pose."
+
+"Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,"
+cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the
+garden together and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that
+stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped over
+the polished leaves. In the grass, white daisies were tremulous.
+
+After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. "I am afraid I must be
+going, Basil," he murmured, "and before I go, I insist on your
+answering a question I put to you some time ago."
+
+"What is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
+
+"You know quite well."
+
+"I do not, Harry."
+
+"Well, I will tell you what it is. I want you to explain to me why you
+won't exhibit Dorian Gray's picture. I want the real reason."
+
+"I told you the real reason."
+
+"No, you did not. You said it was because there was too much of
+yourself in it. Now, that is childish."
+
+"Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every
+portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not
+of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is
+not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on
+the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit
+this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of
+my own soul."
+
+Lord Henry laughed. "And what is that?" he asked.
+
+"I will tell you," said Hallward; but an expression of perplexity came
+over his face.
+
+"I am all expectation, Basil," continued his companion, glancing at him.
+
+"Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry," answered the painter;
+"and I am afraid you will hardly understand it. Perhaps you will
+hardly believe it."
+
+Lord Henry smiled, and leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from
+the grass and examined it. "I am quite sure I shall understand it," he
+replied, gazing intently at the little golden, white-feathered disk,
+"and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it
+is quite incredible."
+
+The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy
+lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the
+languid air. A grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a
+blue thread a long thin dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze
+wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart
+beating, and wondered what was coming.
+
+"The story is simply this," said the painter after some time. "Two
+months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon's. You know we poor
+artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to
+remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a
+white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain
+a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the room
+about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious
+academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at
+me. I turned half-way round and saw Dorian Gray for the first time.
+When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation
+of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some
+one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to
+do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art
+itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. You know
+yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature. I have always been my
+own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray.
+Then--but I don't know how to explain it to you. Something seemed to
+tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. I had
+a strange feeling that fate had in store for me exquisite joys and
+exquisite sorrows. I grew afraid and turned to quit the room. It was
+not conscience that made me do so: it was a sort of cowardice. I take
+no credit to myself for trying to escape."
+
+"Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil.
+Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all."
+
+"I don't believe that, Harry, and I don't believe you do either.
+However, whatever was my motive--and it may have been pride, for I used
+to be very proud--I certainly struggled to the door. There, of course,
+I stumbled against Lady Brandon. 'You are not going to run away so
+soon, Mr. Hallward?' she screamed out. You know her curiously shrill
+voice?"
+
+"Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry,
+pulling the daisy to bits with his long nervous fingers.
+
+"I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to royalties, and
+people with stars and garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras
+and parrot noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend. I had only
+met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. I
+believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at
+least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the
+nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself
+face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely
+stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again.
+It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him.
+Perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. It was simply inevitable.
+We would have spoken to each other without any introduction. I am sure
+of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were
+destined to know each other."
+
+"And how did Lady Brandon describe this wonderful young man?" asked his
+companion. "I know she goes in for giving a rapid _precis_ of all her
+guests. I remember her bringing me up to a truculent and red-faced old
+gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my
+ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to
+everybody in the room, the most astounding details. I simply fled. I
+like to find out people for myself. But Lady Brandon treats her guests
+exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. She either explains them
+entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants
+to know."
+
+"Poor Lady Brandon! You are hard on her, Harry!" said Hallward
+listlessly.
+
+"My dear fellow, she tried to found a _salon_, and only succeeded in
+opening a restaurant. How could I admire her? But tell me, what did
+she say about Mr. Dorian Gray?"
+
+"Oh, something like, 'Charming boy--poor dear mother and I absolutely
+inseparable. Quite forget what he does--afraid he--doesn't do
+anything--oh, yes, plays the piano--or is it the violin, dear Mr.
+Gray?' Neither of us could help laughing, and we became friends at
+once."
+
+"Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far
+the best ending for one," said the young lord, plucking another daisy.
+
+Hallward shook his head. "You don't understand what friendship is,
+Harry," he murmured--"or what enmity is, for that matter. You like
+every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one."
+
+"How horribly unjust of you!" cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat back
+and looking up at the little clouds that, like ravelled skeins of
+glossy white silk, were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the
+summer sky. "Yes; horribly unjust of you. I make a great difference
+between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my
+acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good
+intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
+I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some
+intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that
+very vain of me? I think it is rather vain."
+
+"I should think it was, Harry. But according to your category I must
+be merely an acquaintance."
+
+"My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance."
+
+"And much less than a friend. A sort of brother, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, brothers! I don't care for brothers. My elder brother won't die,
+and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else."
+
+"Harry!" exclaimed Hallward, frowning.
+
+"My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can't help detesting my
+relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand
+other people having the same faults as ourselves. I quite sympathize
+with the rage of the English democracy against what they call the vices
+of the upper orders. The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and
+immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of
+us makes an ass of himself, he is poaching on their preserves. When
+poor Southwark got into the divorce court, their indignation was quite
+magnificent. And yet I don't suppose that ten per cent of the
+proletariat live correctly."
+
+"I don't agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is
+more, Harry, I feel sure you don't either."
+
+Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard and tapped the toe of his
+patent-leather boot with a tasselled ebony cane. "How English you are
+Basil! That is the second time you have made that observation. If one
+puts forward an idea to a true Englishman--always a rash thing to
+do--he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong.
+The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes
+it oneself. Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do
+with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the
+probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely
+intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be coloured
+by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. However, I don't
+propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. I
+like persons better than principles, and I like persons with no
+principles better than anything else in the world. Tell me more about
+Mr. Dorian Gray. How often do you see him?"
+
+"Every day. I couldn't be happy if I didn't see him every day. He is
+absolutely necessary to me."
+
+"How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but
+your art."
+
+"He is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely. "I sometimes
+think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the
+world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art,
+and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also.
+What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of
+Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will
+some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from
+him, sketch from him. Of course, I have done all that. But he is much
+more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't tell you that I am
+dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such
+that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express,
+and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good
+work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way--I wonder
+will you understand me?--his personality has suggested to me an
+entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see
+things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate
+life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'A dream of form in days
+of thought'--who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian
+Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this lad--for he
+seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over
+twenty--his merely visible presence--ah! I wonder can you realize all
+that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh
+school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic
+spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of
+soul and body--how much that is! We in our madness have separated the
+two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is
+void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember
+that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price
+but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have
+ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian
+Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and
+for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I
+had always looked for and always missed."
+
+"Basil, this is extraordinary! I must see Dorian Gray."
+
+Hallward got up from the seat and walked up and down the garden. After
+some time he came back. "Harry," he said, "Dorian Gray is to me simply
+a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see everything in
+him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is
+there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find
+him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of
+certain colours. That is all."
+
+"Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked Lord Henry.
+
+"Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of
+all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never
+cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know
+anything about it. But the world might guess it, and I will not bare
+my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put
+under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing,
+Harry--too much of myself!"
+
+"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion
+is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
+
+"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create
+beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We
+live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of
+autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I
+will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall
+never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."
+
+"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only
+the intellectually lost who ever argue. Tell me, is Dorian Gray very
+fond of you?"
+
+The painter considered for a few moments. "He likes me," he answered
+after a pause; "I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him
+dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I
+know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to
+me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. Now and
+then, however, he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take a real
+delight in giving me pain. Then I feel, Harry, that I have given away
+my whole soul to some one who treats it as if it were a flower to put
+in his coat, a bit of decoration to charm his vanity, an ornament for a
+summer's day."
+
+"Days in summer, Basil, are apt to linger," murmured Lord Henry.
+"Perhaps you will tire sooner than he will. It is a sad thing to think
+of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That
+accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate
+ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have
+something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and
+facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly
+well-informed man--that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the
+thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a
+_bric-a-brac_ shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above
+its proper value. I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day
+you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little
+out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something.
+You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think
+that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you
+will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for
+it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance
+of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind
+is that it leaves one so unromantic."
+
+"Harry, don't talk like that. As long as I live, the personality of
+Dorian Gray will dominate me. You can't feel what I feel. You change
+too often."
+
+"Ah, my dear Basil, that is exactly why I can feel it. Those who are
+faithful know only the trivial side of love: it is the faithless who
+know love's tragedies." And Lord Henry struck a light on a dainty
+silver case and began to smoke a cigarette with a self-conscious and
+satisfied air, as if he had summed up the world in a phrase. There was
+a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy,
+and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like
+swallows. How pleasant it was in the garden! And how delightful other
+people's emotions were!--much more delightful than their ideas, it
+seemed to him. One's own soul, and the passions of one's
+friends--those were the fascinating things in life. He pictured to
+himself with silent amusement the tedious luncheon that he had missed
+by staying so long with Basil Hallward. Had he gone to his aunt's, he
+would have been sure to have met Lord Goodbody there, and the whole
+conversation would have been about the feeding of the poor and the
+necessity for model lodging-houses. Each class would have preached the
+importance of those virtues, for whose exercise there was no necessity
+in their own lives. The rich would have spoken on the value of thrift,
+and the idle grown eloquent over the dignity of labour. It was
+charming to have escaped all that! As he thought of his aunt, an idea
+seemed to strike him. He turned to Hallward and said, "My dear fellow,
+I have just remembered."
+
+"Remembered what, Harry?"
+
+"Where I heard the name of Dorian Gray."
+
+"Where was it?" asked Hallward, with a slight frown.
+
+"Don't look so angry, Basil. It was at my aunt, Lady Agatha's. She
+told me she had discovered a wonderful young man who was going to help
+her in the East End, and that his name was Dorian Gray. I am bound to
+state that she never told me he was good-looking. Women have no
+appreciation of good looks; at least, good women have not. She said
+that he was very earnest and had a beautiful nature. I at once
+pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horribly
+freckled, and tramping about on huge feet. I wish I had known it was
+your friend."
+
+"I am very glad you didn't, Harry."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I don't want you to meet him."
+
+"You don't want me to meet him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, coming into
+the garden.
+
+"You must introduce me now," cried Lord Henry, laughing.
+
+The painter turned to his servant, who stood blinking in the sunlight.
+"Ask Mr. Gray to wait, Parker: I shall be in in a few moments." The
+man bowed and went up the walk.
+
+Then he looked at Lord Henry. "Dorian Gray is my dearest friend," he
+said. "He has a simple and a beautiful nature. Your aunt was quite
+right in what she said of him. Don't spoil him. Don't try to
+influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and
+has many marvellous people in it. Don't take away from me the one
+person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses: my life as an
+artist depends on him. Mind, Harry, I trust you." He spoke very
+slowly, and the words seemed wrung out of him almost against his will.
+
+"What nonsense you talk!" said Lord Henry, smiling, and taking Hallward
+by the arm, he almost led him into the house.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 2
+
+As they entered they saw Dorian Gray. He was seated at the piano, with
+his back to them, turning over the pages of a volume of Schumann's
+"Forest Scenes." "You must lend me these, Basil," he cried. "I want
+to learn them. They are perfectly charming."
+
+"That entirely depends on how you sit to-day, Dorian."
+
+"Oh, I am tired of sitting, and I don't want a life-sized portrait of
+myself," answered the lad, swinging round on the music-stool in a
+wilful, petulant manner. When he caught sight of Lord Henry, a faint
+blush coloured his cheeks for a moment, and he started up. "I beg your
+pardon, Basil, but I didn't know you had any one with you."
+
+"This is Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian, an old Oxford friend of mine. I
+have just been telling him what a capital sitter you were, and now you
+have spoiled everything."
+
+"You have not spoiled my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Gray," said Lord
+Henry, stepping forward and extending his hand. "My aunt has often
+spoken to me about you. You are one of her favourites, and, I am
+afraid, one of her victims also."
+
+"I am in Lady Agatha's black books at present," answered Dorian with a
+funny look of penitence. "I promised to go to a club in Whitechapel
+with her last Tuesday, and I really forgot all about it. We were to
+have played a duet together--three duets, I believe. I don't know what
+she will say to me. I am far too frightened to call."
+
+"Oh, I will make your peace with my aunt. She is quite devoted to you.
+And I don't think it really matters about your not being there. The
+audience probably thought it was a duet. When Aunt Agatha sits down to
+the piano, she makes quite enough noise for two people."
+
+"That is very horrid to her, and not very nice to me," answered Dorian,
+laughing.
+
+Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome,
+with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp
+gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at
+once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's
+passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from
+the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.
+
+"You are too charming to go in for philanthropy, Mr. Gray--far too
+charming." And Lord Henry flung himself down on the divan and opened
+his cigarette-case.
+
+The painter had been busy mixing his colours and getting his brushes
+ready. He was looking worried, and when he heard Lord Henry's last
+remark, he glanced at him, hesitated for a moment, and then said,
+"Harry, I want to finish this picture to-day. Would you think it
+awfully rude of me if I asked you to go away?"
+
+Lord Henry smiled and looked at Dorian Gray. "Am I to go, Mr. Gray?"
+he asked.
+
+"Oh, please don't, Lord Henry. I see that Basil is in one of his sulky
+moods, and I can't bear him when he sulks. Besides, I want you to tell
+me why I should not go in for philanthropy."
+
+"I don't know that I shall tell you that, Mr. Gray. It is so tedious a
+subject that one would have to talk seriously about it. But I
+certainly shall not run away, now that you have asked me to stop. You
+don't really mind, Basil, do you? You have often told me that you
+liked your sitters to have some one to chat to."
+
+Hallward bit his lip. "If Dorian wishes it, of course you must stay.
+Dorian's whims are laws to everybody, except himself."
+
+Lord Henry took up his hat and gloves. "You are very pressing, Basil,
+but I am afraid I must go. I have promised to meet a man at the
+Orleans. Good-bye, Mr. Gray. Come and see me some afternoon in Curzon
+Street. I am nearly always at home at five o'clock. Write to me when
+you are coming. I should be sorry to miss you."
+
+"Basil," cried Dorian Gray, "if Lord Henry Wotton goes, I shall go,
+too. You never open your lips while you are painting, and it is
+horribly dull standing on a platform and trying to look pleasant. Ask
+him to stay. I insist upon it."
+
+"Stay, Harry, to oblige Dorian, and to oblige me," said Hallward,
+gazing intently at his picture. "It is quite true, I never talk when I
+am working, and never listen either, and it must be dreadfully tedious
+for my unfortunate sitters. I beg you to stay."
+
+"But what about my man at the Orleans?"
+
+The painter laughed. "I don't think there will be any difficulty about
+that. Sit down again, Harry. And now, Dorian, get up on the platform,
+and don't move about too much, or pay any attention to what Lord Henry
+says. He has a very bad influence over all his friends, with the
+single exception of myself."
+
+Dorian Gray stepped up on the dais with the air of a young Greek
+martyr, and made a little _moue_ of discontent to Lord Henry, to whom he
+had rather taken a fancy. He was so unlike Basil. They made a
+delightful contrast. And he had such a beautiful voice. After a few
+moments he said to him, "Have you really a very bad influence, Lord
+Henry? As bad as Basil says?"
+
+"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence
+is immoral--immoral from the scientific point of view."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does
+not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His
+virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as
+sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an
+actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is
+self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly--that is what each
+of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They
+have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to
+one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and
+clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage
+has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror
+of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is
+the secret of religion--these are the two things that govern us. And
+yet--"
+
+"Just turn your head a little more to the right, Dorian, like a good
+boy," said the painter, deep in his work and conscious only that a look
+had come into the lad's face that he had never seen there before.
+
+"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with
+that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of
+him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man
+were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to
+every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream--I
+believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we
+would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the
+Hellenic ideal--to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it
+may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The
+mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial
+that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse
+that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body
+sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of
+purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure,
+or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is
+to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for
+the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its
+monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that
+the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the
+brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place
+also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your
+rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid,
+thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping
+dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame--"
+
+"Stop!" faltered Dorian Gray, "stop! you bewilder me. I don't know
+what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don't
+speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think."
+
+For nearly ten minutes he stood there, motionless, with parted lips and
+eyes strangely bright. He was dimly conscious that entirely fresh
+influences were at work within him. Yet they seemed to him to have
+come really from himself. The few words that Basil's friend had said
+to him--words spoken by chance, no doubt, and with wilful paradox in
+them--had touched some secret chord that had never been touched before,
+but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses.
+
+Music had stirred him like that. Music had troubled him many times.
+But music was not articulate. It was not a new world, but rather
+another chaos, that it created in us. Words! Mere words! How
+terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not
+escape from them. And yet what a subtle magic there was in them! They
+seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things, and to
+have a music of their own as sweet as that of viol or of lute. Mere
+words! Was there anything so real as words?
+
+Yes; there had been things in his boyhood that he had not understood.
+He understood them now. Life suddenly became fiery-coloured to him.
+It seemed to him that he had been walking in fire. Why had he not
+known it?
+
+With his subtle smile, Lord Henry watched him. He knew the precise
+psychological moment when to say nothing. He felt intensely
+interested. He was amazed at the sudden impression that his words had
+produced, and, remembering a book that he had read when he was sixteen,
+a book which had revealed to him much that he had not known before, he
+wondered whether Dorian Gray was passing through a similar experience.
+He had merely shot an arrow into the air. Had it hit the mark? How
+fascinating the lad was!
+
+Hallward painted away with that marvellous bold touch of his, that had
+the true refinement and perfect delicacy that in art, at any rate comes
+only from strength. He was unconscious of the silence.
+
+"Basil, I am tired of standing," cried Dorian Gray suddenly. "I must
+go out and sit in the garden. The air is stifling here."
+
+"My dear fellow, I am so sorry. When I am painting, I can't think of
+anything else. But you never sat better. You were perfectly still.
+And I have caught the effect I wanted--the half-parted lips and the
+bright look in the eyes. I don't know what Harry has been saying to
+you, but he has certainly made you have the most wonderful expression.
+I suppose he has been paying you compliments. You mustn't believe a
+word that he says."
+
+"He has certainly not been paying me compliments. Perhaps that is the
+reason that I don't believe anything he has told me."
+
+"You know you believe it all," said Lord Henry, looking at him with his
+dreamy languorous eyes. "I will go out to the garden with you. It is
+horribly hot in the studio. Basil, let us have something iced to
+drink, something with strawberries in it."
+
+"Certainly, Harry. Just touch the bell, and when Parker comes I will
+tell him what you want. I have got to work up this background, so I
+will join you later on. Don't keep Dorian too long. I have never been
+in better form for painting than I am to-day. This is going to be my
+masterpiece. It is my masterpiece as it stands."
+
+Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his
+face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their
+perfume as if it had been wine. He came close to him and put his hand
+upon his shoulder. "You are quite right to do that," he murmured.
+"Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the
+senses but the soul."
+
+The lad started and drew back. He was bareheaded, and the leaves had
+tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads.
+There was a look of fear in his eyes, such as people have when they are
+suddenly awakened. His finely chiselled nostrils quivered, and some
+hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and left them trembling.
+
+"Yes," continued Lord Henry, "that is one of the great secrets of
+life--to cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means
+of the soul. You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you
+think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."
+
+Dorian Gray frowned and turned his head away. He could not help liking
+the tall, graceful young man who was standing by him. His romantic,
+olive-coloured face and worn expression interested him. There was
+something in his low languid voice that was absolutely fascinating.
+His cool, white, flowerlike hands, even, had a curious charm. They
+moved, as he spoke, like music, and seemed to have a language of their
+own. But he felt afraid of him, and ashamed of being afraid. Why had
+it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? He had known
+Basil Hallward for months, but the friendship between them had never
+altered him. Suddenly there had come some one across his life who
+seemed to have disclosed to him life's mystery. And, yet, what was
+there to be afraid of? He was not a schoolboy or a girl. It was
+absurd to be frightened.
+
+"Let us go and sit in the shade," said Lord Henry. "Parker has brought
+out the drinks, and if you stay any longer in this glare, you will be
+quite spoiled, and Basil will never paint you again. You really must
+not allow yourself to become sunburnt. It would be unbecoming."
+
+"What can it matter?" cried Dorian Gray, laughing, as he sat down on
+the seat at the end of the garden.
+
+"It should matter everything to you, Mr. Gray."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because you have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing
+worth having."
+
+"I don't feel that, Lord Henry."
+
+"No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled
+and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and
+passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you
+will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world.
+Will it always be so? ... You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr.
+Gray. Don't frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius--is
+higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the
+great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the
+reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It
+cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It
+makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost
+it you won't smile.... People say sometimes that beauty is only
+superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as
+thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only
+shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of
+the world is the visible, not the invisible.... Yes, Mr. Gray, the
+gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take
+away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly,
+and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then
+you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you, or
+have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory of
+your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes
+brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and
+wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and
+hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly.... Ah!
+realize your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your
+days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure,
+or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar.
+These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live
+the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be
+always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.... A new
+Hedonism--that is what our century wants. You might be its visible
+symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The
+world belongs to you for a season.... The moment I met you I saw that
+you were quite unconscious of what you really are, of what you really
+might be. There was so much in you that charmed me that I felt I must
+tell you something about yourself. I thought how tragic it would be if
+you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will
+last--such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they
+blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now.
+In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after
+year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we
+never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty
+becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into
+hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were
+too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the
+courage to yield to. Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in
+the world but youth!"
+
+Dorian Gray listened, open-eyed and wondering. The spray of lilac fell
+from his hand upon the gravel. A furry bee came and buzzed round it
+for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated
+globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest
+in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import
+make us afraid, or when we are stirred by some new emotion for which we
+cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays
+sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield. After a time the
+bee flew away. He saw it creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian
+convolvulus. The flower seemed to quiver, and then swayed gently to
+and fro.
+
+Suddenly the painter appeared at the door of the studio and made
+staccato signs for them to come in. They turned to each other and
+smiled.
+
+"I am waiting," he cried. "Do come in. The light is quite perfect,
+and you can bring your drinks."
+
+They rose up and sauntered down the walk together. Two green-and-white
+butterflies fluttered past them, and in the pear-tree at the corner of
+the garden a thrush began to sing.
+
+"You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray," said Lord Henry, looking at
+him.
+
+"Yes, I am glad now. I wonder shall I always be glad?"
+
+"Always! That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it.
+Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to
+make it last for ever. It is a meaningless word, too. The only
+difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice
+lasts a little longer."
+
+As they entered the studio, Dorian Gray put his hand upon Lord Henry's
+arm. "In that case, let our friendship be a caprice," he murmured,
+flushing at his own boldness, then stepped up on the platform and
+resumed his pose.
+
+Lord Henry flung himself into a large wicker arm-chair and watched him.
+The sweep and dash of the brush on the canvas made the only sound that
+broke the stillness, except when, now and then, Hallward stepped back
+to look at his work from a distance. In the slanting beams that
+streamed through the open doorway the dust danced and was golden. The
+heavy scent of the roses seemed to brood over everything.
+
+After about a quarter of an hour Hallward stopped painting, looked for
+a long time at Dorian Gray, and then for a long time at the picture,
+biting the end of one of his huge brushes and frowning. "It is quite
+finished," he cried at last, and stooping down he wrote his name in
+long vermilion letters on the left-hand corner of the canvas.
+
+Lord Henry came over and examined the picture. It was certainly a
+wonderful work of art, and a wonderful likeness as well.
+
+"My dear fellow, I congratulate you most warmly," he said. "It is the
+finest portrait of modern times. Mr. Gray, come over and look at
+yourself."
+
+The lad started, as if awakened from some dream.
+
+"Is it really finished?" he murmured, stepping down from the platform.
+
+"Quite finished," said the painter. "And you have sat splendidly
+to-day. I am awfully obliged to you."
+
+"That is entirely due to me," broke in Lord Henry. "Isn't it, Mr.
+Gray?"
+
+Dorian made no answer, but passed listlessly in front of his picture
+and turned towards it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks
+flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes,
+as if he had recognized himself for the first time. He stood there
+motionless and in wonder, dimly conscious that Hallward was speaking to
+him, but not catching the meaning of his words. The sense of his own
+beauty came on him like a revelation. He had never felt it before.
+Basil Hallward's compliments had seemed to him to be merely the
+charming exaggeration of friendship. He had listened to them, laughed
+at them, forgotten them. They had not influenced his nature. Then had
+come Lord Henry Wotton with his strange panegyric on youth, his
+terrible warning of its brevity. That had stirred him at the time, and
+now, as he stood gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, the full
+reality of the description flashed across him. Yes, there would be a
+day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim and
+colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed. The scarlet
+would pass away from his lips and the gold steal from his hair. The
+life that was to make his soul would mar his body. He would become
+dreadful, hideous, and uncouth.
+
+As he thought of it, a sharp pang of pain struck through him like a
+knife and made each delicate fibre of his nature quiver. His eyes
+deepened into amethyst, and across them came a mist of tears. He felt
+as if a hand of ice had been laid upon his heart.
+
+"Don't you like it?" cried Hallward at last, stung a little by the
+lad's silence, not understanding what it meant.
+
+"Of course he likes it," said Lord Henry. "Who wouldn't like it? It
+is one of the greatest things in modern art. I will give you anything
+you like to ask for it. I must have it."
+
+"It is not my property, Harry."
+
+"Whose property is it?"
+
+"Dorian's, of course," answered the painter.
+
+"He is a very lucky fellow."
+
+"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray with his eyes still fixed upon
+his own portrait. "How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and
+dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be
+older than this particular day of June.... If it were only the other
+way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was
+to grow old! For that--for that--I would give everything! Yes, there
+is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul
+for that!"
+
+"You would hardly care for such an arrangement, Basil," cried Lord
+Henry, laughing. "It would be rather hard lines on your work."
+
+"I should object very strongly, Harry," said Hallward.
+
+Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. "I believe you would, Basil.
+You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you than a
+green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say."
+
+The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak like
+that. What had happened? He seemed quite angry. His face was flushed
+and his cheeks burning.
+
+"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your
+silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me?
+Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one
+loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything.
+Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right.
+Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing
+old, I shall kill myself."
+
+Hallward turned pale and caught his hand. "Dorian! Dorian!" he cried,
+"don't talk like that. I have never had such a friend as you, and I
+shall never have such another. You are not jealous of material things,
+are you?--you who are finer than any of them!"
+
+"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of
+the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must
+lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives
+something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture
+could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint
+it? It will mock me some day--mock me horribly!" The hot tears welled
+into his eyes; he tore his hand away and, flinging himself on the
+divan, he buried his face in the cushions, as though he was praying.
+
+"This is your doing, Harry," said the painter bitterly.
+
+Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "It is the real Dorian Gray--that
+is all."
+
+"It is not."
+
+"If it is not, what have I to do with it?"
+
+"You should have gone away when I asked you," he muttered.
+
+"I stayed when you asked me," was Lord Henry's answer.
+
+"Harry, I can't quarrel with my two best friends at once, but between
+you both you have made me hate the finest piece of work I have ever
+done, and I will destroy it. What is it but canvas and colour? I will
+not let it come across our three lives and mar them."
+
+Dorian Gray lifted his golden head from the pillow, and with pallid
+face and tear-stained eyes, looked at him as he walked over to the deal
+painting-table that was set beneath the high curtained window. What
+was he doing there? His fingers were straying about among the litter
+of tin tubes and dry brushes, seeking for something. Yes, it was for
+the long palette-knife, with its thin blade of lithe steel. He had
+found it at last. He was going to rip up the canvas.
+
+With a stifled sob the lad leaped from the couch, and, rushing over to
+Hallward, tore the knife out of his hand, and flung it to the end of
+the studio. "Don't, Basil, don't!" he cried. "It would be murder!"
+
+"I am glad you appreciate my work at last, Dorian," said the painter
+coldly when he had recovered from his surprise. "I never thought you
+would."
+
+"Appreciate it? I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I
+feel that."
+
+"Well, as soon as you are dry, you shall be varnished, and framed, and
+sent home. Then you can do what you like with yourself." And he walked
+across the room and rang the bell for tea. "You will have tea, of
+course, Dorian? And so will you, Harry? Or do you object to such
+simple pleasures?"
+
+"I adore simple pleasures," said Lord Henry. "They are the last refuge
+of the complex. But I don't like scenes, except on the stage. What
+absurd fellows you are, both of you! I wonder who it was defined man
+as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given.
+Man is many things, but he is not rational. I am glad he is not, after
+all--though I wish you chaps would not squabble over the picture. You
+had much better let me have it, Basil. This silly boy doesn't really
+want it, and I really do."
+
+"If you let any one have it but me, Basil, I shall never forgive you!"
+cried Dorian Gray; "and I don't allow people to call me a silly boy."
+
+"You know the picture is yours, Dorian. I gave it to you before it
+existed."
+
+"And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray, and that you
+don't really object to being reminded that you are extremely young."
+
+"I should have objected very strongly this morning, Lord Henry."
+
+"Ah! this morning! You have lived since then."
+
+There came a knock at the door, and the butler entered with a laden
+tea-tray and set it down upon a small Japanese table. There was a
+rattle of cups and saucers and the hissing of a fluted Georgian urn.
+Two globe-shaped china dishes were brought in by a page. Dorian Gray
+went over and poured out the tea. The two men sauntered languidly to
+the table and examined what was under the covers.
+
+"Let us go to the theatre to-night," said Lord Henry. "There is sure
+to be something on, somewhere. I have promised to dine at White's, but
+it is only with an old friend, so I can send him a wire to say that I
+am ill, or that I am prevented from coming in consequence of a
+subsequent engagement. I think that would be a rather nice excuse: it
+would have all the surprise of candour."
+
+"It is such a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered Hallward.
+"And, when one has them on, they are so horrid."
+
+"Yes," answered Lord Henry dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth
+century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the
+only real colour-element left in modern life."
+
+"You really must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."
+
+"Before which Dorian? The one who is pouring out tea for us, or the
+one in the picture?"
+
+"Before either."
+
+"I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry," said the
+lad.
+
+"Then you shall come; and you will come, too, Basil, won't you?"
+
+"I can't, really. I would sooner not. I have a lot of work to do."
+
+"Well, then, you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray."
+
+"I should like that awfully."
+
+The painter bit his lip and walked over, cup in hand, to the picture.
+"I shall stay with the real Dorian," he said, sadly.
+
+"Is it the real Dorian?" cried the original of the portrait, strolling
+across to him. "Am I really like that?"
+
+"Yes; you are just like that."
+
+"How wonderful, Basil!"
+
+"At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never alter,"
+sighed Hallward. "That is something."
+
+"What a fuss people make about fidelity!" exclaimed Lord Henry. "Why,
+even in love it is purely a question for physiology. It has nothing to
+do with our own will. Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old
+men want to be faithless, and cannot: that is all one can say."
+
+"Don't go to the theatre to-night, Dorian," said Hallward. "Stop and
+dine with me."
+
+"I can't, Basil."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I have promised Lord Henry Wotton to go with him."
+
+"He won't like you the better for keeping your promises. He always
+breaks his own. I beg you not to go."
+
+Dorian Gray laughed and shook his head.
+
+"I entreat you."
+
+The lad hesitated, and looked over at Lord Henry, who was watching them
+from the tea-table with an amused smile.
+
+"I must go, Basil," he answered.
+
+"Very well," said Hallward, and he went over and laid down his cup on
+the tray. "It is rather late, and, as you have to dress, you had
+better lose no time. Good-bye, Harry. Good-bye, Dorian. Come and see
+me soon. Come to-morrow."
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"You won't forget?"
+
+"No, of course not," cried Dorian.
+
+"And ... Harry!"
+
+"Yes, Basil?"
+
+"Remember what I asked you, when we were in the garden this morning."
+
+"I have forgotten it."
+
+"I trust you."
+
+"I wish I could trust myself," said Lord Henry, laughing. "Come, Mr.
+Gray, my hansom is outside, and I can drop you at your own place.
+Good-bye, Basil. It has been a most interesting afternoon."
+
+As the door closed behind them, the painter flung himself down on a
+sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 3
+
+At half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon
+Street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor, a genial
+if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside world called
+selfish because it derived no particular benefit from him, but who was
+considered generous by Society as he fed the people who amused him.
+His father had been our ambassador at Madrid when Isabella was young
+and Prim unthought of, but had retired from the diplomatic service in a
+capricious moment of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at
+Paris, a post to which he considered that he was fully entitled by
+reason of his birth, his indolence, the good English of his dispatches,
+and his inordinate passion for pleasure. The son, who had been his
+father's secretary, had resigned along with his chief, somewhat
+foolishly as was thought at the time, and on succeeding some months
+later to the title, had set himself to the serious study of the great
+aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. He had two large town
+houses, but preferred to live in chambers as it was less trouble, and
+took most of his meals at his club. He paid some attention to the
+management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself
+for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of
+having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of
+burning wood on his own hearth. In politics he was a Tory, except when
+the Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused them
+for being a pack of Radicals. He was a hero to his valet, who bullied
+him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom he bullied in turn.
+Only England could have produced him, and he always said that the
+country was going to the dogs. His principles were out of date, but
+there was a good deal to be said for his prejudices.
+
+When Lord Henry entered the room, he found his uncle sitting in a rough
+shooting-coat, smoking a cheroot and grumbling over _The Times_. "Well,
+Harry," said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so early? I
+thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible till
+five."
+
+"Pure family affection, I assure you, Uncle George. I want to get
+something out of you."
+
+"Money, I suppose," said Lord Fermor, making a wry face. "Well, sit
+down and tell me all about it. Young people, nowadays, imagine that
+money is everything."
+
+"Yes," murmured Lord Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; "and
+when they grow older they know it. But I don't want money. It is only
+people who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and I never pay
+mine. Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives charmingly
+upon it. Besides, I always deal with Dartmoor's tradesmen, and
+consequently they never bother me. What I want is information: not
+useful information, of course; useless information."
+
+"Well, I can tell you anything that is in an English Blue Book, Harry,
+although those fellows nowadays write a lot of nonsense. When I was in
+the Diplomatic, things were much better. But I hear they let them in
+now by examination. What can you expect? Examinations, sir, are pure
+humbug from beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite
+enough, and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him."
+
+"Mr. Dorian Gray does not belong to Blue Books, Uncle George," said
+Lord Henry languidly.
+
+"Mr. Dorian Gray? Who is he?" asked Lord Fermor, knitting his bushy
+white eyebrows.
+
+"That is what I have come to learn, Uncle George. Or rather, I know
+who he is. He is the last Lord Kelso's grandson. His mother was a
+Devereux, Lady Margaret Devereux. I want you to tell me about his
+mother. What was she like? Whom did she marry? You have known nearly
+everybody in your time, so you might have known her. I am very much
+interested in Mr. Gray at present. I have only just met him."
+
+"Kelso's grandson!" echoed the old gentleman. "Kelso's grandson! ...
+Of course.... I knew his mother intimately. I believe I was at her
+christening. She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Margaret
+Devereux, and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless
+young fellow--a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern in a foot regiment, or
+something of that kind. Certainly. I remember the whole thing as if
+it happened yesterday. The poor chap was killed in a duel at Spa a few
+months after the marriage. There was an ugly story about it. They
+said Kelso got some rascally adventurer, some Belgian brute, to insult
+his son-in-law in public--paid him, sir, to do it, paid him--and that
+the fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon. The thing was
+hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone at the club for some
+time afterwards. He brought his daughter back with him, I was told,
+and she never spoke to him again. Oh, yes; it was a bad business. The
+girl died, too, died within a year. So she left a son, did she? I had
+forgotten that. What sort of boy is he? If he is like his mother, he
+must be a good-looking chap."
+
+"He is very good-looking," assented Lord Henry.
+
+"I hope he will fall into proper hands," continued the old man. "He
+should have a pot of money waiting for him if Kelso did the right thing
+by him. His mother had money, too. All the Selby property came to
+her, through her grandfather. Her grandfather hated Kelso, thought him
+a mean dog. He was, too. Came to Madrid once when I was there. Egad,
+I was ashamed of him. The Queen used to ask me about the English noble
+who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about their fares. They
+made quite a story of it. I didn't dare show my face at Court for a
+month. I hope he treated his grandson better than he did the jarvies."
+
+"I don't know," answered Lord Henry. "I fancy that the boy will be
+well off. He is not of age yet. He has Selby, I know. He told me so.
+And ... his mother was very beautiful?"
+
+"Margaret Devereux was one of the loveliest creatures I ever saw,
+Harry. What on earth induced her to behave as she did, I never could
+understand. She could have married anybody she chose. Carlington was
+mad after her. She was romantic, though. All the women of that family
+were. The men were a poor lot, but, egad! the women were wonderful.
+Carlington went on his knees to her. Told me so himself. She laughed
+at him, and there wasn't a girl in London at the time who wasn't after
+him. And by the way, Harry, talking about silly marriages, what is
+this humbug your father tells me about Dartmoor wanting to marry an
+American? Ain't English girls good enough for him?"
+
+"It is rather fashionable to marry Americans just now, Uncle George."
+
+"I'll back English women against the world, Harry," said Lord Fermor,
+striking the table with his fist.
+
+"The betting is on the Americans."
+
+"They don't last, I am told," muttered his uncle.
+
+"A long engagement exhausts them, but they are capital at a
+steeplechase. They take things flying. I don't think Dartmoor has a
+chance."
+
+"Who are her people?" grumbled the old gentleman. "Has she got any?"
+
+Lord Henry shook his head. "American girls are as clever at concealing
+their parents, as English women are at concealing their past," he said,
+rising to go.
+
+"They are pork-packers, I suppose?"
+
+"I hope so, Uncle George, for Dartmoor's sake. I am told that
+pork-packing is the most lucrative profession in America, after
+politics."
+
+"Is she pretty?"
+
+"She behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do. It is
+the secret of their charm."
+
+"Why can't these American women stay in their own country? They are
+always telling us that it is the paradise for women."
+
+"It is. That is the reason why, like Eve, they are so excessively
+anxious to get out of it," said Lord Henry. "Good-bye, Uncle George.
+I shall be late for lunch, if I stop any longer. Thanks for giving me
+the information I wanted. I always like to know everything about my
+new friends, and nothing about my old ones."
+
+"Where are you lunching, Harry?"
+
+"At Aunt Agatha's. I have asked myself and Mr. Gray. He is her latest
+_protege_."
+
+"Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha, Harry, not to bother me any more with
+her charity appeals. I am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks
+that I have nothing to do but to write cheques for her silly fads."
+
+"All right, Uncle George, I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect.
+Philanthropic people lose all sense of humanity. It is their
+distinguishing characteristic."
+
+The old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his
+servant. Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street
+and turned his steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.
+
+So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage. Crudely as it had
+been told to him, it had yet stirred him by its suggestion of a
+strange, almost modern romance. A beautiful woman risking everything
+for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a
+hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a
+child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to
+solitude and the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes; it was an
+interesting background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it
+were. Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something
+tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might
+blow.... And how charming he had been at dinner the night before, as
+with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure he had sat
+opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades staining to a richer
+rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking to him was like playing
+upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the
+bow.... There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of
+influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into
+some gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's
+own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of
+passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though
+it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in
+that--perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited
+and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and
+grossly common in its aims.... He was a marvellous type, too, this lad,
+whom by so curious a chance he had met in Basil's studio, or could be
+fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate. Grace was his, and the
+white purity of boyhood, and beauty such as old Greek marbles kept for
+us. There was nothing that one could not do with him. He could be
+made a Titan or a toy. What a pity it was that such beauty was
+destined to fade! ... And Basil? From a psychological point of view,
+how interesting he was! The new manner in art, the fresh mode of
+looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence
+of one who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in
+dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing
+herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought for
+her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which alone are
+wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns of things
+becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value,
+as though they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect
+form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was! He
+remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato, that artist
+in thought, who had first analyzed it? Was it not Buonarotti who had
+carved it in the coloured marbles of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own
+century it was strange.... Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray
+what, without knowing it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned
+the wonderful portrait. He would seek to dominate him--had already,
+indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.
+There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.
+
+Suddenly he stopped and glanced up at the houses. He found that he had
+passed his aunt's some distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back.
+When he entered the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they
+had gone in to lunch. He gave one of the footmen his hat and stick and
+passed into the dining-room.
+
+"Late as usual, Harry," cried his aunt, shaking her head at him.
+
+He invented a facile excuse, and having taken the vacant seat next to
+her, looked round to see who was there. Dorian bowed to him shyly from
+the end of the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his cheek.
+Opposite was the Duchess of Harley, a lady of admirable good-nature and
+good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those ample
+architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses are
+described by contemporary historians as stoutness. Next to her sat, on
+her right, Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical member of Parliament, who
+followed his leader in public life and in private life followed the
+best cooks, dining with the Tories and thinking with the Liberals, in
+accordance with a wise and well-known rule. The post on her left was
+occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley, an old gentleman of considerable
+charm and culture, who had fallen, however, into bad habits of silence,
+having, as he explained once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he
+had to say before he was thirty. His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur,
+one of his aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so
+dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book.
+Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most
+intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a ministerial statement
+in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely
+earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once
+himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of
+them ever quite escape.
+
+"We are talking about poor Dartmoor, Lord Henry," cried the duchess,
+nodding pleasantly to him across the table. "Do you think he will
+really marry this fascinating young person?"
+
+"I believe she has made up her mind to propose to him, Duchess."
+
+"How dreadful!" exclaimed Lady Agatha. "Really, some one should
+interfere."
+
+"I am told, on excellent authority, that her father keeps an American
+dry-goods store," said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.
+
+"My uncle has already suggested pork-packing, Sir Thomas."
+
+"Dry-goods! What are American dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising
+her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb.
+
+"American novels," answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.
+
+The duchess looked puzzled.
+
+"Don't mind him, my dear," whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means
+anything that he says."
+
+"When America was discovered," said the Radical member--and he began to
+give some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a
+subject, he exhausted his listeners. The duchess sighed and exercised
+her privilege of interruption. "I wish to goodness it never had been
+discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really, our girls have no chance
+nowadays. It is most unfair."
+
+"Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered," said Mr.
+Erskine; "I myself would say that it had merely been detected."
+
+"Oh! but I have seen specimens of the inhabitants," answered the
+duchess vaguely. "I must confess that most of them are extremely
+pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in
+Paris. I wish I could afford to do the same."
+
+"They say that when good Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir
+Thomas, who had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.
+
+"Really! And where do bad Americans go to when they die?" inquired the
+duchess.
+
+"They go to America," murmured Lord Henry.
+
+Sir Thomas frowned. "I am afraid that your nephew is prejudiced
+against that great country," he said to Lady Agatha. "I have travelled
+all over it in cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters,
+are extremely civil. I assure you that it is an education to visit it."
+
+"But must we really see Chicago in order to be educated?" asked Mr.
+Erskine plaintively. "I don't feel up to the journey."
+
+Sir Thomas waved his hand. "Mr. Erskine of Treadley has the world on
+his shelves. We practical men like to see things, not to read about
+them. The Americans are an extremely interesting people. They are
+absolutely reasonable. I think that is their distinguishing
+characteristic. Yes, Mr. Erskine, an absolutely reasonable people. I
+assure you there is no nonsense about the Americans."
+
+"How dreadful!" cried Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute
+reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use.
+It is hitting below the intellect."
+
+"I do not understand you," said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.
+
+"I do, Lord Henry," murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile.
+
+"Paradoxes are all very well in their way...." rejoined the baronet.
+
+"Was that a paradox?" asked Mr. Erskine. "I did not think so. Perhaps
+it was. Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test
+reality we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become
+acrobats, we can judge them."
+
+"Dear me!" said Lady Agatha, "how you men argue! I am sure I never can
+make out what you are talking about. Oh! Harry, I am quite vexed with
+you. Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give up
+the East End? I assure you he would be quite invaluable. They would
+love his playing."
+
+"I want him to play to me," cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked
+down the table and caught a bright answering glance.
+
+"But they are so unhappy in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.
+
+"I can sympathize with everything except suffering," said Lord Henry,
+shrugging his shoulders. "I cannot sympathize with that. It is too
+ugly, too horrible, too distressing. There is something terribly
+morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with
+the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's
+sores, the better."
+
+"Still, the East End is a very important problem," remarked Sir Thomas
+with a grave shake of the head.
+
+"Quite so," answered the young lord. "It is the problem of slavery,
+and we try to solve it by amusing the slaves."
+
+The politician looked at him keenly. "What change do you propose,
+then?" he asked.
+
+Lord Henry laughed. "I don't desire to change anything in England
+except the weather," he answered. "I am quite content with philosophic
+contemplation. But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt
+through an over-expenditure of sympathy, I would suggest that we should
+appeal to science to put us straight. The advantage of the emotions is
+that they lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is
+not emotional."
+
+"But we have such grave responsibilities," ventured Mrs. Vandeleur
+timidly.
+
+"Terribly grave," echoed Lady Agatha.
+
+Lord Henry looked over at Mr. Erskine. "Humanity takes itself too
+seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known
+how to laugh, history would have been different."
+
+"You are really very comforting," warbled the duchess. "I have always
+felt rather guilty when I came to see your dear aunt, for I take no
+interest at all in the East End. For the future I shall be able to
+look her in the face without a blush."
+
+"A blush is very becoming, Duchess," remarked Lord Henry.
+
+"Only when one is young," she answered. "When an old woman like myself
+blushes, it is a very bad sign. Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you would tell
+me how to become young again."
+
+He thought for a moment. "Can you remember any great error that you
+committed in your early days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her across
+the table.
+
+"A great many, I fear," she cried.
+
+"Then commit them over again," he said gravely. "To get back one's
+youth, one has merely to repeat one's follies."
+
+"A delightful theory!" she exclaimed. "I must put it into practice."
+
+"A dangerous theory!" came from Sir Thomas's tight lips. Lady Agatha
+shook her head, but could not help being amused. Mr. Erskine listened.
+
+"Yes," he continued, "that is one of the great secrets of life.
+Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and
+discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are
+one's mistakes."
+
+A laugh ran round the table.
+
+He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and
+transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent
+with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went
+on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and
+catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her
+wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the
+hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled
+before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge
+press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round
+her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over
+the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary
+improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him,
+and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose
+temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and
+to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic,
+irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they
+followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him,
+but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips
+and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.
+
+At last, liveried in the costume of the age, reality entered the room
+in the shape of a servant to tell the duchess that her carriage was
+waiting. She wrung her hands in mock despair. "How annoying!" she
+cried. "I must go. I have to call for my husband at the club, to take
+him to some absurd meeting at Willis's Rooms, where he is going to be
+in the chair. If I am late he is sure to be furious, and I couldn't
+have a scene in this bonnet. It is far too fragile. A harsh word
+would ruin it. No, I must go, dear Agatha. Good-bye, Lord Henry, you
+are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing. I am sure I don't
+know what to say about your views. You must come and dine with us some
+night. Tuesday? Are you disengaged Tuesday?"
+
+"For you I would throw over anybody, Duchess," said Lord Henry with a
+bow.
+
+"Ah! that is very nice, and very wrong of you," she cried; "so mind you
+come"; and she swept out of the room, followed by Lady Agatha and the
+other ladies.
+
+When Lord Henry had sat down again, Mr. Erskine moved round, and taking
+a chair close to him, placed his hand upon his arm.
+
+"You talk books away," he said; "why don't you write one?"
+
+"I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I
+should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely
+as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in
+England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias.
+Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the
+beauty of literature."
+
+"I fear you are right," answered Mr. Erskine. "I myself used to have
+literary ambitions, but I gave them up long ago. And now, my dear
+young friend, if you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you
+really meant all that you said to us at lunch?"
+
+"I quite forget what I said," smiled Lord Henry. "Was it all very bad?"
+
+"Very bad indeed. In fact I consider you extremely dangerous, and if
+anything happens to our good duchess, we shall all look on you as being
+primarily responsible. But I should like to talk to you about life.
+The generation into which I was born was tedious. Some day, when you
+are tired of London, come down to Treadley and expound to me your
+philosophy of pleasure over some admirable Burgundy I am fortunate
+enough to possess."
+
+"I shall be charmed. A visit to Treadley would be a great privilege.
+It has a perfect host, and a perfect library."
+
+"You will complete it," answered the old gentleman with a courteous
+bow. "And now I must bid good-bye to your excellent aunt. I am due at
+the Athenaeum. It is the hour when we sleep there."
+
+"All of you, Mr. Erskine?"
+
+"Forty of us, in forty arm-chairs. We are practising for an English
+Academy of Letters."
+
+Lord Henry laughed and rose. "I am going to the park," he cried.
+
+As he was passing out of the door, Dorian Gray touched him on the arm.
+"Let me come with you," he murmured.
+
+"But I thought you had promised Basil Hallward to go and see him,"
+answered Lord Henry.
+
+"I would sooner come with you; yes, I feel I must come with you. Do
+let me. And you will promise to talk to me all the time? No one talks
+so wonderfully as you do."
+
+"Ah! I have talked quite enough for to-day," said Lord Henry, smiling.
+"All I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with
+me, if you care to."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 4
+
+One afternoon, a month later, Dorian Gray was reclining in a luxurious
+arm-chair, in the little library of Lord Henry's house in Mayfair. It
+was, in its way, a very charming room, with its high panelled
+wainscoting of olive-stained oak, its cream-coloured frieze and ceiling
+of raised plasterwork, and its brickdust felt carpet strewn with silk,
+long-fringed Persian rugs. On a tiny satinwood table stood a statuette
+by Clodion, and beside it lay a copy of Les Cent Nouvelles, bound for
+Margaret of Valois by Clovis Eve and powdered with the gilt daisies
+that Queen had selected for her device. Some large blue china jars and
+parrot-tulips were ranged on the mantelshelf, and through the small
+leaded panes of the window streamed the apricot-coloured light of a
+summer day in London.
+
+Lord Henry had not yet come in. He was always late on principle, his
+principle being that punctuality is the thief of time. So the lad was
+looking rather sulky, as with listless fingers he turned over the pages
+of an elaborately illustrated edition of Manon Lescaut that he had
+found in one of the book-cases. The formal monotonous ticking of the
+Louis Quatorze clock annoyed him. Once or twice he thought of going
+away.
+
+At last he heard a step outside, and the door opened. "How late you
+are, Harry!" he murmured.
+
+"I am afraid it is not Harry, Mr. Gray," answered a shrill voice.
+
+He glanced quickly round and rose to his feet. "I beg your pardon. I
+thought--"
+
+"You thought it was my husband. It is only his wife. You must let me
+introduce myself. I know you quite well by your photographs. I think
+my husband has got seventeen of them."
+
+"Not seventeen, Lady Henry?"
+
+"Well, eighteen, then. And I saw you with him the other night at the
+opera." She laughed nervously as she spoke, and watched him with her
+vague forget-me-not eyes. She was a curious woman, whose dresses
+always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a
+tempest. She was usually in love with somebody, and, as her passion
+was never returned, she had kept all her illusions. She tried to look
+picturesque, but only succeeded in being untidy. Her name was
+Victoria, and she had a perfect mania for going to church.
+
+"That was at Lohengrin, Lady Henry, I think?"
+
+"Yes; it was at dear Lohengrin. I like Wagner's music better than
+anybody's. It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other
+people hearing what one says. That is a great advantage, don't you
+think so, Mr. Gray?"
+
+The same nervous staccato laugh broke from her thin lips, and her
+fingers began to play with a long tortoise-shell paper-knife.
+
+Dorian smiled and shook his head: "I am afraid I don't think so, Lady
+Henry. I never talk during music--at least, during good music. If one
+hears bad music, it is one's duty to drown it in conversation."
+
+"Ah! that is one of Harry's views, isn't it, Mr. Gray? I always hear
+Harry's views from his friends. It is the only way I get to know of
+them. But you must not think I don't like good music. I adore it, but
+I am afraid of it. It makes me too romantic. I have simply worshipped
+pianists--two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me. I don't know what
+it is about them. Perhaps it is that they are foreigners. They all
+are, ain't they? Even those that are born in England become foreigners
+after a time, don't they? It is so clever of them, and such a
+compliment to art. Makes it quite cosmopolitan, doesn't it? You have
+never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come. I
+can't afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They make
+one's rooms look so picturesque. But here is Harry! Harry, I came in
+to look for you, to ask you something--I forget what it was--and I
+found Mr. Gray here. We have had such a pleasant chat about music. We
+have quite the same ideas. No; I think our ideas are quite different.
+But he has been most pleasant. I am so glad I've seen him."
+
+"I am charmed, my love, quite charmed," said Lord Henry, elevating his
+dark, crescent-shaped eyebrows and looking at them both with an amused
+smile. "So sorry I am late, Dorian. I went to look after a piece of
+old brocade in Wardour Street and had to bargain for hours for it.
+Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing."
+
+"I am afraid I must be going," exclaimed Lady Henry, breaking an
+awkward silence with her silly sudden laugh. "I have promised to drive
+with the duchess. Good-bye, Mr. Gray. Good-bye, Harry. You are
+dining out, I suppose? So am I. Perhaps I shall see you at Lady
+Thornbury's."
+
+"I dare say, my dear," said Lord Henry, shutting the door behind her
+as, looking like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the
+rain, she flitted out of the room, leaving a faint odour of
+frangipanni. Then he lit a cigarette and flung himself down on the
+sofa.
+
+"Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, Dorian," he said after a
+few puffs.
+
+"Why, Harry?"
+
+"Because they are so sentimental."
+
+"But I like sentimental people."
+
+"Never marry at all, Dorian. Men marry because they are tired; women,
+because they are curious: both are disappointed."
+
+"I don't think I am likely to marry, Harry. I am too much in love.
+That is one of your aphorisms. I am putting it into practice, as I do
+everything that you say."
+
+"Who are you in love with?" asked Lord Henry after a pause.
+
+"With an actress," said Dorian Gray, blushing.
+
+Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "That is a rather commonplace
+_debut_."
+
+"You would not say so if you saw her, Harry."
+
+"Who is she?"
+
+"Her name is Sibyl Vane."
+
+"Never heard of her."
+
+"No one has. People will some day, however. She is a genius."
+
+"My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They
+never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women
+represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the
+triumph of mind over morals."
+
+"Harry, how can you?"
+
+"My dear Dorian, it is quite true. I am analysing women at present, so
+I ought to know. The subject is not so abstruse as I thought it was.
+I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain
+and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to
+gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down
+to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one
+mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. Our
+grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. _Rouge_ and
+_esprit_ used to go together. That is all over now. As long as a woman
+can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly
+satisfied. As for conversation, there are only five women in London
+worth talking to, and two of these can't be admitted into decent
+society. However, tell me about your genius. How long have you known
+her?"
+
+"Ah! Harry, your views terrify me."
+
+"Never mind that. How long have you known her?"
+
+"About three weeks."
+
+"And where did you come across her?"
+
+"I will tell you, Harry, but you mustn't be unsympathetic about it.
+After all, it never would have happened if I had not met you. You
+filled me with a wild desire to know everything about life. For days
+after I met you, something seemed to throb in my veins. As I lounged
+in the park, or strolled down Piccadilly, I used to look at every one
+who passed me and wonder, with a mad curiosity, what sort of lives they
+led. Some of them fascinated me. Others filled me with terror. There
+was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations....
+Well, one evening about seven o'clock, I determined to go out in search
+of some adventure. I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours,
+with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins,
+as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. I fancied
+a thousand things. The mere danger gave me a sense of delight. I
+remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we
+first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret
+of life. I don't know what I expected, but I went out and wandered
+eastward, soon losing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black
+grassless squares. About half-past eight I passed by an absurd little
+theatre, with great flaring gas-jets and gaudy play-bills. A hideous
+Jew, in the most amazing waistcoat I ever beheld in my life, was
+standing at the entrance, smoking a vile cigar. He had greasy
+ringlets, and an enormous diamond blazed in the centre of a soiled
+shirt. 'Have a box, my Lord?' he said, when he saw me, and he took off
+his hat with an air of gorgeous servility. There was something about
+him, Harry, that amused me. He was such a monster. You will laugh at
+me, I know, but I really went in and paid a whole guinea for the
+stage-box. To the present day I can't make out why I did so; and yet if
+I hadn't--my dear Harry, if I hadn't--I should have missed the greatest
+romance of my life. I see you are laughing. It is horrid of you!"
+
+"I am not laughing, Dorian; at least I am not laughing at you. But you
+should not say the greatest romance of your life. You should say the
+first romance of your life. You will always be loved, and you will
+always be in love with love. A _grande passion_ is the privilege of
+people who have nothing to do. That is the one use of the idle classes
+of a country. Don't be afraid. There are exquisite things in store
+for you. This is merely the beginning."
+
+"Do you think my nature so shallow?" cried Dorian Gray angrily.
+
+"No; I think your nature so deep."
+
+"How do you mean?"
+
+"My dear boy, the people who love only once in their lives are really
+the shallow people. What they call their loyalty, and their fidelity,
+I call either the lethargy of custom or their lack of imagination.
+Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life
+of the intellect--simply a confession of failure. Faithfulness! I
+must analyse it some day. The passion for property is in it. There
+are many things that we would throw away if we were not afraid that
+others might pick them up. But I don't want to interrupt you. Go on
+with your story."
+
+"Well, I found myself seated in a horrid little private box, with a
+vulgar drop-scene staring me in the face. I looked out from behind the
+curtain and surveyed the house. It was a tawdry affair, all Cupids and
+cornucopias, like a third-rate wedding-cake. The gallery and pit were
+fairly full, but the two rows of dingy stalls were quite empty, and
+there was hardly a person in what I suppose they called the
+dress-circle. Women went about with oranges and ginger-beer, and there
+was a terrible consumption of nuts going on."
+
+"It must have been just like the palmy days of the British drama."
+
+"Just like, I should fancy, and very depressing. I began to wonder
+what on earth I should do when I caught sight of the play-bill. What
+do you think the play was, Harry?"
+
+"I should think 'The Idiot Boy', or 'Dumb but Innocent'. Our fathers
+used to like that sort of piece, I believe. The longer I live, Dorian,
+the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is
+not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, _les grandperes ont
+toujours tort_."
+
+"This play was good enough for us, Harry. It was Romeo and Juliet. I
+must admit that I was rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare
+done in such a wretched hole of a place. Still, I felt interested, in
+a sort of way. At any rate, I determined to wait for the first act.
+There was a dreadful orchestra, presided over by a young Hebrew who sat
+at a cracked piano, that nearly drove me away, but at last the
+drop-scene was drawn up and the play began. Romeo was a stout elderly
+gentleman, with corked eyebrows, a husky tragedy voice, and a figure
+like a beer-barrel. Mercutio was almost as bad. He was played by the
+low-comedian, who had introduced gags of his own and was on most
+friendly terms with the pit. They were both as grotesque as the
+scenery, and that looked as if it had come out of a country-booth. But
+Juliet! Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a
+little, flowerlike face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of
+dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were
+like the petals of a rose. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen
+in my life. You said to me once that pathos left you unmoved, but that
+beauty, mere beauty, could fill your eyes with tears. I tell you,
+Harry, I could hardly see this girl for the mist of tears that came
+across me. And her voice--I never heard such a voice. It was very low
+at first, with deep mellow notes that seemed to fall singly upon one's
+ear. Then it became a little louder, and sounded like a flute or a
+distant hautboy. In the garden-scene it had all the tremulous ecstasy
+that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing. There
+were moments, later on, when it had the wild passion of violins. You
+know how a voice can stir one. Your voice and the voice of Sibyl Vane
+are two things that I shall never forget. When I close my eyes, I hear
+them, and each of them says something different. I don't know which to
+follow. Why should I not love her? Harry, I do love her. She is
+everything to me in life. Night after night I go to see her play. One
+evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have
+seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from
+her lover's lips. I have watched her wandering through the forest of
+Arden, disguised as a pretty boy in hose and doublet and dainty cap.
+She has been mad, and has come into the presence of a guilty king, and
+given him rue to wear and bitter herbs to taste of. She has been
+innocent, and the black hands of jealousy have crushed her reedlike
+throat. I have seen her in every age and in every costume. Ordinary
+women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their
+century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as
+easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is
+no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and
+chatter at tea-parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped
+smile and their fashionable manner. They are quite obvious. But an
+actress! How different an actress is! Harry! why didn't you tell me
+that the only thing worth loving is an actress?"
+
+"Because I have loved so many of them, Dorian."
+
+"Oh, yes, horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces."
+
+"Don't run down dyed hair and painted faces. There is an extraordinary
+charm in them, sometimes," said Lord Henry.
+
+"I wish now I had not told you about Sibyl Vane."
+
+"You could not have helped telling me, Dorian. All through your life
+you will tell me everything you do."
+
+"Yes, Harry, I believe that is true. I cannot help telling you things.
+You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would
+come and confess it to you. You would understand me."
+
+"People like you--the wilful sunbeams of life--don't commit crimes,
+Dorian. But I am much obliged for the compliment, all the same. And
+now tell me--reach me the matches, like a good boy--thanks--what are
+your actual relations with Sibyl Vane?"
+
+Dorian Gray leaped to his feet, with flushed cheeks and burning eyes.
+"Harry! Sibyl Vane is sacred!"
+
+"It is only the sacred things that are worth touching, Dorian," said
+Lord Henry, with a strange touch of pathos in his voice. "But why
+should you be annoyed? I suppose she will belong to you some day.
+When one is in love, one always begins by deceiving one's self, and one
+always ends by deceiving others. That is what the world calls a
+romance. You know her, at any rate, I suppose?"
+
+"Of course I know her. On the first night I was at the theatre, the
+horrid old Jew came round to the box after the performance was over and
+offered to take me behind the scenes and introduce me to her. I was
+furious with him, and told him that Juliet had been dead for hundreds
+of years and that her body was lying in a marble tomb in Verona. I
+think, from his blank look of amazement, that he was under the
+impression that I had taken too much champagne, or something."
+
+"I am not surprised."
+
+"Then he asked me if I wrote for any of the newspapers. I told him I
+never even read them. He seemed terribly disappointed at that, and
+confided to me that all the dramatic critics were in a conspiracy
+against him, and that they were every one of them to be bought."
+
+"I should not wonder if he was quite right there. But, on the other
+hand, judging from their appearance, most of them cannot be at all
+expensive."
+
+"Well, he seemed to think they were beyond his means," laughed Dorian.
+"By this time, however, the lights were being put out in the theatre,
+and I had to go. He wanted me to try some cigars that he strongly
+recommended. I declined. The next night, of course, I arrived at the
+place again. When he saw me, he made me a low bow and assured me that
+I was a munificent patron of art. He was a most offensive brute,
+though he had an extraordinary passion for Shakespeare. He told me
+once, with an air of pride, that his five bankruptcies were entirely
+due to 'The Bard,' as he insisted on calling him. He seemed to think
+it a distinction."
+
+"It was a distinction, my dear Dorian--a great distinction. Most
+people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose
+of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour. But when
+did you first speak to Miss Sibyl Vane?"
+
+"The third night. She had been playing Rosalind. I could not help
+going round. I had thrown her some flowers, and she had looked at
+me--at least I fancied that she had. The old Jew was persistent. He
+seemed determined to take me behind, so I consented. It was curious my
+not wanting to know her, wasn't it?"
+
+"No; I don't think so."
+
+"My dear Harry, why?"
+
+"I will tell you some other time. Now I want to know about the girl."
+
+"Sibyl? Oh, she was so shy and so gentle. There is something of a
+child about her. Her eyes opened wide in exquisite wonder when I told
+her what I thought of her performance, and she seemed quite unconscious
+of her power. I think we were both rather nervous. The old Jew stood
+grinning at the doorway of the dusty greenroom, making elaborate
+speeches about us both, while we stood looking at each other like
+children. He would insist on calling me 'My Lord,' so I had to assure
+Sibyl that I was not anything of the kind. She said quite simply to
+me, 'You look more like a prince. I must call you Prince Charming.'"
+
+"Upon my word, Dorian, Miss Sibyl knows how to pay compliments."
+
+"You don't understand her, Harry. She regarded me merely as a person
+in a play. She knows nothing of life. She lives with her mother, a
+faded tired woman who played Lady Capulet in a sort of magenta
+dressing-wrapper on the first night, and looks as if she had seen
+better days."
+
+"I know that look. It depresses me," murmured Lord Henry, examining
+his rings.
+
+"The Jew wanted to tell me her history, but I said it did not interest
+me."
+
+"You were quite right. There is always something infinitely mean about
+other people's tragedies."
+
+"Sibyl is the only thing I care about. What is it to me where she came
+from? From her little head to her little feet, she is absolutely and
+entirely divine. Every night of my life I go to see her act, and every
+night she is more marvellous."
+
+"That is the reason, I suppose, that you never dine with me now. I
+thought you must have some curious romance on hand. You have; but it
+is not quite what I expected."
+
+"My dear Harry, we either lunch or sup together every day, and I have
+been to the opera with you several times," said Dorian, opening his
+blue eyes in wonder.
+
+"You always come dreadfully late."
+
+"Well, I can't help going to see Sibyl play," he cried, "even if it is
+only for a single act. I get hungry for her presence; and when I think
+of the wonderful soul that is hidden away in that little ivory body, I
+am filled with awe."
+
+"You can dine with me to-night, Dorian, can't you?"
+
+He shook his head. "To-night she is Imogen," he answered, "and
+to-morrow night she will be Juliet."
+
+"When is she Sibyl Vane?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"I congratulate you."
+
+"How horrid you are! She is all the great heroines of the world in
+one. She is more than an individual. You laugh, but I tell you she
+has genius. I love her, and I must make her love me. You, who know
+all the secrets of life, tell me how to charm Sibyl Vane to love me! I
+want to make Romeo jealous. I want the dead lovers of the world to
+hear our laughter and grow sad. I want a breath of our passion to stir
+their dust into consciousness, to wake their ashes into pain. My God,
+Harry, how I worship her!" He was walking up and down the room as he
+spoke. Hectic spots of red burned on his cheeks. He was terribly
+excited.
+
+Lord Henry watched him with a subtle sense of pleasure. How different
+he was now from the shy frightened boy he had met in Basil Hallward's
+studio! His nature had developed like a flower, had borne blossoms of
+scarlet flame. Out of its secret hiding-place had crept his soul, and
+desire had come to meet it on the way.
+
+"And what do you propose to do?" said Lord Henry at last.
+
+"I want you and Basil to come with me some night and see her act. I
+have not the slightest fear of the result. You are certain to
+acknowledge her genius. Then we must get her out of the Jew's hands.
+She is bound to him for three years--at least for two years and eight
+months--from the present time. I shall have to pay him something, of
+course. When all that is settled, I shall take a West End theatre and
+bring her out properly. She will make the world as mad as she has made
+me."
+
+"That would be impossible, my dear boy."
+
+"Yes, she will. She has not merely art, consummate art-instinct, in
+her, but she has personality also; and you have often told me that it
+is personalities, not principles, that move the age."
+
+"Well, what night shall we go?"
+
+"Let me see. To-day is Tuesday. Let us fix to-morrow. She plays
+Juliet to-morrow."
+
+"All right. The Bristol at eight o'clock; and I will get Basil."
+
+"Not eight, Harry, please. Half-past six. We must be there before the
+curtain rises. You must see her in the first act, where she meets
+Romeo."
+
+"Half-past six! What an hour! It will be like having a meat-tea, or
+reading an English novel. It must be seven. No gentleman dines before
+seven. Shall you see Basil between this and then? Or shall I write to
+him?"
+
+"Dear Basil! I have not laid eyes on him for a week. It is rather
+horrid of me, as he has sent me my portrait in the most wonderful
+frame, specially designed by himself, and, though I am a little jealous
+of the picture for being a whole month younger than I am, I must admit
+that I delight in it. Perhaps you had better write to him. I don't
+want to see him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good
+advice."
+
+Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they need
+most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."
+
+"Oh, Basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit
+of a Philistine. Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered
+that."
+
+"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 poet, 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. He lives the
+poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they
+dare not realize."
+
+"I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, putting some
+perfume on his handkerchief out of a large, gold-topped bottle that
+stood on the table. "It must be, if you say it. And now I am off.
+Imogen is waiting for me. Don't forget about to-morrow. Good-bye."
+
+As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began
+to think. Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as
+Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused
+him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. He was pleased by
+it. It made him a more interesting study. He had been always
+enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary
+subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no
+import. And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by
+vivisecting others. Human life--that appeared to him the one thing
+worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any
+value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of
+pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass,
+nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the
+imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams. There
+were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken
+of them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through
+them if one sought to understand their nature. And, yet, what a great
+reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one! To
+note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life
+of the intellect--to observe where they met, and where they separated,
+at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at
+discord--there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was?
+One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
+
+He was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his
+brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical
+words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned
+to this white girl and bowed in worship before her. To a large extent
+the lad was his own creation. He had made him premature. That was
+something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its
+secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were
+revealed before the veil was drawn away. Sometimes this was the effect
+of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately
+with the passions and the intellect. But now and then a complex
+personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed,
+in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces,
+just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.
+
+Yes, the lad was premature. He was gathering his harvest while it was
+yet spring. The pulse and passion of youth were in him, but he was
+becoming self-conscious. It was delightful to watch him. With his
+beautiful face, and his beautiful soul, he was a thing to wonder at.
+It was no matter how it all ended, or was destined to end. He was like
+one of those gracious figures in a pageant or a play, whose joys seem
+to be remote from one, but whose sorrows stir one's sense of beauty,
+and whose wounds are like red roses.
+
+Soul and body, body and soul--how mysterious they were! There was
+animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality.
+The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could
+say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?
+How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of ordinary psychologists!
+And yet how difficult to decide between the claims of the various
+schools! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or was the
+body really in the soul, as Giordano Bruno thought? The separation of
+spirit from matter was a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter
+was a mystery also.
+
+He began to wonder whether we could ever make psychology so absolute a
+science that each little spring of life would be revealed to us. As it
+was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others.
+Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to
+their mistakes. Moralists had, as a rule, regarded it as a mode of
+warning, had claimed for it a certain ethical efficacy in the formation
+of character, had praised it as something that taught us what to follow
+and showed us what to avoid. But there was no motive power in
+experience. It was as little of an active cause as conscience itself.
+All that it really demonstrated was that our future would be the same
+as our past, and that the sin we had done once, and with loathing, we
+would do many times, and with joy.
+
+It was clear to him that the experimental method was the only method by
+which one could arrive at any scientific analysis of the passions; and
+certainly Dorian Gray was a subject made to his hand, and seemed to
+promise rich and fruitful results. His sudden mad love for Sibyl Vane
+was a psychological phenomenon of no small interest. There was no
+doubt that curiosity had much to do with it, curiosity and the desire
+for new experiences, yet it was not a simple, but rather a very complex
+passion. What there was in it of the purely sensuous instinct of
+boyhood had been transformed by the workings of the imagination,
+changed into something that seemed to the lad himself to be remote from
+sense, and was for that very reason all the more dangerous. It was the
+passions about whose origin we deceived ourselves that tyrannized most
+strongly over us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we
+were conscious. It often happened that when we thought we were
+experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.
+
+While Lord Henry sat dreaming on these things, a knock came to the
+door, and his valet entered and reminded him it was time to dress for
+dinner. He got up and looked out into the street. The sunset had
+smitten into scarlet gold the upper windows of the houses opposite.
+The panes glowed like plates of heated metal. The sky above was like a
+faded rose. He thought of his friend's young fiery-coloured life and
+wondered how it was all going to end.
+
+When he arrived home, about half-past twelve o'clock, he saw a telegram
+lying on the hall table. He opened it and found it was from Dorian
+Gray. It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl
+Vane.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 5
+
+"Mother, Mother, I am so happy!" whispered the girl, burying her face
+in the lap of the faded, tired-looking woman who, with back turned to
+the shrill intrusive light, was sitting in the one arm-chair that their
+dingy sitting-room contained. "I am so happy!" she repeated, "and you
+must be happy, too!"
+
+Mrs. Vane winced and put her thin, bismuth-whitened hands on her
+daughter's head. "Happy!" she echoed, "I am only happy, Sibyl, when I
+see you act. You must not think of anything but your acting. Mr.
+Isaacs has been very good to us, and we owe him money."
+
+The girl looked up and pouted. "Money, Mother?" she cried, "what does
+money matter? Love is more than money."
+
+"Mr. Isaacs has advanced us fifty pounds to pay off our debts and to
+get a proper outfit for James. You must not forget that, Sibyl. Fifty
+pounds is a very large sum. Mr. Isaacs has been most considerate."
+
+"He is not a gentleman, Mother, and I hate the way he talks to me,"
+said the girl, rising to her feet and going over to the window.
+
+"I don't know how we could manage without him," answered the elder
+woman querulously.
+
+Sibyl Vane tossed her head and laughed. "We don't want him any more,
+Mother. Prince Charming rules life for us now." Then she paused. A
+rose shook in her blood and shadowed her cheeks. Quick breath parted
+the petals of her lips. They trembled. Some southern wind of passion
+swept over her and stirred the dainty folds of her dress. "I love
+him," she said simply.
+
+"Foolish child! foolish child!" was the parrot-phrase flung in answer.
+The waving of crooked, false-jewelled fingers gave grotesqueness to the
+words.
+
+The girl laughed again. The joy of a caged bird was in her voice. Her
+eyes caught the melody and echoed it in radiance, then closed for a
+moment, as though to hide their secret. When they opened, the mist of
+a dream had passed across them.
+
+Thin-lipped wisdom spoke at her from the worn chair, hinted at
+prudence, quoted from that book of cowardice whose author apes the name
+of common sense. She did not listen. She was free in her prison of
+passion. Her prince, Prince Charming, was with her. She had called on
+memory to remake him. She had sent her soul to search for him, and it
+had brought him back. His kiss burned again upon her mouth. Her
+eyelids were warm with his breath.
+
+Then wisdom altered its method and spoke of espial and discovery. This
+young man might be rich. If so, marriage should be thought of.
+Against the shell of her ear broke the waves of worldly cunning. The
+arrows of craft shot by her. She saw the thin lips moving, and smiled.
+
+Suddenly she felt the need to speak. The wordy silence troubled her.
+"Mother, Mother," she cried, "why does he love me so much? I know why
+I love him. I love him because he is like what love himself should be.
+But what does he see in me? I am not worthy of him. And yet--why, I
+cannot tell--though I feel so much beneath him, I don't feel humble. I
+feel proud, terribly proud. Mother, did you love my father as I love
+Prince Charming?"
+
+The elder woman grew pale beneath the coarse powder that daubed her
+cheeks, and her dry lips twitched with a spasm of pain. Sybil rushed
+to her, flung her arms round her neck, and kissed her. "Forgive me,
+Mother. I know it pains you to talk about our father. But it only
+pains you because you loved him so much. Don't look so sad. I am as
+happy to-day as you were twenty years ago. Ah! let me be happy for
+ever!"
+
+"My child, you are far too young to think of falling in love. Besides,
+what do you know of this young man? You don't even know his name. The
+whole thing is most inconvenient, and really, when James is going away
+to Australia, and I have so much to think of, I must say that you
+should have shown more consideration. However, as I said before, if he
+is rich ..."
+
+"Ah! Mother, Mother, let me be happy!"
+
+Mrs. Vane glanced at her, and with one of those false theatrical
+gestures that so often become a mode of second nature to a
+stage-player, clasped her in her arms. At this moment, the door opened
+and a young lad with rough brown hair came into the room. He was
+thick-set of figure, and his hands and feet were large and somewhat
+clumsy in movement. He was not so finely bred as his sister. One
+would hardly have guessed the close relationship that existed between
+them. Mrs. Vane fixed her eyes on him and intensified her smile. She
+mentally elevated her son to the dignity of an audience. She felt sure
+that the _tableau_ was interesting.
+
+"You might keep some of your kisses for me, Sibyl, I think," said the
+lad with a good-natured grumble.
+
+"Ah! but you don't like being kissed, Jim," she cried. "You are a
+dreadful old bear." And she ran across the room and hugged him.
+
+James Vane looked into his sister's face with tenderness. "I want you
+to come out with me for a walk, Sibyl. I don't suppose I shall ever
+see this horrid London again. I am sure I don't want to."
+
+"My son, don't say such dreadful things," murmured Mrs. Vane, taking up
+a tawdry theatrical dress, with a sigh, and beginning to patch it. She
+felt a little disappointed that he had not joined the group. It would
+have increased the theatrical picturesqueness of the situation.
+
+"Why not, Mother? I mean it."
+
+"You pain me, my son. I trust you will return from Australia in a
+position of affluence. I believe there is no society of any kind in
+the Colonies--nothing that I would call society--so when you have made
+your fortune, you must come back and assert yourself in London."
+
+"Society!" muttered the lad. "I don't want to know anything about
+that. I should like to make some money to take you and Sibyl off the
+stage. I hate it."
+
+"Oh, Jim!" said Sibyl, laughing, "how unkind of you! But are you
+really going for a walk with me? That will be nice! I was afraid you
+were going to say good-bye to some of your friends--to Tom Hardy, who
+gave you that hideous pipe, or Ned Langton, who makes fun of you for
+smoking it. It is very sweet of you to let me have your last
+afternoon. Where shall we go? Let us go to the park."
+
+"I am too shabby," he answered, frowning. "Only swell people go to the
+park."
+
+"Nonsense, Jim," she whispered, stroking the sleeve of his coat.
+
+He hesitated for a moment. "Very well," he said at last, "but don't be
+too long dressing." She danced out of the door. One could hear her
+singing as she ran upstairs. Her little feet pattered overhead.
+
+He walked up and down the room two or three times. Then he turned to
+the still figure in the chair. "Mother, are my things ready?" he asked.
+
+"Quite ready, James," she answered, keeping her eyes on her work. For
+some months past she had felt ill at ease when she was alone with this
+rough stern son of hers. Her shallow secret nature was troubled when
+their eyes met. She used to wonder if he suspected anything. The
+silence, for he made no other observation, became intolerable to her.
+She began to complain. Women defend themselves by attacking, just as
+they attack by sudden and strange surrenders. "I hope you will be
+contented, James, with your sea-faring life," she said. "You must
+remember that it is your own choice. You might have entered a
+solicitor's office. Solicitors are a very respectable class, and in
+the country often dine with the best families."
+
+"I hate offices, and I hate clerks," he replied. "But you are quite
+right. I have chosen my own life. All I say is, watch over Sibyl.
+Don't let her come to any harm. Mother, you must watch over her."
+
+"James, you really talk very strangely. Of course I watch over Sibyl."
+
+"I hear a gentleman comes every night to the theatre and goes behind to
+talk to her. Is that right? What about that?"
+
+"You are speaking about things you don't understand, James. In the
+profession we are accustomed to receive a great deal of most gratifying
+attention. I myself used to receive many bouquets at one time. That
+was when acting was really understood. As for Sibyl, I do not know at
+present whether her attachment is serious or not. But there is no
+doubt that the young man in question is a perfect gentleman. He is
+always most polite to me. Besides, he has the appearance of being
+rich, and the flowers he sends are lovely."
+
+"You don't know his name, though," said the lad harshly.
+
+"No," answered his mother with a placid expression in her face. "He
+has not yet revealed his real name. I think it is quite romantic of
+him. He is probably a member of the aristocracy."
+
+James Vane bit his lip. "Watch over Sibyl, Mother," he cried, "watch
+over her."
+
+"My son, you distress me very much. Sibyl is always under my special
+care. Of course, if this gentleman is wealthy, there is no reason why
+she should not contract an alliance with him. I trust he is one of the
+aristocracy. He has all the appearance of it, I must say. It might be
+a most brilliant marriage for Sibyl. They would make a charming
+couple. His good looks are really quite remarkable; everybody notices
+them."
+
+The lad muttered something to himself and drummed on the window-pane
+with his coarse fingers. He had just turned round to say something
+when the door opened and Sibyl ran in.
+
+"How serious you both are!" she cried. "What is the matter?"
+
+"Nothing," he answered. "I suppose one must be serious sometimes.
+Good-bye, Mother; I will have my dinner at five o'clock. Everything is
+packed, except my shirts, so you need not trouble."
+
+"Good-bye, my son," she answered with a bow of strained stateliness.
+
+She was extremely annoyed at the tone he had adopted with her, and
+there was something in his look that had made her feel afraid.
+
+"Kiss me, Mother," said the girl. Her flowerlike lips touched the
+withered cheek and warmed its frost.
+
+"My child! my child!" cried Mrs. Vane, looking up to the ceiling in
+search of an imaginary gallery.
+
+"Come, Sibyl," said her brother impatiently. He hated his mother's
+affectations.
+
+They went out into the flickering, wind-blown sunlight and strolled
+down the dreary Euston Road. The passersby glanced in wonder at the
+sullen heavy youth who, in coarse, ill-fitting clothes, was in the
+company of such a graceful, refined-looking girl. He was like a common
+gardener walking with a rose.
+
+Jim frowned from time to time when he caught the inquisitive glance of
+some stranger. He had that dislike of being stared at, which comes on
+geniuses late in life and never leaves the commonplace. Sibyl,
+however, was quite unconscious of the effect she was producing. Her
+love was trembling in laughter on her lips. She was thinking of Prince
+Charming, and, that she might think of him all the more, she did not
+talk of him, but prattled on about the ship in which Jim was going to
+sail, about the gold he was certain to find, about the wonderful
+heiress whose life he was to save from the wicked, red-shirted
+bushrangers. For he was not to remain a sailor, or a supercargo, or
+whatever he was going to be. Oh, no! A sailor's existence was
+dreadful. Fancy being cooped up in a horrid ship, with the hoarse,
+hump-backed waves trying to get in, and a black wind blowing the masts
+down and tearing the sails into long screaming ribands! He was to
+leave the vessel at Melbourne, bid a polite good-bye to the captain,
+and go off at once to the gold-fields. Before a week was over he was to
+come across a large nugget of pure gold, the largest nugget that had
+ever been discovered, and bring it down to the coast in a waggon
+guarded by six mounted policemen. The bushrangers were to attack them
+three times, and be defeated with immense slaughter. Or, no. He was
+not to go to the gold-fields at all. They were horrid places, where
+men got intoxicated, and shot each other in bar-rooms, and used bad
+language. He was to be a nice sheep-farmer, and one evening, as he was
+riding home, he was to see the beautiful heiress being carried off by a
+robber on a black horse, and give chase, and rescue her. Of course,
+she would fall in love with him, and he with her, and they would get
+married, and come home, and live in an immense house in London. Yes,
+there were delightful things in store for him. But he must be very
+good, and not lose his temper, or spend his money foolishly. She was
+only a year older than he was, but she knew so much more of life. He
+must be sure, also, to write to her by every mail, and to say his
+prayers each night before he went to sleep. God was very good, and
+would watch over him. She would pray for him, too, and in a few years
+he would come back quite rich and happy.
+
+The lad listened sulkily to her and made no answer. He was heart-sick
+at leaving home.
+
+Yet it was not this alone that made him gloomy and morose.
+Inexperienced though he was, he had still a strong sense of the danger
+of Sibyl's position. This young dandy who was making love to her could
+mean her no good. He was a gentleman, and he hated him for that, hated
+him through some curious race-instinct for which he could not account,
+and which for that reason was all the more dominant within him. He was
+conscious also of the shallowness and vanity of his mother's nature,
+and in that saw infinite peril for Sibyl and Sibyl's happiness.
+Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge
+them; sometimes they forgive them.
+
+His mother! He had something on his mind to ask of her, something that
+he had brooded on for many months of silence. A chance phrase that he
+had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached his ears
+one night as he waited at the stage-door, had set loose a train of
+horrible thoughts. He remembered it as if it had been the lash of a
+hunting-crop across his face. His brows knit together into a wedge-like
+furrow, and with a twitch of pain he bit his underlip.
+
+"You are not listening to a word I am saying, Jim," cried Sibyl, "and I
+am making the most delightful plans for your future. Do say something."
+
+"What do you want me to say?"
+
+"Oh! that you will be a good boy and not forget us," she answered,
+smiling at him.
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "You are more likely to forget me than I am
+to forget you, Sibyl."
+
+She flushed. "What do you mean, Jim?" she asked.
+
+"You have a new friend, I hear. Who is he? Why have you not told me
+about him? He means you no good."
+
+"Stop, Jim!" she exclaimed. "You must not say anything against him. I
+love him."
+
+"Why, you don't even know his name," answered the lad. "Who is he? I
+have a right to know."
+
+"He is called Prince Charming. Don't you like the name. Oh! you silly
+boy! you should never forget it. If you only saw him, you would think
+him the most wonderful person in the world. Some day you will meet
+him--when you come back from Australia. You will like him so much.
+Everybody likes him, and I ... love him. I wish you could come to the
+theatre to-night. He is going to be there, and I am to play Juliet.
+Oh! how I shall play it! Fancy, Jim, to be in love and play Juliet!
+To have him sitting there! To play for his delight! I am afraid I may
+frighten the company, frighten or enthrall them. To be in love is to
+surpass one's self. Poor dreadful Mr. Isaacs will be shouting 'genius'
+to his loafers at the bar. He has preached me as a dogma; to-night he
+will announce me as a revelation. I feel it. And it is all his, his
+only, Prince Charming, my wonderful lover, my god of graces. But I am
+poor beside him. Poor? What does that matter? When poverty creeps in
+at the door, love flies in through the window. Our proverbs want
+rewriting. They were made in winter, and it is summer now; spring-time
+for me, I think, a very dance of blossoms in blue skies."
+
+"He is a gentleman," said the lad sullenly.
+
+"A prince!" she cried musically. "What more do you want?"
+
+"He wants to enslave you."
+
+"I shudder at the thought of being free."
+
+"I want you to beware of him."
+
+"To see him is to worship him; to know him is to trust him."
+
+"Sibyl, you are mad about him."
+
+She laughed and took his arm. "You dear old Jim, you talk as if you
+were a hundred. Some day you will be in love yourself. Then you will
+know what it is. Don't look so sulky. Surely you should be glad to
+think that, though you are going away, you leave me happier than I have
+ever been before. Life has been hard for us both, terribly hard and
+difficult. But it will be different now. You are going to a new
+world, and I have found one. Here are two chairs; let us sit down and
+see the smart people go by."
+
+They took their seats amidst a crowd of watchers. The tulip-beds
+across the road flamed like throbbing rings of fire. A white
+dust--tremulous cloud of orris-root it seemed--hung in the panting air.
+The brightly coloured parasols danced and dipped like monstrous
+butterflies.
+
+She made her brother talk of himself, his hopes, his prospects. He
+spoke slowly and with effort. They passed words to each other as
+players at a game pass counters. Sibyl felt oppressed. She could not
+communicate her joy. A faint smile curving that sullen mouth was all
+the echo she could win. After some time she became silent. Suddenly
+she caught a glimpse of golden hair and laughing lips, and in an open
+carriage with two ladies Dorian Gray drove past.
+
+She started to her feet. "There he is!" she cried.
+
+"Who?" said Jim Vane.
+
+"Prince Charming," she answered, looking after the victoria.
+
+He jumped up and seized her roughly by the arm. "Show him to me.
+Which is he? Point him out. I must see him!" he exclaimed; but at
+that moment the Duke of Berwick's four-in-hand came between, and when
+it had left the space clear, the carriage had swept out of the park.
+
+"He is gone," murmured Sibyl sadly. "I wish you had seen him."
+
+"I wish I had, for as sure as there is a God in heaven, if he ever does
+you any wrong, I shall kill him."
+
+She looked at him in horror. He repeated his words. They cut the air
+like a dagger. The people round began to gape. A lady standing close
+to her tittered.
+
+"Come away, Jim; come away," she whispered. He followed her doggedly
+as she passed through the crowd. He felt glad at what he had said.
+
+When they reached the Achilles Statue, she turned round. There was
+pity in her eyes that became laughter on her lips. She shook her head
+at him. "You are foolish, Jim, utterly foolish; a bad-tempered boy,
+that is all. How can you say such horrible things? You don't know
+what you are talking about. You are simply jealous and unkind. Ah! I
+wish you would fall in love. Love makes people good, and what you said
+was wicked."
+
+"I am sixteen," he answered, "and I know what I am about. Mother is no
+help to you. She doesn't understand how to look after you. I wish now
+that I was not going to Australia at all. I have a great mind to chuck
+the whole thing up. I would, if my articles hadn't been signed."
+
+"Oh, don't be so serious, Jim. You are like one of the heroes of those
+silly melodramas Mother used to be so fond of acting in. I am not
+going to quarrel with you. I have seen him, and oh! to see him is
+perfect happiness. We won't quarrel. I know you would never harm any
+one I love, would you?"
+
+"Not as long as you love him, I suppose," was the sullen answer.
+
+"I shall love him for ever!" she cried.
+
+"And he?"
+
+"For ever, too!"
+
+"He had better."
+
+She shrank from him. Then she laughed and put her hand on his arm. He
+was merely a boy.
+
+At the Marble Arch they hailed an omnibus, which left them close to
+their shabby home in the Euston Road. It was after five o'clock, and
+Sibyl had to lie down for a couple of hours before acting. Jim
+insisted that she should do so. He said that he would sooner part with
+her when their mother was not present. She would be sure to make a
+scene, and he detested scenes of every kind.
+
+In Sybil's own room they parted. There was jealousy in the lad's
+heart, and a fierce murderous hatred of the stranger who, as it seemed
+to him, had come between them. Yet, when her arms were flung round his
+neck, and her fingers strayed through his hair, he softened and kissed
+her with real affection. There were tears in his eyes as he went
+downstairs.
+
+His mother was waiting for him below. She grumbled at his
+unpunctuality, as he entered. He made no answer, but sat down to his
+meagre meal. The flies buzzed round the table and crawled over the
+stained cloth. Through the rumble of omnibuses, and the clatter of
+street-cabs, he could hear the droning voice devouring each minute that
+was left to him.
+
+After some time, he thrust away his plate and put his head in his
+hands. He felt that he had a right to know. It should have been told
+to him before, if it was as he suspected. Leaden with fear, his mother
+watched him. Words dropped mechanically from her lips. A tattered
+lace handkerchief twitched in her fingers. When the clock struck six,
+he got up and went to the door. Then he turned back and looked at her.
+Their eyes met. In hers he saw a wild appeal for mercy. It enraged
+him.
+
+"Mother, I have something to ask you," he said. Her eyes wandered
+vaguely about the room. She made no answer. "Tell me the truth. I
+have a right to know. Were you married to my father?"
+
+She heaved a deep sigh. It was a sigh of relief. The terrible moment,
+the moment that night and day, for weeks and months, she had dreaded,
+had come at last, and yet she felt no terror. Indeed, in some measure
+it was a disappointment to her. The vulgar directness of the question
+called for a direct answer. The situation had not been gradually led
+up to. It was crude. It reminded her of a bad rehearsal.
+
+"No," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life.
+
+"My father was a scoundrel then!" cried the lad, clenching his fists.
+
+She shook her head. "I knew he was not free. We loved each other very
+much. If he had lived, he would have made provision for us. Don't
+speak against him, my son. He was your father, and a gentleman.
+Indeed, he was highly connected."
+
+An oath broke from his lips. "I don't care for myself," he exclaimed,
+"but don't let Sibyl.... It is a gentleman, isn't it, who is in love
+with her, or says he is? Highly connected, too, I suppose."
+
+For a moment a hideous sense of humiliation came over the woman. Her
+head drooped. She wiped her eyes with shaking hands. "Sibyl has a
+mother," she murmured; "I had none."
+
+The lad was touched. He went towards her, and stooping down, he kissed
+her. "I am sorry if I have pained you by asking about my father," he
+said, "but I could not help it. I must go now. Good-bye. Don't forget
+that you will have only one child now to look after, and believe me
+that if this man wrongs my sister, I will find out who he is, track him
+down, and kill him like a dog. I swear it."
+
+The exaggerated folly of the threat, the passionate gesture that
+accompanied it, the mad melodramatic words, made life seem more vivid
+to her. She was familiar with the atmosphere. She breathed more
+freely, and for the first time for many months she really admired her
+son. She would have liked to have continued the scene on the same
+emotional scale, but he cut her short. Trunks had to be carried down
+and mufflers looked for. The lodging-house drudge bustled in and out.
+There was the bargaining with the cabman. The moment was lost in
+vulgar details. It was with a renewed feeling of disappointment that
+she waved the tattered lace handkerchief from the window, as her son
+drove away. She was conscious that a great opportunity had been
+wasted. She consoled herself by telling Sibyl how desolate she felt
+her life would be, now that she had only one child to look after. She
+remembered the phrase. It had pleased her. Of the threat she said
+nothing. It was vividly and dramatically expressed. She felt that
+they would all laugh at it some day.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 6
+
+"I suppose you have heard the news, Basil?" said Lord Henry that
+evening as Hallward was shown into a little private room at the Bristol
+where dinner had been laid for three.
+
+"No, Harry," answered the artist, giving his hat and coat to the bowing
+waiter. "What is it? Nothing about politics, I hope! They don't
+interest me. There is hardly a single person in the House of Commons
+worth painting, though many of them would be the better for a little
+whitewashing."
+
+"Dorian Gray is engaged to be married," said Lord Henry, watching him
+as he spoke.
+
+Hallward started and then frowned. "Dorian engaged to be married!" he
+cried. "Impossible!"
+
+"It is perfectly true."
+
+"To whom?"
+
+"To some little actress or other."
+
+"I can't believe it. Dorian is far too sensible."
+
+"Dorian is far too wise not to do foolish things now and then, my dear
+Basil."
+
+"Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry."
+
+"Except in America," rejoined Lord Henry languidly. "But I didn't say
+he was married. I said he was engaged to be married. There is a great
+difference. I have a distinct remembrance of being married, but I have
+no recollection at all of being engaged. I am inclined to think that I
+never was engaged."
+
+"But think of Dorian's birth, and position, and wealth. It would be
+absurd for him to marry so much beneath him."
+
+"If you want to make him marry this girl, tell him that, Basil. He is
+sure to do it, then. Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it
+is always from the noblest motives."
+
+"I hope the girl is good, Harry. I don't want to see Dorian tied to
+some vile creature, who might degrade his nature and ruin his
+intellect."
+
+"Oh, she is better than good--she is beautiful," murmured Lord Henry,
+sipping a glass of vermouth and orange-bitters. "Dorian says she is
+beautiful, and he is not often wrong about things of that kind. Your
+portrait of him has quickened his appreciation of the personal
+appearance of other people. It has had that excellent effect, amongst
+others. We are to see her to-night, if that boy doesn't forget his
+appointment."
+
+"Are you serious?"
+
+"Quite serious, Basil. I should be miserable if I thought I should
+ever be more serious than I am at the present moment."
+
+"But do you approve of it, Harry?" asked the painter, walking up and
+down the room and biting his lip. "You can't approve of it, possibly.
+It is some silly infatuation."
+
+"I never approve, or disapprove, of anything now. It is an absurd
+attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air
+our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people
+say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If a
+personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality
+selects is absolutely delightful to me. Dorian Gray falls in love with
+a beautiful girl who acts Juliet, and proposes to marry her. Why not?
+If he wedded Messalina, he would be none the less interesting. You
+know I am not a champion of marriage. The real drawback to marriage is
+that it makes one unselfish. And unselfish people are colourless.
+They lack individuality. Still, there are certain temperaments that
+marriage makes more complex. They retain their egotism, and add to it
+many other egos. They are forced to have more than one life. They
+become more highly organized, and to be highly organized is, I should
+fancy, the object of man's existence. Besides, every experience is of
+value, and whatever one may say against marriage, it is certainly an
+experience. I hope that Dorian Gray will make this girl his wife,
+passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become
+fascinated by some one else. He would be a wonderful study."
+
+"You don't mean a single word of all that, Harry; you know you don't.
+If Dorian Gray's life were spoiled, no one would be sorrier than
+yourself. You are much better than you pretend to be."
+
+Lord Henry laughed. "The reason we all like to think so well of others
+is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is
+sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our
+neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a
+benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account,
+and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare
+our pockets. I mean everything that I have said. I have the greatest
+contempt for optimism. As for a spoiled life, no life is spoiled but
+one whose growth is arrested. If you want to mar a nature, you have
+merely to reform it. As for marriage, of course that would be silly,
+but there are other and more interesting bonds between men and women.
+I will certainly encourage them. They have the charm of being
+fashionable. But here is Dorian himself. He will tell you more than I
+can."
+
+"My dear Harry, my dear Basil, you must both congratulate me!" said the
+lad, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings and
+shaking each of his friends by the hand in turn. "I have never been so
+happy. Of course, it is sudden--all really delightful things are. And
+yet it seems to me to be the one thing I have been looking for all my
+life." He was flushed with excitement and pleasure, and looked
+extraordinarily handsome.
+
+"I hope you will always be very happy, Dorian," said Hallward, "but I
+don't quite forgive you for not having let me know of your engagement.
+You let Harry know."
+
+"And I don't forgive you for being late for dinner," broke in Lord
+Henry, putting his hand on the lad's shoulder and smiling as he spoke.
+"Come, let us sit down and try what the new _chef_ here is like, and then
+you will tell us how it all came about."
+
+"There is really not much to tell," cried Dorian as they took their
+seats at the small round table. "What happened was simply this. After
+I left you yesterday evening, Harry, I dressed, had some dinner at that
+little Italian restaurant in Rupert Street you introduced me to, and
+went down at eight o'clock to the theatre. Sibyl was playing Rosalind.
+Of course, the scenery was dreadful and the Orlando absurd. But Sibyl!
+You should have seen her! When she came on in her boy's clothes, she
+was perfectly wonderful. She wore a moss-coloured velvet jerkin with
+cinnamon sleeves, slim, brown, cross-gartered hose, a dainty little
+green cap with a hawk's feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak
+lined with dull red. She had never seemed to me more exquisite. She
+had all the delicate grace of that Tanagra figurine that you have in
+your studio, Basil. Her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves
+round a pale rose. As for her acting--well, you shall see her
+to-night. She is simply a born artist. I sat in the dingy box
+absolutely enthralled. I forgot that I was in London and in the
+nineteenth century. I was away with my love in a forest that no man
+had ever seen. After the performance was over, I went behind and spoke
+to her. As we were sitting together, suddenly there came into her eyes
+a look that I had never seen there before. My lips moved towards hers.
+We kissed each other. I can't describe to you what I felt at that
+moment. It seemed to me that all my life had been narrowed to one
+perfect point of rose-coloured joy. She trembled all over and shook
+like a white narcissus. Then she flung herself on her knees and kissed
+my hands. I feel that I should not tell you all this, but I can't help
+it. Of course, our engagement is a dead secret. She has not even told
+her own mother. I don't know what my guardians will say. Lord Radley
+is sure to be furious. I don't care. I shall be of age in less than a
+year, and then I can do what I like. I have been right, Basil, haven't
+I, to take my love out of poetry and to find my wife in Shakespeare's
+plays? Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their
+secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and
+kissed Juliet on the mouth."
+
+"Yes, Dorian, I suppose you were right," said Hallward slowly.
+
+"Have you seen her to-day?" asked Lord Henry.
+
+Dorian Gray shook his head. "I left her in the forest of Arden; I
+shall find her in an orchard in Verona."
+
+Lord Henry sipped his champagne in a meditative manner. "At what
+particular point did you mention the word marriage, Dorian? And what
+did she say in answer? Perhaps you forgot all about it."
+
+"My dear Harry, I did not treat it as a business transaction, and I did
+not make any formal proposal. I told her that I loved her, and she
+said she was not worthy to be my wife. Not worthy! Why, the whole
+world is nothing to me compared with her."
+
+"Women are wonderfully practical," murmured Lord Henry, "much more
+practical than we are. In situations of that kind we often forget to
+say anything about marriage, and they always remind us."
+
+Hallward laid his hand upon his arm. "Don't, Harry. You have annoyed
+Dorian. He is not like other men. He would never bring misery upon
+any one. His nature is too fine for that."
+
+Lord Henry looked across the table. "Dorian is never annoyed with me,"
+he answered. "I asked the question for the best reason possible, for
+the only reason, indeed, that excuses one for asking any
+question--simple curiosity. I have a theory that it is always the
+women who propose to us, and not we who propose to the women. Except,
+of course, in middle-class life. But then the middle classes are not
+modern."
+
+Dorian Gray laughed, and tossed his head. "You are quite incorrigible,
+Harry; but I don't mind. It is impossible to be angry with you. When
+you see Sibyl Vane, you will feel that the man who could wrong her
+would be a beast, a beast without a heart. I cannot understand how any
+one can wish to shame the thing he loves. I love Sibyl Vane. I want
+to place her on a pedestal of gold and to see the world worship the
+woman who is mine. What is marriage? An irrevocable vow. You mock at
+it for that. Ah! don't mock. It is an irrevocable vow that I want to
+take. Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good. When I
+am with her, I regret all that you have taught me. I become different
+from what you have known me to be. I am changed, and the mere touch of
+Sibyl Vane's hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating,
+poisonous, delightful theories."
+
+"And those are ...?" asked Lord Henry, helping himself to some salad.
+
+"Oh, your theories about life, your theories about love, your theories
+about pleasure. All your theories, in fact, Harry."
+
+"Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about," he answered
+in his slow melodious voice. "But I am afraid I cannot claim my theory
+as my own. It belongs to Nature, not to me. Pleasure is Nature's
+test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but
+when we are good, we are not always happy."
+
+"Ah! but what do you mean by good?" cried Basil Hallward.
+
+"Yes," echoed Dorian, leaning back in his chair and looking at Lord
+Henry over the heavy clusters of purple-lipped irises that stood in the
+centre of the table, "what do you mean by good, Harry?"
+
+"To be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he replied, touching
+the thin stem of his glass with his pale, fine-pointed fingers.
+"Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others. One's own
+life--that is the important thing. As for the lives of one's
+neighbours, if one wishes to be a prig or a Puritan, one can flaunt
+one's moral views about them, but they are not one's concern. Besides,
+individualism has really the higher aim. Modern morality consists in
+accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of
+culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest
+immorality."
+
+"But, surely, if one lives merely for one's self, Harry, one pays a
+terrible price for doing so?" suggested the painter.
+
+"Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that
+the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but
+self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege
+of the rich."
+
+"One has to pay in other ways but money."
+
+"What sort of ways, Basil?"
+
+"Oh! I should fancy in remorse, in suffering, in ... well, in the
+consciousness of degradation."
+
+Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, mediaeval art is
+charming, but mediaeval emotions are out of date. One can use them in
+fiction, of course. But then the only things that one can use in
+fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. Believe me,
+no civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever
+knows what a pleasure is."
+
+"I know what pleasure is," cried Dorian Gray. "It is to adore some
+one."
+
+"That is certainly better than being adored," he answered, toying with
+some fruits. "Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as
+humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us
+to do something for them."
+
+"I should have said that whatever they ask for they had first given to
+us," murmured the lad gravely. "They create love in our natures. They
+have a right to demand it back."
+
+"That is quite true, Dorian," cried Hallward.
+
+"Nothing is ever quite true," said Lord Henry.
+
+"This is," interrupted Dorian. "You must admit, Harry, that women give
+to men the very gold of their lives."
+
+"Possibly," he sighed, "but they invariably want it back in such very
+small change. That is the worry. Women, as some witty Frenchman once
+put it, inspire us with the desire to do masterpieces and always
+prevent us from carrying them out."
+
+"Harry, you are dreadful! I don't know why I like you so much."
+
+"You will always like me, Dorian," he replied. "Will you have some
+coffee, you fellows? Waiter, bring coffee, and _fine-champagne_, and
+some cigarettes. No, don't mind the cigarettes--I have some. Basil, I
+can't allow you to smoke cigars. You must have a cigarette. A
+cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite,
+and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes, Dorian,
+you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you
+have never had the courage to commit."
+
+"What nonsense you talk, Harry!" cried the lad, taking a light from a
+fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table.
+"Let us go down to the theatre. When Sibyl comes on the stage you will
+have a new ideal of life. She will represent something to you that you
+have never known."
+
+"I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his
+eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion. I am afraid, however,
+that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing. Still, your
+wonderful girl may thrill me. I love acting. It is so much more real
+than life. Let us go. Dorian, you will come with me. I am so sorry,
+Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. You must follow
+us in a hansom."
+
+They got up and put on their coats, sipping their coffee standing. The
+painter was silent and preoccupied. There was a gloom over him. He
+could not bear this marriage, and yet it seemed to him to be better
+than many other things that might have happened. After a few minutes,
+they all passed downstairs. He drove off by himself, as had been
+arranged, and watched the flashing lights of the little brougham in
+front of him. A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that
+Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the
+past. Life had come between them.... His eyes darkened, and the
+crowded flaring streets became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew
+up at the theatre, it seemed to him that he had grown years older.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 7
+
+For some reason or other, the house was crowded that night, and the fat
+Jew manager who met them at the door was beaming from ear to ear with
+an oily tremulous smile. He escorted them to their box with a sort of
+pompous humility, waving his fat jewelled hands and talking at the top
+of his voice. Dorian Gray loathed him more than ever. He felt as if
+he had come to look for Miranda and had been met by Caliban. Lord
+Henry, upon the other hand, rather liked him. At least he declared he
+did, and insisted on shaking him by the hand and assuring him that he
+was proud to meet a man who had discovered a real genius and gone
+bankrupt over a poet. Hallward amused himself with watching the faces
+in the pit. The heat was terribly oppressive, and the huge sunlight
+flamed like a monstrous dahlia with petals of yellow fire. The youths
+in the gallery had taken off their coats and waistcoats and hung them
+over the side. They talked to each other across the theatre and shared
+their oranges with the tawdry girls who sat beside them. Some women
+were laughing in the pit. Their voices were horribly shrill and
+discordant. The sound of the popping of corks came from the bar.
+
+"What a place to find one's divinity in!" said Lord Henry.
+
+"Yes!" answered Dorian Gray. "It was here I found her, and she is
+divine beyond all living things. When she acts, you will forget
+everything. These common rough people, with their coarse faces and
+brutal gestures, become quite different when she is on the stage. They
+sit silently and watch her. They weep and laugh as she wills them to
+do. She makes them as responsive as a violin. She spiritualizes them,
+and one feels that they are of the same flesh and blood as one's self."
+
+"The same flesh and blood as one's self! Oh, I hope not!" exclaimed
+Lord Henry, who was scanning the occupants of the gallery through his
+opera-glass.
+
+"Don't pay any attention to him, Dorian," said the painter. "I
+understand what you mean, and I believe in this girl. Any one you love
+must be marvellous, and any girl who has the effect you describe must
+be fine and noble. To spiritualize one's age--that is something worth
+doing. If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without
+one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have
+been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and
+lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of
+all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. This
+marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first, but I admit it
+now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you would have
+been incomplete."
+
+"Thanks, Basil," answered Dorian Gray, pressing his hand. "I knew that
+you would understand me. Harry is so cynical, he terrifies me. But
+here is the orchestra. It is quite dreadful, but it only lasts for
+about five minutes. Then the curtain rises, and you will see the girl
+to whom I am going to give all my life, to whom I have given everything
+that is good in me."
+
+A quarter of an hour afterwards, amidst an extraordinary turmoil of
+applause, Sibyl Vane stepped on to the stage. Yes, she was certainly
+lovely to look at--one of the loveliest creatures, Lord Henry thought,
+that he had ever seen. There was something of the fawn in her shy
+grace and startled eyes. A faint blush, like the shadow of a rose in a
+mirror of silver, came to her cheeks as she glanced at the crowded
+enthusiastic house. She stepped back a few paces and her lips seemed
+to tremble. Basil Hallward leaped to his feet and began to applaud.
+Motionless, and as one in a dream, sat Dorian Gray, gazing at her.
+Lord Henry peered through his glasses, murmuring, "Charming! charming!"
+
+The scene was the hall of Capulet's house, and Romeo in his pilgrim's
+dress had entered with Mercutio and his other friends. The band, such
+as it was, struck up a few bars of music, and the dance began. Through
+the crowd of ungainly, shabbily dressed actors, Sibyl Vane moved like a
+creature from a finer world. Her body swayed, while she danced, as a
+plant sways in the water. The curves of her throat were the curves of
+a white lily. Her hands seemed to be made of cool ivory.
+
+Yet she was curiously listless. She showed no sign of joy when her
+eyes rested on Romeo. The few words she had to speak--
+
+ Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
+ Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
+ For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
+ And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss--
+
+with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly
+artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view
+of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in colour. It took away
+all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal.
+
+Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her. He was puzzled and anxious.
+Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. She seemed to
+them to be absolutely incompetent. They were horribly disappointed.
+
+Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony scene of
+the second act. They waited for that. If she failed there, there was
+nothing in her.
+
+She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. That could not
+be denied. But the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew
+worse as she went on. Her gestures became absurdly artificial. She
+overemphasized everything that she had to say. The beautiful passage--
+
+ Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,
+ Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek
+ For that which thou hast heard me speak to-night--
+
+was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been
+taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. When she
+leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines--
+
+ Although I joy in thee,
+ I have no joy of this contract to-night:
+ It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
+ Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
+ Ere one can say, "It lightens." Sweet, good-night!
+ This bud of love by summer's ripening breath
+ May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet--
+
+she spoke the words as though they conveyed no meaning to her. It was
+not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she was absolutely
+self-contained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete failure.
+
+Even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their
+interest in the play. They got restless, and began to talk loudly and
+to whistle. The Jew manager, who was standing at the back of the
+dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. The only person unmoved was
+the girl herself.
+
+When the second act was over, there came a storm of hisses, and Lord
+Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. "She is quite
+beautiful, Dorian," he said, "but she can't act. Let us go."
+
+"I am going to see the play through," answered the lad, in a hard
+bitter voice. "I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an
+evening, Harry. I apologize to you both."
+
+"My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill," interrupted
+Hallward. "We will come some other night."
+
+"I wish she were ill," he rejoined. "But she seems to me to be simply
+callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she was a
+great artist. This evening she is merely a commonplace mediocre
+actress."
+
+"Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more
+wonderful thing than art."
+
+"They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry. "But
+do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not
+good for one's morals to see bad acting. Besides, I don't suppose you
+will want your wife to act, so what does it matter if she plays Juliet
+like a wooden doll? She is very lovely, and if she knows as little
+about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful
+experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really
+fascinating--people who know absolutely everything, and people who know
+absolutely nothing. Good heavens, my dear boy, don't look so tragic!
+The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is
+unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke
+cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful.
+What more can you want?"
+
+"Go away, Harry," cried the lad. "I want to be alone. Basil, you must
+go. Ah! can't you see that my heart is breaking?" The hot tears came
+to his eyes. His lips trembled, and rushing to the back of the box, he
+leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.
+
+"Let us go, Basil," said Lord Henry with a strange tenderness in his
+voice, and the two young men passed out together.
+
+A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up and the curtain rose
+on the third act. Dorian Gray went back to his seat. He looked pale,
+and proud, and indifferent. The play dragged on, and seemed
+interminable. Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots
+and laughing. The whole thing was a _fiasco_. The last act was played
+to almost empty benches. The curtain went down on a titter and some
+groans.
+
+As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into the
+greenroom. The girl was standing there alone, with a look of triumph
+on her face. Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a
+radiance about her. Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of
+their own.
+
+When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy
+came over her. "How badly I acted to-night, Dorian!" she cried.
+
+"Horribly!" he answered, gazing at her in amazement. "Horribly! It
+was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was. You have no
+idea what I suffered."
+
+The girl smiled. "Dorian," she answered, lingering over his name with
+long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to
+the red petals of her mouth. "Dorian, you should have understood. But
+you understand now, don't you?"
+
+"Understand what?" he asked, angrily.
+
+"Why I was so bad to-night. Why I shall always be bad. Why I shall
+never act well again."
+
+He shrugged his shoulders. "You are ill, I suppose. When you are ill
+you shouldn't act. You make yourself ridiculous. My friends were
+bored. I was bored."
+
+She seemed not to listen to him. She was transfigured with joy. An
+ecstasy of happiness dominated her.
+
+"Dorian, Dorian," she cried, "before I knew you, acting was the one
+reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I
+thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night and Portia the
+other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia
+were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted
+with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world.
+I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came--oh, my
+beautiful love!--and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what
+reality really is. To-night, for the first time in my life, I saw
+through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness of the empty pageant in
+which I had always played. To-night, for the first time, I became
+conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the
+moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and
+that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, were not
+what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something
+of which all art is but a reflection. You had made me understand what
+love really is. My love! My love! Prince Charming! Prince of life!
+I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever
+be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play? When I came on
+to-night, I could not understand how it was that everything had gone
+from me. I thought that I was going to be wonderful. I found that I
+could do nothing. Suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant.
+The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard them hissing, and I smiled.
+What could they know of love such as ours? Take me away, Dorian--take
+me away with you, where we can be quite alone. I hate the stage. I
+might mimic a passion that I do not feel, but I cannot mimic one that
+burns me like fire. Oh, Dorian, Dorian, you understand now what it
+signifies? Even if I could do it, it would be profanation for me to
+play at being in love. You have made me see that."
+
+He flung himself down on the sofa and turned away his face. "You have
+killed my love," he muttered.
+
+She looked at him in wonder and laughed. He made no answer. She came
+across to him, and with her little fingers stroked his hair. She knelt
+down and pressed his hands to her lips. He drew them away, and a
+shudder ran through him.
+
+Then he leaped up and went to the door. "Yes," he cried, "you have
+killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even
+stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because
+you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you
+realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the
+shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and
+stupid. My God! how mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been!
+You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never
+think of you. I will never mention your name. You don't know what you
+were to me, once. Why, once ... Oh, I can't bear to think of it! I
+wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of
+my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art!
+Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous,
+splendid, magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you
+would have borne my name. What are you now? A third-rate actress with
+a pretty face."
+
+The girl grew white, and trembled. She clenched her hands together,
+and her voice seemed to catch in her throat. "You are not serious,
+Dorian?" she murmured. "You are acting."
+
+"Acting! I leave that to you. You do it so well," he answered
+bitterly.
+
+She rose from her knees and, with a piteous expression of pain in her
+face, came across the room to him. She put her hand upon his arm and
+looked into his eyes. He thrust her back. "Don't touch me!" he cried.
+
+A low moan broke from her, and she flung herself at his feet and lay
+there like a trampled flower. "Dorian, Dorian, don't leave me!" she
+whispered. "I am so sorry I didn't act well. I was thinking of you
+all the time. But I will try--indeed, I will try. It came so suddenly
+across me, my love for you. I think I should never have known it if
+you had not kissed me--if we had not kissed each other. Kiss me again,
+my love. Don't go away from me. I couldn't bear it. Oh! don't go
+away from me. My brother ... No; never mind. He didn't mean it. He
+was in jest.... But you, oh! can't you forgive me for to-night? I will
+work so hard and try to improve. Don't be cruel to me, because I love
+you better than anything in the world. After all, it is only once that
+I have not pleased you. But you are quite right, Dorian. I should
+have shown myself more of an artist. It was foolish of me, and yet I
+couldn't help it. Oh, don't leave me, don't leave me." A fit of
+passionate sobbing choked her. She crouched on the floor like a
+wounded thing, and Dorian Gray, with his beautiful eyes, looked down at
+her, and his chiselled lips curled in exquisite disdain. There is
+always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has
+ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.
+Her tears and sobs annoyed him.
+
+"I am going," he said at last in his calm clear voice. "I don't wish
+to be unkind, but I can't see you again. You have disappointed me."
+
+She wept silently, and made no answer, but crept nearer. Her little
+hands stretched blindly out, and appeared to be seeking for him. He
+turned on his heel and left the room. In a few moments he was out of
+the theatre.
+
+Where he went to he hardly knew. He remembered wandering through dimly
+lit streets, past gaunt, black-shadowed archways and evil-looking
+houses. Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after
+him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves
+like monstrous apes. He had seen grotesque children huddled upon
+door-steps, and heard shrieks and oaths from gloomy courts.
+
+As the dawn was just breaking, he found himself close to Covent Garden.
+The darkness lifted, and, flushed with faint fires, the sky hollowed
+itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies
+rumbled slowly down the polished empty street. The air was heavy with
+the perfume of the flowers, and their beauty seemed to bring him an
+anodyne for his pain. He followed into the market and watched the men
+unloading their waggons. A white-smocked carter offered him some
+cherries. He thanked him, wondered why he refused to accept any money
+for them, and began to eat them listlessly. They had been plucked at
+midnight, and the coldness of the moon had entered into them. A long
+line of boys carrying crates of striped tulips, and of yellow and red
+roses, defiled in front of him, threading their way through the huge,
+jade-green piles of vegetables. Under the portico, with its grey,
+sun-bleached pillars, loitered a troop of draggled bareheaded girls,
+waiting for the auction to be over. Others crowded round the swinging
+doors of the coffee-house in the piazza. The heavy cart-horses slipped
+and stamped upon the rough stones, shaking their bells and trappings.
+Some of the drivers were lying asleep on a pile of sacks. Iris-necked
+and pink-footed, the pigeons ran about picking up seeds.
+
+After a little while, he hailed a hansom and drove home. For a few
+moments he loitered upon the doorstep, looking round at the silent
+square, with its blank, close-shuttered windows and its staring blinds.
+The sky was pure opal now, and the roofs of the houses glistened like
+silver against it. From some chimney opposite a thin wreath of smoke
+was rising. It curled, a violet riband, through the nacre-coloured air.
+
+In the huge gilt Venetian lantern, spoil of some Doge's barge, that
+hung from the ceiling of the great, oak-panelled hall of entrance,
+lights were still burning from three flickering jets: thin blue petals
+of flame they seemed, rimmed with white fire. He turned them out and,
+having thrown his hat and cape on the table, passed through the library
+towards the door of his bedroom, a large octagonal chamber on the
+ground floor that, in his new-born feeling for luxury, he had just had
+decorated for himself and hung with some curious Renaissance tapestries
+that had been discovered stored in a disused attic at Selby Royal. As
+he was turning the handle of the door, his eye fell upon the portrait
+Basil Hallward had painted of him. He started back as if in surprise.
+Then he went on into his own room, looking somewhat puzzled. After he
+had taken the button-hole out of his coat, he seemed to hesitate.
+Finally, he came back, went over to the picture, and examined it. In
+the dim arrested light that struggled through the cream-coloured silk
+blinds, the face appeared to him to be a little changed. The
+expression looked different. One would have said that there was a
+touch of cruelty in the mouth. It was certainly strange.
+
+He turned round and, walking to the window, drew up the blind. The
+bright dawn flooded the room and swept the fantastic shadows into dusky
+corners, where they lay shuddering. But the strange expression that he
+had noticed in the face of the portrait seemed to linger there, to be
+more intensified even. The quivering ardent sunlight showed him the
+lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking
+into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
+
+He winced and, taking up from the table an oval glass framed in ivory
+Cupids, one of Lord Henry's many presents to him, glanced hurriedly
+into its polished depths. No line like that warped his red lips. What
+did it mean?
+
+He rubbed his eyes, and came close to the picture, and examined it
+again. There were no signs of any change when he looked into the
+actual painting, and yet there was no doubt that the whole expression
+had altered. It was not a mere fancy of his own. The thing was
+horribly apparent.
+
+He threw himself into a chair and began to think. Suddenly there
+flashed across his mind what he had said in Basil Hallward's studio the
+day the picture had been finished. Yes, he remembered it perfectly.
+He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the
+portrait grow old; that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the
+face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that
+the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and
+thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness
+of his then just conscious boyhood. Surely his wish had not been
+fulfilled? Such things were impossible. It seemed monstrous even to
+think of them. And, yet, there was the picture before him, with the
+touch of cruelty in the mouth.
+
+Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. He had
+dreamed of her as a great artist, had given his love to her because he
+had thought her great. Then she had disappointed him. She had been
+shallow and unworthy. And, yet, a feeling of infinite regret came over
+him, as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a little
+child. He remembered with what callousness he had watched her. Why
+had he been made like that? Why had such a soul been given to him?
+But he had suffered also. During the three terrible hours that the
+play had lasted, he had lived centuries of pain, aeon upon aeon of
+torture. His life was well worth hers. She had marred him for a
+moment, if he had wounded her for an age. Besides, women were better
+suited to bear sorrow than men. They lived on their emotions. They
+only thought of their emotions. When they took lovers, it was merely
+to have some one with whom they could have scenes. Lord Henry had told
+him that, and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble
+about Sibyl Vane? She was nothing to him now.
+
+But the picture? What was he to say of that? It held the secret of
+his life, and told his story. It had taught him to love his own
+beauty. Would it teach him to loathe his own soul? Would he ever look
+at it again?
+
+No; it was merely an illusion wrought on the troubled senses. The
+horrible night that he had passed had left phantoms behind it.
+Suddenly there had fallen upon his brain that tiny scarlet speck that
+makes men mad. The picture had not changed. It was folly to think so.
+
+Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and its cruel
+smile. Its bright hair gleamed in the early sunlight. Its blue eyes
+met his own. A sense of infinite pity, not for himself, but for the
+painted image of himself, came over him. It had altered already, and
+would alter more. Its gold would wither into grey. Its red and white
+roses would die. For every sin that he committed, a stain would fleck
+and wreck its fairness. But he would not sin. The picture, changed or
+unchanged, would be to him the visible emblem of conscience. He would
+resist temptation. He would not see Lord Henry any more--would not, at
+any rate, listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil
+Hallward's garden had first stirred within him the passion for
+impossible things. He would go back to Sibyl Vane, make her amends,
+marry her, try to love her again. Yes, it was his duty to do so. She
+must have suffered more than he had. Poor child! He had been selfish
+and cruel to her. The fascination that she had exercised over him
+would return. They would be happy together. His life with her would
+be beautiful and pure.
+
+He got up from his chair and drew a large screen right in front of the
+portrait, shuddering as he glanced at it. "How horrible!" he murmured
+to himself, and he walked across to the window and opened it. When he
+stepped out on to the grass, he drew a deep breath. The fresh morning
+air seemed to drive away all his sombre passions. He thought only of
+Sibyl. A faint echo of his love came back to him. He repeated her
+name over and over again. The birds that were singing in the
+dew-drenched garden seemed to be telling the flowers about her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 8
+
+It was long past noon when he awoke. His valet had crept several times
+on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring, and had wondered
+what made his young master sleep so late. Finally his bell sounded,
+and Victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile of letters, on
+a small tray of old Sevres china, and drew back the olive-satin
+curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in front of the
+three tall windows.
+
+"Monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling.
+
+"What o'clock is it, Victor?" asked Dorian Gray drowsily.
+
+"One hour and a quarter, Monsieur."
+
+How late it was! He sat up, and having sipped some tea, turned over
+his letters. One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought by
+hand that morning. He hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside.
+The others he opened listlessly. They contained the usual collection
+of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes
+of charity concerts, and the like that are showered on fashionable
+young men every morning during the season. There was a rather heavy
+bill for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set that he had not yet
+had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely
+old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when
+unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were several
+very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders
+offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the
+most reasonable rates of interest.
+
+After about ten minutes he got up, and throwing on an elaborate
+dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the
+onyx-paved bathroom. The cool water refreshed him after his long
+sleep. He seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through. A
+dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once
+or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it.
+
+As soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a
+light French breakfast that had been laid out for him on a small round
+table close to the open window. It was an exquisite day. The warm air
+seemed laden with spices. A bee flew in and buzzed round the
+blue-dragon bowl that, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, stood before
+him. He felt perfectly happy.
+
+Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the
+portrait, and he started.
+
+"Too cold for Monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the
+table. "I shut the window?"
+
+Dorian shook his head. "I am not cold," he murmured.
+
+Was it all true? Had the portrait really changed? Or had it been
+simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where
+there had been a look of joy? Surely a painted canvas could not alter?
+The thing was absurd. It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day.
+It would make him smile.
+
+And, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing! First in
+the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of
+cruelty round the warped lips. He almost dreaded his valet leaving the
+room. He knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the
+portrait. He was afraid of certainty. When the coffee and cigarettes
+had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a wild desire to
+tell him to remain. As the door was closing behind him, he called him
+back. The man stood waiting for his orders. Dorian looked at him for
+a moment. "I am not at home to any one, Victor," he said with a sigh.
+The man bowed and retired.
+
+Then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on
+a luxuriously cushioned couch that stood facing the screen. The screen
+was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a
+rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern. He scanned it curiously,
+wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life.
+
+Should he move it aside, after all? Why not let it stay there? What
+was the use of knowing? If the thing was true, it was terrible. If it
+was not true, why trouble about it? But what if, by some fate or
+deadlier chance, eyes other than his spied behind and saw the horrible
+change? What should he do if Basil Hallward came and asked to look at
+his own picture? Basil would be sure to do that. No; the thing had to
+be examined, and at once. Anything would be better than this dreadful
+state of doubt.
+
+He got up and locked both doors. At least he would be alone when he
+looked upon the mask of his shame. Then he drew the screen aside and
+saw himself face to face. It was perfectly true. The portrait had
+altered.
+
+As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he
+found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost
+scientific interest. That such a change should have taken place was
+incredible to him. And yet it was a fact. Was there some subtle
+affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form
+and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be
+that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they
+made true? Or was there some other, more terrible reason? He
+shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there,
+gazing at the picture in sickened horror.
+
+One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him. It had made him
+conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane. It was not
+too late to make reparation for that. She could still be his wife.
+His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would
+be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil
+Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would
+be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the
+fear of God to us all. There were opiates for remorse, drugs that
+could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of
+the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men
+brought upon their souls.
+
+Three o'clock struck, and four, and the half-hour rang its double
+chime, but Dorian Gray did not stir. He was trying to gather up the
+scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern; to find his
+way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was
+wandering. He did not know what to do, or what to think. Finally, he
+went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had
+loved, imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness. He
+covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of
+pain. There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we
+feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession,
+not the priest, that gives us absolution. When Dorian had finished the
+letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.
+
+Suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard Lord Henry's
+voice outside. "My dear boy, I must see you. Let me in at once. I
+can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."
+
+He made no answer at first, but remained quite still. The knocking
+still continued and grew louder. Yes, it was better to let Lord Henry
+in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel
+with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was
+inevitable. He jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture,
+and unlocked the door.
+
+"I am so sorry for it all, Dorian," said Lord Henry as he entered.
+"But you must not think too much about it."
+
+"Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?" asked the lad.
+
+"Yes, of course," answered Lord Henry, sinking into a chair and slowly
+pulling off his yellow gloves. "It is dreadful, from one point of
+view, but it was not your fault. Tell me, did you go behind and see
+her, after the play was over?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I felt sure you had. Did you make a scene with her?"
+
+"I was brutal, Harry--perfectly brutal. But it is all right now. I am
+not sorry for anything that has happened. It has taught me to know
+myself better."
+
+"Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it in that way! I was afraid I
+would find you plunged in remorse and tearing that nice curly hair of
+yours."
+
+"I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head and
+smiling. "I am perfectly happy now. I know what conscience is, to
+begin with. It is not what you told me it was. It is the divinest
+thing in us. Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more--at least not before
+me. I want to be good. I can't bear the idea of my soul being
+hideous."
+
+"A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you
+on it. But how are you going to begin?"
+
+"By marrying Sibyl Vane."
+
+"Marrying Sibyl Vane!" cried Lord Henry, standing up and looking at him
+in perplexed amazement. "But, my dear Dorian--"
+
+"Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say. Something dreadful
+about marriage. Don't say it. Don't ever say things of that kind to
+me again. Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me. I am not going to
+break my word to her. She is to be my wife."
+
+"Your wife! Dorian! ... Didn't you get my letter? I wrote to you this
+morning, and sent the note down by my own man."
+
+"Your letter? Oh, yes, I remember. I have not read it yet, Harry. I
+was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like. You
+cut life to pieces with your epigrams."
+
+"You know nothing then?"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+Lord Henry walked across the room, and sitting down by Dorian Gray,
+took both his hands in his own and held them tightly. "Dorian," he
+said, "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that Sibyl Vane
+is dead."
+
+A cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet,
+tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp. "Dead! Sibyl dead!
+It is not true! It is a horrible lie! How dare you say it?"
+
+"It is quite true, Dorian," said Lord Henry, gravely. "It is in all
+the morning papers. I wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one
+till I came. There will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must
+not be mixed up in it. Things like that make a man fashionable in
+Paris. But in London people are so prejudiced. Here, one should never
+make one's _debut_ with a scandal. One should reserve that to give an
+interest to one's old age. I suppose they don't know your name at the
+theatre? If they don't, it is all right. Did any one see you going
+round to her room? That is an important point."
+
+Dorian did not answer for a few moments. He was dazed with horror.
+Finally he stammered, in a stifled voice, "Harry, did you say an
+inquest? What did you mean by that? Did Sibyl--? Oh, Harry, I can't
+bear it! But be quick. Tell me everything at once."
+
+"I have no doubt it was not an accident, Dorian, though it must be put
+in that way to the public. It seems that as she was leaving the
+theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had
+forgotten something upstairs. They waited some time for her, but she
+did not come down again. They ultimately found her lying dead on the
+floor of her dressing-room. She had swallowed something by mistake,
+some dreadful thing they use at theatres. I don't know what it was,
+but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it. I should fancy it
+was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously."
+
+"Harry, Harry, it is terrible!" cried the lad.
+
+"Yes; it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed
+up in it. I see by _The Standard_ that she was seventeen. I should have
+thought she was almost younger than that. She looked such a child, and
+seemed to know so little about acting. Dorian, you mustn't let this
+thing get on your nerves. You must come and dine with me, and
+afterwards we will look in at the opera. It is a Patti night, and
+everybody will be there. You can come to my sister's box. She has got
+some smart women with her."
+
+"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself,
+"murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife.
+Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as
+happily in my garden. And to-night I am to dine with you, and then go
+on to the opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose, afterwards. How
+extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book,
+Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has
+happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears.
+Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my
+life. Strange, that my first passionate love-letter should have been
+addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent
+people we call the dead? Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen?
+Oh, Harry, how I loved her once! It seems years ago to me now. She
+was everything to me. Then came that dreadful night--was it really
+only last night?--when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke.
+She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic. But I was not
+moved a bit. I thought her shallow. Suddenly something happened that
+made me afraid. I can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible. I
+said I would go back to her. I felt I had done wrong. And now she is
+dead. My God! My God! Harry, what shall I do? You don't know the
+danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight. She would
+have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was
+selfish of her."
+
+"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case
+and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever
+reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible
+interest in life. If you had married this girl, you would have been
+wretched. Of course, you would have treated her kindly. One can
+always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing. But she would
+have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her. And
+when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes
+dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's
+husband has to pay for. I say nothing about the social mistake, which
+would have been abject--which, of course, I would not have allowed--but
+I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an
+absolute failure."
+
+"I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room
+and looking horribly pale. "But I thought it was my duty. It is not
+my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was
+right. I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good
+resolutions--that they are always made too late. Mine certainly were."
+
+"Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific
+laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely _nil_.
+They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions
+that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said
+for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they
+have no account."
+
+"Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
+"why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to? I
+don't think I am heartless. Do you?"
+
+"You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be
+entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry with
+his sweet melancholy smile.
+
+The lad frowned. "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he rejoined,
+"but I am glad you don't think I am heartless. I am nothing of the
+kind. I know I am not. And yet I must admit that this thing that has
+happened does not affect me as it should. It seems to me to be simply
+like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play. It has all the terrible
+beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but
+by which I have not been wounded."
+
+"It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an
+exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism, "an
+extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is
+this: It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
+an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
+absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
+of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us
+an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
+Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
+beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the
+whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly
+we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
+play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
+of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that
+has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I
+wish that I had ever had such an experience. It would have made me in
+love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have adored
+me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have
+always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them,
+or they to care for me. They have become stout and tedious, and when I
+meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of
+woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual
+stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one
+should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar."
+
+"I must sow poppies in my garden," sighed Dorian.
+
+"There is no necessity," rejoined his companion. "Life has always
+poppies in her hands. Of course, now and then things linger. I once
+wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic
+mourning for a romance that would not die. Ultimately, however, it did
+die. I forget what killed it. I think it was her proposing to
+sacrifice the whole world for me. That is always a dreadful moment.
+It fills one with the terror of eternity. Well--would you believe
+it?--a week ago, at Lady Hampshire's, I found myself seated at dinner
+next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole
+thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future. I had
+buried my romance in a bed of asphodel. She dragged it out again and
+assured me that I had spoiled her life. I am bound to state that she
+ate an enormous dinner, so I did not feel any anxiety. But what a lack
+of taste she showed! The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
+But women never know when the curtain has fallen. They always want a
+sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over,
+they propose to continue it. If they were allowed their own way, every
+comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in
+a farce. They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of
+art. You are more fortunate than I am. I assure you, Dorian, that not
+one of the women I have known would have done for me what Sibyl Vane
+did for you. Ordinary women always console themselves. Some of them
+do it by going in for sentimental colours. Never trust a woman who
+wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who
+is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history.
+Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good
+qualities of their husbands. They flaunt their conjugal felicity in
+one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins. Religion
+consoles some. Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a
+woman once told me, and I can quite understand it. Besides, nothing
+makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes
+egotists of us all. Yes; there is really no end to the consolations
+that women find in modern life. Indeed, I have not mentioned the most
+important one."
+
+"What is that, Harry?" said the lad listlessly.
+
+"Oh, the obvious consolation. Taking some one else's admirer when one
+loses one's own. In good society that always whitewashes a woman. But
+really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the
+women one meets! There is something to me quite beautiful about her
+death. I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
+They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with,
+such as romance, passion, and love."
+
+"I was terribly cruel to her. You forget that."
+
+"I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more
+than anything else. They have wonderfully primitive instincts. We
+have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their
+masters, all the same. They love being dominated. I am sure you were
+splendid. I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can
+fancy how delightful you looked. And, after all, you said something to
+me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely
+fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key
+to everything."
+
+"What was that, Harry?"
+
+"You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of
+romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that
+if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."
+
+"She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his
+face in his hands.
+
+"No, she will never come to life. She has played her last part. But
+you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply
+as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful
+scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur. The girl never really
+lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was
+always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and
+left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's
+music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched
+actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.
+Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because
+Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of
+Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was
+less real than they are."
+
+There was a silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly,
+and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden. The
+colours faded wearily out of things.
+
+After some time Dorian Gray looked up. "You have explained me to
+myself, Harry," he murmured with something of a sigh of relief. "I
+felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I
+could not express it to myself. How well you know me! But we will not
+talk again of what has happened. It has been a marvellous experience.
+That is all. I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as
+marvellous."
+
+"Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that
+you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do."
+
+"But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled? What
+then?"
+
+"Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go, "then, my dear Dorian, you
+would have to fight for your victories. As it is, they are brought to
+you. No, you must keep your good looks. We live in an age that reads
+too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. We
+cannot spare you. And now you had better dress and drive down to the
+club. We are rather late, as it is."
+
+"I think I shall join you at the opera, Harry. I feel too tired to eat
+anything. What is the number of your sister's box?"
+
+"Twenty-seven, I believe. It is on the grand tier. You will see her
+name on the door. But I am sorry you won't come and dine."
+
+"I don't feel up to it," said Dorian listlessly. "But I am awfully
+obliged to you for all that you have said to me. You are certainly my
+best friend. No one has ever understood me as you have."
+
+"We are only at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered Lord
+Henry, shaking him by the hand. "Good-bye. I shall see you before
+nine-thirty, I hope. Remember, Patti is singing."
+
+As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell, and in
+a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down.
+He waited impatiently for him to go. The man seemed to take an
+interminable time over everything.
+
+As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen and drew it back. No;
+there was no further change in the picture. It had received the news
+of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself. It was
+conscious of the events of life as they occurred. The vicious cruelty
+that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the
+very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was. Or
+was it indifferent to results? Did it merely take cognizance of what
+passed within the soul? He wondered, and hoped that some day he would
+see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he
+hoped it.
+
+Poor Sibyl! What a romance it had all been! She had often mimicked
+death on the stage. Then Death himself had touched her and taken her
+with him. How had she played that dreadful last scene? Had she cursed
+him, as she died? No; she had died for love of him, and love would
+always be a sacrament to him now. She had atoned for everything by the
+sacrifice she had made of her life. He would not think any more of
+what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the
+theatre. When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic
+figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of
+love. A wonderful tragic figure? Tears came to his eyes as he
+remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy
+tremulous grace. He brushed them away hastily and looked again at the
+picture.
+
+He felt that the time had really come for making his choice. Or had
+his choice already been made? Yes, life had decided that for
+him--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth,
+infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder
+sins--he was to have all these things. The portrait was to bear the
+burden of his shame: that was all.
+
+A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that
+was in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery
+of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips
+that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had sat
+before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as
+it seemed to him at times. Was it to alter now with every mood to
+which he yielded? Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to
+be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that
+had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair?
+The pity of it! the pity of it!
+
+For a moment, he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that
+existed between him and the picture might cease. It had changed in
+answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain
+unchanged. And yet, who, that knew anything about life, would
+surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that
+chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?
+Besides, was it really under his control? Had it indeed been prayer
+that had produced the substitution? Might there not be some curious
+scientific reason for it all? If thought could exercise its influence
+upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon
+dead and inorganic things? Nay, without thought or conscious desire,
+might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods
+and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?
+But the reason was of no importance. He would never again tempt by a
+prayer any terrible power. If the picture was to alter, it was to
+alter. That was all. Why inquire too closely into it?
+
+For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to
+follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him
+the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body,
+so it would reveal to him his own soul. And when winter came upon it,
+he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of
+summer. When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid
+mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood.
+Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse of
+his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be
+strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the
+coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.
+
+He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture,
+smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was
+already waiting for him. An hour later he was at the opera, and Lord
+Henry was leaning over his chair.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 9
+
+As he was sitting at breakfast next morning, Basil Hallward was shown
+into the room.
+
+"I am so glad I have found you, Dorian," he said gravely. "I called
+last night, and they told me you were at the opera. Of course, I knew
+that was impossible. But I wish you had left word where you had really
+gone to. I passed a dreadful evening, half afraid that one tragedy
+might be followed by another. I think you might have telegraphed for
+me when you heard of it first. I read of it quite by chance in a late
+edition of _The Globe_ that I picked up at the club. I came here at once
+and was miserable at not finding you. I can't tell you how
+heart-broken I am about the whole thing. I know what you must suffer.
+But where were you? Did you go down and see the girl's mother? For a
+moment I thought of following you there. They gave the address in the
+paper. Somewhere in the Euston Road, isn't it? But I was afraid of
+intruding upon a sorrow that I could not lighten. Poor woman! What a
+state she must be in! And her only child, too! What did she say about
+it all?"
+
+"My dear Basil, how do I know?" murmured Dorian Gray, sipping some
+pale-yellow wine from a delicate, gold-beaded bubble of Venetian glass
+and looking dreadfully bored. "I was at the opera. You should have
+come on there. I met Lady Gwendolen, Harry's sister, for the first
+time. We were in her box. She is perfectly charming; and Patti sang
+divinely. Don't talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn't talk about
+a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry
+says, that gives reality to things. I may mention that she was not the
+woman's only child. There is a son, a charming fellow, I believe. But
+he is not on the stage. He is a sailor, or something. And now, tell
+me about yourself and what you are painting."
+
+"You went to the opera?" said Hallward, speaking very slowly and with a
+strained touch of pain in his voice. "You went to the opera while
+Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging? You can talk to me
+of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely, before
+the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in? Why,
+man, there are horrors in store for that little white body of hers!"
+
+"Stop, Basil! I won't hear it!" cried Dorian, leaping to his feet.
+"You must not tell me about things. What is done is done. What is
+past is past."
+
+"You call yesterday the past?"
+
+"What has the actual lapse of time got to do with it? It is only
+shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who
+is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a
+pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to
+use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."
+
+"Dorian, this is horrible! Something has changed you completely. You
+look exactly the same wonderful boy who, day after day, used to come
+down to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple,
+natural, and affectionate then. You were the most unspoiled creature
+in the whole world. Now, I don't know what has come over you. You
+talk as if you had no heart, no pity in you. It is all Harry's
+influence. I see that."
+
+The lad flushed up and, going to the window, looked out for a few
+moments on the green, flickering, sun-lashed garden. "I owe a great
+deal to Harry, Basil," he said at last, "more than I owe to you. You
+only taught me to be vain."
+
+"Well, I am punished for that, Dorian--or shall be some day."
+
+"I don't know what you mean, Basil," he exclaimed, turning round. "I
+don't know what you want. What do you want?"
+
+"I want the Dorian Gray I used to paint," said the artist sadly.
+
+"Basil," said the lad, going over to him and putting his hand on his
+shoulder, "you have come too late. Yesterday, when I heard that Sibyl
+Vane had killed herself--"
+
+"Killed herself! Good heavens! is there no doubt about that?" cried
+Hallward, looking up at him with an expression of horror.
+
+"My dear Basil! Surely you don't think it was a vulgar accident? Of
+course she killed herself."
+
+The elder man buried his face in his hands. "How fearful," he
+muttered, and a shudder ran through him.
+
+"No," said Dorian Gray, "there is nothing fearful about it. It is one
+of the great romantic tragedies of the age. As a rule, people who act
+lead the most commonplace lives. They are good husbands, or faithful
+wives, or something tedious. You know what I mean--middle-class virtue
+and all that kind of thing. How different Sibyl was! She lived her
+finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she
+played--the night you saw her--she acted badly because she had known
+the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet
+might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art. There is
+something of the martyr about her. Her death has all the pathetic
+uselessness of martyrdom, all its wasted beauty. But, as I was saying,
+you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come in yesterday
+at a particular moment--about half-past five, perhaps, or a quarter to
+six--you would have found me in tears. Even Harry, who was here, who
+brought me the news, in fact, had no idea what I was going through. I
+suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion.
+No one can, except sentimentalists. And you are awfully unjust, Basil.
+You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find
+me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You
+remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who
+spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance
+redressed, or some unjust law altered--I forget exactly what it was.
+Finally he succeeded, and nothing could exceed his disappointment. He
+had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of _ennui_, and became a
+confirmed misanthrope. And besides, my dear old Basil, if you really
+want to console me, teach me rather to forget what has happened, or to
+see it from a proper artistic point of view. Was it not Gautier who
+used to write about _la consolation des arts_? I remember picking up a
+little vellum-covered book in your studio one day and chancing on that
+delightful phrase. Well, I am not like that young man you told me of
+when we were down at Marlow together, the young man who used to say
+that yellow satin could console one for all the miseries of life. I
+love beautiful things that one can touch and handle. Old brocades,
+green bronzes, lacquer-work, carved ivories, exquisite surroundings,
+luxury, pomp--there is much to be got from all these. But the artistic
+temperament that they create, or at any rate reveal, is still more to
+me. To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to
+escape the suffering of life. I know you are surprised at my talking
+to you like this. You have not realized how I have developed. I was a
+schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions, new
+thoughts, new ideas. I am different, but you must not like me less. I
+am changed, but you must always be my friend. Of course, I am very
+fond of Harry. But I know that you are better than he is. You are not
+stronger--you are too much afraid of life--but you are better. And how
+happy we used to be together! Don't leave me, Basil, and don't quarrel
+with me. I am what I am. There is nothing more to be said."
+
+The painter felt strangely moved. The lad was infinitely dear to him,
+and his personality had been the great turning point in his art. He
+could not bear the idea of reproaching him any more. After all, his
+indifference was probably merely a mood that would pass away. There
+was so much in him that was good, so much in him that was noble.
+
+"Well, Dorian," he said at length, with a sad smile, "I won't speak to
+you again about this horrible thing, after to-day. I only trust your
+name won't be mentioned in connection with it. The inquest is to take
+place this afternoon. Have they summoned you?"
+
+Dorian shook his head, and a look of annoyance passed over his face at
+the mention of the word "inquest." There was something so crude and
+vulgar about everything of the kind. "They don't know my name," he
+answered.
+
+"But surely she did?"
+
+"Only my Christian name, and that I am quite sure she never mentioned
+to any one. She told me once that they were all rather curious to
+learn who I was, and that she invariably told them my name was Prince
+Charming. It was pretty of her. You must do me a drawing of Sibyl,
+Basil. I should like to have something more of her than the memory of
+a few kisses and some broken pathetic words."
+
+"I will try and do something, Dorian, if it would please you. But you
+must come and sit to me yourself again. I can't get on without you."
+
+"I can never sit to you again, Basil. It is impossible!" he exclaimed,
+starting back.
+
+The painter stared at him. "My dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried.
+"Do you mean to say you don't like what I did of you? Where is it?
+Why have you pulled the screen in front of it? Let me look at it. It
+is the best thing I have ever done. Do take the screen away, Dorian.
+It is simply disgraceful of your servant hiding my work like that. I
+felt the room looked different as I came in."
+
+"My servant has nothing to do with it, Basil. You don't imagine I let
+him arrange my room for me? He settles my flowers for me
+sometimes--that is all. No; I did it myself. The light was too strong
+on the portrait."
+
+"Too strong! Surely not, my dear fellow? It is an admirable place for
+it. Let me see it." And Hallward walked towards the corner of the
+room.
+
+A cry of terror broke from Dorian Gray's lips, and he rushed between
+the painter and the screen. "Basil," he said, looking very pale, "you
+must not look at it. I don't wish you to."
+
+"Not look at my own work! You are not serious. Why shouldn't I look
+at it?" exclaimed Hallward, laughing.
+
+"If you try to look at it, Basil, on my word of honour I will never
+speak to you again as long as I live. I am quite serious. I don't
+offer any explanation, and you are not to ask for any. But, remember,
+if you touch this screen, everything is over between us."
+
+Hallward was thunderstruck. He looked at Dorian Gray in absolute
+amazement. He had never seen him like this before. The lad was
+actually pallid with rage. His hands were clenched, and the pupils of
+his eyes were like disks of blue fire. He was trembling all over.
+
+"Dorian!"
+
+"Don't speak!"
+
+"But what is the matter? Of course I won't look at it if you don't
+want me to," he said, rather coldly, turning on his heel and going over
+towards the window. "But, really, it seems rather absurd that I
+shouldn't see my own work, especially as I am going to exhibit it in
+Paris in the autumn. I shall probably have to give it another coat of
+varnish before that, so I must see it some day, and why not to-day?"
+
+"To exhibit it! You want to exhibit it?" exclaimed Dorian Gray, a
+strange sense of terror creeping over him. Was the world going to be
+shown his secret? Were people to gape at the mystery of his life?
+That was impossible. Something--he did not know what--had to be done
+at once.
+
+"Yes; I don't suppose you will object to that. Georges Petit is going
+to collect all my best pictures for a special exhibition in the Rue de
+Seze, which will open the first week in October. The portrait will
+only be away a month. I should think you could easily spare it for
+that time. In fact, you are sure to be out of town. And if you keep
+it always behind a screen, you can't care much about it."
+
+Dorian Gray passed his hand over his forehead. There were beads of
+perspiration there. He felt that he was on the brink of a horrible
+danger. "You told me a month ago that you would never exhibit it," he
+cried. "Why have you changed your mind? You people who go in for
+being consistent have just as many moods as others have. The only
+difference is that your moods are rather meaningless. You can't have
+forgotten that you assured me most solemnly that nothing in the world
+would induce you to send it to any exhibition. You told Harry exactly
+the same thing." He stopped suddenly, and a gleam of light came into
+his eyes. He remembered that Lord Henry had said to him once, half
+seriously and half in jest, "If you want to have a strange quarter of
+an hour, get Basil to tell you why he won't exhibit your picture. He
+told me why he wouldn't, and it was a revelation to me." Yes, perhaps
+Basil, too, had his secret. He would ask him and try.
+
+"Basil," he said, coming over quite close and looking him straight in
+the face, "we have each of us a secret. Let me know yours, and I shall
+tell you mine. What was your reason for refusing to exhibit my
+picture?"
+
+The painter shuddered in spite of himself. "Dorian, if I told you, you
+might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. I
+could not bear your doing either of those two things. If you wish me
+never to look at your picture again, I am content. I have always you
+to look at. If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden
+from the world, I am satisfied. Your friendship is dearer to me than
+any fame or reputation."
+
+"No, Basil, you must tell me," insisted Dorian Gray. "I think I have a
+right to know." His feeling of terror had passed away, and curiosity
+had taken its place. He was determined to find out Basil Hallward's
+mystery.
+
+"Let us sit down, Dorian," said the painter, looking troubled. "Let us
+sit down. And just answer me one question. Have you noticed in the
+picture something curious?--something that probably at first did not
+strike you, but that revealed itself to you suddenly?"
+
+"Basil!" cried the lad, clutching the arms of his chair with trembling
+hands and gazing at him with wild startled eyes.
+
+"I see you did. Don't speak. Wait till you hear what I have to say.
+Dorian, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most
+extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and
+power, by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen
+ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I
+worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I
+wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with
+you. When you were away from me, you were still present in my art....
+Of course, I never let you know anything about this. It would have
+been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly
+understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to
+face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes--too
+wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril
+of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them.... Weeks and
+weeks went on, and I grew more and more absorbed in you. Then came a
+new development. I had drawn you as Paris in dainty armour, and as
+Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished boar-spear. Crowned with
+heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing
+across the green turbid Nile. You had leaned over the still pool of
+some Greek woodland and seen in the water's silent silver the marvel of
+your own face. And it had all been what art should be--unconscious,
+ideal, and remote. One day, a fatal day I sometimes think, I
+determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually are,
+not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your own
+time. Whether it was the realism of the method, or the mere wonder of
+your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or
+veil, I cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it, every flake
+and film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid
+that others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told
+too much, that I had put too much of myself into it. Then it was that
+I resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a
+little annoyed; but then you did not realize all that it meant to me.
+Harry, to whom I talked about it, laughed at me. But I did not mind
+that. When the picture was finished, and I sat alone with it, I felt
+that I was right.... Well, after a few days the thing left my studio,
+and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its
+presence, it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I
+had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking
+and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a
+mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really
+shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we
+fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour--that is all. It
+often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than
+it ever reveals him. And so when I got this offer from Paris, I
+determined to make your portrait the principal thing in my exhibition.
+It never occurred to me that you would refuse. I see now that you were
+right. The picture cannot be shown. You must not be angry with me,
+Dorian, for what I have told you. As I said to Harry, once, you are
+made to be worshipped."
+
+Dorian Gray drew a long breath. The colour came back to his cheeks,
+and a smile played about his lips. The peril was over. He was safe
+for the time. Yet he could not help feeling infinite pity for the
+painter who had just made this strange confession to him, and wondered
+if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a
+friend. Lord Henry had the charm of being very dangerous. But that
+was all. He was too clever and too cynical to be really fond of.
+Would there ever be some one who would fill him with a strange
+idolatry? Was that one of the things that life had in store?
+
+"It is extraordinary to me, Dorian," said Hallward, "that you should
+have seen this in the portrait. Did you really see it?"
+
+"I saw something in it," he answered, "something that seemed to me very
+curious."
+
+"Well, you don't mind my looking at the thing now?"
+
+Dorian shook his head. "You must not ask me that, Basil. I could not
+possibly let you stand in front of that picture."
+
+"You will some day, surely?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Well, perhaps you are right. And now good-bye, Dorian. You have been
+the one person in my life who has really influenced my art. Whatever I
+have done that is good, I owe to you. Ah! you don't know what it cost
+me to tell you all that I have told you."
+
+"My dear Basil," said Dorian, "what have you told me? Simply that you
+felt that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment."
+
+"It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I
+have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one
+should never put one's worship into words."
+
+"It was a very disappointing confession."
+
+"Why, what did you expect, Dorian? You didn't see anything else in the
+picture, did you? There was nothing else to see?"
+
+"No; there was nothing else to see. Why do you ask? But you mustn't
+talk about worship. It is foolish. You and I are friends, Basil, and
+we must always remain so."
+
+"You have got Harry," said the painter sadly.
+
+"Oh, Harry!" cried the lad, with a ripple of laughter. "Harry spends
+his days in saying what is incredible and his evenings in doing what is
+improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead. But still I
+don't think I would go to Harry if I were in trouble. I would sooner
+go to you, Basil."
+
+"You will sit to me again?"
+
+"Impossible!"
+
+"You spoil my life as an artist by refusing, Dorian. No man comes
+across two ideal things. Few come across one."
+
+"I can't explain it to you, Basil, but I must never sit to you again.
+There is something fatal about a portrait. It has a life of its own.
+I will come and have tea with you. That will be just as pleasant."
+
+"Pleasanter for you, I am afraid," murmured Hallward regretfully. "And
+now good-bye. I am sorry you won't let me look at the picture once
+again. But that can't be helped. I quite understand what you feel
+about it."
+
+As he left the room, Dorian Gray smiled to himself. Poor Basil! How
+little he knew of the true reason! And how strange it was that,
+instead of having been forced to reveal his own secret, he had
+succeeded, almost by chance, in wresting a secret from his friend! How
+much that strange confession explained to him! The painter's absurd
+fits of jealousy, his wild devotion, his extravagant panegyrics, his
+curious reticences--he understood them all now, and he felt sorry.
+There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured
+by romance.
+
+He sighed and touched the bell. The portrait must be hidden away at
+all costs. He could not run such a risk of discovery again. It had
+been mad of him to have allowed the thing to remain, even for an hour,
+in a room to which any of his friends had access.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 10
+
+When his servant entered, he looked at him steadfastly and wondered if
+he had thought of peering behind the screen. The man was quite
+impassive and waited for his orders. Dorian lit a cigarette and walked
+over to the glass and glanced into it. He could see the reflection of
+Victor's face perfectly. It was like a placid mask of servility.
+There was nothing to be afraid of, there. Yet he thought it best to be
+on his guard.
+
+Speaking very slowly, he told him to tell the house-keeper that he
+wanted to see her, and then to go to the frame-maker and ask him to
+send two of his men round at once. It seemed to him that as the man
+left the room his eyes wandered in the direction of the screen. Or was
+that merely his own fancy?
+
+After a few moments, in her black silk dress, with old-fashioned thread
+mittens on her wrinkled hands, Mrs. Leaf bustled into the library. He
+asked her for the key of the schoolroom.
+
+"The old schoolroom, Mr. Dorian?" she exclaimed. "Why, it is full of
+dust. I must get it arranged and put straight before you go into it.
+It is not fit for you to see, sir. It is not, indeed."
+
+"I don't want it put straight, Leaf. I only want the key."
+
+"Well, sir, you'll be covered with cobwebs if you go into it. Why, it
+hasn't been opened for nearly five years--not since his lordship died."
+
+He winced at the mention of his grandfather. He had hateful memories
+of him. "That does not matter," he answered. "I simply want to see
+the place--that is all. Give me the key."
+
+"And here is the key, sir," said the old lady, going over the contents
+of her bunch with tremulously uncertain hands. "Here is the key. I'll
+have it off the bunch in a moment. But you don't think of living up
+there, sir, and you so comfortable here?"
+
+"No, no," he cried petulantly. "Thank you, Leaf. That will do."
+
+She lingered for a few moments, and was garrulous over some detail of
+the household. He sighed and told her to manage things as she thought
+best. She left the room, wreathed in smiles.
+
+As the door closed, Dorian put the key in his pocket and looked round
+the room. His eye fell on a large, purple satin coverlet heavily
+embroidered with gold, a splendid piece of late seventeenth-century
+Venetian work that his grandfather had found in a convent near Bologna.
+Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in. It had perhaps
+served often as a pall for the dead. Now it was to hide something that
+had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death
+itself--something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.
+What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image
+on the canvas. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. They
+would defile it and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still
+live on. It would be always alive.
+
+He shuddered, and for a moment he regretted that he had not told Basil
+the true reason why he had wished to hide the picture away. Basil
+would have helped him to resist Lord Henry's influence, and the still
+more poisonous influences that came from his own temperament. The love
+that he bore him--for it was really love--had nothing in it that was
+not noble and intellectual. It was not that mere physical admiration
+of beauty that is born of the senses and that dies when the senses
+tire. It was such love as Michelangelo had known, and Montaigne, and
+Winckelmann, and Shakespeare himself. Yes, Basil could have saved him.
+But it was too late now. The past could always be annihilated.
+Regret, denial, or forgetfulness could do that. But the future was
+inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible
+outlet, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.
+
+He took up from the couch the great purple-and-gold texture that
+covered it, and, holding it in his hands, passed behind the screen.
+Was the face on the canvas viler than before? It seemed to him that it
+was unchanged, and yet his loathing of it was intensified. Gold hair,
+blue eyes, and rose-red lips--they all were there. It was simply the
+expression that had altered. That was horrible in its cruelty.
+Compared to what he saw in it of censure or rebuke, how shallow Basil's
+reproaches about Sibyl Vane had been!--how shallow, and of what little
+account! His own soul was looking out at him from the canvas and
+calling him to judgement. A look of pain came across him, and he flung
+the rich pall over the picture. As he did so, a knock came to the
+door. He passed out as his servant entered.
+
+"The persons are here, Monsieur."
+
+He felt that the man must be got rid of at once. He must not be
+allowed to know where the picture was being taken to. There was
+something sly about him, and he had thoughtful, treacherous eyes.
+Sitting down at the writing-table he scribbled a note to Lord Henry,
+asking him to send him round something to read and reminding him that
+they were to meet at eight-fifteen that evening.
+
+"Wait for an answer," he said, handing it to him, "and show the men in
+here."
+
+In two or three minutes there was another knock, and Mr. Hubbard
+himself, the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street, came in
+with a somewhat rough-looking young assistant. Mr. Hubbard was a
+florid, red-whiskered little man, whose admiration for art was
+considerably tempered by the inveterate impecuniosity of most of the
+artists who dealt with him. As a rule, he never left his shop. He
+waited for people to come to him. But he always made an exception in
+favour of Dorian Gray. There was something about Dorian that charmed
+everybody. It was a pleasure even to see him.
+
+"What can I do for you, Mr. Gray?" he said, rubbing his fat freckled
+hands. "I thought I would do myself the honour of coming round in
+person. I have just got a beauty of a frame, sir. Picked it up at a
+sale. Old Florentine. Came from Fonthill, I believe. Admirably
+suited for a religious subject, Mr. Gray."
+
+"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round, Mr.
+Hubbard. I shall certainly drop in and look at the frame--though I
+don't go in much at present for religious art--but to-day I only want a
+picture carried to the top of the house for me. It is rather heavy, so
+I thought I would ask you to lend me a couple of your men."
+
+"No trouble at all, Mr. Gray. I am delighted to be of any service to
+you. Which is the work of art, sir?"
+
+"This," replied Dorian, moving the screen back. "Can you move it,
+covering and all, just as it is? I don't want it to get scratched
+going upstairs."
+
+"There will be no difficulty, sir," said the genial frame-maker,
+beginning, with the aid of his assistant, to unhook the picture from
+the long brass chains by which it was suspended. "And, now, where
+shall we carry it to, Mr. Gray?"
+
+"I will show you the way, Mr. Hubbard, if you will kindly follow me.
+Or perhaps you had better go in front. I am afraid it is right at the
+top of the house. We will go up by the front staircase, as it is
+wider."
+
+He held the door open for them, and they passed out into the hall and
+began the ascent. The elaborate character of the frame had made the
+picture extremely bulky, and now and then, in spite of the obsequious
+protests of Mr. Hubbard, who had the true tradesman's spirited dislike
+of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful, Dorian put his hand to it
+so as to help them.
+
+"Something of a load to carry, sir," gasped the little man when they
+reached the top landing. And he wiped his shiny forehead.
+
+"I am afraid it is rather heavy," murmured Dorian as he unlocked the
+door that opened into the room that was to keep for him the curious
+secret of his life and hide his soul from the eyes of men.
+
+He had not entered the place for more than four years--not, indeed,
+since he had used it first as a play-room when he was a child, and then
+as a study when he grew somewhat older. It was a large,
+well-proportioned room, which had been specially built by the last Lord
+Kelso for the use of the little grandson whom, for his strange likeness
+to his mother, and also for other reasons, he had always hated and
+desired to keep at a distance. It appeared to Dorian to have but
+little changed. There was the huge Italian _cassone_, with its
+fantastically painted panels and its tarnished gilt mouldings, in which
+he had so often hidden himself as a boy. There the satinwood book-case
+filled with his dog-eared schoolbooks. On the wall behind it was
+hanging the same ragged Flemish tapestry where a faded king and queen
+were playing chess in a garden, while a company of hawkers rode by,
+carrying hooded birds on their gauntleted wrists. How well he
+remembered it all! Every moment of his lonely childhood came back to
+him as he looked round. He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish
+life, and it seemed horrible to him that it was here the fatal portrait
+was to be hidden away. How little he had thought, in those dead days,
+of all that was in store for him!
+
+But there was no other place in the house so secure from prying eyes as
+this. He had the key, and no one else could enter it. Beneath its
+purple pall, the face painted on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden,
+and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself
+would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his
+soul? He kept his youth--that was enough. And, besides, might not
+his nature grow finer, after all? There was no reason that the future
+should be so full of shame. Some love might come across his life, and
+purify him, and shield him from those sins that seemed to be already
+stirring in spirit and in flesh--those curious unpictured sins whose
+very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm. Perhaps, some
+day, the cruel look would have passed away from the scarlet sensitive
+mouth, and he might show to the world Basil Hallward's masterpiece.
+
+No; that was impossible. Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing
+upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of
+sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it. The cheeks would
+become hollow or flaccid. Yellow crow's feet would creep round the
+fading eyes and make them horrible. The hair would lose its
+brightness, the mouth would gape or droop, would be foolish or gross,
+as the mouths of old men are. There would be the wrinkled throat, the
+cold, blue-veined hands, the twisted body, that he remembered in the
+grandfather who had been so stern to him in his boyhood. The picture
+had to be concealed. There was no help for it.
+
+"Bring it in, Mr. Hubbard, please," he said, wearily, turning round.
+"I am sorry I kept you so long. I was thinking of something else."
+
+"Always glad to have a rest, Mr. Gray," answered the frame-maker, who
+was still gasping for breath. "Where shall we put it, sir?"
+
+"Oh, anywhere. Here: this will do. I don't want to have it hung up.
+Just lean it against the wall. Thanks."
+
+"Might one look at the work of art, sir?"
+
+Dorian started. "It would not interest you, Mr. Hubbard," he said,
+keeping his eye on the man. He felt ready to leap upon him and fling
+him to the ground if he dared to lift the gorgeous hanging that
+concealed the secret of his life. "I shan't trouble you any more now.
+I am much obliged for your kindness in coming round."
+
+"Not at all, not at all, Mr. Gray. Ever ready to do anything for you,
+sir." And Mr. Hubbard tramped downstairs, followed by the assistant,
+who glanced back at Dorian with a look of shy wonder in his rough
+uncomely face. He had never seen any one so marvellous.
+
+When the sound of their footsteps had died away, Dorian locked the door
+and put the key in his pocket. He felt safe now. No one would ever
+look upon the horrible thing. No eye but his would ever see his shame.
+
+On reaching the library, he found that it was just after five o'clock
+and that the tea had been already brought up. On a little table of
+dark perfumed wood thickly incrusted with nacre, a present from Lady
+Radley, his guardian's wife, a pretty professional invalid who had
+spent the preceding winter in Cairo, was lying a note from Lord Henry,
+and beside it was a book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn
+and the edges soiled. A copy of the third edition of _The St. James's
+Gazette_ had been placed on the tea-tray. It was evident that Victor had
+returned. He wondered if he had met the men in the hall as they were
+leaving the house and had wormed out of them what they had been doing.
+He would be sure to miss the picture--had no doubt missed it already,
+while he had been laying the tea-things. The screen had not been set
+back, and a blank space was visible on the wall. Perhaps some night he
+might find him creeping upstairs and trying to force the door of the
+room. It was a horrible thing to have a spy in one's house. He had
+heard of rich men who had been blackmailed all their lives by some
+servant who had read a letter, or overheard a conversation, or picked
+up a card with an address, or found beneath a pillow a withered flower
+or a shred of crumpled lace.
+
+He sighed, and having poured himself out some tea, opened Lord Henry's
+note. It was simply to say that he sent him round the evening paper,
+and a book that might interest him, and that he would be at the club at
+eight-fifteen. He opened _The St. James's_ languidly, and looked through
+it. A red pencil-mark on the fifth page caught his eye. It drew
+attention to the following paragraph:
+
+
+INQUEST ON AN ACTRESS.--An inquest was held this morning at the Bell
+Tavern, Hoxton Road, by Mr. Danby, the District Coroner, on the body of
+Sibyl Vane, a young actress recently engaged at the Royal Theatre,
+Holborn. A verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
+Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who
+was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of
+Dr. Birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased.
+
+
+He frowned, and tearing the paper in two, went across the room and
+flung the pieces away. How ugly it all was! And how horribly real
+ugliness made things! He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for
+having sent him the report. And it was certainly stupid of him to have
+marked it with red pencil. Victor might have read it. The man knew
+more than enough English for that.
+
+Perhaps he had read it and had begun to suspect something. And, yet,
+what did it matter? What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's
+death? There was nothing to fear. Dorian Gray had not killed her.
+
+His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was
+it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal
+stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange
+Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung
+himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a
+few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had
+ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the
+delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb
+show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly
+made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually
+revealed.
+
+It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being,
+indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who
+spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
+passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his
+own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through
+which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere
+artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue,
+as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The
+style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid
+and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms, of technical
+expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work
+of some of the finest artists of the French school of _Symbolistes_.
+There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in
+colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical
+philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the
+spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions
+of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of
+incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The
+mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so
+full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated,
+produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter,
+a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of
+the falling day and creeping shadows.
+
+Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed
+through the windows. He read on by its wan light till he could read no
+more. Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the
+lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed
+the book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his
+bedside and began to dress for dinner.
+
+It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the club, where he found
+Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking very much bored.
+
+"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but really it is entirely your
+fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the
+time was going."
+
+"Yes, I thought you would like it," replied his host, rising from his
+chair.
+
+"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a
+great difference."
+
+"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry. And they passed
+into the dining-room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 11
+
+For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of
+this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never
+sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than
+nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
+different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the
+changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have
+almost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian
+in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely
+blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And,
+indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own
+life, written before he had lived it.
+
+In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero. He
+never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat
+grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still
+water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was
+occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once, apparently,
+been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in
+nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its
+place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its
+really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow and
+despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he
+had most dearly valued.
+
+For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and
+many others besides him, seemed never to leave him. Even those who had
+heard the most evil things against him--and from time to time strange
+rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the
+chatter of the clubs--could not believe anything to his dishonour when
+they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself
+unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when
+Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his
+face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the
+memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. They wondered how one
+so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an
+age that was at once sordid and sensual.
+
+Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged
+absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were
+his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep
+upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left
+him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil
+Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on
+the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him
+from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to
+quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his
+own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
+He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and
+terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead
+or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which
+were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would
+place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture,
+and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
+
+There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own
+delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little
+ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in
+disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he
+had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant
+because it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare.
+That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as
+they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase
+with gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He
+had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.
+
+Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to
+society. Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each
+Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the
+world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the
+day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little
+dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were
+noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited,
+as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with
+its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered
+cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. Indeed, there were many,
+especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw,
+in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often
+dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of
+the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and
+perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them he seemed to be of
+the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make
+themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one
+for whom "the visible world existed."
+
+And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the
+arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
+Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment
+universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert
+the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for
+him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to
+time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of
+the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in
+everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of
+his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.
+
+For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost
+immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a
+subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the
+London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the
+Satyricon once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be
+something more than a mere _arbiter elegantiarum_, to be consulted on the
+wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a
+cane. He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have
+its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the
+spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
+
+The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
+decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
+sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
+conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.
+But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had
+never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal
+merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or
+to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a
+new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the
+dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through
+history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been
+surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful
+rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose
+origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more
+terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance,
+they had sought to escape; Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out
+the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to
+the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.
+
+Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism
+that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely
+puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was
+to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to
+accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any
+mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to be experience
+itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might
+be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar
+profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. But it was to
+teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that is
+itself but a moment.
+
+There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either
+after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of
+death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through
+the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality
+itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,
+and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one
+might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled
+with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the
+curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb
+shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside,
+there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men
+going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down
+from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it
+feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from
+her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by
+degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we
+watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan
+mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we
+had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been
+studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the
+letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
+Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night
+comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where
+we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the
+necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of
+stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids
+might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in
+the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh
+shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in
+which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
+in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of
+joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
+
+It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray
+to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his
+search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and
+possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
+would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
+alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and
+then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
+intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
+is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
+indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
+of it.
+
+It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman
+Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great
+attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all
+the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb
+rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity
+of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it
+sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble
+pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly
+and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or
+raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid
+wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "_panis
+caelestis_," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the
+Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his
+breast for his sins. The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their
+lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their
+subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with
+wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of
+one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn
+grating the true story of their lives.
+
+But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
+development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
+mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable
+for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which
+there are no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its
+marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
+antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a
+season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of
+the _Darwinismus_ movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in
+tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the
+brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of
+the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
+morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him
+before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance
+compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all
+intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
+He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual
+mysteries to reveal.
+
+And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their
+manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums
+from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not
+its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their
+true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one
+mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets
+that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
+brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often
+to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several
+influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers;
+of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that
+sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to
+be able to expel melancholy from the soul.
+
+At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long
+latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of
+olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad
+gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled
+Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while
+grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching
+upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of
+reed or brass and charmed--or feigned to charm--great hooded snakes and
+horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of
+barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's
+beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell
+unheeded on his ear. He collected together from all parts of the world
+the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of
+dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact
+with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them. He had
+the mysterious _juruparis_ of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not
+allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been
+subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the
+Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human
+bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile, and the sonorous green
+jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular
+sweetness. He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when
+they were shaken; the long _clarin_ of the Mexicans, into which the
+performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the
+harsh _ture_ of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who
+sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a
+distance of three leagues; the _teponaztli_, that has two vibrating
+tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an
+elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the _yotl_-bells of
+the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge
+cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the
+one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican
+temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a
+description. The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated
+him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like
+Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous
+voices. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his
+box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt
+pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work
+of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
+
+On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a
+costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered
+with five hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for
+years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. He would often
+spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various
+stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that
+turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver,
+the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,
+carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red
+cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts with their
+alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. He loved the red gold of the
+sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow
+of the milky opal. He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of
+extraordinary size and richness of colour, and had a turquoise _de la
+vieille roche_ that was the envy of all the connoisseurs.
+
+He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso's
+Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real
+jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of
+Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes "with
+collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." There was a gem in
+the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition
+of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into
+a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemist, Pierre de
+Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India
+made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth
+provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The
+garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her
+colour. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus,
+that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids.
+Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a
+newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The
+bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm
+that could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the
+aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any
+danger by fire.
+
+The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand,
+as the ceremony of his coronation. The gates of the palace of John the
+Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake
+inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." Over the gable
+were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the
+gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night. In Lodge's
+strange romance 'A Margarite of America', it was stated that in the
+chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of the
+world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of
+chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." Marco Polo
+had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the
+mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that
+the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned
+for seven moons over its loss. When the Huns lured the king into the
+great pit, he flung it away--Procopius tells the story--nor was it ever
+found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight
+of gold pieces for it. The King of Malabar had shown to a certain
+Venetian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god
+that he worshipped.
+
+When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of
+France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome,
+and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.
+Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and
+twenty-one diamonds. Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand
+marks, which was covered with balas rubies. Hall described Henry VIII,
+on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a
+jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other
+rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses."
+The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold
+filigrane. Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour
+studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with
+turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap _parseme_ with pearls. Henry II wore
+jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with
+twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients. The ducal hat of Charles
+the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race, was hung with
+pear-shaped pearls and studded with sapphires.
+
+How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and
+decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
+
+Then he turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that
+performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern
+nations of Europe. As he investigated the subject--and he always had
+an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment
+in whatever he took up--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the
+ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things. He, at any
+rate, had escaped that. Summer followed summer, and the yellow
+jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the
+story of their shame, but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face
+or stained his flowerlike bloom. How different it was with material
+things! Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocus-coloured
+robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
+by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where the huge velarium
+that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail
+of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a
+chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined steeds? He longed to see the
+curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were
+displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
+the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
+bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
+Pontus and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests,
+rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature"; and
+the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which
+were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "_Madame, je suis tout
+joyeux_," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold
+thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four
+pearls. He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims
+for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen
+hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the
+king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings
+were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked
+in gold." Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of
+black velvet powdered with crescents and suns. Its curtains were of
+damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver
+ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it
+stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black
+velvet upon cloth of silver. Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides
+fifteen feet high in his apartment. The state bed of Sobieski, King of
+Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with
+verses from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully
+chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. It
+had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of
+Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy.
+
+And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite
+specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting
+the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and
+stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that
+from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air," and
+"running water," and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from Java;
+elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair
+blue silks and wrought with _fleurs-de-lis_, birds and images; veils of
+_lacis_ worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish
+velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese _Foukousas_,
+with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds.
+
+He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed
+he had for everything connected with the service of the Church. In the
+long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house, he had
+stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the
+raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and
+fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by
+the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted pain.
+He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask,
+figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in
+six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the
+pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreys were divided
+into panels representing scenes from the life of the Virgin, and the
+coronation of the Virgin was figured in coloured silks upon the hood.
+This was Italian work of the fifteenth century. Another cope was of
+green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves,
+from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which
+were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals. The morse
+bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work. The orphreys were
+woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with
+medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian.
+He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold
+brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with
+representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, and
+embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of
+white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins
+and _fleurs-de-lis_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and
+many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to
+which such things were put, there was something that quickened his
+imagination.
+
+For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely
+house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he
+could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times
+to be almost too great to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely
+locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with
+his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him
+the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the
+purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. For weeks he would not go there,
+would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart,
+his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence.
+Then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to
+dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day,
+until he was driven away. On his return he would sit in front of the
+picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other
+times, with that pride of individualism that is half the
+fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure at the misshapen
+shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.
+
+After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and
+gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as
+well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they had more
+than once spent the winter. He hated to be separated from the picture
+that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that during his
+absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the
+elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.
+
+He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing. It was true
+that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness
+of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn
+from that? He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him. He had
+not painted it. What was it to him how vile and full of shame it
+looked? Even if he told them, would they believe it?
+
+Yet he was afraid. Sometimes when he was down at his great house in
+Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank
+who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton
+luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly
+leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not
+been tampered with and that the picture was still there. What if it
+should be stolen? The mere thought made him cold with horror. Surely
+the world would know his secret then. Perhaps the world already
+suspected it.
+
+For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him.
+He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth
+and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it was
+said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into the
+smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another
+gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. Curious stories
+became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. It
+was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a
+low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with
+thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade. His
+extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear
+again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass
+him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though
+they were determined to discover his secret.
+
+Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice,
+and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his
+charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth
+that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer
+to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about
+him. It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most
+intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. Women who had
+wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and
+set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or
+horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.
+
+Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many his
+strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain element of
+security. Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to
+believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and
+fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more
+importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability
+is of much less value than the possession of a good _chef_. And, after
+all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has
+given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private
+life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold _entrees_, as
+Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject, and there is
+possibly a good deal to be said for his view. For the canons of good
+society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is
+absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony,
+as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of
+a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful
+to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is
+merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
+
+Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the
+shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing
+simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a
+being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform
+creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and
+passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies
+of the dead. He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery
+of his country house and look at the various portraits of those whose
+blood flowed in his veins. Here was Philip Herbert, described by
+Francis Osborne, in his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and
+King James, as one who was "caressed by the Court for his handsome
+face, which kept him not long company." Was it young Herbert's life
+that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body
+to body till it had reached his own? Was it some dim sense of that
+ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause,
+give utterance, in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had
+so changed his life? Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled
+surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
+with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet. What had this
+man's legacy been? Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him
+some inheritance of sin and shame? Were his own actions merely the
+dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize? Here, from the
+fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl
+stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves. A flower was in her right hand,
+and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses. On
+a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple. There were large
+green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. He knew her life, and
+the strange stories that were told about her lovers. Had he something
+of her temperament in him? These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to
+look curiously at him. What of George Willoughby, with his powdered
+hair and fantastic patches? How evil he looked! The face was
+saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with
+disdain. Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
+were so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
+century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What of the
+second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his
+wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
+Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls
+and insolent pose! What passions had he bequeathed? The world had
+looked upon him as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
+The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the
+portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. Her blood,
+also, stirred within him. How curious it all seemed! And his mother
+with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew
+what he had got from her. He had got from her his beauty, and his
+passion for the beauty of others. She laughed at him in her loose
+Bacchante dress. There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple
+spilled from the cup she was holding. The carnations of the painting
+had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and
+brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever he went.
+
+Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,
+nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
+with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There
+were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history
+was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act
+and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it
+had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known
+them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
+stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of
+subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
+been his own.
+
+The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
+himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how,
+crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
+Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
+Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the
+flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
+caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
+an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
+wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
+with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
+days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _taedium vitae_, that comes
+on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear
+emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of
+pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the
+Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero
+Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with
+colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon
+from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
+
+Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the
+two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious
+tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and
+beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made
+monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and
+painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death
+from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as
+Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of
+Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was
+bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used
+hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with
+roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse,
+with Fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the blood
+of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence,
+child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by his
+debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white
+and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy
+that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose
+melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a
+passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the
+Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when
+gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery
+took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid veins the blood of
+three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the
+lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome
+as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and
+gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a
+shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles
+VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned
+him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had
+sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards
+painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his
+trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto
+Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page,
+and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow
+piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep,
+and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.
+
+There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them at night,
+and they troubled his imagination in the day. The Renaissance knew of
+strange manners of poisoning--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted
+torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander
+and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There
+were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he
+could realize his conception of the beautiful.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 12
+
+It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth
+birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.
+
+He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's, where he
+had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold
+and foggy. At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street,
+a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast and with the collar of
+his grey ulster turned up. He had a bag in his hand. Dorian
+recognized him. It was Basil Hallward. A strange sense of fear, for
+which he could not account, came over him. He made no sign of
+recognition and went on quickly in the direction of his own house.
+
+But Hallward had seen him. Dorian heard him first stopping on the
+pavement and then hurrying after him. In a few moments, his hand was
+on his arm.
+
+"Dorian! What an extraordinary piece of luck! I have been waiting for
+you in your library ever since nine o'clock. Finally I took pity on
+your tired servant and told him to go to bed, as he let me out. I am
+off to Paris by the midnight train, and I particularly wanted to see
+you before I left. I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as
+you passed me. But I wasn't quite sure. Didn't you recognize me?"
+
+"In this fog, my dear Basil? Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor
+Square. I believe my house is somewhere about here, but I don't feel
+at all certain about it. I am sorry you are going away, as I have not
+seen you for ages. But I suppose you will be back soon?"
+
+"No: I am going to be out of England for six months. I intend to take
+a studio in Paris and shut myself up till I have finished a great
+picture I have in my head. However, it wasn't about myself I wanted to
+talk. Here we are at your door. Let me come in for a moment. I have
+something to say to you."
+
+"I shall be charmed. But won't you miss your train?" said Dorian Gray
+languidly as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his
+latch-key.
+
+The lamplight struggled out through the fog, and Hallward looked at his
+watch. "I have heaps of time," he answered. "The train doesn't go
+till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven. In fact, I was on my
+way to the club to look for you, when I met you. You see, I shan't
+have any delay about luggage, as I have sent on my heavy things. All I
+have with me is in this bag, and I can easily get to Victoria in twenty
+minutes."
+
+Dorian looked at him and smiled. "What a way for a fashionable painter
+to travel! A Gladstone bag and an ulster! Come in, or the fog will
+get into the house. And mind you don't talk about anything serious.
+Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be."
+
+Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the
+library. There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open
+hearth. The lamps were lit, and an open Dutch silver spirit-case
+stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on
+a little marqueterie table.
+
+"You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian. He gave me
+everything I wanted, including your best gold-tipped cigarettes. He is
+a most hospitable creature. I like him much better than the Frenchman
+you used to have. What has become of the Frenchman, by the bye?"
+
+Dorian shrugged his shoulders. "I believe he married Lady Radley's
+maid, and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.
+Anglomania is very fashionable over there now, I hear. It seems silly
+of the French, doesn't it? But--do you know?--he was not at all a bad
+servant. I never liked him, but I had nothing to complain about. One
+often imagines things that are quite absurd. He was really very
+devoted to me and seemed quite sorry when he went away. Have another
+brandy-and-soda? Or would you like hock-and-seltzer? I always take
+hock-and-seltzer myself. There is sure to be some in the next room."
+
+"Thanks, I won't have anything more," said the painter, taking his cap
+and coat off and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the
+corner. "And now, my dear fellow, I want to speak to you seriously.
+Don't frown like that. You make it so much more difficult for me."
+
+"What is it all about?" cried Dorian in his petulant way, flinging
+himself down on the sofa. "I hope it is not about myself. I am tired
+of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else."
+
+"It is about yourself," answered Hallward in his grave deep voice, "and
+I must say it to you. I shall only keep you half an hour."
+
+Dorian sighed and lit a cigarette. "Half an hour!" he murmured.
+
+"It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your own
+sake that I am speaking. I think it right that you should know that
+the most dreadful things are being said against you in London."
+
+"I don't wish to know anything about them. I love scandals about other
+people, but scandals about myself don't interest me. They have not got
+the charm of novelty."
+
+"They must interest you, Dorian. Every gentleman is interested in his
+good name. You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and
+degraded. Of course, you have your position, and your wealth, and all
+that kind of thing. But position and wealth are not everything. Mind
+you, I don't believe these rumours at all. At least, I can't believe
+them when I see you. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's
+face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices.
+There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows
+itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the
+moulding of his hands even. Somebody--I won't mention his name, but
+you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done. I had
+never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the
+time, though I have heard a good deal since. He offered an extravagant
+price. I refused him. There was something in the shape of his fingers
+that I hated. I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied
+about him. His life is dreadful. But you, Dorian, with your pure,
+bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth--I can't
+believe anything against you. And yet I see you very seldom, and you
+never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I
+hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I
+don't know what to say. Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of
+Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it? Why is it that so
+many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite you to
+theirs? You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley. I met him at dinner
+last week. Your name happened to come up in conversation, in
+connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the
+Dudley. Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most
+artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl
+should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the
+same room with. I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked
+him what he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody.
+It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fatal to young men? There
+was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were
+his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England
+with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable. What about Adrian
+Singleton and his dreadful end? What about Lord Kent's only son and
+his career? I met his father yesterday in St. James's Street. He
+seemed broken with shame and sorrow. What about the young Duke of
+Perth? What sort of life has he got now? What gentleman would
+associate with him?"
+
+"Stop, Basil. You are talking about things of which you know nothing,"
+said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt
+in his voice. "You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.
+It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows
+anything about mine. With such blood as he has in his veins, how could
+his record be clean? You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.
+Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery? If Kent's
+silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me? If
+Adrian Singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am I his
+keeper? I know how people chatter in England. The middle classes air
+their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper
+about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try
+and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with
+the people they slander. In this country, it is enough for a man to
+have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him.
+And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead
+themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land
+of the hypocrite."
+
+"Dorian," cried Hallward, "that is not the question. England is bad
+enough I know, and English society is all wrong. That is the reason
+why I want you to be fine. You have not been fine. One has a right to
+judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to
+lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have filled them
+with a madness for pleasure. They have gone down into the depths. You
+led them there. Yes: you led them there, and yet you can smile, as
+you are smiling now. And there is worse behind. I know you and Harry
+are inseparable. Surely for that reason, if for none other, you should
+not have made his sister's name a by-word."
+
+"Take care, Basil. You go too far."
+
+"I must speak, and you must listen. You shall listen. When you met
+Lady Gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her. Is there
+a single decent woman in London now who would drive with her in the
+park? Why, even her children are not allowed to live with her. Then
+there are other stories--stories that you have been seen creeping at
+dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest
+dens in London. Are they true? Can they be true? When I first heard
+them, I laughed. I hear them now, and they make me shudder. What
+about your country-house and the life that is led there? Dorian, you
+don't know what is said about you. I won't tell you that I don't want
+to preach to you. I remember Harry saying once that every man who
+turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by
+saying that, and then proceeded to break his word. I do want to preach
+to you. I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect
+you. I want you to have a clean name and a fair record. I want you to
+get rid of the dreadful people you associate with. Don't shrug your
+shoulders like that. Don't be so indifferent. You have a wonderful
+influence. Let it be for good, not for evil. They say that you
+corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite
+sufficient for you to enter a house for shame of some kind to follow
+after. I don't know whether it is so or not. How should I know? But
+it is said of you. I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.
+Lord Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford. He showed me
+a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in
+her villa at Mentone. Your name was implicated in the most terrible
+confession I ever read. I told him that it was absurd--that I knew you
+thoroughly and that you were incapable of anything of the kind. Know
+you? I wonder do I know you? Before I could answer that, I should
+have to see your soul."
+
+"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa and
+turning almost white from fear.
+
+"Yes," answered Hallward gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his
+voice, "to see your soul. But only God can do that."
+
+A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man. "You
+shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the
+table. "Come: it is your own handiwork. Why shouldn't you look at
+it? You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose.
+Nobody would believe you. If they did believe you, they would like me
+all the better for it. I know the age better than you do, though you
+will prate about it so tediously. Come, I tell you. You have
+chattered enough about corruption. Now you shall look on it face to
+face."
+
+There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered. He stamped
+his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner. He felt a
+terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret,
+and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of
+all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the
+hideous memory of what he had done.
+
+"Yes," he continued, coming closer to him and looking steadfastly into
+his stern eyes, "I shall show you my soul. You shall see the thing
+that you fancy only God can see."
+
+Hallward started back. "This is blasphemy, Dorian!" he cried. "You
+must not say things like that. They are horrible, and they don't mean
+anything."
+
+"You think so?" He laughed again.
+
+"I know so. As for what I said to you to-night, I said it for your
+good. You know I have been always a stanch friend to you."
+
+"Don't touch me. Finish what you have to say."
+
+A twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face. He paused for
+a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him. After all, what
+right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray? If he had done a
+tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered!
+Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fire-place, and
+stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frostlike ashes and
+their throbbing cores of flame.
+
+"I am waiting, Basil," said the young man in a hard clear voice.
+
+He turned round. "What I have to say is this," he cried. "You must
+give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against
+you. If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to
+end, I shall believe you. Deny them, Dorian, deny them! Can't you see
+what I am going through? My God! don't tell me that you are bad, and
+corrupt, and shameful."
+
+Dorian Gray smiled. There was a curl of contempt in his lips. "Come
+upstairs, Basil," he said quietly. "I keep a diary of my life from day
+to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written. I shall
+show it to you if you come with me."
+
+"I shall come with you, Dorian, if you wish it. I see I have missed my
+train. That makes no matter. I can go to-morrow. But don't ask me to
+read anything to-night. All I want is a plain answer to my question."
+
+"That shall be given to you upstairs. I could not give it here. You
+will not have to read long."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 13
+
+He passed out of the room and began the ascent, Basil Hallward
+following close behind. They walked softly, as men do instinctively at
+night. The lamp cast fantastic shadows on the wall and staircase. A
+rising wind made some of the windows rattle.
+
+When they reached the top landing, Dorian set the lamp down on the
+floor, and taking out the key, turned it in the lock. "You insist on
+knowing, Basil?" he asked in a low voice.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I am delighted," he answered, smiling. Then he added, somewhat
+harshly, "You are the one man in the world who is entitled to know
+everything about me. You have had more to do with my life than you
+think"; and, taking up the lamp, he opened the door and went in. A
+cold current of air passed them, and the light shot up for a moment in
+a flame of murky orange. He shuddered. "Shut the door behind you," he
+whispered, as he placed the lamp on the table.
+
+Hallward glanced round him with a puzzled expression. The room looked
+as if it had not been lived in for years. A faded Flemish tapestry, a
+curtained picture, an old Italian _cassone_, and an almost empty
+book-case--that was all that it seemed to contain, besides a chair and
+a table. As Dorian Gray was lighting a half-burned candle that was
+standing on the mantelshelf, he saw that the whole place was covered
+with dust and that the carpet was in holes. A mouse ran scuffling
+behind the wainscoting. There was a damp odour of mildew.
+
+"So you think that it is only God who sees the soul, Basil? Draw that
+curtain back, and you will see mine."
+
+The voice that spoke was cold and cruel. "You are mad, Dorian, or
+playing a part," muttered Hallward, frowning.
+
+"You won't? Then I must do it myself," said the young man, and he tore
+the curtain from its rod and flung it on the ground.
+
+An exclamation of horror broke from the painter's lips as he saw in the
+dim light the hideous face on the canvas grinning at him. There was
+something in its expression that filled him with disgust and loathing.
+Good heavens! it was Dorian Gray's own face that he was looking at!
+The horror, whatever it was, had not yet entirely spoiled that
+marvellous beauty. There was still some gold in the thinning hair and
+some scarlet on the sensual mouth. The sodden eyes had kept something
+of the loveliness of their blue, the noble curves had not yet
+completely passed away from chiselled nostrils and from plastic throat.
+Yes, it was Dorian himself. But who had done it? He seemed to
+recognize his own brushwork, and the frame was his own design. The
+idea was monstrous, yet he felt afraid. He seized the lighted candle,
+and held it to the picture. In the left-hand corner was his own name,
+traced in long letters of bright vermilion.
+
+It was some foul parody, some infamous ignoble satire. He had never
+done that. Still, it was his own picture. He knew it, and he felt as
+if his blood had changed in a moment from fire to sluggish ice. His
+own picture! What did it mean? Why had it altered? He turned and
+looked at Dorian Gray with the eyes of a sick man. His mouth twitched,
+and his parched tongue seemed unable to articulate. He passed his hand
+across his forehead. It was dank with clammy sweat.
+
+The young man was leaning against the mantelshelf, watching him with
+that strange expression that one sees on the faces of those who are
+absorbed in a play when some great artist is acting. There was neither
+real sorrow in it nor real joy. There was simply the passion of the
+spectator, with perhaps a flicker of triumph in his eyes. He had taken
+the flower out of his coat, and was smelling it, or pretending to do so.
+
+"What does this mean?" cried Hallward, at last. His own voice sounded
+shrill and curious in his ears.
+
+"Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian Gray, crushing the flower in
+his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my
+good looks. One day you introduced me to a friend of yours, who
+explained to me the wonder of youth, and you finished a portrait of me
+that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment that, even
+now, I don't know whether I regret or not, I made a wish, perhaps you
+would call it a prayer...."
+
+"I remember it! Oh, how well I remember it! No! the thing is
+impossible. The room is damp. Mildew has got into the canvas. The
+paints I used had some wretched mineral poison in them. I tell you the
+thing is impossible."
+
+"Ah, what is impossible?" murmured the young man, going over to the
+window and leaning his forehead against the cold, mist-stained glass.
+
+"You told me you had destroyed it."
+
+"I was wrong. It has destroyed me."
+
+"I don't believe it is my picture."
+
+"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.
+
+"My ideal, as you call it..."
+
+"As you called it."
+
+"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were to me such
+an ideal as I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."
+
+"It is the face of my soul."
+
+"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a
+devil."
+
+"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with a
+wild gesture of despair.
+
+Hallward turned again to the portrait and gazed at it. "My God! If it
+is true," he exclaimed, "and this is what you have done with your life,
+why, you must be worse even than those who talk against you fancy you
+to be!" He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it. The
+surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it. It was
+from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come.
+Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were
+slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery
+grave was not so fearful.
+
+His hand shook, and the candle fell from its socket on the floor and
+lay there sputtering. He placed his foot on it and put it out. Then
+he flung himself into the rickety chair that was standing by the table
+and buried his face in his hands.
+
+"Good God, Dorian, what a lesson! What an awful lesson!" There was no
+answer, but he could hear the young man sobbing at the window. "Pray,
+Dorian, pray," he murmured. "What is it that one was taught to say in
+one's boyhood? 'Lead us not into temptation. Forgive us our sins.
+Wash away our iniquities.' Let us say that together. The prayer of
+your pride has been answered. The prayer of your repentance will be
+answered also. I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You
+worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished."
+
+Dorian Gray turned slowly around and looked at him with tear-dimmed
+eyes. "It is too late, Basil," he faltered.
+
+"It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try if we cannot
+remember a prayer. Isn't there a verse somewhere, 'Though your sins be
+as scarlet, yet I will make them as white as snow'?"
+
+"Those words mean nothing to me now."
+
+"Hush! Don't say that. You have done enough evil in your life. My
+God! Don't you see that accursed thing leering at us?"
+
+Dorian Gray glanced at the picture, and suddenly an uncontrollable
+feeling of hatred for Basil Hallward came over him, as though it had
+been suggested to him by the image on the canvas, whispered into his
+ear by those grinning lips. The mad passions of a hunted animal
+stirred within him, and he loathed the man who was seated at the table,
+more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything. He glanced
+wildly around. Something glimmered on the top of the painted chest
+that faced him. His eye fell on it. He knew what it was. It was a
+knife that he had brought up, some days before, to cut a piece of cord,
+and had forgotten to take away with him. He moved slowly towards it,
+passing Hallward as he did so. As soon as he got behind him, he seized
+it and turned round. Hallward stirred in his chair as if he was going
+to rise. He rushed at him and dug the knife into the great vein that
+is behind the ear, crushing the man's head down on the table and
+stabbing again and again.
+
+There was a stifled groan and the horrible sound of some one choking
+with blood. Three times the outstretched arms shot up convulsively,
+waving grotesque, stiff-fingered hands in the air. He stabbed him
+twice more, but the man did not move. Something began to trickle on
+the floor. He waited for a moment, still pressing the head down. Then
+he threw the knife on the table, and listened.
+
+He could hear nothing, but the drip, drip on the threadbare carpet. He
+opened the door and went out on the landing. The house was absolutely
+quiet. No one was about. For a few seconds he stood bending over the
+balustrade and peering down into the black seething well of darkness.
+Then he took out the key and returned to the room, locking himself in
+as he did so.
+
+The thing was still seated in the chair, straining over the table with
+bowed head, and humped back, and long fantastic arms. Had it not been
+for the red jagged tear in the neck and the clotted black pool that was
+slowly widening on the table, one would have said that the man was
+simply asleep.
+
+How quickly it had all been done! He felt strangely calm, and walking
+over to the window, opened it and stepped out on the balcony. The wind
+had blown the fog away, and the sky was like a monstrous peacock's
+tail, starred with myriads of golden eyes. He looked down and saw the
+policeman going his rounds and flashing the long beam of his lantern on
+the doors of the silent houses. The crimson spot of a prowling hansom
+gleamed at the corner and then vanished. A woman in a fluttering shawl
+was creeping slowly by the railings, staggering as she went. Now and
+then she stopped and peered back. Once, she began to sing in a hoarse
+voice. The policeman strolled over and said something to her. She
+stumbled away, laughing. A bitter blast swept across the square. The
+gas-lamps flickered and became blue, and the leafless trees shook their
+black iron branches to and fro. He shivered and went back, closing the
+window behind him.
+
+Having reached the door, he turned the key and opened it. He did not
+even glance at the murdered man. He felt that the secret of the whole
+thing was not to realize the situation. The friend who had painted the
+fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due had gone out of his
+life. That was enough.
+
+Then he remembered the lamp. It was a rather curious one of Moorish
+workmanship, made of dull silver inlaid with arabesques of burnished
+steel, and studded with coarse turquoises. Perhaps it might be missed
+by his servant, and questions would be asked. He hesitated for a
+moment, then he turned back and took it from the table. He could not
+help seeing the dead thing. How still it was! How horribly white the
+long hands looked! It was like a dreadful wax image.
+
+Having locked the door behind him, he crept quietly downstairs. The
+woodwork creaked and seemed to cry out as if in pain. He stopped
+several times and waited. No: everything was still. It was merely
+the sound of his own footsteps.
+
+When he reached the library, he saw the bag and coat in the corner.
+They must be hidden away somewhere. He unlocked a secret press that
+was in the wainscoting, a press in which he kept his own curious
+disguises, and put them into it. He could easily burn them afterwards.
+Then he pulled out his watch. It was twenty minutes to two.
+
+He sat down and began to think. Every year--every month, almost--men
+were strangled in England for what he had done. There had been a
+madness of murder in the air. Some red star had come too close to the
+earth.... And yet, what evidence was there against him? Basil Hallward
+had left the house at eleven. No one had seen him come in again. Most
+of the servants were at Selby Royal. His valet had gone to bed....
+Paris! Yes. It was to Paris that Basil had gone, and by the midnight
+train, as he had intended. With his curious reserved habits, it would
+be months before any suspicions would be roused. Months! Everything
+could be destroyed long before then.
+
+A sudden thought struck him. He put on his fur coat and hat and went
+out into the hall. There he paused, hearing the slow heavy tread of
+the policeman on the pavement outside and seeing the flash of the
+bull's-eye reflected in the window. He waited and held his breath.
+
+After a few moments he drew back the latch and slipped out, shutting
+the door very gently behind him. Then he began ringing the bell. In
+about five minutes his valet appeared, half-dressed and looking very
+drowsy.
+
+"I am sorry to have had to wake you up, Francis," he said, stepping in;
+"but I had forgotten my latch-key. What time is it?"
+
+"Ten minutes past two, sir," answered the man, looking at the clock and
+blinking.
+
+"Ten minutes past two? How horribly late! You must wake me at nine
+to-morrow. I have some work to do."
+
+"All right, sir."
+
+"Did any one call this evening?"
+
+"Mr. Hallward, sir. He stayed here till eleven, and then he went away
+to catch his train."
+
+"Oh! I am sorry I didn't see him. Did he leave any message?"
+
+"No, sir, except that he would write to you from Paris, if he did not
+find you at the club."
+
+"That will do, Francis. Don't forget to call me at nine to-morrow."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+The man shambled down the passage in his slippers.
+
+Dorian Gray threw his hat and coat upon the table and passed into the
+library. For a quarter of an hour he walked up and down the room,
+biting his lip and thinking. Then he took down the Blue Book from one
+of the shelves and began to turn over the leaves. "Alan Campbell, 152,
+Hertford Street, Mayfair." Yes; that was the man he wanted.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 14
+
+At nine o'clock the next morning his servant came in with a cup of
+chocolate on a tray and opened the shutters. Dorian was sleeping quite
+peacefully, lying on his right side, with one hand underneath his
+cheek. He looked like a boy who had been tired out with play, or study.
+
+The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as
+he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he
+had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all.
+His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain.
+But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.
+
+He turned round, and leaning upon his elbow, began to sip his
+chocolate. The mellow November sun came streaming into the room. The
+sky was bright, and there was a genial warmth in the air. It was
+almost like a morning in May.
+
+Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent,
+blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there
+with terrible distinctness. He winced at the memory of all that he had
+suffered, and for a moment the same curious feeling of loathing for
+Basil Hallward that had made him kill him as he sat in the chair came
+back to him, and he grew cold with passion. The dead man was still
+sitting there, too, and in the sunlight now. How horrible that was!
+Such hideous things were for the darkness, not for the day.
+
+He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken
+or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory
+than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride
+more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of
+joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the
+senses. But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out
+of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might
+strangle one itself.
+
+When the half-hour struck, he passed his hand across his forehead, and
+then got up hastily and dressed himself with even more than his usual
+care, giving a good deal of attention to the choice of his necktie and
+scarf-pin and changing his rings more than once. He spent a long time
+also over breakfast, tasting the various dishes, talking to his valet
+about some new liveries that he was thinking of getting made for the
+servants at Selby, and going through his correspondence. At some of
+the letters, he smiled. Three of them bored him. One he read several
+times over and then tore up with a slight look of annoyance in his
+face. "That awful thing, a woman's memory!" as Lord Henry had once
+said.
+
+After he had drunk his cup of black coffee, he wiped his lips slowly
+with a napkin, motioned to his servant to wait, and going over to the
+table, sat down and wrote two letters. One he put in his pocket, the
+other he handed to the valet.
+
+"Take this round to 152, Hertford Street, Francis, and if Mr. Campbell
+is out of town, get his address."
+
+As soon as he was alone, he lit a cigarette and began sketching upon a
+piece of paper, drawing first flowers and bits of architecture, and
+then human faces. Suddenly he remarked that every face that he drew
+seemed to have a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward. He frowned, and
+getting up, went over to the book-case and took out a volume at hazard.
+He was determined that he would not think about what had happened until
+it became absolutely necessary that he should do so.
+
+When he had stretched himself on the sofa, he looked at the title-page
+of the book. It was Gautier's Emaux et Camees, Charpentier's
+Japanese-paper edition, with the Jacquemart etching. The binding was
+of citron-green leather, with a design of gilt trellis-work and dotted
+pomegranates. It had been given to him by Adrian Singleton. As he
+turned over the pages, his eye fell on the poem about the hand of
+Lacenaire, the cold yellow hand "_du supplice encore mal lavee_," with
+its downy red hairs and its "_doigts de faune_." He glanced at his own
+white taper fingers, shuddering slightly in spite of himself, and
+passed on, till he came to those lovely stanzas upon Venice:
+
+ Sur une gamme chromatique,
+ Le sein de peries ruisselant,
+ La Venus de l'Adriatique
+ Sort de l'eau son corps rose et blanc.
+
+ Les domes, sur l'azur des ondes
+ Suivant la phrase au pur contour,
+ S'enflent comme des gorges rondes
+ Que souleve un soupir d'amour.
+
+ L'esquif aborde et me depose,
+ Jetant son amarre au pilier,
+ Devant une facade rose,
+ Sur le marbre d'un escalier.
+
+
+How exquisite they were! As one read them, one seemed to be floating
+down the green water-ways of the pink and pearl city, seated in a black
+gondola with silver prow and trailing curtains. The mere lines looked
+to him like those straight lines of turquoise-blue that follow one as
+one pushes out to the Lido. The sudden flashes of colour reminded him
+of the gleam of the opal-and-iris-throated birds that flutter round the
+tall honeycombed Campanile, or stalk, with such stately grace, through
+the dim, dust-stained arcades. Leaning back with half-closed eyes, he
+kept saying over and over to himself:
+
+ "Devant une facade rose,
+ Sur le marbre d'un escalier."
+
+The whole of Venice was in those two lines. He remembered the autumn
+that he had passed there, and a wonderful love that had stirred him to
+mad delightful follies. There was romance in every place. But Venice,
+like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true
+romantic, background was everything, or almost everything. Basil had
+been with him part of the time, and had gone wild over Tintoret. Poor
+Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!
+
+He sighed, and took up the volume again, and tried to forget. He read
+of the swallows that fly in and out of the little _cafe_ at Smyrna where
+the Hadjis sit counting their amber beads and the turbaned merchants
+smoke their long tasselled pipes and talk gravely to each other; he
+read of the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde that weeps tears of
+granite in its lonely sunless exile and longs to be back by the hot,
+lotus-covered Nile, where there are Sphinxes, and rose-red ibises, and
+white vultures with gilded claws, and crocodiles with small beryl eyes
+that crawl over the green steaming mud; he began to brood over those
+verses which, drawing music from kiss-stained marble, tell of that
+curious statue that Gautier compares to a contralto voice, the "_monstre
+charmant_" that couches in the porphyry-room of the Louvre. But after a
+time the book fell from his hand. He grew nervous, and a horrible fit
+of terror came over him. What if Alan Campbell should be out of
+England? Days would elapse before he could come back. Perhaps he
+might refuse to come. What could he do then? Every moment was of
+vital importance.
+
+They had been great friends once, five years before--almost
+inseparable, indeed. Then the intimacy had come suddenly to an end.
+When they met in society now, it was only Dorian Gray who smiled: Alan
+Campbell never did.
+
+He was an extremely clever young man, though he had no real
+appreciation of the visible arts, and whatever little sense of the
+beauty of poetry he possessed he had gained entirely from Dorian. His
+dominant intellectual passion was for science. At Cambridge he had
+spent a great deal of his time working in the laboratory, and had taken
+a good class in the Natural Science Tripos of his year. Indeed, he was
+still devoted to the study of chemistry, and had a laboratory of his
+own in which he used to shut himself up all day long, greatly to the
+annoyance of his mother, who had set her heart on his standing for
+Parliament and had a vague idea that a chemist was a person who made up
+prescriptions. He was an excellent musician, however, as well, and
+played both the violin and the piano better than most amateurs. In
+fact, it was music that had first brought him and Dorian Gray
+together--music and that indefinable attraction that Dorian seemed to
+be able to exercise whenever he wished--and, indeed, exercised often
+without being conscious of it. They had met at Lady Berkshire's the
+night that Rubinstein played there, and after that used to be always
+seen together at the opera and wherever good music was going on. For
+eighteen months their intimacy lasted. Campbell was always either at
+Selby Royal or in Grosvenor Square. To him, as to many others, Dorian
+Gray was the type of everything that is wonderful and fascinating in
+life. Whether or not a quarrel had taken place between them no one
+ever knew. But suddenly people remarked that they scarcely spoke when
+they met and that Campbell seemed always to go away early from any
+party at which Dorian Gray was present. He had changed, too--was
+strangely melancholy at times, appeared almost to dislike hearing
+music, and would never himself play, giving as his excuse, when he was
+called upon, that he was so absorbed in science that he had no time
+left in which to practise. And this was certainly true. Every day he
+seemed to become more interested in biology, and his name appeared once
+or twice in some of the scientific reviews in connection with certain
+curious experiments.
+
+This was the man Dorian Gray was waiting for. Every second he kept
+glancing at the clock. As the minutes went by he became horribly
+agitated. At last he got up and began to pace up and down the room,
+looking like a beautiful caged thing. He took long stealthy strides.
+His hands were curiously cold.
+
+The suspense became unbearable. Time seemed to him to be crawling with
+feet of lead, while he by monstrous winds was being swept towards the
+jagged edge of some black cleft of precipice. He knew what was waiting
+for him there; saw it, indeed, and, shuddering, crushed with dank hands
+his burning lids as though he would have robbed the very brain of sight
+and driven the eyeballs back into their cave. It was useless. The
+brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination, made
+grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,
+danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through moving
+masks. Then, suddenly, time stopped for him. Yes: that blind,
+slow-breathing thing crawled no more, and horrible thoughts, time being
+dead, raced nimbly on in front, and dragged a hideous future from its
+grave, and showed it to him. He stared at it. Its very horror made
+him stone.
+
+At last the door opened and his servant entered. He turned glazed eyes
+upon him.
+
+"Mr. Campbell, sir," said the man.
+
+A sigh of relief broke from his parched lips, and the colour came back
+to his cheeks.
+
+"Ask him to come in at once, Francis." He felt that he was himself
+again. His mood of cowardice had passed away.
+
+The man bowed and retired. In a few moments, Alan Campbell walked in,
+looking very stern and rather pale, his pallor being intensified by his
+coal-black hair and dark eyebrows.
+
+"Alan! This is kind of you. I thank you for coming."
+
+"I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray. But you said it
+was a matter of life and death." His voice was hard and cold. He
+spoke with slow deliberation. There was a look of contempt in the
+steady searching gaze that he turned on Dorian. He kept his hands in
+the pockets of his Astrakhan coat, and seemed not to have noticed the
+gesture with which he had been greeted.
+
+"Yes: it is a matter of life and death, Alan, and to more than one
+person. Sit down."
+
+Campbell took a chair by the table, and Dorian sat opposite to him.
+The two men's eyes met. In Dorian's there was infinite pity. He knew
+that what he was going to do was dreadful.
+
+After a strained moment of silence, he leaned across and said, very
+quietly, but watching the effect of each word upon the face of him he
+had sent for, "Alan, in a locked room at the top of this house, a room
+to which nobody but myself has access, a dead man is seated at a table.
+He has been dead ten hours now. Don't stir, and don't look at me like
+that. Who the man is, why he died, how he died, are matters that do
+not concern you. What you have to do is this--"
+
+"Stop, Gray. I don't want to know anything further. Whether what you
+have told me is true or not true doesn't concern me. I entirely
+decline to be mixed up in your life. Keep your horrible secrets to
+yourself. They don't interest me any more."
+
+"Alan, they will have to interest you. This one will have to interest
+you. I am awfully sorry for you, Alan. But I can't help myself. You
+are the one man who is able to save me. I am forced to bring you into
+the matter. I have no option. Alan, you are scientific. You know
+about chemistry and things of that kind. You have made experiments.
+What you have got to do is to destroy the thing that is upstairs--to
+destroy it so that not a vestige of it will be left. Nobody saw this
+person come into the house. Indeed, at the present moment he is
+supposed to be in Paris. He will not be missed for months. When he is
+missed, there must be no trace of him found here. You, Alan, you must
+change him, and everything that belongs to him, into a handful of ashes
+that I may scatter in the air."
+
+"You are mad, Dorian."
+
+"Ah! I was waiting for you to call me Dorian."
+
+"You are mad, I tell you--mad to imagine that I would raise a finger to
+help you, mad to make this monstrous confession. I will have nothing
+to do with this matter, whatever it is. Do you think I am going to
+peril my reputation for you? What is it to me what devil's work you
+are up to?"
+
+"It was suicide, Alan."
+
+"I am glad of that. But who drove him to it? You, I should fancy."
+
+"Do you still refuse to do this for me?"
+
+"Of course I refuse. I will have absolutely nothing to do with it. I
+don't care what shame comes on you. You deserve it all. I should not
+be sorry to see you disgraced, publicly disgraced. How dare you ask
+me, of all men in the world, to mix myself up in this horror? I should
+have thought you knew more about people's characters. Your friend Lord
+Henry Wotton can't have taught you much about psychology, whatever else
+he has taught you. Nothing will induce me to stir a step to help you.
+You have come to the wrong man. Go to some of your friends. Don't
+come to me."
+
+"Alan, it was murder. I killed him. You don't know what he had made
+me suffer. Whatever my life is, he had more to do with the making or
+the marring of it than poor Harry has had. He may not have intended
+it, the result was the same."
+
+"Murder! Good God, Dorian, is that what you have come to? I shall not
+inform upon you. It is not my business. Besides, without my stirring
+in the matter, you are certain to be arrested. Nobody ever commits a
+crime without doing something stupid. But I will have nothing to do
+with it."
+
+"You must have something to do with it. Wait, wait a moment; listen to
+me. Only listen, Alan. All I ask of you is to perform a certain
+scientific experiment. You go to hospitals and dead-houses, and the
+horrors that you do there don't affect you. If in some hideous
+dissecting-room or fetid laboratory you found this man lying on a
+leaden table with red gutters scooped out in it for the blood to flow
+through, you would simply look upon him as an admirable subject. You
+would not turn a hair. You would not believe that you were doing
+anything wrong. On the contrary, you would probably feel that you were
+benefiting the human race, or increasing the sum of knowledge in the
+world, or gratifying intellectual curiosity, or something of that kind.
+What I want you to do is merely what you have often done before.
+Indeed, to destroy a body must be far less horrible than what you are
+accustomed to work at. And, remember, it is the only piece of evidence
+against me. If it is discovered, I am lost; and it is sure to be
+discovered unless you help me."
+
+"I have no desire to help you. You forget that. I am simply
+indifferent to the whole thing. It has nothing to do with me."
+
+"Alan, I entreat you. Think of the position I am in. Just before you
+came I almost fainted with terror. You may know terror yourself some
+day. No! don't think of that. Look at the matter purely from the
+scientific point of view. You don't inquire where the dead things on
+which you experiment come from. Don't inquire now. I have told you
+too much as it is. But I beg of you to do this. We were friends once,
+Alan."
+
+"Don't speak about those days, Dorian--they are dead."
+
+"The dead linger sometimes. The man upstairs will not go away. He is
+sitting at the table with bowed head and outstretched arms. Alan!
+Alan! If you don't come to my assistance, I am ruined. Why, they will
+hang me, Alan! Don't you understand? They will hang me for what I
+have done."
+
+"There is no good in prolonging this scene. I absolutely refuse to do
+anything in the matter. It is insane of you to ask me."
+
+"You refuse?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I entreat you, Alan."
+
+"It is useless."
+
+The same look of pity came into Dorian Gray's eyes. Then he stretched
+out his hand, took a piece of paper, and wrote something on it. He
+read it over twice, folded it carefully, and pushed it across the
+table. Having done this, he got up and went over to the window.
+
+Campbell looked at him in surprise, and then took up the paper, and
+opened it. As he read it, his face became ghastly pale and he fell
+back in his chair. A horrible sense of sickness came over him. He
+felt as if his heart was beating itself to death in some empty hollow.
+
+After two or three minutes of terrible silence, Dorian turned round and
+came and stood behind him, putting his hand upon his shoulder.
+
+"I am so sorry for you, Alan," he murmured, "but you leave me no
+alternative. I have a letter written already. Here it is. You see
+the address. If you don't help me, I must send it. If you don't help
+me, I will send it. You know what the result will be. But you are
+going to help me. It is impossible for you to refuse now. I tried to
+spare you. You will do me the justice to admit that. You were stern,
+harsh, offensive. You treated me as no man has ever dared to treat
+me--no living man, at any rate. I bore it all. Now it is for me to
+dictate terms."
+
+Campbell buried his face in his hands, and a shudder passed through him.
+
+"Yes, it is my turn to dictate terms, Alan. You know what they are.
+The thing is quite simple. Come, don't work yourself into this fever.
+The thing has to be done. Face it, and do it."
+
+A groan broke from Campbell's lips and he shivered all over. The
+ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece seemed to him to be dividing
+time into separate atoms of agony, each of which was too terrible to be
+borne. He felt as if an iron ring was being slowly tightened round his
+forehead, as if the disgrace with which he was threatened had already
+come upon him. The hand upon his shoulder weighed like a hand of lead.
+It was intolerable. It seemed to crush him.
+
+"Come, Alan, you must decide at once."
+
+"I cannot do it," he said, mechanically, as though words could alter
+things.
+
+"You must. You have no choice. Don't delay."
+
+He hesitated a moment. "Is there a fire in the room upstairs?"
+
+"Yes, there is a gas-fire with asbestos."
+
+"I shall have to go home and get some things from the laboratory."
+
+"No, Alan, you must not leave the house. Write out on a sheet of
+notepaper what you want and my servant will take a cab and bring the
+things back to you."
+
+Campbell scrawled a few lines, blotted them, and addressed an envelope
+to his assistant. Dorian took the note up and read it carefully. Then
+he rang the bell and gave it to his valet, with orders to return as
+soon as possible and to bring the things with him.
+
+As the hall door shut, Campbell started nervously, and having got up
+from the chair, went over to the chimney-piece. He was shivering with a
+kind of ague. For nearly twenty minutes, neither of the men spoke. A
+fly buzzed noisily about the room, and the ticking of the clock was
+like the beat of a hammer.
+
+As the chime struck one, Campbell turned round, and looking at Dorian
+Gray, saw that his eyes were filled with tears. There was something in
+the purity and refinement of that sad face that seemed to enrage him.
+"You are infamous, absolutely infamous!" he muttered.
+
+"Hush, Alan. You have saved my life," said Dorian.
+
+"Your life? Good heavens! what a life that is! You have gone from
+corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. In
+doing what I am going to do--what you force me to do--it is not of your
+life that I am thinking."
+
+"Ah, Alan," murmured Dorian with a sigh, "I wish you had a thousandth
+part of the pity for me that I have for you." He turned away as he
+spoke and stood looking out at the garden. Campbell made no answer.
+
+After about ten minutes a knock came to the door, and the servant
+entered, carrying a large mahogany chest of chemicals, with a long coil
+of steel and platinum wire and two rather curiously shaped iron clamps.
+
+"Shall I leave the things here, sir?" he asked Campbell.
+
+"Yes," said Dorian. "And I am afraid, Francis, that I have another
+errand for you. What is the name of the man at Richmond who supplies
+Selby with orchids?"
+
+"Harden, sir."
+
+"Yes--Harden. You must go down to Richmond at once, see Harden
+personally, and tell him to send twice as many orchids as I ordered,
+and to have as few white ones as possible. In fact, I don't want any
+white ones. It is a lovely day, Francis, and Richmond is a very pretty
+place--otherwise I wouldn't bother you about it."
+
+"No trouble, sir. At what time shall I be back?"
+
+Dorian looked at Campbell. "How long will your experiment take, Alan?"
+he said in a calm indifferent voice. The presence of a third person in
+the room seemed to give him extraordinary courage.
+
+Campbell frowned and bit his lip. "It will take about five hours," he
+answered.
+
+"It will be time enough, then, if you are back at half-past seven,
+Francis. Or stay: just leave my things out for dressing. You can
+have the evening to yourself. I am not dining at home, so I shall not
+want you."
+
+"Thank you, sir," said the man, leaving the room.
+
+"Now, Alan, there is not a moment to be lost. How heavy this chest is!
+I'll take it for you. You bring the other things." He spoke rapidly
+and in an authoritative manner. Campbell felt dominated by him. They
+left the room together.
+
+When they reached the top landing, Dorian took out the key and turned
+it in the lock. Then he stopped, and a troubled look came into his
+eyes. He shuddered. "I don't think I can go in, Alan," he murmured.
+
+"It is nothing to me. I don't require you," said Campbell coldly.
+
+Dorian half opened the door. As he did so, he saw the face of his
+portrait leering in the sunlight. On the floor in front of it the torn
+curtain was lying. He remembered that the night before he had
+forgotten, for the first time in his life, to hide the fatal canvas,
+and was about to rush forward, when he drew back with a shudder.
+
+What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on
+one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible
+it was!--more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the
+silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing
+whose grotesque misshapen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that
+it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it.
+
+He heaved a deep breath, opened the door a little wider, and with
+half-closed eyes and averted head, walked quickly in, determined that
+he would not look even once upon the dead man. Then, stooping down and
+taking up the gold-and-purple hanging, he flung it right over the
+picture.
+
+There he stopped, feeling afraid to turn round, and his eyes fixed
+themselves on the intricacies of the pattern before him. He heard
+Campbell bringing in the heavy chest, and the irons, and the other
+things that he had required for his dreadful work. He began to wonder
+if he and Basil Hallward had ever met, and, if so, what they had
+thought of each other.
+
+"Leave me now," said a stern voice behind him.
+
+He turned and hurried out, just conscious that the dead man had been
+thrust back into the chair and that Campbell was gazing into a
+glistening yellow face. As he was going downstairs, he heard the key
+being turned in the lock.
+
+It was long after seven when Campbell came back into the library. He
+was pale, but absolutely calm. "I have done what you asked me to do,"
+he muttered. "And now, good-bye. Let us never see each other again."
+
+"You have saved me from ruin, Alan. I cannot forget that," said Dorian
+simply.
+
+As soon as Campbell had left, he went upstairs. There was a horrible
+smell of nitric acid in the room. But the thing that had been sitting
+at the table was gone.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 15
+
+That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
+button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
+Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants. His forehead was
+throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his
+manner as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as
+ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to
+play a part. Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could
+have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any
+tragedy of our age. Those finely shaped fingers could never have
+clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God
+and goodness. He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his
+demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a
+double life.
+
+It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who
+was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe as the
+remains of really remarkable ugliness. She had proved an excellent
+wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her
+husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed,
+and married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she
+devoted herself now to the pleasures of French fiction, French cookery,
+and French _esprit_ when she could get it.
+
+Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that
+she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life. "I know, my
+dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say,
+"and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake. It is most
+fortunate that you were not thought of at the time. As it was, our
+bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to
+raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with anybody.
+However, that was all Narborough's fault. He was dreadfully
+short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who
+never sees anything."
+
+Her guests this evening were rather tedious. The fact was, as she
+explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married
+daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
+matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her. "I think it
+is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered. "Of course I go and
+stay with them every summer after I come from Homburg, but then an old
+woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake
+them up. You don't know what an existence they lead down there. It is
+pure unadulterated country life. They get up early, because they have
+so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to
+think about. There has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since
+the time of Queen Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep
+after dinner. You shan't sit next either of them. You shall sit by me
+and amuse me."
+
+Dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round the room. Yes:
+it was certainly a tedious party. Two of the people he had never seen
+before, and the others consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those
+middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies,
+but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; Lady Ruxton, an
+overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always
+trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly plain that to
+her great disappointment no one would ever believe anything against
+her; Mrs. Erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp and
+Venetian-red hair; Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy
+dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces that, once
+seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked,
+white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the
+impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of
+ideas.
+
+He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough, looking at the
+great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the
+mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed: "How horrid of Henry Wotton to be
+so late! I sent round to him this morning on chance and he promised
+faithfully not to disappoint me."
+
+It was some consolation that Harry was to be there, and when the door
+opened and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some
+insincere apology, he ceased to feel bored.
+
+But at dinner he could not eat anything. Plate after plate went away
+untasted. Lady Narborough kept scolding him for what she called "an
+insult to poor Adolphe, who invented the _menu_ specially for you," and
+now and then Lord Henry looked across at him, wondering at his silence
+and abstracted manner. From time to time the butler filled his glass
+with champagne. He drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase.
+
+"Dorian," said Lord Henry at last, as the _chaud-froid_ was being handed
+round, "what is the matter with you to-night? You are quite out of
+sorts."
+
+"I believe he is in love," cried Lady Narborough, "and that he is
+afraid to tell me for fear I should be jealous. He is quite right. I
+certainly should."
+
+"Dear Lady Narborough," murmured Dorian, smiling, "I have not been in
+love for a whole week--not, in fact, since Madame de Ferrol left town."
+
+"How you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old lady.
+"I really cannot understand it."
+
+"It is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl,
+Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry. "She is the one link between us and
+your short frocks."
+
+"She does not remember my short frocks at all, Lord Henry. But I
+remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago, and how _decolletee_
+she was then."
+
+"She is still _decolletee_," he answered, taking an olive in his long
+fingers; "and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an
+_edition de luxe_ of a bad French novel. She is really wonderful, and
+full of surprises. Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary.
+When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief."
+
+"How can you, Harry!" cried Dorian.
+
+"It is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess. "But her
+third husband, Lord Henry! You don't mean to say Ferrol is the fourth?"
+
+"Certainly, Lady Narborough."
+
+"I don't believe a word of it."
+
+"Well, ask Mr. Gray. He is one of her most intimate friends."
+
+"Is it true, Mr. Gray?"
+
+"She assures me so, Lady Narborough," said Dorian. "I asked her
+whether, like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and
+hung at her girdle. She told me she didn't, because none of them had
+had any hearts at all."
+
+"Four husbands! Upon my word that is _trop de zele_."
+
+"_Trop d'audace_, I tell her," said Dorian.
+
+"Oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear. And what is Ferrol
+like? I don't know him."
+
+"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,"
+said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.
+
+Lady Narborough hit him with her fan. "Lord Henry, I am not at all
+surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked."
+
+"But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows.
+"It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent
+terms."
+
+"Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady,
+shaking her head.
+
+Lord Henry looked serious for some moments. "It is perfectly
+monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying
+things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely
+true."
+
+"Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair.
+
+"I hope so," said his hostess, laughing. "But really, if you all
+worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way, I shall have to marry
+again so as to be in the fashion."
+
+"You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord Henry.
+"You were far too happy. When a woman marries again, it is because she
+detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he
+adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs."
+
+"Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady.
+
+"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the
+rejoinder. "Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them,
+they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. You will never
+ask me to dinner again after saying this, I am afraid, Lady Narborough,
+but it is quite true."
+
+"Of course it is true, Lord Henry. If we women did not love you for
+your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be
+married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however,
+that that would alter you much. Nowadays all the married men live like
+bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men."
+
+"_Fin de siecle_," murmured Lord Henry.
+
+"_Fin du globe_," answered his hostess.
+
+"I wish it were _fin du globe_," said Dorian with a sigh. "Life is a
+great disappointment."
+
+"Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't
+tell me that you have exhausted life. When a man says that one knows
+that life has exhausted him. Lord Henry is very wicked, and I
+sometimes wish that I had been; but you are made to be good--you look
+so good. I must find you a nice wife. Lord Henry, don't you think
+that Mr. Gray should get married?"
+
+"I am always telling him so, Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry with a
+bow.
+
+"Well, we must look out for a suitable match for him. I shall go
+through Debrett carefully to-night and draw out a list of all the
+eligible young ladies."
+
+"With their ages, Lady Narborough?" asked Dorian.
+
+"Of course, with their ages, slightly edited. But nothing must be done
+in a hurry. I want it to be what _The Morning Post_ calls a suitable
+alliance, and I want you both to be happy."
+
+"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord
+Henry. "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love
+her."
+
+"Ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair
+and nodding to Lady Ruxton. "You must come and dine with me soon
+again. You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what Sir
+Andrew prescribes for me. You must tell me what people you would like
+to meet, though. I want it to be a delightful gathering."
+
+"I like men who have a future and women who have a past," he answered.
+"Or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?"
+
+"I fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up. "A thousand pardons,
+my dear Lady Ruxton," she added, "I didn't see you hadn't finished your
+cigarette."
+
+"Never mind, Lady Narborough. I smoke a great deal too much. I am
+going to limit myself, for the future."
+
+"Pray don't, Lady Ruxton," said Lord Henry. "Moderation is a fatal
+thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a
+feast."
+
+Lady Ruxton glanced at him curiously. "You must come and explain that
+to me some afternoon, Lord Henry. It sounds a fascinating theory," she
+murmured, as she swept out of the room.
+
+"Now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal,"
+cried Lady Narborough from the door. "If you do, we are sure to
+squabble upstairs."
+
+The men laughed, and Mr. Chapman got up solemnly from the foot of the
+table and came up to the top. Dorian Gray changed his seat and went
+and sat by Lord Henry. Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about
+the situation in the House of Commons. He guffawed at his adversaries.
+The word _doctrinaire_--word full of terror to the British
+mind--reappeared from time to time between his explosions. An
+alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory. He hoisted the
+Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought. The inherited stupidity of the
+race--sound English common sense he jovially termed it--was shown to be
+the proper bulwark for society.
+
+A smile curved Lord Henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at
+Dorian.
+
+"Are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked. "You seemed rather out of
+sorts at dinner."
+
+"I am quite well, Harry. I am tired. That is all."
+
+"You were charming last night. The little duchess is quite devoted to
+you. She tells me she is going down to Selby."
+
+"She has promised to come on the twentieth."
+
+"Is Monmouth to be there, too?"
+
+"Oh, yes, Harry."
+
+"He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her. She is very
+clever, too clever for a woman. She lacks the indefinable charm of
+weakness. It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image
+precious. Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay.
+White porcelain feet, if you like. They have been through the fire,
+and what fire does not destroy, it hardens. She has had experiences."
+
+"How long has she been married?" asked Dorian.
+
+"An eternity, she tells me. I believe, according to the peerage, it is
+ten years, but ten years with Monmouth must have been like eternity,
+with time thrown in. Who else is coming?"
+
+"Oh, the Willoughbys, Lord Rugby and his wife, our hostess, Geoffrey
+Clouston, the usual set. I have asked Lord Grotrian."
+
+"I like him," said Lord Henry. "A great many people don't, but I find
+him charming. He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by
+being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type."
+
+"I don't know if he will be able to come, Harry. He may have to go to
+Monte Carlo with his father."
+
+"Ah! what a nuisance people's people are! Try and make him come. By
+the way, Dorian, you ran off very early last night. You left before
+eleven. What did you do afterwards? Did you go straight home?"
+
+Dorian glanced at him hurriedly and frowned.
+
+"No, Harry," he said at last, "I did not get home till nearly three."
+
+"Did you go to the club?"
+
+"Yes," he answered. Then he bit his lip. "No, I don't mean that. I
+didn't go to the club. I walked about. I forget what I did.... How
+inquisitive you are, Harry! You always want to know what one has been
+doing. I always want to forget what I have been doing. I came in at
+half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time. I had left my
+latch-key at home, and my servant had to let me in. If you want any
+corroborative evidence on the subject, you can ask him."
+
+Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. "My dear fellow, as if I cared!
+Let us go up to the drawing-room. No sherry, thank you, Mr. Chapman.
+Something has happened to you, Dorian. Tell me what it is. You are
+not yourself to-night."
+
+"Don't mind me, Harry. I am irritable, and out of temper. I shall
+come round and see you to-morrow, or next day. Make my excuses to Lady
+Narborough. I shan't go upstairs. I shall go home. I must go home."
+
+"All right, Dorian. I dare say I shall see you to-morrow at tea-time.
+The duchess is coming."
+
+"I will try to be there, Harry," he said, leaving the room. As he
+drove back to his own house, he was conscious that the sense of terror
+he thought he had strangled had come back to him. Lord Henry's casual
+questioning had made him lose his nerve for the moment, and he wanted
+his nerve still. Things that were dangerous had to be destroyed. He
+winced. He hated the idea of even touching them.
+
+Yet it had to be done. He realized that, and when he had locked the
+door of his library, he opened the secret press into which he had
+thrust Basil Hallward's coat and bag. A huge fire was blazing. He
+piled another log on it. The smell of the singeing clothes and burning
+leather was horrible. It took him three-quarters of an hour to consume
+everything. At the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some
+Algerian pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and
+forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar.
+
+Suddenly he started. His eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed
+nervously at his underlip. Between two of the windows stood a large
+Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony and inlaid with ivory and blue
+lapis. He watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate
+and make afraid, as though it held something that he longed for and yet
+almost loathed. His breath quickened. A mad craving came over him.
+He lit a cigarette and then threw it away. His eyelids drooped till
+the long fringed lashes almost touched his cheek. But he still watched
+the cabinet. At last he got up from the sofa on which he had been
+lying, went over to it, and having unlocked it, touched some hidden
+spring. A triangular drawer passed slowly out. His fingers moved
+instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something. It was a
+small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought,
+the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with
+round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads. He opened it.
+Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and
+persistent.
+
+He hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his
+face. Then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly
+hot, he drew himself up and glanced at the clock. It was twenty
+minutes to twelve. He put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as
+he did so, and went into his bedroom.
+
+As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian Gray,
+dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat, crept
+quietly out of his house. In Bond Street he found a hansom with a good
+horse. He hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver an address.
+
+The man shook his head. "It is too far for me," he muttered.
+
+"Here is a sovereign for you," said Dorian. "You shall have another if
+you drive fast."
+
+"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour," and
+after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove rapidly
+towards the river.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 16
+
+A cold rain began to fall, and the blurred street-lamps looked ghastly
+in the dripping mist. The public-houses were just closing, and dim men
+and women were clustering in broken groups round their doors. From
+some of the bars came the sound of horrible laughter. In others,
+drunkards brawled and screamed.
+
+Lying back in the hansom, with his hat pulled over his forehead, Dorian
+Gray watched with listless eyes the sordid shame of the great city, and
+now and then he repeated to himself the words that Lord Henry had said
+to him on the first day they had met, "To cure the soul by means of the
+senses, and the senses by means of the soul." Yes, that was the
+secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were
+opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the
+memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were
+new.
+
+The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From time to time a
+huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm across and hid it. The
+gas-lamps grew fewer, and the streets more narrow and gloomy. Once the
+man lost his way and had to drive back half a mile. A steam rose from
+the horse as it splashed up the puddles. The sidewindows of the hansom
+were clogged with a grey-flannel mist.
+
+"To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of
+the soul!" How the words rang in his ears! His soul, certainly, was
+sick to death. Was it true that the senses could cure it? Innocent
+blood had been spilled. What could atone for that? Ah! for that there
+was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness
+was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing
+out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one.
+Indeed, what right had Basil to have spoken to him as he had done? Who
+had made him a judge over others? He had said things that were
+dreadful, horrible, not to be endured.
+
+On and on plodded the hansom, going slower, it seemed to him, at each
+step. He thrust up the trap and called to the man to drive faster.
+The hideous hunger for opium began to gnaw at him. His throat burned
+and his delicate hands twitched nervously together. He struck at the
+horse madly with his stick. The driver laughed and whipped up. He
+laughed in answer, and the man was silent.
+
+The way seemed interminable, and the streets like the black web of some
+sprawling spider. The monotony became unbearable, and as the mist
+thickened, he felt afraid.
+
+Then they passed by lonely brickfields. The fog was lighter here, and
+he could see the strange, bottle-shaped kilns with their orange,
+fanlike tongues of fire. A dog barked as they went by, and far away in
+the darkness some wandering sea-gull screamed. The horse stumbled in a
+rut, then swerved aside and broke into a gallop.
+
+After some time they left the clay road and rattled again over
+rough-paven streets. Most of the windows were dark, but now and then
+fantastic shadows were silhouetted against some lamplit blind. He
+watched them curiously. They moved like monstrous marionettes and made
+gestures like live things. He hated them. A dull rage was in his
+heart. As they turned a corner, a woman yelled something at them from
+an open door, and two men ran after the hansom for about a hundred
+yards. The driver beat at them with his whip.
+
+It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. Certainly with
+hideous iteration the bitten lips of Dorian Gray shaped and reshaped
+those subtle words that dealt with soul and sense, till he had found in
+them the full expression, as it were, of his mood, and justified, by
+intellectual approval, passions that without such justification would
+still have dominated his temper. From cell to cell of his brain crept
+the one thought; and the wild desire to live, most terrible of all
+man's appetites, quickened into force each trembling nerve and fibre.
+Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real,
+became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one
+reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of
+disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more
+vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious
+shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song. They were what he needed
+for forgetfulness. In three days he would be free.
+
+Suddenly the man drew up with a jerk at the top of a dark lane. Over
+the low roofs and jagged chimney-stacks of the houses rose the black
+masts of ships. Wreaths of white mist clung like ghostly sails to the
+yards.
+
+"Somewhere about here, sir, ain't it?" he asked huskily through the
+trap.
+
+Dorian started and peered round. "This will do," he answered, and
+having got out hastily and given the driver the extra fare he had
+promised him, he walked quickly in the direction of the quay. Here and
+there a lantern gleamed at the stern of some huge merchantman. The
+light shook and splintered in the puddles. A red glare came from an
+outward-bound steamer that was coaling. The slimy pavement looked like
+a wet mackintosh.
+
+He hurried on towards the left, glancing back now and then to see if he
+was being followed. In about seven or eight minutes he reached a small
+shabby house that was wedged in between two gaunt factories. In one of
+the top-windows stood a lamp. He stopped and gave a peculiar knock.
+
+After a little time he heard steps in the passage and the chain being
+unhooked. The door opened quietly, and he went in without saying a
+word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the
+shadow as he passed. At the end of the hall hung a tattered green
+curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him
+in from the street. He dragged it aside and entered a long low room
+which looked as if it had once been a third-rate dancing-saloon. Shrill
+flaring gas-jets, dulled and distorted in the fly-blown mirrors that
+faced them, were ranged round the walls. Greasy reflectors of ribbed
+tin backed them, making quivering disks of light. The floor was
+covered with ochre-coloured sawdust, trampled here and there into mud,
+and stained with dark rings of spilled liquor. Some Malays were
+crouching by a little charcoal stove, playing with bone counters and
+showing their white teeth as they chattered. In one corner, with his
+head buried in his arms, a sailor sprawled over a table, and by the
+tawdrily painted bar that ran across one complete side stood two
+haggard women, mocking an old man who was brushing the sleeves of his
+coat with an expression of disgust. "He thinks he's got red ants on
+him," laughed one of them, as Dorian passed by. The man looked at her
+in terror and began to whimper.
+
+At the end of the room there was a little staircase, leading to a
+darkened chamber. As Dorian hurried up its three rickety steps, the
+heavy odour of opium met him. He heaved a deep breath, and his
+nostrils quivered with pleasure. When he entered, a young man with
+smooth yellow hair, who was bending over a lamp lighting a long thin
+pipe, looked up at him and nodded in a hesitating manner.
+
+"You here, Adrian?" muttered Dorian.
+
+"Where else should I be?" he answered, listlessly. "None of the chaps
+will speak to me now."
+
+"I thought you had left England."
+
+"Darlington is not going to do anything. My brother paid the bill at
+last. George doesn't speak to me either.... I don't care," he added
+with a sigh. "As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends.
+I think I have had too many friends."
+
+Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things that lay in such
+fantastic postures on the ragged mattresses. The twisted limbs, the
+gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He knew in
+what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were
+teaching them the secret of some new joy. They were better off than he
+was. He was prisoned in thought. Memory, like a horrible malady, was
+eating his soul away. From time to time he seemed to see the eyes of
+Basil Hallward looking at him. Yet he felt he could not stay. The
+presence of Adrian Singleton troubled him. He wanted to be where no
+one would know who he was. He wanted to escape from himself.
+
+"I am going on to the other place," he said after a pause.
+
+"On the wharf?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That mad-cat is sure to be there. They won't have her in this place
+now."
+
+Dorian shrugged his shoulders. "I am sick of women who love one.
+Women who hate one are much more interesting. Besides, the stuff is
+better."
+
+"Much the same."
+
+"I like it better. Come and have something to drink. I must have
+something."
+
+"I don't want anything," murmured the young man.
+
+"Never mind."
+
+Adrian Singleton rose up wearily and followed Dorian to the bar. A
+half-caste, in a ragged turban and a shabby ulster, grinned a hideous
+greeting as he thrust a bottle of brandy and two tumblers in front of
+them. The women sidled up and began to chatter. Dorian turned his
+back on them and said something in a low voice to Adrian Singleton.
+
+A crooked smile, like a Malay crease, writhed across the face of one of
+the women. "We are very proud to-night," she sneered.
+
+"For God's sake don't talk to me," cried Dorian, stamping his foot on
+the ground. "What do you want? Money? Here it is. Don't ever talk
+to me again."
+
+Two red sparks flashed for a moment in the woman's sodden eyes, then
+flickered out and left them dull and glazed. She tossed her head and
+raked the coins off the counter with greedy fingers. Her companion
+watched her enviously.
+
+"It's no use," sighed Adrian Singleton. "I don't care to go back.
+What does it matter? I am quite happy here."
+
+"You will write to me if you want anything, won't you?" said Dorian,
+after a pause.
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Good night, then."
+
+"Good night," answered the young man, passing up the steps and wiping
+his parched mouth with a handkerchief.
+
+Dorian walked to the door with a look of pain in his face. As he drew
+the curtain aside, a hideous laugh broke from the painted lips of the
+woman who had taken his money. "There goes the devil's bargain!" she
+hiccoughed, in a hoarse voice.
+
+"Curse you!" he answered, "don't call me that."
+
+She snapped her fingers. "Prince Charming is what you like to be
+called, ain't it?" she yelled after him.
+
+The drowsy sailor leaped to his feet as she spoke, and looked wildly
+round. The sound of the shutting of the hall door fell on his ear. He
+rushed out as if in pursuit.
+
+Dorian Gray hurried along the quay through the drizzling rain. His
+meeting with Adrian Singleton had strangely moved him, and he wondered
+if the ruin of that young life was really to be laid at his door, as
+Basil Hallward had said to him with such infamy of insult. He bit his
+lip, and for a few seconds his eyes grew sad. Yet, after all, what did
+it matter to him? One's days were too brief to take the burden of
+another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life and
+paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so
+often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed.
+In her dealings with man, destiny never closed her accounts.
+
+There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or
+for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature that every fibre of
+the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful
+impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their
+will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is
+taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or, if it lives at
+all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its
+charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are
+sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of
+evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.
+
+Callous, concentrated on evil, with stained mind, and soul hungry for
+rebellion, Dorian Gray hastened on, quickening his step as he went, but
+as he darted aside into a dim archway, that had served him often as a
+short cut to the ill-famed place where he was going, he felt himself
+suddenly seized from behind, and before he had time to defend himself,
+he was thrust back against the wall, with a brutal hand round his
+throat.
+
+He struggled madly for life, and by a terrible effort wrenched the
+tightening fingers away. In a second he heard the click of a revolver,
+and saw the gleam of a polished barrel, pointing straight at his head,
+and the dusky form of a short, thick-set man facing him.
+
+"What do you want?" he gasped.
+
+"Keep quiet," said the man. "If you stir, I shoot you."
+
+"You are mad. What have I done to you?"
+
+"You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," was the answer, "and Sibyl Vane
+was my sister. She killed herself. I know it. Her death is at your
+door. I swore I would kill you in return. For years I have sought
+you. I had no clue, no trace. The two people who could have described
+you were dead. I knew nothing of you but the pet name she used to call
+you. I heard it to-night by chance. Make your peace with God, for
+to-night you are going to die."
+
+Dorian Gray grew sick with fear. "I never knew her," he stammered. "I
+never heard of her. You are mad."
+
+"You had better confess your sin, for as sure as I am James Vane, you
+are going to die." There was a horrible moment. Dorian did not know
+what to say or do. "Down on your knees!" growled the man. "I give you
+one minute to make your peace--no more. I go on board to-night for
+India, and I must do my job first. One minute. That's all."
+
+Dorian's arms fell to his side. Paralysed with terror, he did not know
+what to do. Suddenly a wild hope flashed across his brain. "Stop," he
+cried. "How long ago is it since your sister died? Quick, tell me!"
+
+"Eighteen years," said the man. "Why do you ask me? What do years
+matter?"
+
+"Eighteen years," laughed Dorian Gray, with a touch of triumph in his
+voice. "Eighteen years! Set me under the lamp and look at my face!"
+
+James Vane hesitated for a moment, not understanding what was meant.
+Then he seized Dorian Gray and dragged him from the archway.
+
+Dim and wavering as was the wind-blown light, yet it served to show him
+the hideous error, as it seemed, into which he had fallen, for the face
+of the man he had sought to kill had all the bloom of boyhood, all the
+unstained purity of youth. He seemed little more than a lad of twenty
+summers, hardly older, if older indeed at all, than his sister had been
+when they had parted so many years ago. It was obvious that this was
+not the man who had destroyed her life.
+
+He loosened his hold and reeled back. "My God! my God!" he cried, "and
+I would have murdered you!"
+
+Dorian Gray drew a long breath. "You have been on the brink of
+committing a terrible crime, my man," he said, looking at him sternly.
+"Let this be a warning to you not to take vengeance into your own
+hands."
+
+"Forgive me, sir," muttered James Vane. "I was deceived. A chance
+word I heard in that damned den set me on the wrong track."
+
+"You had better go home and put that pistol away, or you may get into
+trouble," said Dorian, turning on his heel and going slowly down the
+street.
+
+James Vane stood on the pavement in horror. He was trembling from head
+to foot. After a little while, a black shadow that had been creeping
+along the dripping wall moved out into the light and came close to him
+with stealthy footsteps. He felt a hand laid on his arm and looked
+round with a start. It was one of the women who had been drinking at
+the bar.
+
+"Why didn't you kill him?" she hissed out, putting haggard face quite
+close to his. "I knew you were following him when you rushed out from
+Daly's. You fool! You should have killed him. He has lots of money,
+and he's as bad as bad."
+
+"He is not the man I am looking for," he answered, "and I want no man's
+money. I want a man's life. The man whose life I want must be nearly
+forty now. This one is little more than a boy. Thank God, I have not
+got his blood upon my hands."
+
+The woman gave a bitter laugh. "Little more than a boy!" she sneered.
+"Why, man, it's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me
+what I am."
+
+"You lie!" cried James Vane.
+
+She raised her hand up to heaven. "Before God I am telling the truth,"
+she cried.
+
+"Before God?"
+
+"Strike me dumb if it ain't so. He is the worst one that comes here.
+They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face. It's nigh
+on eighteen years since I met him. He hasn't changed much since then.
+I have, though," she added, with a sickly leer.
+
+"You swear this?"
+
+"I swear it," came in hoarse echo from her flat mouth. "But don't give
+me away to him," she whined; "I am afraid of him. Let me have some
+money for my night's lodging."
+
+He broke from her with an oath and rushed to the corner of the street,
+but Dorian Gray had disappeared. When he looked back, the woman had
+vanished also.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 17
+
+A week later Dorian Gray was sitting in the conservatory at Selby
+Royal, talking to the pretty Duchess of Monmouth, who with her husband,
+a jaded-looking man of sixty, was amongst his guests. It was tea-time,
+and the mellow light of the huge, lace-covered lamp that stood on the
+table lit up the delicate china and hammered silver of the service at
+which the duchess was presiding. Her white hands were moving daintily
+among the cups, and her full red lips were smiling at something that
+Dorian had whispered to her. Lord Henry was lying back in a
+silk-draped wicker chair, looking at them. On a peach-coloured divan
+sat Lady Narborough, pretending to listen to the duke's description of
+the last Brazilian beetle that he had added to his collection. Three
+young men in elaborate smoking-suits were handing tea-cakes to some of
+the women. The house-party consisted of twelve people, and there were
+more expected to arrive on the next day.
+
+"What are you two talking about?" said Lord Henry, strolling over to
+the table and putting his cup down. "I hope Dorian has told you about
+my plan for rechristening everything, Gladys. It is a delightful idea."
+
+"But I don't want to be rechristened, Harry," rejoined the duchess,
+looking up at him with her wonderful eyes. "I am quite satisfied with
+my own name, and I am sure Mr. Gray should be satisfied with his."
+
+"My dear Gladys, I would not alter either name for the world. They are
+both perfect. I was thinking chiefly of flowers. Yesterday I cut an
+orchid, for my button-hole. It was a marvellous spotted thing, as
+effective as the seven deadly sins. In a thoughtless moment I asked
+one of the gardeners what it was called. He told me it was a fine
+specimen of _Robinsoniana_, or something dreadful of that kind. It is a
+sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to
+things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one
+quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in
+literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled
+to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."
+
+"Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked.
+
+"His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian.
+
+"I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the duchess.
+
+"I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair. "From
+a label there is no escape! I refuse the title."
+
+"Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips.
+
+"You wish me to defend my throne, then?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I give the truths of to-morrow."
+
+"I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered.
+
+"You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood.
+
+"Of your shield, Harry, not of your spear."
+
+"I never tilt against beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand.
+
+"That is your error, Harry, believe me. You value beauty far too much."
+
+"How can you say that? I admit that I think that it is better to be
+beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand, no one is more ready
+than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly."
+
+"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the duchess.
+"What becomes of your simile about the orchid?"
+
+"Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good
+Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly
+virtues have made our England what she is."
+
+"You don't like your country, then?" she asked.
+
+"I live in it."
+
+"That you may censure it the better."
+
+"Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he inquired.
+
+"What do they say of us?"
+
+"That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop."
+
+"Is that yours, Harry?"
+
+"I give it to you."
+
+"I could not use it. It is too true."
+
+"You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description."
+
+"They are practical."
+
+"They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger,
+they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy."
+
+"Still, we have done great things."
+
+"Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys."
+
+"We have carried their burden."
+
+"Only as far as the Stock Exchange."
+
+She shook her head. "I believe in the race," she cried.
+
+"It represents the survival of the pushing."
+
+"It has development."
+
+"Decay fascinates me more."
+
+"What of art?" she asked.
+
+"It is a malady."
+
+"Love?"
+
+"An illusion."
+
+"Religion?"
+
+"The fashionable substitute for belief."
+
+"You are a sceptic."
+
+"Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith."
+
+"What are you?"
+
+"To define is to limit."
+
+"Give me a clue."
+
+"Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth."
+
+"You bewilder me. Let us talk of some one else."
+
+"Our host is a delightful topic. Years ago he was christened Prince
+Charming."
+
+"Ah! don't remind me of that," cried Dorian Gray.
+
+"Our host is rather horrid this evening," answered the duchess,
+colouring. "I believe he thinks that Monmouth married me on purely
+scientific principles as the best specimen he could find of a modern
+butterfly."
+
+"Well, I hope he won't stick pins into you, Duchess," laughed Dorian.
+
+"Oh! my maid does that already, Mr. Gray, when she is annoyed with me."
+
+"And what does she get annoyed with you about, Duchess?"
+
+"For the most trivial things, Mr. Gray, I assure you. Usually because
+I come in at ten minutes to nine and tell her that I must be dressed by
+half-past eight."
+
+"How unreasonable of her! You should give her warning."
+
+"I daren't, Mr. Gray. Why, she invents hats for me. You remember the
+one I wore at Lady Hilstone's garden-party? You don't, but it is nice
+of you to pretend that you do. Well, she made it out of nothing. All
+good hats are made out of nothing."
+
+"Like all good reputations, Gladys," interrupted Lord Henry. "Every
+effect that one produces gives one an enemy. To be popular one must be
+a mediocrity."
+
+"Not with women," said the duchess, shaking her head; "and women rule
+the world. I assure you we can't bear mediocrities. We women, as some
+one says, love with our ears, just as you men love with your eyes, if
+you ever love at all."
+
+"It seems to me that we never do anything else," murmured Dorian.
+
+"Ah! then, you never really love, Mr. Gray," answered the duchess with
+mock sadness.
+
+"My dear Gladys!" cried Lord Henry. "How can you say that? Romance
+lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.
+Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved.
+Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely
+intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best,
+and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as
+possible."
+
+"Even when one has been wounded by it, Harry?" asked the duchess after
+a pause.
+
+"Especially when one has been wounded by it," answered Lord Henry.
+
+The duchess turned and looked at Dorian Gray with a curious expression
+in her eyes. "What do you say to that, Mr. Gray?" she inquired.
+
+Dorian hesitated for a moment. Then he threw his head back and
+laughed. "I always agree with Harry, Duchess."
+
+"Even when he is wrong?"
+
+"Harry is never wrong, Duchess."
+
+"And does his philosophy make you happy?"
+
+"I have never searched for happiness. Who wants happiness? I have
+searched for pleasure."
+
+"And found it, Mr. Gray?"
+
+"Often. Too often."
+
+The duchess sighed. "I am searching for peace," she said, "and if I
+don't go and dress, I shall have none this evening."
+
+"Let me get you some orchids, Duchess," cried Dorian, starting to his
+feet and walking down the conservatory.
+
+"You are flirting disgracefully with him," said Lord Henry to his
+cousin. "You had better take care. He is very fascinating."
+
+"If he were not, there would be no battle."
+
+"Greek meets Greek, then?"
+
+"I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman."
+
+"They were defeated."
+
+"There are worse things than capture," she answered.
+
+"You gallop with a loose rein."
+
+"Pace gives life," was the _riposte_.
+
+"I shall write it in my diary to-night."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That a burnt child loves the fire."
+
+"I am not even singed. My wings are untouched."
+
+"You use them for everything, except flight."
+
+"Courage has passed from men to women. It is a new experience for us."
+
+"You have a rival."
+
+"Who?"
+
+He laughed. "Lady Narborough," he whispered. "She perfectly adores
+him."
+
+"You fill me with apprehension. The appeal to antiquity is fatal to us
+who are romanticists."
+
+"Romanticists! You have all the methods of science."
+
+"Men have educated us."
+
+"But not explained you."
+
+"Describe us as a sex," was her challenge.
+
+"Sphinxes without secrets."
+
+She looked at him, smiling. "How long Mr. Gray is!" she said. "Let us
+go and help him. I have not yet told him the colour of my frock."
+
+"Ah! you must suit your frock to his flowers, Gladys."
+
+"That would be a premature surrender."
+
+"Romantic art begins with its climax."
+
+"I must keep an opportunity for retreat."
+
+"In the Parthian manner?"
+
+"They found safety in the desert. I could not do that."
+
+"Women are not always allowed a choice," he answered, but hardly had he
+finished the sentence before from the far end of the conservatory came
+a stifled groan, followed by the dull sound of a heavy fall. Everybody
+started up. The duchess stood motionless in horror. And with fear in
+his eyes, Lord Henry rushed through the flapping palms to find Dorian
+Gray lying face downwards on the tiled floor in a deathlike swoon.
+
+He was carried at once into the blue drawing-room and laid upon one of
+the sofas. After a short time, he came to himself and looked round
+with a dazed expression.
+
+"What has happened?" he asked. "Oh! I remember. Am I safe here,
+Harry?" He began to tremble.
+
+"My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, "you merely fainted. That was
+all. You must have overtired yourself. You had better not come down
+to dinner. I will take your place."
+
+"No, I will come down," he said, struggling to his feet. "I would
+rather come down. I must not be alone."
+
+He went to his room and dressed. There was a wild recklessness of
+gaiety in his manner as he sat at table, but now and then a thrill of
+terror ran through him when he remembered that, pressed against the
+window of the conservatory, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the
+face of James Vane watching him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 18
+
+The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the
+time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet
+indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of being hunted, snared,
+tracked down, had begun to dominate him. If the tapestry did but
+tremble in the wind, he shook. The dead leaves that were blown against
+the leaded panes seemed to him like his own wasted resolutions and wild
+regrets. When he closed his eyes, he saw again the sailor's face
+peering through the mist-stained glass, and horror seemed once more to
+lay its hand upon his heart.
+
+But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of
+the night and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him. Actual
+life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the
+imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet
+of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen
+brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor
+the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust
+upon the weak. That was all. Besides, had any stranger been prowling
+round the house, he would have been seen by the servants or the
+keepers. Had any foot-marks been found on the flower-beds, the
+gardeners would have reported it. Yes, it had been merely fancy.
+Sibyl Vane's brother had not come back to kill him. He had sailed away
+in his ship to founder in some winter sea. From him, at any rate, he
+was safe. Why, the man did not know who he was, could not know who he
+was. The mask of youth had saved him.
+
+And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think
+that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them
+visible form, and make them move before one! What sort of life would
+his be if, day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from
+silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear
+as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep!
+As the thought crept through his brain, he grew pale with terror, and
+the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder. Oh! in what a
+wild hour of madness he had killed his friend! How ghastly the mere
+memory of the scene! He saw it all again. Each hideous detail came
+back to him with added horror. Out of the black cave of time, terrible
+and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his sin. When Lord Henry
+came in at six o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will
+break.
+
+It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. There was
+something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that
+seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life. But
+it was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had
+caused the change. His own nature had revolted against the excess of
+anguish that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm.
+With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. Their
+strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man,
+or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The
+loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plenitude.
+Besides, he had convinced himself that he had been the victim of a
+terror-stricken imagination, and looked back now on his fears with
+something of pity and not a little of contempt.
+
+After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden
+and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. The crisp
+frost lay like salt upon the grass. The sky was an inverted cup of
+blue metal. A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake.
+
+At the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey
+Clouston, the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of
+his gun. He jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take
+the mare home, made his way towards his guest through the withered
+bracken and rough undergrowth.
+
+"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.
+
+"Not very good, Dorian. I think most of the birds have gone to the
+open. I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new
+ground."
+
+Dorian strolled along by his side. The keen aromatic air, the brown
+and red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of the
+beaters ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of the guns
+that followed, fascinated him and filled him with a sense of delightful
+freedom. He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the
+high indifference of joy.
+
+Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front
+of them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing it
+forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of alders. Sir
+Geoffrey put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something in the
+animal's grace of movement that strangely charmed Dorian Gray, and he
+cried out at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey. Let it live."
+
+"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare bounded
+into the thicket, he fired. There were two cries heard, the cry of a
+hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is
+worse.
+
+"Good heavens! I have hit a beater!" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey. "What an
+ass the man was to get in front of the guns! Stop shooting there!" he
+called out at the top of his voice. "A man is hurt."
+
+The head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand.
+
+"Where, sir? Where is he?" he shouted. At the same time, the firing
+ceased along the line.
+
+"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
+"Why on earth don't you keep your men back? Spoiled my shooting for
+the day."
+
+Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing the
+lithe swinging branches aside. In a few moments they emerged, dragging
+a body after them into the sunlight. He turned away in horror. It
+seemed to him that misfortune followed wherever he went. He heard Sir
+Geoffrey ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative answer of
+the keeper. The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with
+faces. There was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of
+voices. A great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the
+boughs overhead.
+
+After a few moments--that were to him, in his perturbed state, like
+endless hours of pain--he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He started
+and looked round.
+
+"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting is
+stopped for to-day. It would not look well to go on."
+
+"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered bitterly. "The
+whole thing is hideous and cruel. Is the man ...?"
+
+He could not finish the sentence.
+
+"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry. "He got the whole charge of
+shot in his chest. He must have died almost instantaneously. Come;
+let us go home."
+
+They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly
+fifty yards without speaking. Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry and
+said, with a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."
+
+"What is?" asked Lord Henry. "Oh! this accident, I suppose. My dear
+fellow, it can't be helped. It was the man's own fault. Why did he
+get in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is rather
+awkward for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It
+makes people think that one is a wild shot. And Geoffrey is not; he
+shoots very straight. But there is no use talking about the matter."
+
+Dorian shook his head. "It is a bad omen, Harry. I feel as if
+something horrible were going to happen to some of us. To myself,
+perhaps," he added, passing his hand over his eyes, with a gesture of
+pain.
+
+The elder man laughed. "The only horrible thing in the world is _ennui_,
+Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness. But we
+are not likely to suffer from it unless these fellows keep chattering
+about this thing at dinner. I must tell them that the subject is to be
+tabooed. As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny
+does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.
+Besides, what on earth could happen to you, Dorian? You have
+everything in the world that a man can want. There is no one who would
+not be delighted to change places with you."
+
+"There is no one with whom I would not change places, Harry. Don't
+laugh like that. I am telling you the truth. The wretched peasant who
+has just died is better off than I am. I have no terror of death. It
+is the coming of death that terrifies me. Its monstrous wings seem to
+wheel in the leaden air around me. Good heavens! don't you see a man
+moving behind the trees there, watching me, waiting for me?"
+
+Lord Henry looked in the direction in which the trembling gloved hand
+was pointing. "Yes," he said, smiling, "I see the gardener waiting for
+you. I suppose he wants to ask you what flowers you wish to have on
+the table to-night. How absurdly nervous you are, my dear fellow! You
+must come and see my doctor, when we get back to town."
+
+Dorian heaved a sigh of relief as he saw the gardener approaching. The
+man touched his hat, glanced for a moment at Lord Henry in a hesitating
+manner, and then produced a letter, which he handed to his master.
+"Her Grace told me to wait for an answer," he murmured.
+
+Dorian put the letter into his pocket. "Tell her Grace that I am
+coming in," he said, coldly. The man turned round and went rapidly in
+the direction of the house.
+
+"How fond women are of doing dangerous things!" laughed Lord Henry.
+"It is one of the qualities in them that I admire most. A woman will
+flirt with anybody in the world as long as other people are looking on."
+
+"How fond you are of saying dangerous things, Harry! In the present
+instance, you are quite astray. I like the duchess very much, but I
+don't love her."
+
+"And the duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you
+are excellently matched."
+
+"You are talking scandal, Harry, and there is never any basis for
+scandal."
+
+"The basis of every scandal is an immoral certainty," said Lord Henry,
+lighting a cigarette.
+
+"You would sacrifice anybody, Harry, for the sake of an epigram."
+
+"The world goes to the altar of its own accord," was the answer.
+
+"I wish I could love," cried Dorian Gray with a deep note of pathos in
+his voice. "But I seem to have lost the passion and forgotten the
+desire. I am too much concentrated on myself. My own personality has
+become a burden to me. I want to escape, to go away, to forget. It
+was silly of me to come down here at all. I think I shall send a wire
+to Harvey to have the yacht got ready. On a yacht one is safe."
+
+"Safe from what, Dorian? You are in some trouble. Why not tell me
+what it is? You know I would help you."
+
+"I can't tell you, Harry," he answered sadly. "And I dare say it is
+only a fancy of mine. This unfortunate accident has upset me. I have
+a horrible presentiment that something of the kind may happen to me."
+
+"What nonsense!"
+
+"I hope it is, but I can't help feeling it. Ah! here is the duchess,
+looking like Artemis in a tailor-made gown. You see we have come back,
+Duchess."
+
+"I have heard all about it, Mr. Gray," she answered. "Poor Geoffrey is
+terribly upset. And it seems that you asked him not to shoot the hare.
+How curious!"
+
+"Yes, it was very curious. I don't know what made me say it. Some
+whim, I suppose. It looked the loveliest of little live things. But I
+am sorry they told you about the man. It is a hideous subject."
+
+"It is an annoying subject," broke in Lord Henry. "It has no
+psychological value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on
+purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one
+who had committed a real murder."
+
+"How horrid of you, Harry!" cried the duchess. "Isn't it, Mr. Gray?
+Harry, Mr. Gray is ill again. He is going to faint."
+
+Dorian drew himself up with an effort and smiled. "It is nothing,
+Duchess," he murmured; "my nerves are dreadfully out of order. That is
+all. I am afraid I walked too far this morning. I didn't hear what
+Harry said. Was it very bad? You must tell me some other time. I
+think I must go and lie down. You will excuse me, won't you?"
+
+They had reached the great flight of steps that led from the
+conservatory on to the terrace. As the glass door closed behind
+Dorian, Lord Henry turned and looked at the duchess with his slumberous
+eyes. "Are you very much in love with him?" he asked.
+
+She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape.
+"I wish I knew," she said at last.
+
+He shook his head. "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty
+that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful."
+
+"One may lose one's way."
+
+"All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"Disillusion."
+
+"It was my _debut_ in life," she sighed.
+
+"It came to you crowned."
+
+"I am tired of strawberry leaves."
+
+"They become you."
+
+"Only in public."
+
+"You would miss them," said Lord Henry.
+
+"I will not part with a petal."
+
+"Monmouth has ears."
+
+"Old age is dull of hearing."
+
+"Has he never been jealous?"
+
+"I wish he had been."
+
+He glanced about as if in search of something. "What are you looking
+for?" she inquired.
+
+"The button from your foil," he answered. "You have dropped it."
+
+She laughed. "I have still the mask."
+
+"It makes your eyes lovelier," was his reply.
+
+She laughed again. Her teeth showed like white seeds in a scarlet
+fruit.
+
+Upstairs, in his own room, Dorian Gray was lying on a sofa, with terror
+in every tingling fibre of his body. Life had suddenly become too
+hideous a burden for him to bear. The dreadful death of the unlucky
+beater, shot in the thicket like a wild animal, had seemed to him to
+pre-figure death for himself also. He had nearly swooned at what Lord
+Henry had said in a chance mood of cynical jesting.
+
+At five o'clock he rang his bell for his servant and gave him orders to
+pack his things for the night-express to town, and to have the brougham
+at the door by eight-thirty. He was determined not to sleep another
+night at Selby Royal. It was an ill-omened place. Death walked there
+in the sunlight. The grass of the forest had been spotted with blood.
+
+Then he wrote a note to Lord Henry, telling him that he was going up to
+town to consult his doctor and asking him to entertain his guests in
+his absence. As he was putting it into the envelope, a knock came to
+the door, and his valet informed him that the head-keeper wished to see
+him. He frowned and bit his lip. "Send him in," he muttered, after
+some moments' hesitation.
+
+As soon as the man entered, Dorian pulled his chequebook out of a
+drawer and spread it out before him.
+
+"I suppose you have come about the unfortunate accident of this
+morning, Thornton?" he said, taking up a pen.
+
+"Yes, sir," answered the gamekeeper.
+
+"Was the poor fellow married? Had he any people dependent on him?"
+asked Dorian, looking bored. "If so, I should not like them to be left
+in want, and will send them any sum of money you may think necessary."
+
+"We don't know who he is, sir. That is what I took the liberty of
+coming to you about."
+
+"Don't know who he is?" said Dorian, listlessly. "What do you mean?
+Wasn't he one of your men?"
+
+"No, sir. Never saw him before. Seems like a sailor, sir."
+
+The pen dropped from Dorian Gray's hand, and he felt as if his heart
+had suddenly stopped beating. "A sailor?" he cried out. "Did you say
+a sailor?"
+
+"Yes, sir. He looks as if he had been a sort of sailor; tattooed on
+both arms, and that kind of thing."
+
+"Was there anything found on him?" said Dorian, leaning forward and
+looking at the man with startled eyes. "Anything that would tell his
+name?"
+
+"Some money, sir--not much, and a six-shooter. There was no name of any
+kind. A decent-looking man, sir, but rough-like. A sort of sailor we
+think."
+
+Dorian started to his feet. A terrible hope fluttered past him. He
+clutched at it madly. "Where is the body?" he exclaimed. "Quick! I
+must see it at once."
+
+"It is in an empty stable in the Home Farm, sir. The folk don't like
+to have that sort of thing in their houses. They say a corpse brings
+bad luck."
+
+"The Home Farm! Go there at once and meet me. Tell one of the grooms
+to bring my horse round. No. Never mind. I'll go to the stables
+myself. It will save time."
+
+In less than a quarter of an hour, Dorian Gray was galloping down the
+long avenue as hard as he could go. The trees seemed to sweep past him
+in spectral procession, and wild shadows to fling themselves across his
+path. Once the mare swerved at a white gate-post and nearly threw him.
+He lashed her across the neck with his crop. She cleft the dusky air
+like an arrow. The stones flew from her hoofs.
+
+At last he reached the Home Farm. Two men were loitering in the yard.
+He leaped from the saddle and threw the reins to one of them. In the
+farthest stable a light was glimmering. Something seemed to tell him
+that the body was there, and he hurried to the door and put his hand
+upon the latch.
+
+There he paused for a moment, feeling that he was on the brink of a
+discovery that would either make or mar his life. Then he thrust the
+door open and entered.
+
+On a heap of sacking in the far corner was lying the dead body of a man
+dressed in a coarse shirt and a pair of blue trousers. A spotted
+handkerchief had been placed over the face. A coarse candle, stuck in
+a bottle, sputtered beside it.
+
+Dorian Gray shuddered. He felt that his could not be the hand to take
+the handkerchief away, and called out to one of the farm-servants to
+come to him.
+
+"Take that thing off the face. I wish to see it," he said, clutching
+at the door-post for support.
+
+When the farm-servant had done so, he stepped forward. A cry of joy
+broke from his lips. The man who had been shot in the thicket was
+James Vane.
+
+He stood there for some minutes looking at the dead body. As he rode
+home, his eyes were full of tears, for he knew he was safe.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 19
+
+"There is no use your telling me that you are going to be good," cried
+Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled
+with rose-water. "You are quite perfect. Pray, don't change."
+
+Dorian Gray shook his head. "No, Harry, I have done too many dreadful
+things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began my good
+actions yesterday."
+
+"Where were you yesterday?"
+
+"In the country, Harry. I was staying at a little inn by myself."
+
+"My dear boy," said Lord Henry, smiling, "anybody can be good in the
+country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why
+people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized.
+Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are
+only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the
+other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being
+either, so they stagnate."
+
+"Culture and corruption," echoed Dorian. "I have known something of
+both. It seems terrible to me now that they should ever be found
+together. For I have a new ideal, Harry. I am going to alter. I
+think I have altered."
+
+"You have not yet told me what your good action was. Or did you say
+you had done more than one?" asked his companion as he spilled into his
+plate a little crimson pyramid of seeded strawberries and, through a
+perforated, shell-shaped spoon, snowed white sugar upon them.
+
+"I can tell you, Harry. It is not a story I could tell to any one
+else. I spared somebody. It sounds vain, but you understand what I
+mean. She was quite beautiful and wonderfully like Sibyl Vane. I
+think it was that which first attracted me to her. You remember Sibyl,
+don't you? How long ago that seems! Well, Hetty was not one of our
+own class, of course. She was simply a girl in a village. But I
+really loved her. I am quite sure that I loved her. All during this
+wonderful May that we have been having, I used to run down and see her
+two or three times a week. Yesterday she met me in a little orchard.
+The apple-blossoms kept tumbling down on her hair, and she was
+laughing. We were to have gone away together this morning at dawn.
+Suddenly I determined to leave her as flowerlike as I had found her."
+
+"I should think the novelty of the emotion must have given you a thrill
+of real pleasure, Dorian," interrupted Lord Henry. "But I can finish
+your idyll for you. You gave her good advice and broke her heart.
+That was the beginning of your reformation."
+
+"Harry, you are horrible! You mustn't say these dreadful things.
+Hetty's heart is not broken. Of course, she cried and all that. But
+there is no disgrace upon her. She can live, like Perdita, in her
+garden of mint and marigold."
+
+"And weep over a faithless Florizel," said Lord Henry, laughing, as he
+leaned back in his chair. "My dear Dorian, you have the most curiously
+boyish moods. Do you think this girl will ever be really content now
+with any one of her own rank? I suppose she will be married some day
+to a rough carter or a grinning ploughman. Well, the fact of having
+met you, and loved you, will teach her to despise her husband, and she
+will be wretched. From a moral point of view, I cannot say that I
+think much of your great renunciation. Even as a beginning, it is
+poor. Besides, how do you know that Hetty isn't floating at the
+present moment in some starlit mill-pond, with lovely water-lilies
+round her, like Ophelia?"
+
+"I can't bear this, Harry! You mock at everything, and then suggest
+the most serious tragedies. I am sorry I told you now. I don't care
+what you say to me. I know I was right in acting as I did. Poor
+Hetty! As I rode past the farm this morning, I saw her white face at
+the window, like a spray of jasmine. Don't let us talk about it any
+more, and don't try to persuade me that the first good action I have
+done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever
+known, is really a sort of sin. I want to be better. I am going to be
+better. Tell me something about yourself. What is going on in town?
+I have not been to the club for days."
+
+"The people are still discussing poor Basil's disappearance."
+
+"I should have thought they had got tired of that by this time," said
+Dorian, pouring himself out some wine and frowning slightly.
+
+"My dear boy, they have only been talking about it for six weeks, and
+the British public are really not equal to the mental strain of having
+more than one topic every three months. They have been very fortunate
+lately, however. They have had my own divorce-case and Alan Campbell's
+suicide. Now they have got the mysterious disappearance of an artist.
+Scotland Yard still insists that the man in the grey ulster who left
+for Paris by the midnight train on the ninth of November was poor
+Basil, and the French police declare that Basil never arrived in Paris
+at all. I suppose in about a fortnight we shall be told that he has
+been seen in San Francisco. It is an odd thing, but every one who
+disappears is said to be seen at San Francisco. It must be a
+delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world."
+
+"What do you think has happened to Basil?" asked Dorian, holding up his
+Burgundy against the light and wondering how it was that he could
+discuss the matter so calmly.
+
+"I have not the slightest idea. If Basil chooses to hide himself, it
+is no business of mine. If he is dead, I don't want to think about
+him. Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me. I hate it."
+
+"Why?" said the younger man wearily.
+
+"Because," said Lord Henry, passing beneath his nostrils the gilt
+trellis of an open vinaigrette box, "one can survive everything
+nowadays except that. Death and vulgarity are the only two facts in
+the nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. Let us have our
+coffee in the music-room, Dorian. You must play Chopin to me. The man
+with whom my wife ran away played Chopin exquisitely. Poor Victoria!
+I was very fond of her. The house is rather lonely without her. Of
+course, married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one
+regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them
+the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality."
+
+Dorian said nothing, but rose from the table, and passing into the next
+room, sat down to the piano and let his fingers stray across the white
+and black ivory of the keys. After the coffee had been brought in, he
+stopped, and looking over at Lord Henry, said, "Harry, did it ever
+occur to you that Basil was murdered?"
+
+Lord Henry yawned. "Basil was very popular, and always wore a
+Waterbury watch. Why should he have been murdered? He was not clever
+enough to have enemies. Of course, he had a wonderful genius for
+painting. But a man can paint like Velasquez and yet be as dull as
+possible. Basil was really rather dull. He only interested me once,
+and that was when he told me, years ago, that he had a wild adoration
+for you and that you were the dominant motive of his art."
+
+"I was very fond of Basil," said Dorian with a note of sadness in his
+voice. "But don't people say that he was murdered?"
+
+"Oh, some of the papers do. It does not seem to me to be at all
+probable. I know there are dreadful places in Paris, but Basil was not
+the sort of man to have gone to them. He had no curiosity. It was his
+chief defect."
+
+"What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?"
+said the younger man. He watched him intently after he had spoken.
+
+"I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that
+doesn't suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime.
+It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. I am sorry if I hurt
+your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true. Crime belongs
+exclusively to the lower orders. I don't blame them in the smallest
+degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us,
+simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations."
+
+"A method of procuring sensations? Do you think, then, that a man who
+has once committed a murder could possibly do the same crime again?
+Don't tell me that."
+
+"Oh! anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried Lord
+Henry, laughing. "That is one of the most important secrets of life.
+I should fancy, however, that murder is always a mistake. One should
+never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner. But let us
+pass from poor Basil. I wish I could believe that he had come to such
+a really romantic end as you suggest, but I can't. I dare say he fell
+into the Seine off an omnibus and that the conductor hushed up the
+scandal. Yes: I should fancy that was his end. I see him lying now
+on his back under those dull-green waters, with the heavy barges
+floating over him and long weeds catching in his hair. Do you know, I
+don't think he would have done much more good work. During the last
+ten years his painting had gone off very much."
+
+Dorian heaved a sigh, and Lord Henry strolled across the room and began
+to stroke the head of a curious Java parrot, a large, grey-plumaged
+bird with pink crest and tail, that was balancing itself upon a bamboo
+perch. As his pointed fingers touched it, it dropped the white scurf
+of crinkled lids over black, glasslike eyes and began to sway backwards
+and forwards.
+
+"Yes," he continued, turning round and taking his handkerchief out of
+his pocket; "his painting had quite gone off. It seemed to me to have
+lost something. It had lost an ideal. When you and he ceased to be
+great friends, he ceased to be a great artist. What was it separated
+you? I suppose he bored you. If so, he never forgave you. It's a
+habit bores have. By the way, what has become of that wonderful
+portrait he did of you? I don't think I have ever seen it since he
+finished it. Oh! I remember your telling me years ago that you had
+sent it down to Selby, and that it had got mislaid or stolen on the
+way. You never got it back? What a pity! it was really a
+masterpiece. I remember I wanted to buy it. I wish I had now. It
+belonged to Basil's best period. Since then, his work was that curious
+mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man
+to be called a representative British artist. Did you advertise for
+it? You should."
+
+"I forget," said Dorian. "I suppose I did. But I never really liked
+it. I am sorry I sat for it. The memory of the thing is hateful to
+me. Why do you talk of it? It used to remind me of those curious
+lines in some play--Hamlet, I think--how do they run?--
+
+ "Like the painting of a sorrow,
+ A face without a heart."
+
+Yes: that is what it was like."
+
+Lord Henry laughed. "If a man treats life artistically, his brain is
+his heart," he answered, sinking into an arm-chair.
+
+Dorian Gray shook his head and struck some soft chords on the piano.
+"'Like the painting of a sorrow,'" he repeated, "'a face without a
+heart.'"
+
+The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes. "By
+the way, Dorian," he said after a pause, "'what does it profit a man if
+he gain the whole world and lose--how does the quotation run?--his own
+soul'?"
+
+The music jarred, and Dorian Gray started and stared at his friend.
+"Why do you ask me that, Harry?"
+
+"My dear fellow," said Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise,
+"I asked you because I thought you might be able to give me an answer.
+That is all. I was going through the park last Sunday, and close by
+the Marble Arch there stood a little crowd of shabby-looking people
+listening to some vulgar street-preacher. As I passed by, I heard the
+man yelling out that question to his audience. It struck me as being
+rather dramatic. London is very rich in curious effects of that kind.
+A wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly
+white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful
+phrase flung into the air by shrill hysterical lips--it was really very
+good in its way, quite a suggestion. I thought of telling the prophet
+that art had a soul, but that man had not. I am afraid, however, he
+would not have understood me."
+
+"Don't, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and
+sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There
+is a soul in each one of us. I know it."
+
+"Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?"
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely
+certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the
+lesson of romance. How grave you are! Don't be so serious. What have
+you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given
+up our belief in the soul. Play me something. Play me a nocturne,
+Dorian, and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept
+your youth. You must have some secret. I am only ten years older than
+you are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. You are really
+wonderful, Dorian. You have never looked more charming than you do
+to-night. You remind me of the day I saw you first. You were rather
+cheeky, very shy, and absolutely extraordinary. You have changed, of
+course, but not in appearance. I wish you would tell me your secret.
+To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take
+exercise, get up early, or be respectable. Youth! There is nothing
+like it. It's absurd to talk of the ignorance of youth. The only
+people to whose opinions I listen now with any respect are people much
+younger than myself. They seem in front of me. Life has revealed to
+them her latest wonder. As for the aged, I always contradict the aged.
+I do it on principle. If you ask them their opinion on something that
+happened yesterday, they solemnly give you the opinions current in
+1820, when people wore high stocks, believed in everything, and knew
+absolutely nothing. How lovely that thing you are playing is! I
+wonder, did Chopin write it at Majorca, with the sea weeping round the
+villa and the salt spray dashing against the panes? It is marvellously
+romantic. What a blessing it is that there is one art left to us that
+is not imitative! Don't stop. I want music to-night. It seems to me
+that you are the young Apollo and that I am Marsyas listening to you.
+I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that even you know nothing of. The
+tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. I am
+amazed sometimes at my own sincerity. Ah, Dorian, how happy you are!
+What an exquisite life you have had! You have drunk deeply of
+everything. You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing
+has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the
+sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the same."
+
+"I am not the same, Harry."
+
+"Yes, you are the same. I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
+Don't spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type.
+Don't make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now. You need
+not shake your head: you know you are. Besides, Dorian, don't deceive
+yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a
+question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which
+thought hides itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy
+yourself safe and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour
+in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once
+loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten
+poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music
+that you had ceased to play--I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things
+like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that
+somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. There are
+moments when the odour of _lilas blanc_ passes suddenly across me, and I
+have to live the strangest month of my life over again. I wish I could
+change places with you, Dorian. The world has cried out against us
+both, but it has always worshipped you. It always will worship you.
+You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is
+afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything,
+never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything
+outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to
+music. Your days are your sonnets."
+
+Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair.
+"Yes, life has been exquisite," he murmured, "but I am not going to
+have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these extravagant
+things to me. You don't know everything about me. I think that if you
+did, even you would turn from me. You laugh. Don't laugh."
+
+"Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the
+nocturne over again. Look at that great, honey-coloured moon that
+hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if
+you play she will come closer to the earth. You won't? Let us go to
+the club, then. It has been a charming evening, and we must end it
+charmingly. There is some one at White's who wants immensely to know
+you--young Lord Poole, Bournemouth's eldest son. He has already copied
+your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite
+delightful and rather reminds me of you."
+
+"I hope not," said Dorian with a sad look in his eyes. "But I am tired
+to-night, Harry. I shan't go to the club. It is nearly eleven, and I
+want to go to bed early."
+
+"Do stay. You have never played so well as to-night. There was
+something in your touch that was wonderful. It had more expression
+than I had ever heard from it before."
+
+"It is because I am going to be good," he answered, smiling. "I am a
+little changed already."
+
+"You cannot change to me, Dorian," said Lord Henry. "You and I will
+always be friends."
+
+"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.
+Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It
+does harm."
+
+"My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will soon be
+going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people
+against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too
+delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we
+are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book,
+there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It
+annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that
+the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
+That is all. But we won't discuss literature. Come round to-morrow. I
+am going to ride at eleven. We might go together, and I will take you
+to lunch afterwards with Lady Branksome. She is a charming woman, and
+wants to consult you about some tapestries she is thinking of buying.
+Mind you come. Or shall we lunch with our little duchess? She says
+she never sees you now. Perhaps you are tired of Gladys? I thought
+you would be. Her clever tongue gets on one's nerves. Well, in any
+case, be here at eleven."
+
+"Must I really come, Harry?"
+
+"Certainly. The park is quite lovely now. I don't think there have
+been such lilacs since the year I met you."
+
+"Very well. I shall be here at eleven," said Dorian. "Good night,
+Harry." As he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, as if he
+had something more to say. Then he sighed and went out.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER 20
+
+It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and
+did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he strolled home,
+smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. He
+heard one of them whisper to the other, "That is Dorian Gray." He
+remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared
+at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half
+the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was
+that no one knew who he was. He had often told the girl whom he had
+lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had
+told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and
+answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. What a
+laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had
+been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but
+she had everything that he had lost.
+
+When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent
+him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and
+began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.
+
+Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing
+for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as
+Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself,
+filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he
+had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible
+joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had
+been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to
+shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?
+
+Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that
+the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the
+unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to
+that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure
+swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment.
+Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Smite us for our iniquities" should be
+the prayer of man to a most just God.
+
+The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many
+years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids
+laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that
+night of horror when he had first noted the change in the fatal
+picture, and with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished
+shield. Once, some one who had terribly loved him had written to him a
+mad letter, ending with these idolatrous words: "The world is changed
+because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips
+rewrite history." The phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated
+them over and over to himself. Then he loathed his own beauty, and
+flinging the mirror on the floor, crushed it into silver splinters
+beneath his heel. It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty
+and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his
+life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a
+mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an
+unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he
+worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.
+
+It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that. It
+was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. James
+Vane was hidden in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard. Alan Campbell
+had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the
+secret that he had been forced to know. The excitement, such as it
+was, over Basil Hallward's disappearance would soon pass away. It was
+already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the
+death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the
+living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the
+portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It
+was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said things to
+him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. The
+murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell,
+his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do it. It was
+nothing to him.
+
+A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting
+for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent
+thing, at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be
+good.
+
+As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in
+the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it
+had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel
+every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil
+had already gone away. He would go and look.
+
+He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the
+door, a smile of joy flitted across his strangely young-looking face
+and lingered for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and
+the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror
+to him. He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.
+
+He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and
+dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and
+indignation broke from him. He could see no change, save that in the
+eyes there was a look of cunning and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of
+the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome--more loathsome, if
+possible, than before--and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed
+brighter, and more like blood newly spilled. Then he trembled. Had it
+been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the
+desire for a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking
+laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things
+finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these? And why was the
+red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a
+horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the
+painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand
+that had not held the knife. Confess? Did it mean that he was to
+confess? To give himself up and be put to death? He laughed. He felt
+that the idea was monstrous. Besides, even if he did confess, who
+would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere.
+Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned
+what had been below-stairs. The world would simply say that he was mad.
+They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.... Yet it was
+his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public
+atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to
+earth as well as to heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him
+till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders.
+The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking
+of Hetty Merton. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul
+that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there
+been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been
+something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell? ... No.
+There had been nothing more. Through vanity he had spared her. In
+hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he
+had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.
+
+But this murder--was it to dog him all his life? Was he always to be
+burdened by his past? Was he really to confess? Never. There was
+only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself--that
+was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once
+it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of
+late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night.
+When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes
+should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions.
+Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like
+conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.
+
+He looked round and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He
+had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It
+was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would
+kill the painter's work, and all that that meant. It would kill the
+past, and when that was dead, he would be free. It would kill this
+monstrous soul-life, and without its hideous warnings, he would be at
+peace. He seized the thing, and stabbed the picture with it.
+
+There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its
+agony that the frightened servants woke and crept out of their rooms.
+Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped and looked
+up at the great house. They walked on till they met a policeman and
+brought him back. The man rang the bell several times, but there was
+no answer. Except for a light in one of the top windows, the house was
+all dark. After a time, he went away and stood in an adjoining portico
+and watched.
+
+"Whose house is that, Constable?" asked the elder of the two gentlemen.
+
+"Mr. Dorian Gray's, sir," answered the policeman.
+
+They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. One of
+them was Sir Henry Ashton's uncle.
+
+Inside, in the servants' part of the house, the half-clad domestics
+were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying
+and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.
+
+After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the
+footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply.
+They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying
+to force the door, they got on the roof and dropped down on to the
+balcony. The windows yielded easily--their bolts were old.
+
+When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait
+of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his
+exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in
+evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled,
+and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings
+that they recognized who it was.
projects / gender-roles-text-analysis.git / blobdiff