The Picture of Dorian Gray
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Oscar Wilde >> The Picture of Dorian Gray
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"I am so sorry you have given yourself the trouble of coming round,
Mr. Ashton. I will certainly drop in and look at the frame,--though
I don't go in much 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 up-stairs."
"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. Ashton, 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. Ashton, who had a true tradesman's 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.
"A terrible load to carry," 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
Sherard for the use of the little nephew whom, being himself
childless, and perhaps for other reasons, he had always hated and
desired to keep at a distance. It did not appear to Dorian to have
much 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 was the
satinwood bookcase filled with his dog-eared school-books. On the
wall behind it was hanging the same [62] 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 recalled it all! Every moment of his lonely
childhood came back to him, as he looked round. He remembered the
stainless purity of his boyish life, and it seemed horrible to him
that it was here that 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. The thing upon the canvas was growing old,
hour by hour, and week by week. Even if it escaped the hideousness
of sin, 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 uncle 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. Ashton, 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. Ashton," 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 won'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. Ashton tramped down-stairs, 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 [63]
the door, and put the key in his pocket. He felt safe now. No one
would ever look on 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 his
guardian's wife, Lady Radley, 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 replaced,
and the blank space on the wall was visible. Perhaps some night he
might find him creeping up-stairs 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 bit 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. He read 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 slightly, and, tearing the paper in two, went across the
room and flung the pieces into a gilt basket. 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 account. 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-colored
octagonal stand, that had always looked to him like the work of some
[64] strange Egyptian bees who wrought in silver, and took the volume
up. He 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 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 Decadents. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as
orchids, and as evil in color. 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 odor 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 revery, a
malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and
the 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 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 what the
time was."
"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, if you have discovered that, you have discovered a great deal,"
murmured Lord Henry, with his curious smile. "Come, let us go in to
dinner. It is dreadfully late, and I am afraid the champagne will be
too much iced."
CHAPTER IX
[65] For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory 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
five large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
different colors, 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 temperament and the scientific
temperament 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 book'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 beauty 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 over-emphasized, account of the sorrow
and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and in the
world, he had most valued.
He, at any rate, had no cause to fear that. The boyish 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 rumors about his mode of
life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs) could
not believe anything to his dishonor 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 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 sensuous.
He himself, 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, would creep
up-stairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never
left him, 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
often with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that
seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual
mouth, [66] 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 that, many years before, 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 belong to 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 he affected from time to time, 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" had once 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
[67] 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 ourselves, and that we 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 the anchorite out to herd 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 re-create 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 one 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 revery.
Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear
to tremble. Black fantastic 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. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by
degrees the forms and colors 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 have left them, and beside them [68] lies the half-read 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 re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness, a world in
which things would have fresh shapes and colors, 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 among 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
color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that
curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor of
temperament, and that indeed, according to certain modern
psychologists, is often a condition of it.
It was rumored 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 with the priest, in his stiff flowered
cope, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the
tabernacle, and 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 tarnished 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 [69] 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 mysteries to reveal.
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