Chương Chương 11 · For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of

. 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 cælestis_,” 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 _parsemé_ 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 _entrées_, 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 _tædium vitæ_, 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.