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 her 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,
