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CHAPTER 11-PART 1
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 *** 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
*** 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.
-CHAPTER 11-PART 2
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
***, and the coronation of the *** was figured in coloured silks upon the
hood.
This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.
Another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of
acanthus-leaves, from which spread long- stemmed white blossoms, the details of
which were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals.
The morse bore a seraph's head in gold- thread raised work.
The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with
medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian.
He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and
yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the Passion
and Crucifixion of Christ, and embroidered
with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk
damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and fleurs-de-lis; altar frontals of
crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria.
In the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that
quickened his imagination.
For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be
to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from
the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.
Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood,
he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him
the real degradation of his life, and in
front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.
For weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get
back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in
mere existence.
Then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful
places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven
away.
On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself,
but filled, at other times, with that pride of individualism that is half the
fascination of sin, and smiling with secret
pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been
his own.
After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and gave up the villa
that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as well as the little white walled-
in house at Algiers where they had more than once spent the winter.
He hated to be separated from the picture that was such a part of his life, and was
also afraid that during his absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite
of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.
He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.
It was true that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and
ugliness of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn from
that?
He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him.
He had not painted it. What was it to him how vile and full of
shame it looked?
Even if he told them, would they believe it?
Yet he was afraid.
Sometimes when he was down at his great house in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the
fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding
the county by the wanton luxury and
gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush
back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was
still there.
What if it should be stolen? The mere thought made him cold with horror.
Surely the world would know his secret then.
Perhaps the world already suspected it.
For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him.
He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth and social
position fully entitled him to become a member, and it was said that on one
occasion, when he was brought by a friend
into the smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another gentleman got
up in a marked manner and went out. Curious stories became current about him
after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.
It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den
in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners
and knew the mysteries of their trade.
His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear
again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass him with a sneer,
or look at him with cold searching eyes, as
though they were determined to discover his secret.
Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice, and in the
opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the
infinite grace of that wonderful youth that
seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer to the
calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him.
It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most intimate with him
appeared, after a time, to shun him.
Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and
set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian
Gray entered the room.
Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many his strange and
dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain element of
security.
Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the
detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.
It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its
opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a
good chef.
And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has
given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life.
Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees, as Lord Henry remarked
once, in a discussion on the subject, and there is possibly a good deal to be said
for his view.
For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art.
Form is absolutely essential to it.
It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should
combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that
make such plays delightful to us.
Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not.
It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion.
He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a
thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.
To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform
creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose
very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.
He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house and
look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins.
Here was Philip Herbert, described by Francis Osborne, in his Memoires on the
Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James, as one who was "caressed by the Court for
his handsome face, which kept him not long company."
Was it young Herbert's life that he sometimes led?
Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?
Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost
without cause, give utterance, in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that
had so changed his life?
Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and
wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard, with his silver-and-black armour piled at his
feet.
What had this man's legacy been? Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples
bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?
Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize?
Here, from the fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood,
pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves.
A flower was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white
and damask roses. On a table by her side lay a mandolin and
an apple.
There were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes.
He knew her life, and the strange stories that were told about her lovers.
Had he something of her temperament in him?
These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him.
What of George Willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches?
How evil he looked!
The face was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with
disdain.
Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were so overladen with
rings.
He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of
Lord Ferrars.
What of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his
wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert?
How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose!
What passions had he bequeathed? The world had looked upon him as infamous.
He had led the *** 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 *** 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.