

T
half-past twelve next day Lord Henry Wotton strolled from Curzon
Street over to the Albany to call on his uncle, Lord Fermor,
a genial if somewhat rough-mannered old bachelor, whom the outside
world called selfish because it derived no particular benefit
from him, but who was considered generous by Society as he fed
the people who amused him. His father had been our ambassador
at Madrid when Isabella was young and Prim unthought of, but
had retired from the diplomatic service in a capricious moment
of annoyance on not being offered the Embassy at Paris, a post
to which he considered that he was fully entitled by reason of
his birth, his indolence, the good English of his dispatches,
and his inordinate passion for pleasure. The son, who had been
his father's secretary, had resigned along with his chief, somewhat
foolishly as was thought at the time, and on succeeding some
months later to the title, had set himself to the serious study
of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing. He
had two large town houses, but preferred to live in chambers
as it was less trouble, and took most of his meals at his club.
He paid some attention to the management of his collieries in
the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry
on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that
it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood
on his own hearth. In politics he was a Tory, except when the
Tories were in office, during which period he roundly abused
them for being a pack of Radicals. He was a hero to his valet,
who bullied him, and a terror to most of his relations, whom
he bullied in turn. Only England could have produced him, and
he always said that the country was going to the dogs. His principles
were out of date, but there was a good deal to be said for his
prejudices.
When Lord Henry entered the room,
he found his uncle sitting in a rough shooting-coat, smoking
a cheroot and grumbling over The Times. "Well, Harry,"
said the old gentleman, "what brings you out so early? I
thought you dandies never got up till two, and were not visible
till five."
"Pure family affection,
I assure you, Uncle George. I want to get something out of you."
"Money, I suppose,"
said Lord Fermor, making a wry face. "Well, sit down and
tell me all about it. Young people, nowadays, imagine that money
is everything."
"Yes," murmured Lord
Henry, settling his button-hole in his coat; "and when they
grow older they know it. But I don't want money. It is only people
who pay their bills who want that, Uncle George, and I never
pay mine. Credit is the capital of a younger son, and one lives
charmingly upon it. Besides, I always deal with Dartmoor's tradesmen,
and consequently they never bother me. What I want is information:
not useful information, of course; useless information."
"Well, I can tell you anything
that is in an English Blue Book, Harry, although those fellows
nowadays write a lot of nonsense. When I was in the Diplomatic,
things were much better. But I hear they let them in now by examination.
What can you expect? Examinations, sir, are pure humbug from
beginning to end. If a man is a gentleman, he knows quite enough,
and if he is not a gentleman, whatever he knows is bad for him."
"Mr. Dorian Gray does not
belong to Blue Books, Uncle George," said Lord Henry languidly.
"Mr. Dorian Gray? Who is
he?" asked Lord Fermor, knitting his bushy white eyebrows.
"That is what I have come
to learn, Uncle George. Or rather, I know who he is. He is the
last Lord Kelso's grandson. His mother was a Devereux, Lady Margaret
Devereaux. I want you to tell me about his mother. What was she
like? Whom did she marry? You have known nearly everybody in
your time, so you might have known her. I am very much interested
in Mr. Gray at present. I have only just met him."
"Kelso's grandson!"
echoed the old gentleman. "Kelso's grandson!... Of course....
I knew his mother intimately. I believe I was at her christening.
She was an extraordinarily beautiful girl, Margaret Devereux,
and made all the men frantic by running away with a penniless
young fellow a mere nobody, sir, a subaltern
in a foot regiment, or something of that kind. Certainly. I remember
the whole thing as if it happened yesterday. The poor chap was
killed in a duel at Spa a few months after the marriage. There
was an ugly story about it. They said Kelso got some rascally
adventurer, some Belgian brute, to insult his son-in-law in public
paid him, sir, to do it, paid him and that the
fellow spitted his man as if he had been a pigeon. The thing
was hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone at the club
for some time afterwards. He brought his daughter back with him,
I was told, and she never spoke to him again. Oh, yes; it was
a bad business. The girl died, too, died within a year. So she
left a son, did she? I had forgotten that. What sort of boy is
he? If he is like his mother, he must be a good-looking chap."
"He is very good-looking,"
assented Lord Henry.
"I hope he will fall into
proper hands," continued the old man. "He should have
a pot of money waiting for him if Kelso did the right thing by
him. His mother had money, too. All the Selby property came to
her, through her grandfather. Her grandfather hated Kelso, thought
him a mean dog. He was, too. Came to Madrid once when I was there.
Egad, I was ashamed of him. The Queen used to ask me about the
English noble who was always quarrelling with the cabmen about
their fares. They made quite a story of it. I didn't dare show
my face at Court for a month. I hope he treated his grandson
better than he did the jarvies."
"I don't know," answered
Lord Henry. "I fancy that the boy will be well off. He is
not of age yet. He has Selby, I know. He told me so. And... his
mother was very beautiful?"
"Margaret Devereux was one
of the loveliest creatures I ever saw, Harry. What on earth induced
her to behave as she did, I never could understand. She could
have married anybody she chose. Carlington was mad after her.
She was romantic, though. All the women of that family were.
The men were a poor lot, but, egad! the women were wonderful.
Carlington went on his knees to her. Told me so himself. She
laughed at him, and there wasn't a girl in London at the time
who wasn't after him. And by the way, Harry, talking about silly
marriages, what is this humbug your father tells me about Dartmoor
wanting to marry an American? Ain't English girls good enough
for him?"
"It is rather fashionable
to marry Americans just now, Uncle George."
"I'll back English women
against the world, Harry," said Lord Fermor, striking the
table with his fist.
"The betting is on the Americans."
"They don't last, I am told,"
muttered his uncle.
"A long engagement exhausts
them, but they are capital at a steeplechase. They take things
flying. I don't think Dartmoor has a chance."
"Who are her people?"
grumbled the old gentleman. "Has she got any?"
Lord Henry shook his head. "American
girls are as clever at concealing their parents, as English women
are at concealing their past," he said, rising to go.
"They are pork-packers,
I suppose?"
"I hope so, Uncle George,
for Dartmoor's sake. I am told that pork-packing is the most
lucrative profession in America, after politics."
"Is she pretty?"
"She behaves as if she was
beautiful. Most American women do. It is the secret of their
charm."
"Why can't these American
women stay in their own country? They are always telling us that
it is the paradise for women."
"It is. That is the reason
why, like Eve, they are so excessively anxious to get out of
it," said Lord Henry. "Good-bye, Uncle George. I shall
be late for lunch, if I stop any longer. Thanks for giving me
the information I wanted. I always like to know everything about
my new friends, and nothing about my old ones."
"Where are you lunching,
Harry?"
"At Aunt Agatha's. I have
asked myself and Mr. Gray. He is her latest protege."
"Humph! tell your Aunt Agatha,
Harry, not to bother me any more with her charity appeals. I
am sick of them. Why, the good woman thinks that I have nothing
to do but to write cheques for her silly fads."
"All right, Uncle George,
I'll tell her, but it won't have any effect. Philanthropic people
lose all sense of humanity. It is their distinguishing characteristic."
The old gentleman growled approvingly
and rang the bell for his servant. Lord Henry passed up the low
arcade into Burlington Street and turned his steps in the direction
of Berkeley Square.
So that was the story of Dorian
Gray's parentage. Crudely as it had been told to him, it had
yet stirred him by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern
romance. A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion.
A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous
crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then a child born in pain.
The mother snatched away by death, the boy left to solitude and
the tyranny of an old and loveless man. Yes; it was an interesting
background. It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were.
Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something
tragic. Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower
might blow.... And how charming he had been at dinner the night
before, as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure
he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades
staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face. Talking
to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered
to every touch and thrill of the bow.... There was something
terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity
was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form, and
let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual
views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion
and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as though
it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real
joy in that perhaps the most satisfying joy left
to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly
carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims.... He
was a marvellous type, too, this lad, whom by so curious a chance
he had met in Basil's studio, or could be fashioned into a marvellous
type, at any rate. Grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood,
and beauty such as old Greek marbles kept for us. There was nothing
that one could not do with him. He could be made a Titan or a
toy. What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade!...
And Basil? From a psychological point of view, how interesting
he was! The new manner in art, the fresh mode of looking at life,
suggested so strangely by the merely visible presence of one
who was unconscious of it all; the silent spirit that dwelt in
dim woodland, and walked unseen in open field, suddenly showing
herself, Dryadlike and not afraid, because in his soul who sought
for her there had been wakened that wonderful vision to which
alone are wonderful things revealed; the mere shapes and patterns
of things becoming, as it were, refined, and gaining a kind of
symbolical value, as though they were themselves patterns of
some other and more perfect form whose shadow they made real:
how strange it all was! He remembered something like it in history.
Was it not Plato, that artist in thought, who had first analyzed
it? Was it not Buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles
of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own century it was strange....
Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing
it, the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful
portrait. He would seek to dominate him had already,
indeed, half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his
own. There was something fascinating in this son of love and
death.
Suddenly he stopped and glanced
up at the houses. He found that he had passed his aunt's some
distance, and, smiling to himself, turned back. When he entered
the somewhat sombre hall, the butler told him that they had gone
in to lunch. He gave one of the footmen his hat and stick and
passed into the dining-room.
"Late as usual, Harry,"
cried his aunt, shaking her head at him.
He invented a facile excuse,
and having taken the vacant seat next to her, looked round to
see who was there. Dorian bowed to him shyly from the end of
the table, a flush of pleasure stealing into his cheek. Opposite
was the Duchess of Harley, a lady of admirable good-nature and
good temper, much liked by every one who knew her, and of those
ample architectural proportions that in women who are not duchesses
are described by contemporary historians as stoutness. Next to
her sat, on her right, Sir Thomas Burdon, a Radical member of
Parliament, who followed his leader in public life and in private
life followed the best cooks, dining with the Tories and thinking
with the Liberals, in accordance with a wise and well-known rule.
The post on her left was occupied by Mr. Erskine of Treadley,
an old gentleman of considerable charm and culture, who had fallen,
however, into bad habits of silence, having, as he explained
once to Lady Agatha, said everything that he had to say before
he was thirty. His own neighbour was Mrs. Vandeleur, one of his
aunt's oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so
dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book.
Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a
most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a ministerial
statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing
in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable
error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people
fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape.
"We are talking about poor
Dartmoor, Lord Henry," cried the duchess, nodding pleasantly
to him across the table. "Do you think he will really marry
this fascinating young person?"
"I believe she has made
up her mind to propose to him, Duchess."
"How dreadful!" exclaimed
Lady Agatha. "Really, some one should interfere."
"I am told, on excellent
authority, that her father keeps an American dry-goods store,"
said Sir Thomas Burdon, looking supercilious.
"My uncle has already suggested
pork-packing Sir Thomas."
"Dry-goods! What are American
dry-goods?" asked the duchess, raising her large hands in
wonder and accentuating the verb.
"American novels,"
answered Lord Henry, helping himself to some quail.
The duchess looked puzzled.
"Don't mind him, my dear,"
whispered Lady Agatha. "He never means anything that he
says."
"When America was discovered,"
said the Radical member and he began to give
some wearisome facts. Like all people who try to exhaust a subject,
he exhausted his listeners. The duchess sighed and exercised
her privilege of interruption. "I wish to goodness it never
had been discovered at all!" she exclaimed. "Really,
our girls have no chance nowadays. It is most unfair."
"Perhaps, after all, America
never has been discovered," said Mr. Erskine; "I myself
would say that it had merely been detected."
"Oh! but I have seen specimens
of the inhabitants," answered the duchess vaguely. "I
must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. And they
dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I wish
I could afford to do the same."
"They say that when good
Americans die they go to Paris," chuckled Sir Thomas, who
had a large wardrobe of Humour's cast-off clothes.
"Really! And where do bad
Americans go to when they die?" inquired the duchess.
"They go to America,"
murmured Lord Henry.
Sir Thomas frowned. "I am
afraid that your nephew is prejudiced against that great country,"
he said to Lady Agatha. "I have travelled all over it in
cars provided by the directors, who, in such matters, are extremely
civil. I assure you that it is an education to visit it."
"But must we really see
Chicago in order to be educated?" asked Mr. Erskine plaintively.
"I don't feel up to the journey."
Sir Thomas waved his hand. "Mr.
Erskine of Treadley has the world on his shelves. We practical
men like to see things, not to read about them. The Americans
are an extremely interesting people. They are absolutely reasonable.
I think that is their distinguishing characteristic. Yes, Mr. Erskine, an
absolutely reasonable people. I assure you there is no nonsense
about the Americans."
"How dreadful!" cried
Lord Henry. "I can stand brute force, but brute reason is
quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It
is hitting below the intellect."
"I do not understand you,"
said Sir Thomas, growing rather red.
"I do, Lord Henry,"
murmured Mr. Erskine, with a smile.
"Paradoxes are all very
well in their way..." rejoined the baronet.
"Was that a paradox?"
asked Mr. Erskine. "I did not think so. Perhaps it was.
Well, the way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality
we must see it on the tight rope. When the verities become acrobats,
we can judge them."
"Dear me!" said Lady
Agatha, "how you men argue! I am sure I never can make out
what you are talking about. Oh! Harry, I am quite vexed with
you. Why do you try to persuade our nice Mr. Dorian Gray to give
up the East End? I assure you he would be quite invaluable. They
would love his playing."
"I want him to play to me,"
cried Lord Henry, smiling, and he looked down the table and caught
a bright answering glance.
"But they are so unhappy
in Whitechapel," continued Lady Agatha.
"I can sympathize with everything
except suffering," said Lord Henry, shrugging his shoulders.
"I cannot sympathize with that. It is too ugly, too horrible,
too distressing. There is something terribly morbid in the modern
sympathy with pain. One should sympathize with the colour, the
beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores, the
better."
"Still, the East End is
a very important problem," remarked Sir Thomas with a grave
shake of the head.
"Quite so," answered
the young lord. "It is the problem of slavery, and we try
to solve it by amusing the slaves."
The politician looked at him
keenly. "What change do you propose, then?" he asked.
Lord Henry laughed. "I don't
desire to change anything in England except the weather,"
he answered. "I am quite content with philosophic contemplation.
But, as the nineteenth century has gone bankrupt through an over-expenditure
of sympathy, I would suggest that we should appeal to science
to put us straight. The advantage of the emotions is that they
lead us astray, and the advantage of science is that it is not
emotional."
"But we have such grave
responsibilities," ventured Mrs. Vandeleur timidly.
"Terribly grave," echoed
Lady Agatha.
Lord Henry looked over at Mr.
Erskine. "Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the
world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh,
history would have been different."
"You are really very comforting,"
warbled the duchess. "I have always felt rather guilty when
I came to see your dear aunt, for I take no interest at all in
the East End. For the future I shall be able to look her in the
face without a blush."
"A blush is very becoming,
Duchess," remarked Lord Henry.
"Only when one is young,"
she answered. "When an old woman like myself blushes, it
is a very bad sign. Ah! Lord Henry, I wish you would tell me
how to become young again."
He thought for a moment. "Can
you remember any great error that you committed in your early
days, Duchess?" he asked, looking at her across the table.
"A great many, I fear,"
she cried.
"Then commit them over again,"
he said gravely. "To get back one's youth, one has merely
to repeat one's follies."
"A delightful theory!"
she exclaimed. "I must put it into practice."
"A dangerous theory!"
came from Sir Thomas's tight lips. Lady Agatha shook her head,
but could not help being amused. Mr. Erskine listened.
"Yes," he continued,
"that is one of the great secrets of life. Nowadays most
people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when
it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's
mistakes."
A laugh ran round the table.
He played with the idea and grew
wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape
and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it
with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into
a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching
the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained
robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills
of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled
before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod
the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice
rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled
in red foam over the vat's black, dripping, sloping sides. It
was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of
Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst
his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate
seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination.
He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners
out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian
Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell,
smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave
in his darkening eyes.
At last, liveried in the costume
of the age, reality entered the room in the shape of a servant
to tell the duchess that her carriage was waiting. She wrung
her hands in mock despair. "How annoying!" she cried.
"I must go. I have to call for my husband at the club, to
take him to some absurd meeting at Willis's Rooms, where he is
going to be in the chair. If I am late he is sure to be furious,
and I couldn't have a scene in this bonnet. It is far too fragile.
A harsh word would ruin it. No, I must go, dear Agatha. Good-bye,
Lord Henry, you are quite delightful and dreadfully demoralizing.
I am sure I don't know what to say about your views. You must
come and dine with us some night. Tuesday? Are you disengaged
Tuesday?"
"For you I would throw over
anybody, Duchess," said Lord Henry with a bow.
"Ah! that is very nice,
and very wrong of you," she cried; "so mind you come";
and she swept out of the room, followed by Lady Agatha and the
other ladies.
When Lord Henry had sat down
again, Mr. Erskine moved round, and taking a chair close to him,
placed his hand upon his arm.
"You talk books away,"
he said; "why don't you write one?"
"I am too fond of reading
books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write
a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian
carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England
for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias.
Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of
the beauty of literature."
"I fear you are right,"
answered Mr. Erskine. "I myself used to have literary ambitions,
but I gave them up long ago. And now, my dear young friend, if
you will allow me to call you so, may I ask if you really meant
all that you said to us at lunch?"
"I quite forget what I said,"
smiled Lord Henry. "Was it all very bad?"
"Very bad indeed. In fact
I consider you extremely dangerous, and if anything happens to
our good duchess, we shall all look on you as being primarily
responsible. But I should like to talk to you about life. The
generation into which I was born was tedious. Some day, when
you are tired of London, come down to Treadley and expound to
me your philosophy of pleasure over some admirable Burgundy I
am fortunate enough to possess."
"I shall be charmed. A visit
to Treadley would be a great privilege. It has a perfect host,
and a perfect library."
"You will complete it,"
answered the old gentleman with a courteous bow. "And now
I must bid good-bye to your excellent aunt. I am due at the Athenaeum.
It is the hour when we sleep there."
"All of you, Mr. Erskine?"
"Forty of us, in forty arm-chairs.
We are practising for an English Academy of Letters."
Lord Henry laughed and rose.
"I am going to the park," he cried.
As he was passing out of the
door, Dorian Gray touched him on the arm. "Let me come with
you," he murmured.
"But I thought you had promised
Basil Hallward to go and see him," answered Lord Henry.
"I would sooner come with
you; yes, I feel I must come with you. Do let me. And you will
promise to talk to me all the time? No one talks so wonderfully
as you do."
"Ah! I have talked quite
enough for to-day," said Lord Henry, smiling. "All
I want now is to look at life. You may come and look at it with
me, if you care to."
[Chapter Four]
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Oscar Wilde Collection