OR
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 turé 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 "Tannhäuser"
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 be had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that
turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line
of silver, the pistachio-coloured peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow
topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed
stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels,
and amethysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire.
He loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly
whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. He procured
from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness
of colour, and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that
was the envy of all the connoisseurs.
He discovered wonderful stories,
also, about jewels. In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent
was mentioned with eyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic
history of Alexander, the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have
found in the vale of Jordan snakes "with collars of real
emeralds growing on their backs." There was a gem in the
brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition
of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could
be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. According to the great
alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible,
and the agate of India made him eloquent. The cornelian appeased
anger, and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove
away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus
deprived the moon of her colour. The selenite waxed and waned
with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could
be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had
seen a white stone taken from the brain of a newly killed toad,
that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar, that
was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that
could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the
aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from
any danger by fire.
The King of Ceilan rode through
his city with a large ruby in his hand, as the ceremony of his
coronation. The gates of the palace of John the Priest were "made
of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake inwrought, so that
no man might bring poison within." Over the gable were "two
golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the
gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night. In Lodge's
strange romance A Margarite of America, it was stated that in
the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste
ladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through
fair mirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene
emeraults." Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu
place rose-coloured pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster
had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King
Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons
over its loss. When the Huns lured the king into the great pit,
he flung it away Procopius tells the story
nor was it ever found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered
five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it. The King of Malabar
had shown to a certain Venetian a rosary of three hundred and
four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped.
When the Duke de Valentinois,
son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of France, his horse was
loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome, and his cap had
double rows of rubies that threw out a great light. Charles of
England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one
diamonds. Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks,
which was covered with balas rubies. Hall described Henry VIII,
on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing
"a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds
and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of
large balasses." The favourites of James I wore ear-rings
of emeralds set in gold filigrane. Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston
a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar of
gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parsemé
with pearls. Henry II wore jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow,
and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two great
orients. The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of
Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studded
with sapphires.
How exquisite life had once been!
How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the
luxury of the dead was wonderful.
Then he turned his attention
to embroideries and to the tapestries that performed the office
of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern nations of Europe.
As he investigated the subject and he always
had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed
for the moment in whatever he took up he was
almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought
on beautiful and wonderful things. He, at any rate, had escaped
that. Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed
and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the story
of their shame, but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face
or stained his flowerlike bloom. How different it was with material
things! Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocus-coloured
robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been
worked by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where the huge
velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome,
that Titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry
sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined
steeds? He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for
the Priest of the Sun, on which were displayed all the dainties
and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth
of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden bees; the fantastic
robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus and
were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests,
rocks, hunters all, in fact, that a painter can
copy from nature"; and the coat that Charles of Orleans
once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses
of a song beginning "Madame, je suis tout joyeux,"
the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold
thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed
with four pearls. He read of the room that was prepared at the
palace at Rheims for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was
decorated with "thirteen hundred and twenty-one parrots,
made in broidery, and blazoned with the king's arms, and five
hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings were similarly
ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold."
Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of black
velvet powdered with crescents and suns. Its curtains were of
damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold
and silver ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries
of pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's
devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver. Louis XIV had
gold embroidered caryatides fifteen feet high in his apartment.
The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of Smyrna
gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with verses from the Koran.
Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully chased, and profusely
set with enamelled and jewelled medallions. It had been taken
from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of Mohammed
had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy.
And so, for a whole year, he
sought to accumulate the most exquisite specimens that he could
find of textile and embroidered work, getting the dainty Delhi
muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and stitched
over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that from
their transparency are known in the East as "woven air,"
and "running water," and "evening dew"; strange
figured cloths from Java; elaborate yellow Chinese hangings;
books bound in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with
fleurs-de-lis, birds and images; veils of lacis
worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish
velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas,
with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged
birds.
He had a special passion, also,
for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything
connected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar chests
that lined the west gallery of his house, he had stored away
many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment
of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine
linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn
by the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted
pain. He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread
damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates
set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side
was the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreys
were divided into panels representing scenes from the life of
the Virgin, and the coronation of the Virgin was figured in coloured
silks upon the hood. This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.
Another cope was of green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped
groups of acanthus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white
blossoms, the details of which were picked out with silver thread
and coloured crystals. The morse bore a seraph's head in gold-thread
raised work. The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold
silk, and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs,
among whom was St. Sebastian. He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured
silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask
and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the Passion
and Crucifixion of Christ, and embroidered with lions and peacocks
and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask,
decorated with tulips and dolphins and fleurs-de-lis;
altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals,
chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to which such
things were put, there was something that quickened his imagination.
For these treasures, and everything
that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means
of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season,
from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great
to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he
had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands
the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the
real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the
purple-and-gold pall as a curtain. For weeks he would not go
there, would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his
light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption
in mere existence. Then, suddenly, some night he would creep
out of the house, go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields,
and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. On his
return he would sit in front of the 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 entrées, as Lord Henry remarked once,
in a discussion on the subject, and there is possibly a good
deal to be said for his view. For the canons of good society
are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely
essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as
well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character
of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays
delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think
not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian
Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of
those who conceive the ego in man as a thing simple, permanent,
reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad
lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that
bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and
whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the
dead. He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery
of his country house and look at the various portraits of those
whose blood flowed in his veins. Here was Philip Herbert, described
by Francis Osborne, in his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth
and King James, as one who was "caressed by the Court for
his handsome face, which kept him not long company." Was
it young Herbert's life that he sometimes led? Had some strange
poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his
own? Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made
him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in
Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed
his life? Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat,
and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet. What had
this man's legacy been? Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed
him some inheritance of sin and shame? Were his own actions merely
the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize? Here,
from the fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her
gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves. A flower
was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar
of white and damask roses. On a table by her side lay a mandolin
and an apple. There were large green rosettes upon her little
pointed shoes. He knew her life, and the strange stories that
were told about her lovers. Had he something of her temperament
in him? These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously
at him. What of George Willoughby, with his powdered hair and
fantastic patches? How evil he looked! The face was saturnine
and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain.
Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that were
so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What
of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent
in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage
with Mrs. Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he was, with his
chestnut curls and insolent pose! What passions had he bequeathed?
The world had looked upon him as infamous. He had led the orgies
at Carlton House. The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast.
Beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped
woman in black. Her blood, also, stirred within him. How curious
it all seemed! And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face and
her moist, wine-dashed lips he knew what he had
got from her. He had got from her his beauty, and his passion
for the beauty of others. She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante
dress. There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilled
from the cup she was holding. The carnations of the painting
had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth
and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever
he went.
Yet one had ancestors in literature
as well as in one's own race, nearer perhaps in type and temperament,
many of them, and certainly with an influence of which one was
more absolutely conscious. There were times when it appeared
to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record
of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance,
but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been
in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them
all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full
of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their
lives had been his own.
The hero of the wonderful novel
that had so influenced his life had himself known this curious
fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, crowned with laurel,
lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as Tiberius, in
a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of Elephantis,
while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the flute-player
mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had caroused
with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian,
had wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking
round with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that
was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible
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, 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.
[Chapter Twelve]
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Oscar Wilde Collection