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 beauty 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 over-emphasised, account of the sorrow and despair
of one who had himself lost what in others, and in 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 ageing 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 realisation 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
spiritualising of the senses its highest realisation.
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 organised 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
symbolise. He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and watch
the priest, in his stiff flowered vestment, slowly and with white hands
moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled
lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one
would fain think, is indeed the "_panis cælestis_," the bread of angels,
or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host
into the chalice, and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming
censers, that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the
air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle fascination for him. As he
passed out, he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and
long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women
whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives.
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for
the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are
no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous
power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season;
and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the
_Darwinismus_ movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in
tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the
brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of
the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him
before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared
with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all
intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual
mysteries to reveal.
And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of their
manufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorous gums
from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not
its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their
true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one
mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets
that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to
elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several
influences of sweet-smelling roots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, or
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
gypsies 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 civilisations, 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 Chili, and the sonorous green jaspers
that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular sweetness.
He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were
shaken; the long _clarin_ of the Mexicans, into which the performer does
not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the harsh _ture_ of the
Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in
high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a distance of three
leagues; the _teponaztli_, that has two vibrating tongues of wood, and
is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gum obtained from
the milky juice of plants; the _yotl_-bells of the Aztecs, that are hung
in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindrical drum, covered with the
skins of great serpents, like the one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went
with Cortes into the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has
left us so vivid a description. The fantastic character of these
instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought
that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and
with hideous voices. Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would
sit in his box at the Opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening
in rapt pleasure to "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
he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by
lamp-light, the cymophane with its wire-like 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,
at 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 Brantôme,
and his cap had double rows of rubles 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 earrings 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 flower-like 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 Médicis 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 lys_, 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 lys_; 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 someone 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 anyone 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, civilised 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
wrist-bands, 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 realise? 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 over-laden with rings. He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What of the
second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his wildest
days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and
insolent pose! What passions had he bequeathed? The world had looked
upon him as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House. The star
of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the portrait of
his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. Her blood, also, stirred
within him. How curious it all seemed! And his mother with her Lady
Hamilton face, and her moist wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got
from her. He had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty
of others. She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress. There were
vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilled from the cup she was
holding. The carnations of the painting had withered, but the eyes were
still wonderful in their depth and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to
follow him wherever he went.
Yet one had ancestors in literature, as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with
an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were
times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was
merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and
circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had
been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them
all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of
the world and made sin so marvellous, and evil so full of subtlety. It
seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how,
crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him, and the
flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _tædium vitæ_, that comes
on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear
emerald at the red shambles of the Circus, and then, in a litter of
pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the
Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold, and heard men cry on Nero
Cæsar 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
acanthus-like 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
realise his conception of the beautiful.