[65] For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory 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
five large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
different colors, 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 temperament and the scientific temperament 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 book'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-emphasized, account of the sorrow and
despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and in the world,
he had most valued.
He, at any rate, had no cause to fear that. The boyish 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 rumors about his mode of life crept
through London and became the chatter of the clubs) could not believe
anything to his dishonor 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 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
sensuous.
He himself, 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, would creep
up-stairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never
left him, 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 often with a monstrous and
terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead
or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, [66] 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 that, many years before, 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 belong
to 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 he affected
from time to time, 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" had once 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 [67] 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 ourselves, and that we 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 the
anchorite out to herd 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 re-create 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 one 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 revery. Gradually white fingers creep through the
curtains, and they appear to tremble. Black fantastic 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. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by
degrees the forms and colors 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
have left them, and beside them [68] lies the half-read 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 re-fashioned anew
for our pleasure in the darkness, a world in which things would have
fresh shapes and colors, 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 among 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 color and satisfied his
intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
is not incompatible with a real ardor of temperament, and that indeed,
according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.
It was rumored 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 with the priest, in his stiff flowered cope, slowly and
with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, and 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 tarnished
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 [69] 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
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
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, or turbaned
Indians, crouching upon scarlet mats, 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 Chili, and the sonorous green
stones 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 trees, and that can be heard, it is said, at a
distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that [70] 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 that great work of art a
presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
On another 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. He would often spend a whole day
settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had
collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by
lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver, the
pistachio-colored 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 color, 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 he was said to have
found snakes in the vale of Jordan "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 color. 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 [71] 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 Margarite were seen "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 watched
the inhabitants of Zipangu place a rose-colored pearl in the mouth 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 his 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 a Venetian a rosary
of one 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 rubies that threw out a great
light. Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with three
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 favorites of James I. wore
ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. Edward II. gave to Piers
Gaveston a suit of red-gold armor studded with jacinths, and 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 set with twelve rubies and fifty-two great pearls. The
ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race,
was studded with sapphires and hung with pear-shaped pearls.
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 frescos 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 gone to? Where was the great crocus-colored
robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
for Athena? Where the huge velarium that Nero had stretched across the
Colosseum at Rome, on which were represented the starry sky, and Apollo
driving a chariot drawn by [72] white gilt-reined steeds? He longed to
see the curious table-napkins wrought for Elagabalus, 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, a 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 under it.
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-threat 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 had 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- [73] 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 colored 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 colored 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-colored 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 these
things were put there was something that quickened his imagination.
For these things, 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 had draped the purple-and-gold pall in
front of it 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 pleasure 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 rebellion 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 he had more
than once spent his winter. He hated to be separated from the picture
that was such a part of his life, and he was also afraid that during
his absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the
elaborate bolts and 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 [74] 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 splendor 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 blackballed at a West End club of which his birth and social
position fully entitled him to become a member, and on one occasion,
when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the Carlton,
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 said 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 if 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 called them) that were circulated about
him. It was remarked, however, that those who had been most intimate
with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. Of all his friends, or
so-called friends, Lord Henry Wotton was the only one who remained
loyal to 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 lent him, 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
charming. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance
than morals, and the highest respectability is of less value in its
opinion 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 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 charming. Is insincerity such a [75]
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 that 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 armor 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? Those 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 Sherard, 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!
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
[76] were times when it seemed 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
wonder. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
been his own.
The hero of the dangerous novel that had so influenced his life had
himself had this curious fancy. In a chapter of the book 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 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 colors, 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
chapter immediately following, in which the hero describes the curious
tapestries that he had had woven for him from Gustave Moreau's designs,
and on which 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; 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 her 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 [77] 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 honor 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 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 realize his conception of the beautiful.