Chapter 11

by Oscar Wilde

　　For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influenceof this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to saythat he never sought to free himself from it. He procured fromParis no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition,and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suithis various moods and the changing fancies of a nature overwhich he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control.The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romanticand 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 storyof 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 somewhatgrotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and stillwater 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 sorrowand 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 lifecrept 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 unspottedfrom the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when DorianGray entered the room. There was something in the purity of hisface that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recallto them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was couldhave escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordidand sensual.Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious andprolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjectureamong those who were his friends, or thought that they were so,he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the doorwith 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 atthe fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass.The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his senseof 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 monstrousand terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinklingforehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimeswhich were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated handsof the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and thefailing limbs.There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleeplessin his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordidroom of the little ill-famed tavern near the docks which,under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habitto frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought uponhis soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because itwas purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare.That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirredin 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 moreravenous 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 Wednesdayevening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the worldhis beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the dayto charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners,in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were notedas 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 realizationof 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 scholarwith all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizenof the world. To them he seemed to be of the company of those whomDante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfectby the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom "thevisible 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 buta preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantasticbecomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in itsown way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernityof beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him.His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from timeto time he affected, had their marked influence on the youngexquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows,who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproducethe accidental charm of his graceful, though to him onlyhalf-serious fopperies.For, while he was but too ready to accept the position thatwas almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age,and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he mightreally become to the London of his own day what to imperialNeronian Rome the author of the Satyricon once had been,yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a merearbiter 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 haveits reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and findin 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 aboutpassions and sensations that seem stronger than themselves,and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highlyorganized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Graythat the true nature of the senses had never been understood,and that they had remained savage and animal merely becausethe world had sought to starve them into submission or to killthem by pain, instead of aiming at making them elementsof a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty wasto be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon manmoving 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 formsof self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fearand whose result was a degradation infinitely more terriblethan 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 ofthe desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field ashis companions.Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonismthat was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomelypuritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it wasnever to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrificeof any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to beexperience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitteras 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 lifethat 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 almostenamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy,when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terriblethan reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurksin all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality,this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whoseminds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually whitefingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble.In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the cornersof the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirringof birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forthto their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down fromthe hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it fearedto wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep fromher 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 tapersstand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut bookthat we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn atthe ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that wehad read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unrealshadows 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 usa terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energyin the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing,it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a worldthat 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 pastwould have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembranceeven of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasuretheir pain.It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to DorianGray 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 reallyalien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences,and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied hisintellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifferencethat is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a conditionof it.It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the RomanCatholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had alwaysa great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awfulreally than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred himas much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the sensesas by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternalpathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. He lovedto kneel down on the cold marble pavement and watch the priest,in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands movingaside 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 breadof 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 subtlefascination for him. As he passed out, he used to look with wonderat the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of oneof them and listen to men and women whispering through the worngrating the true story of their lives.But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual developmentby any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a housein 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 isin travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common thingsstrange 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 materialisticdoctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasurein 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 absolutedependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy,normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of lifeseemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He feltkeenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separatedfrom 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 counterpartin 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 wokethe memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain,and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often to elaboratea real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influencesof sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balmsand 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 melancholyfrom the soul.At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a longlatticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-greenlacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gipsies tore wildmusic from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled Tunisians pluckedat the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroesbeat 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 stirredhim 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 instrumentsthat could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the fewsavage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations,and loved to touch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the RioNegro Indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youthsmay 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 fortha note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourds filled with pebblesthat rattled when they were shaken; the long clarin of the Mexicans,into which the performer does not blow, but through which he inhalesthe air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded bythe 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 hastwo vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that aresmeared 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 Mexicantemple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description.The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felta 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 aloneor with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeingin the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy ofhis own soul.On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appearedat 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 saidnever to have left him. He would often spend a whole daysettling and resettling in their cases the various stones that behad collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns redby 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'spearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal.He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size andrichness of colour, and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that wasthe envy of all the connoisseurs.He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels.In Alphonso's Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned witheyes of real jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander,the Conqueror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordansnakes "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 diamondrendered 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 castout 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 newlykilled toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. The bezoar,that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm that couldcure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspilates,that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any dangerby 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 Johnthe Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the hornedsnake 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 statedthat in the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chasteladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fairmirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults."Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colouredpearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had beenenamoured 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 goldpieces for it. The King of Malabar had shown to a certain Venetiana rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god thathe worshipped.When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XIIof 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 andtwenty-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 "ajacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and otherrich 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 studdedwith jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and askull-cap parseme with pearls. Henry II wore jewelled gloves reachingto the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-twogreat orients. The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Dukeof Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studdedwith 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 tapestriesthat performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms ofthe northern nations of Europe. As he investigated the subject--and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutelyabsorbed for the moment in whatever he took up--he was almostsaddened by the reflection of the ruin that time brought onbeautiful and wonderful things. He, at any rate, had escaped that.Summer followed summer, and the yellow jonquils bloomed and diedmany times, and nights of horror repeated the story of their shame,but he was unchanged. No winter marred his face or stained hisflowerlike 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 workedby brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where the hugevelarium 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 Priestof the Sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands thatcould be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic,with its three hundred golden bees; the fantastic robes that excitedthe 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 Charlesof Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which were embroideredthe 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 forthe use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteenhundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazonedwith 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-bedmade 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 edgeswith broideries of pearls, and it stood in a room hung with rowsof the queen's devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver.Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides fifteen feet highin his apartment. The state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland,was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with versesfrom 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 thestandard of Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of itscanopy.And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisitespecimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work,getting the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmatesand 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 bluesilks and wrought with fleurs-de-lis, birds and images; veils of lacisworked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish velvets;Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese Foukousas, with theirgreen-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 serviceof the Church. In the long cedar chests that lined the westgallery of his house, he had stored away many rare and beautifulspecimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ,who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she mayhide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the sufferingthat 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 setin six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either sidewas the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreyswere divided into panels representing scenes from the lifeof the Virgin, and the coronation of the Virgin was figuredin coloured silks upon the hood. This was Italian workof the fifteenth century. Another cope was of green velvet,embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves, fromwhich spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of whichwere 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 withrepresentations 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 withtulips and dolphins and fleurs-de-lis; altar frontalsof crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals,chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to whichsuch things were put, there was something that quickenedhis 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 toogreat to be borne. Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he hadspent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terribleportrait 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 passionateabsorption in mere existence. Then, suddenly, some night he would creepout 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 returnhe would sit in front of the her times, with that pride of individualismthat is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasureat the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have beenhis 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 theyhad more than once spent the winter. He hated to be separated fromthe picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraidthat during his absence some one might gain access to the room,in spite of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed uponthe door.He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.It was true that the portrait still preserved, under allthe foulness and ugliness of the face, its marked likenessto himself; but what could they learn from that? He would laughat 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 housein Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of hisown rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the countyby the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life,he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to seethat the door had not been tampered with and that the picture wasstill there. What if it should be stolen? The mere thought madehim 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 birthand social position fully entitled him to become a member, and itwas said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend intothe smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and anothergentleman got up in a marked manner and went out. Curious storiesbecame current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailorsin a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consortedwith thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappearagain in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass himwith a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though theywere 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 frankdebonair manner, his charming boyish smile, and the infinitegrace 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 beenmost intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had bravedall social censure and set convention at defiance, were seento grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray enteredthe room.Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of manyhis strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certainelement of security. Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of thosewho are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively thatmanners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion,the highest respectability is of much less value than the possessionof a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolationto be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner,or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life.Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrees,as Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject,and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view.For the canons of good society are, or should be, the sameas the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well asits unreality, and should combine the insincere characterof a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such playsdelightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing?I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiplyour personalities.Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonderat the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in manas 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 strangelegacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was taintedwith the monstrous maladies of the dead. He loved to strollthrough the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country house and lookat 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'slife that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonousgerm crept from body to body till it had reached his own?Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had madehim so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance,in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had so changedhis 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 Giovannaof Naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead manhad 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 abouther lovers. Had he something of her temperament in him? These oval,heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. What ofGeorge 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 thatwere so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of theeighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars.What of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the PrinceRegent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses atthe secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert? How proud andhandsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose!What passions had he bequeathed? The world had looked uponhim as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House.The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hungthe 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 beautyof others. She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress.There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilledfrom the cup she was holding. The carnations of the paintinghad withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depthand brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever hewent.Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainlywith an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the wholeof history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had livedit in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had createdit for him, as it had been in his brain and in his passions.He felt that he had known them all, those strange terrible figuresthat had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellousand evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysteriousway their lives had been his own.The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life hadhimself 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 booksof Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him andthe flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula,had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and suppedin 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 daggerthat was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terribletaedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing;and had peered through a clear emerald at the red shambles of the circusand then, in a litter of pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules,been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Goldand 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 marriageto the Sun.Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter,and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in somecurious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were picturedthe awful and beautiful forms of those whom vice and bloodand weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan,who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poisonthat 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 murderedbody was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him;the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding besidehim 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 byhis debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilionof white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs,and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymedeor Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only bythe 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 dicewhen gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo,who in mockery took the name of Innocent and into whose torpidveins 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 poisonto Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of ashameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship;Charles VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that aleper 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 imagesof love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkinand 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 dyingin the yellow piazza of Perugia, those who had hated himcould not choose but weep, and Atalanta, who had cursed him,blessed him.There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw themat 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 gloveand a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain.Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments whenhe looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realizehis conception of the beautiful.