The Picture of Dorian Gray
his heart,” he answered, sinking into an arm-chair.
Dorian Gray shook his head and struck some soft chords on the piano.
“‘Like the painting of a sorrow,’” he repeated, “‘a face without a
heart.’”
The elder man lay back and looked at him with half-closed eyes. “By the
way, Dorian,” he said after a pause, “‘what does it profit a man if he
gain the whole world and lose—how does the quotation run?—his own
soul’?”
The music jarred, and Dorian Gray started and stared at his friend.
“Why do you ask me that, Harry?”
“My dear fellow,” said Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows in surprise,
“I asked you because I thought you might be able to give me an answer.
That is all. I was going through the park last Sunday, and close by the
Marble Arch there stood a little crowd of shabby-looking people
listening to some vulgar street-preacher. As I passed by, I heard the
man yelling out that question to his audience. It struck me as being
rather dramatic. London is very rich in curious effects of that kind. A
wet Sunday, an uncouth Christian in a mackintosh, a ring of sickly
white faces under a broken roof of dripping umbrellas, and a wonderful
phrase flung into the air by shrill hysterical lips—it was really very
good in its way, quite a suggestion. I thought of telling the prophet
that art had a soul, but that man had not. I am afraid, however, he
would not have understood me.”
“Don’t, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and
sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is
a soul in each one of us. I know it.”
“Do you feel quite sure of that, Dorian?”
“Quite sure.”
“Ah! then it must be an illusion. The things one feels absolutely
certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the
lesson of romance. How grave you are! Don’t be so serious. What have
you or I to do with the superstitions of our age? No: we have given up
our belief in the soul. Play me something. Play me a nocturne, Dorian,
and, as you play, tell me, in a low voice, how you have kept your
youth. You must have some secret. I am only ten years older than you
are, and I am wrinkled, and worn, and yellow. You are really wonderful,
Dorian. You have never looked more charming than you do to-night. You
remind me of the day I saw you first. You were rather cheeky, very shy,
and absolutely extraordinary. You have changed, of course, but not in
appearance. I wish you would tell me your secret. To get back my youth
I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early,
or be respectable. Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk
of the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen
now with any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in
front of me. Life has revealed to them her latest wonder. As for the
aged, I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle. If you ask
them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly
give you the opinions current in 1820, when people wore high stocks,
believed in everything, and knew absolutely nothing. How lovely that
thing you are playing is! I wonder, did Chopin write it at Majorca,
with the sea weeping round the villa and the salt spray dashing against
the panes? It is marvellously romantic. What a blessing it is that
there is one art left to us that is not imitative! Don’t stop. I want
music to-night. It seems to me that you are the young Apollo and that I
am Marsyas listening to you. I have sorrows, Dorian, of my own, that
even you know nothing of. The tragedy of old age is not that one is
old, but that one is young. I am amazed sometimes at my own sincerity.
Ah, Dorian, how happy you are! What an exquisite life you have had! You
have drunk deeply of everything. You have crushed the grapes against
your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to
you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are
still the same.”
“I am not the same, Harry.”
“Yes, you are the same. I wonder what the rest of your life will be.
Don’t spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type.
Don’t make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now. You need
not shake your head: you know you are. Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive
yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question
of nerves, and fibres, and slowly built-up cells in which thought hides
itself and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe and
think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a
morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that
brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you
had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had
ceased to play—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that
our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own
senses will imagine them for us. There are moments when the odour of
_lilas blanc_ passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the
strangest month of my life over again. I wish I could change places
with you, Dorian. The world has cried out against us both, but it has
always worshipped you. It always will worship you. You are the type of
what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am
so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or
painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has
been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your
sonnets.”
Dorian rose up from the piano and passed his hand through his hair.
“Yes, life has been exquisite,” he murmured, “but I am not going to
have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these extravagant
things to me. You don’t know everything about me. I think that if you
did, even you would turn from me. You laugh. Don’t laugh.”
“Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and give me the nocturne
over again. Look at that great, honey-coloured moon that hangs in the
dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she
will come closer to the earth. You won’t? Let us go to the club, then.
It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. There is
some one at White’s who wants immensely to know you—young Lord Poole,
Bournemouth’s eldest son. He has already copied your neckties, and has
begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite delightful and rather
reminds me of you.”
“I hope not,” said Dorian with a sad look in his eyes. “But I am tired
to-night, Harry. I shan’t go to the club. It is nearly eleven, and I
want to go to bed early.”
“Do stay. You have never played so well as to-night. There was
something in your touch that was wonderful. It had more expression than
I had ever heard from it before.”
“It is because I am going to be good,” he answered, smiling. “I am a
little changed already.”
“You cannot change to me, Dorian,” said Lord Henry. “You and I will
always be friends.”
“Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that.
Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It
does harm.”
“My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralize. You will soon be
going about like the converted, and the revivalist, warning people
against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too
delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we
are, and will be what we will be. As for being poisoned by a book,
there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It
annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that
the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
That is all. But we won’t discuss literature. Come round to-morrow. I
am going to ride at eleven. We might go together, and I will take you
to lunch afterwards with Lady Branksome. She is a charming woman, and
wants to consult you about some tapestries she is thinking of buying.
Mind you come. Or shall we lunch with our little duchess? She says she
never sees you now. Perhaps you are tired of Gladys? I thought you
would be. Her clever tongue gets on one’s nerves. Well, in any case, be
here at eleven.”
“Must I really come, Harry?”
“Certainly. The park is quite lovely now. I don’t think there have been
such lilacs since the year I met you.”
“Very well. I shall be here at eleven,” said Dorian. “Good night,
Harry.” As he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, as if he had
something more to say. Then he sighed and went out.
CHAPTER XX.
It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm and
did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he strolled home,
smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. He
heard one of them whisper to the other, “That is Dorian Gray.” He
remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared
at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half the
charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that
no one knew who he was. He had often told the girl whom he had lured to
love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had told her
once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and answered that
wicked people were always very old and very ugly. What a laugh she
had!—just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her
cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had
everything that he had lost.
When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent
him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and
began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.
Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing
for the unstained purity of his boyhood—his rose-white boyhood, as Lord
Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled
his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had
been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in
being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been
the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame.
But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?
Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that
the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the
unsullied splendour of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to
that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought its sure
swift penalty along with it. There was purification in punishment. Not
“Forgive us our sins” but “Smite us for our iniquities” should be the
prayer of man to a most just God.
The curiously carved mirror that Lord Henry had given to him, so many
years ago now, was standing on the table, and the white-limbed Cupids
laughed round it as of old. He took it up, as he had done on that night
of horror when he had first noted the change in the fatal picture, and
with wild, tear-dimmed eyes looked into its polished shield. Once, some
one who had terribly loved him had written to him a mad letter, ending
with these idolatrous words: “The world is changed because you are made
of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.” The
phrases came back to his memory, and he repeated them over and over to
himself. Then he loathed his own beauty, and flinging the mirror on the
floor, crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel. It was his
beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed
for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from
stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery.
What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow
moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had
spoiled him.