Chapter 11
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Chapter 11For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris han nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the ging fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost trol. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantid the stific temperaments were sely blended, became to him a kind uring type of himself. And, ihe whole book seemed to him to taiory of his own life, written before he had lived it.
In one point he was more fortuhan the novels fantastic hero. He never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once, apparently, been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy-- and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, at of the sorrow and despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he had most dearly valued.
For the wonderful beauty that had so fasated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, seemed o leave him. Even those who had heard the most evil things against him-- and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs-- could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray ehe room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innoce that they had tarhey wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of ahat was at once sordid and sensual.
Often, ourning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absehat gave rise to such strange jecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging fa the vas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the trast used to qui his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his owy, more and more ied in the corruption of his own soul. He would examih minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lihat seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, w 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 sted chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed taverhe 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 urely selfish. But moments such as these were rare. That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. The more he khe more he desired to know. He had mad huhat 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 musis of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, itling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were noted as much for the careful sele and plag of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle symphonic arras of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. Ihere were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fahat they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed ion or Oxford days, a type that was to bine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grad distin and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them he seemed to be of the pany of those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom "the visible world existed."
And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic bees 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 fasation for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influen the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him ihing that he did, and tried to reproduce the actal 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 ing of age, and found, indeed, a subtle pleasure ihought that he might really bee to the London of his own day what to imp<mark>?99ｌｉb.</mark>erial Neronian Rome the author of the Satyri once had bee in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to be sulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a ie, or the duct of a e. 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 ses highest realization.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions aions that seem strohan themselves, and that they are scious of sharing with the less highly anized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been uood, 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 rejes, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose in was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorahey had sought to escape; Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his panions.
Yes: there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh unely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was o accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experies aim, indeed, was to be experieself, 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 trate himself upon the moments of a life that is itself but a moment.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawher after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible thay itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the ers 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 ing down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers a must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, ach the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirret back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us ged. Out of the unreal shadows of the night es 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 y for the tinuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some m upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be ged, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no scious form of obligatiret, 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 objeongst the true objects, of life; and in his search for sensations that would be at onew and delightful, and possess that element of strahat is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he ko be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifferehat is not inpatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that, indeed, acc to certain modern psychologists, is often a dition of it.
It was rumoured of him ohat he was about to join the Roman Catholiunion, aainly the Roman ritual had always a great attra for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb reje 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 arble pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrah that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is ihe "panis caelestis," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalid smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming sers that the grave boys, in their lad scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their subtle fasation for him. As he passed out, he used to look with wo the black fessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the wrating 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 on things strao us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to apany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he ined to the materialistic does of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in trag the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the ception of the absolute dependence of the spirit oain physical ditions, 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 importanpared with life itself. He felt keenly scious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from a and experiment. He khat the senses, han the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.
And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their manufacture, distilling heavily sted oils and burning odorous gums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not its terpart in the sensuous life, a himself to discover their true relations, w what there was in frankinse that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirred ones passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that staihe imagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smelling roots and sted, pollen-laden flowers; of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that sis; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.
At aime he devoted himself eo musid in a long latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious certs in which mad gipsies tore wild musi little zithers, rave, yellow-shawled Tunisians plucked at the strairings of monstrous lutes, while grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, croug upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of reed or brass and charmed-- or feigo charm--great hooded snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schuberts grace, and Chopiiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell unheeded on his ear. He collected together from all parts of the world the stra instruments that could be fouher iombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived tact with Western civilizations, and loved to toud try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that wome allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and sc, 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 Cuzd 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 Mexis, into which the performer does not blow, but through which he ihe air; the harsh ture of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long in high trees, and be heard, it is said, at a distance of three leagues; the teponaztli, that has two vibrating tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with aic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge drical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the ohat Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexi temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. The fantastic character of these instruments fasated him, and he felt a curious delight ihought 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 "Tannh?user" and seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
On one occasioook up the study of jewels, and appeared at a e ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said o have left him. He would often spend a whole day settling aling in their cases the various stohat be had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the cymophah 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 amon-stones, e and violet spinels, and amethysts with their alternate layer>.9９ｌｉb.</a>s of ruby and sapphire. He loved the red gold of the sunstone, and the moonstones pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and riess of colour, and had a turquoise de la vieille roche that was the envy of all the oisseurs.
He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonsos Clericalis Disciplina a serpent was mentioned with eyes of real jath, and in the romantic history of Alexahe queror of Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes "with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." There was a gem in the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition of goldeers and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep and slain. Acc to the great alchemist, Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made him eloquent. The elian appeased anger, and the hyath provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wihe gar cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her colour. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stoaken 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 s of Arabian birds was the aspilates, that, acc 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 ation. The gates of the palace of John the Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." Over the gable were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night. In Lodges strange romance A Margarite of America, it was stated that in the chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of the world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slaihief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss. When the Huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung it away-- Procopius tells the story--nor was it ever found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight of gold pieces for it. The King of Malabar had shown to a certaiian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god that he worshipped.
When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, acc to Brantome, and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light. Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and twenty-one diamonds. Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand marks, which was covered with balas rubies. Hall described Henry VIII, on his way to the Tower previous to his ation, as wearing "a jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses." The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold filigrane. Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit old armour studded with jaths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parsemé with pearls. Henry II wore jewelled gloves reag to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients. The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race, was hung with pear-shaped pearls and studded with sapphires.
How exquisite life had once been! How geous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
Theurned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern nations of Europe. As he iigated the subject-- and he always had araordinary faculty of being absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up--he was almost saddened by the refle of the ruin that time brought oiful 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 unged. No winter marred his face or stained his flowerlike bloom. How different it was with material things! Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where the huge velarium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail of purple on which was represehe starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white, gilt-reieeds? He loo see the curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast; the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred goldehe fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of Pontus and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters--all, in 藏书网fact, that a painter 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 apa of the words being wrought in gold thread, and eaote, of square shape in those days, formed with four pearls. He read of the room that repared 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 kings arms, and five hundred and sixty-oterflies, whose wings were similarly ored with the arms of the queen, the whole worked in gold." Catherine de Médicis had a m-bed made for her of black velvet powdered with crests 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 queens devices in cut black velvet upon cloth of silver. Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides fiftee 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 beh the tremulous gilt of its opy.
And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite spes that he could find of textile and embroidered wetting the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and stitched over with iridest 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 ese 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; Geian work, with its gilt s, 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 ected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar chests that lihe west gallery of his house, he had stored away many rare aiful spes of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must urple and jewels and fine lihat she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted pain. He possessed a geous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask, figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond whi either side was the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreys were divided into panels representing ses from the life of the Virgin, and the ation of the Virgin was figured in coloured silks upon the hood. This was Italian work of the fifteenth tury. Another cope was of gree, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of athus-leaves, from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals. The morse bore a seraphs head in gold-thread raised work. The orphreys were woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian. He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins and fleurs-de-lys; altar frontals of crimso and blue linen; and many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to which such things were put, there was something that quied his imagination.
For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of fetfulness, 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 giures 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 fet the hideous paihing, a back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existehen, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful plaear Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. On his return he would sit in front of the her times, with that pride of individualism that is half the fasation 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 eo be long out of England, and gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they had more than once spent the winter. He hated to be separated from the picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that during his absene one might gain access to the room, in spite of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.
He was quite scious 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 likeo himself; but what could they learn from that? He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him. He had not pai. What was it to him how vile and full of shame it looked? Even if he told them, would they believe it?
Yet he was afraid. Sometimes when he was down at his great house in Nottinghamshire, eaining the fashionable young men of his own rank who were his chief panions, and astounding the ty by the wanton luxury and geous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not been tampered with and that the picture was still there. What if it should be stolen? The mere thought made him cold with horror. Surely the world would know his secret then. Perhaps the world already suspected it.
For, while he fasated many, there were not a few who distrusted him. He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth and social position fully entitled him to bee a member, and it was said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into the smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwid anentleman got up in a marked manner a out. Curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year. It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with fn sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he sorted with thieves and ers and khe 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 ers, or pass him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searg eyes, as though they were determio discover his secret.
Of susolences 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 o leave him, were in themselves a suffit ao the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about him. It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him. Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social sure a vention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray ehe room.
Yet these whispered sdals only increased in the eyes of many his strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certai of security. Society--civilized society, at least-- is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rid fasating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importahan morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor solation 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 ot atone for half-cold entrées, as Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject, and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view. For the s of good society are, or should be, the same as the s of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its uy, and should bihe insincere character of a romantic play with the wit ay that make such plays delightful to us. Is insiy such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we multiply our personalities.
Such, at any rate, was Dorian Grays opinion. He used to wo the shallow psychology of those who ceive the ego in man as a thing simple, perma, reliable, and of one esseo him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a plex 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 try house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins. Here hilip 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 pany." Was it young Herberts 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 Hallwards studio, to the mad prayer that had so ged his life? Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard, with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet. What had this mans legacy been? Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him some iance of sin and shame? Were his own aerely the dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize? Here, from the fading vas, 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 straories that were told about her lovers. Had he something of her temperament in him? These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him. What of Gee 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 mai of the eighteenth tury, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What of the sed Lord Beham, the panion of the Prince Regent in his wildest days, and one of the wit the secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and i pose! assions had he bequeathed? The world had looked upon him as infamous. He had led the ies at Carlton House. The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. Her blood, also, stirred within him. How curious it all seemed! And his mother with her Lady Hamilton fad her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got from her. He had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty of others. She laughed at him in her loose Bate dress. There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilled from the cup she was holding. The ations of the painting had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever he went.
Yet one had aors in literature as well as in ones own raearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, aainly with an influence of whie was more absolutely scious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in ad 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 straerrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.
The hero of the wonderful hat had so influenced his life had himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how, ed 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 ser; and, as Caligula, had caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in an ivory manger with a jewel-froed horse; and, as Domitian, had wahrough a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard eyes for the refle of the dagger that was to end his days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible taedium vitae, that es 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 Pomegrao a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
Over and ain Doriao read this fantastic chapter, and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious tapestries or ingly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful aiful forms of those whom vid blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lht suck death from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Veian, knoaul the Sed, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two huhousand florins, was bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visti, who used hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Bia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him and his maained 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 on in a pavilion of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs aaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as other men 藏书网have for red wihe 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 I and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was bur Rome as the enemy of God and man, whled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra dEste in a erald, and in honour of a shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI, who had so wildly adored his brothers wife that a leper had warned him of the insanity that was ing on him, and who, when his brain had sied and grown strange, could only be soothed by Sara cards painted with the images of love ah and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and athuslike curls, Grifoo Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simoo with his page, and whose eliness 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 horri.ble fasation in them all. He saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. The Renaissanew of strange manners of poisoning-- poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embrlove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber . 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 ception of the beautiful.
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