The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde pt. II

[tsururu]

"Don't talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more wonderful thing than Art.""They are both simply forms of imitation," remarked Lord Henry.

There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating-people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing.

I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real.

I have grown sick of shadows.

How little can you know of love, if you say it mars your art!

There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love.

When they took lovers, it was merely to have some one with whom they could have scenes.

we live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities

He was afraid of certainty.

There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.

The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died. To you at least she was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's music sounded richer and more full of joy. The moment she touched actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away. Mourn for Ophelia, if you like. Put ashes on your head because Cordelia was strangled. Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of Brabantio died. But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than they are.

Don't talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression, as Harry says, that gives reality to things.

I suffered immensely. Then it passed away. I cannot repeat an emotion. No one can, except sentimentalists.

To become the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape the suffering of life.

I grew afraid that others would know of my idolatry.

Well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good-looking and that I could paint. Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour-that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.

"My dear Basil," said Dorian, "what have you told me? Simply that you felt that you admired me too much. That is not even a compliment.""It was not intended as a compliment. It was a confession. Now that I have made it, something seems to have gone out of me. Perhaps one should never put one's worship into words."

Harry spends his days in saying what is incredible, and his evenings in doing what is improbable. Just the sort of life I would like to lead.

There seemed to him to be something tragic in a friendship so coloured by romance.

It seemed to him that it was unchanged; and yet his loathing of it was intensified.

After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference."

And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.

It was with an almost cruel joy-and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its place

among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so

The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seemed stronger than themselves, and that they are conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradation infinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feare4d to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back to their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having, has it were, caught their colour and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.

But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany and found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, as has been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal.

In the nests of Arabian birds was the aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any danger by fire.

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the mouths of the dead.

and he always had an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment in whatever he took up

For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne.

that pride of individualism is half the fascination of sin

Yet these whispered scandals only increased, in the eyes of many, his strange and dangerous charm. His great wealth was a certain element of security. Society, civilized society at least, is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating. It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability is of much less value than the possession of a good chef. And, after all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold entrées, as Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject; and there is possibly a good deal to be said for his view. For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceived the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead.

There was a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them at night, and they troubled his imagination in the day. The Renaissance knew of strange manners of poisoning-poisoning by a helmet and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain. Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

I am tired of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else.

You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it. It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows anything about mine.

The middle classes air their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try and pretend that they are in smart society, and on intimate terms with the people they slander. In this country it is enough for a man to have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

One has the right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends.

I won't tell you that I don't want to preach to you. I remember Harry saying once that every man who turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by saying that, and then proceeded to break his word. I do want to preach to you.

The man had to touch him twice on the shoulder before he woke, and as he opened his eyes a faint smile passed across his lips, as though he had been lost in some delightful dream. Yet he had not dreamed at all. His night had been untroubled by any images of pleasure or of pain. But youth smiles without any reason. It is one of its chiefest charms.

They get up early, because they have so much to do, and go to bed early because they have so little to think about.

who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends

was under the impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of ideas

I have not been in love for a whole week

Lady Narborough hit him with her fan. "Lord Henry, I am not at all surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked.""But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows. "It can only be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.""Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady, shaking her head.Lord Henry looked serious for some moments. "It is perfectly monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.""Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair."I hope so," said his hostess, laughing. "But really if you all worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way, I shall have to marry again so as to be in the fashion.""You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord Henry. "You were far too happy. When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck; men risk theirs.""Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady."If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the rejoinder. "Women love us for our defects. If we have enough of them they will forgive us everything, even our intellects. You will never ask me to dinner again, after saying this, I am afraid, Lady Narborough; but it is quite true.""Or course it is true. Lord Henry. If we women did not love you for your defects, where would you all be? Not one of you would ever be married. You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors. Not, however, that that would alter you much. Nowadays all the married men live like bachelors, and all the bachelors live like married men.""Fin de siècle," murmured Lord Henry."Fin du globe," answered his hostess."I wish it were fin du globe," said Dorian, with a sigh. "Life is a great disappointment."

"A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her."

"I like men who have a future, and women who have a past," he answered.

I am sick of women who love one. Women who hate one are much more interesting.

One's days were too brief to take the burden of another's errors on one's shoulders. Each man lived his own life, and paid his own price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. One had to pay over and over again, indeed. In her dealings with man Destiny never closed her accounts.

It is a sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. I never quarrel with actions. My quarrel is with words. This is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for."Then what should we call you, Harry?" she asked."His name is Prince Paradox," said Dorian."I recognize him in a flash," exclaimed the Duchess."I won't hear of it," laughed Lord Henry, sinking into a chair. "From a label there is no escape! I refuse the title.""Royalties may not abdicate," fell as a warning from pretty lips."You wish to defend my throne, then?""Yes.""I give the truths of to-morrow.""I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered."You disarm me, Gladys," he cried, catching the wilfulness of her mood."Of your shield, Harry: not of your spear.""I never tilt against Beauty," he said, with a wave of his hand."That is your error, Harry, believe me. You value beauty far too much.""How can you say that? I admit that I think that it is better to be beautiful than to be good. But on the other hand no one is more ready than I am to acknowledge that it is better to be good than to be ugly.""Ugliness is one of the seven deadly sins, then?" cried the Duchess. "What becomes of your similes about the orchid?""Ugliness is one of the seven deadly virtues, Gladys. You, as a good Tory, must not underrate them. Beer, the Bible, and the seven deadly virtues have made our England what she is.""You don't like your country, then?" she asked."I live in it.""That you may censure it the better.""Would you have me take the verdict of Europe on it?" he enquired."What do they say of us.""That Tartuffe has emigrated to England and opened a shop.""Is that yours, Harry?""I give it to you.""I could not use it. It is too true.""You need not be afraid. Our countrymen never recognize a description.""They are practical.""They are more cunning than practical. When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.""Still, we have done great things.""Great things have been thrust on us, Gladys.""We have carried their burden.""Only as far as the Stock Exchange."She shook her head. "I believe in the race," she cried."It represents the survival of the pushing.""It has development.""Decay fascinates me more.""What of Art?" she asked."It is a malady.""Love?""An illusion.""Religion?""The fashionable substitute for Belief.""You are a sceptic.""Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.""What are you?""To define is to limit.""Give me a clue.""Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth.""You bewilder me. Let us talk of some one else."

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter the singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of lie is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

"Greek meets Greek, then?""I am on the side of the Trojans. They fought for a woman.""They were defeated.""There are worse things than capture," she answered."You gallop with a loose rein.""Pace gives life," was the riposte."I shall write it in my diary to-night.""What?""That a burnt child loves the fire.""I am not even singed. My wings are untouched.""You can use them for everything, except flight."

sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself

But perhaps it had been only his fancy that had called vengeance out of the night, and set the hideous shapes of punishment before him. Actual life was chaos, but there was something terribly logical in the imagination. It was the imagination that set remorse to dog the feet of sin. It was the imagination that made each crime bear its misshapen brood. In the common world of fact the wicked were not punished, nor the good rewarded. Success was given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak.

The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.

As for omens, there is no such thing as an omen. Destiny does not send us heralds. She is too wise or too cruel for that.

I have no terror of Death. It is the coming of Death that terrifies me.

"I like the Duchess very much, but I don't love her.""And the Duchess loves you very much, but she likes you less, so you are excellently matched."

"It has no psychological value at all. Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know some one who had committed a real murder."

"Are you very much in love with him?" he asked.She did not answer for some time, but stood gazing at the landscape. "I wish I knew," she said at last.He shook his head. "Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things wonderful.""One may lose one's way.""All ways end at the same point, my dear Gladys.""What is that?""Disillusion."

Of course married life is merely a habit, a bad habit. But then one regrets the loss even of one's worst habits. Perhaps one regrets them the most. They are such an essential part of one's personality.

"If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart."

The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect.

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.

As for the aged, I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle.

The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame. That is all.

She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

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.