The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde

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Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde

Release Date: June 9, 2008 [EBook #174]

[This file last updated on July 2, 2011]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ***

Produced by Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

by

Oscar Wilde

THE PREFACE

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and

conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate

into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful

things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without

being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the

cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom

beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well

written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing

his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban

not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part

of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists

in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove

anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has

ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an

unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist

can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist

instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for

an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is

the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the

actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read

the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life,

that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art

shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree,

the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making

a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for

making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE

CHAPTER 1

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light

summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through

the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate

perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was

lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry

Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured

blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to

bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then

the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long

tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window,

producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of

those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of

an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of

swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their

way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous

insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine,

seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London

was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the

full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,

and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist

himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago

caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many

strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so

skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his

face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up,

and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he

sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he

feared he might awake.

"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said

Lord Henry languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the

Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have

gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been

able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that

I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor

is really the only place."

"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head

back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at

Oxford. "No, I won't send it anywhere."

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through

the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls

from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My

dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters

are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as

you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you,

for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,

and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you

far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite

jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."

"I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit

it. I have put too much of myself into it."

Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed.

"Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same."

"Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you

were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with

your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young

Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why,

my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an

intellectual expression and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends

where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode

of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one

sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something

horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions.

How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But

then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the

age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen,

and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful.

Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but

whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of

that. He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always

here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in

summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter

yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him."

"You don't understand me, Harry," answered the artist. "Of course I am

not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry

to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the

truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual

distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the

faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's

fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best

...