by Oscar Wilde Published: 1890
Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it first appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting influence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps
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Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life; indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence. The novel was a succès de scandale and the book was later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895. It has lost none of its power to fascinate and disturb.
BOOK EXTRACTS
Youth Obsession
When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. Curious sensation of tenor came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious , trying to improve the hopeless failure , or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, the vulgar, these are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you. Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing.
Nothing can cure the soul but the senses just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.
…a post to which be considered that he was fully entitled by reason of his birth, his indolence the good English of his despatches and his inordinate passion for pleasure
THE WOMEN
she behaves as if she was beautiful. Most American women do . It is the secret of their charm
A strange , almost modern romance. A beautiful women risking everything for a mad passion. A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous, treacherous crime. Months of voicesness agony, then a child born in pain
She was free in her prison of passion
behind every exquisite thing that existed, the was something tragic
…I used to look at every one who passed me, and wonder, with mad curiosity, what sort of lives they led. Some of them fascinated me. Other filled me with terror. There was an exquisite poison in the air. I had a passion for sensations…well one evening about seven o clock , I determined to go out in search of some adventure, I felt that this grey monstrous London of ours, with its myriad of people , its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins, as you once phrased it, must have something in store for me. I faced a thousand things, the mere danger gave me a sense of delight. I remembered what you had said to me on that wonderful evening when we first dined together, about the search for beauty being the real secret of life.
Compared to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshappen dreams.
There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken to them. There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature. And , yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world had became to one. To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect – to observe where they met and where they separated, at what point they were in unison and at what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
A chance phrase that he had heard at the theatre, a whispered sneer that had reached his ear one night as he waited at the stage door, had set loose a train of horrible thoughts.
I never approve, or disapprove, or anything now. It is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices. I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people do. If qa personality fascinates me,m whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely deloightful to me.
When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy
Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is tnhat they can afford nothing but self- denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the priviledge of the rich.
One hardly knew at times whethere one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confersions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book.
Finally, he went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had loved, imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness. He covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain. There is a luxury in self reproach when we blame ourselves we feel that no one else has the right to blame us.
Yes, life had decided that for him life and his infinite curiousity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasure and subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins he was to have all these things.
The consequence is that he has nothignleft for life but his prejudices, his principles and his common sense. The only artist I have ever known, who are personally delightful are the bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequentely are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The wost their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book os second rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He live the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that tbey don’t dare realize
The past could always be annihilated. Regret, denial of forgetfulness could do that. But the future was inevitable. There were passions in him that would find their terrible outlet, dreamas that would make the shadow of their evil real.
There were moments, indeed , at nights , when lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or the sordid room of the little ill famed tavern near the docks, which under an assumed name, and in disuguis, it was his habit to frequent, he would gthink of the ruin he had brough upon his soul, with a pituy that was all the more poignant because if was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare.
That curiousity 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 know, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.
Foer a while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a sublte pleasure in the in the thought that hemight really become to London of his own day what to imperial nerenian rome the author of the satyricon, once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be something more than a mere arbiter 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 have it reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
As he looked back upon man moving through history, he was haunted by a feeling of lost. So much had been surrendered! And to such little purpose! There had been mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self torute and self denial, whose origina was fear and whorse results was a degradation infitely m,ore terrible than that dancied degradation from which, in their ignorance, they had saught to escape.
On one occasion he took up the study of jewels and appeared at a costume bal as anne de joyeuse in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty pearls. This enthralled him for years and indeed, may be said to have left him. He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in thie cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamp light, the cymophane with its wire like line of silver, the pistachio coloured peridot, rose pink and wine yellow topazes, carbunchles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four rayed stars, flamed 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 mooonstoned pearly whiteness and the broken rainbow of the milky opal. He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of extraordinary size and richness of color, and had a turquoise de la veille roche that was the envy of all the conoisseurs
He discovered wonderful stories, aslo about jewels. In alphonsos “ clericalis disciplina” a serpent was mentioned with eye of real jacinth, and in the romancit history of alexander , the conquerer of emathia was said to have found in the vale of jourdan snakes “ with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs” there was a gem on the brain of the dragon, philostratus told us by the exhibiton 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 diamond rendered a ma n invisible, and the agate of india made him eloquen. The cornelian appeased anger and the hyacinth provoked sleep and the amythist drove away the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demonds and the hydropicus deprived the moon of ther color. The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids. Leonardus camillies had seen white stones taken from the brain of a newly killed toad, thay was a certain antidote against poison.
Yes: there was to be, as Lord henry had prophesied, a new Hedonis, that was to recreate life, and to sav e it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our day its curious revival. It was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim , indeed, was to be experienced itself , and not the fruits of experience, sweet or biter as they might be. Of the asceticism that deaders the scenes, 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 life that is itself but a moment.
…seeing in the prelude to the great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of how own soul.
Shameful passion
Could only be soothed by saracers cards painted with the images of love and death and madness
All the candour of youth was there, as well as the youth’s passionate purity
“ I believe that if one man were to live out his fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought reality to every dream. I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of medievalism, the retune of the hellenic ideal – to sometime finer, richer, then the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The multination of the savages has its tragic survival in the self denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains there but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it, resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing, for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful
he had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain young, and the portrait grow old, that his own beauty might be untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passion and his sins; the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.
Don’t spoil him. Don’t try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. The world is wide, and has many marvellous people in it. Don’t take away from me the one person who give my art whatever charm it possesses; my life as an artist depends on him.
I make a great difference between people. I chose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all man of some intellectual power and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain”
Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it.
Darwinism's movement
Yet, as has been said of him, before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared to 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.
He saw that there was no mood in the mind that had no its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one mystical and ambergris that stirred one’s passion and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the brain and in champak that stained the imagination and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes and to estimate the several influenced of sweet smelling roots, and scented pollen laden flowers, of aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickness, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy from the soul.
Hock and seltzer
Dorian winced, and looked around the grotesque things that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged masteries. The twisted limbs, the gasping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. He knew in what strange heavens they were suffering, and what dull hells were teaching them the secret of new joy. They were better off than he was. He was prisoned in though, memory, like a horrible malady, was eating his soul away. He wanted to escape from himself.
There are moments, psychologist tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominated a nature, that ever fibre of the body , as every cell of the brain, seems to be instincts with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscience is either killed, or if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion ins fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as the dogians weary not for reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was a rebel that he fell.
“why have you stopped playing, Dorrian? Go back and give me the nocturne over again. Look at that great honey colored 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.
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 to the ignorance of youth. The only people to whose opinion 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
Like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart
And yet if it had been merely an illusion, how terrible it was to think that conscience could raise such fearful phantoms, and give them a visible form, and make them more before one? What sort of life would his be if , day and night, shadows of his crime were to peer at him from silent corners, to mock him from secret places, to whisper in his ear as he sat at the feast, to wake him with icy fingers as he lay asleep. As the thought crepe throught his brina, he grew pale with terror and the air seemed to him to have become suddenly colder.
There are a 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 while 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 amongst 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 the silent house, as though it feared to wake the 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 thme, and we watch the dawn remalking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors gets back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and besides them lie 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 to often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over a terrible sense of the stereotypes=d 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 which things would have fresh shapes and colors and be changed, or have other secrets, a wolrd which the past would have little or no place , or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the bitterness and the memories of pleasure
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