THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (adapted and simplified)

The Picture of Dorian Gray
by
Oscar Wilde

Adapted by RDC

THE STUDIO WHERE Lord Henry Wotton sat smelled of roses. In it was the full-length portrait of a youth of great beauty. In front was the artist, Basil Hallward.
"It’s your best work, Basil," said Lord Henry.
"It’s a portrait of a man named Dorian Gray. I’m afraid it has the secret of my soul. Two months ago I went to Lady Brandon's. After being in the room ten minutes, I was conscious of someone looking at me. I saw Dorian for the first time.
“I grew pale and felt terror. I was face to face with someone so fascinating that, if I allowed it, it would absorb my whole nature, soul, and art. I had been my own master till I met Dorian Gray. Then I had a strange feeling that fate had in store for me wonderful joys and sorrows. I grew afraid and turned to leave. It was not conscience but cowardice."
"They’re the same, Basil.”
“It was foolish, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce us. Dorian said we were made to know each other. Now I’m not happy if I don’t see him every day."
"I thought you cared only for your art."
"He’s my art now," said the painter gravely. “We in our madness have separated soul and body for a common realism, an empty ideal!”
The painter considered his ideal.
"But now and then he is horribly thoughtless, and seems to take delight in giving me pain.”
“My aunt spoke of him once,” said Henry. “She never said he was good-looking. Women don’t appreciate looks. Instead she called him earnest, with a beautiful nature. I wish I had known it was your friend."
"I am glad you didn't, Harry. I don't want you to meet him."
"You don't want me to meet him?"
"No."
"Mr. Dorian Gray is in the studio, sir," said the butler, entering.
"You must introduce me now," laughed Lord Henry.
"Dorian is my dearest friend," Basil said. "He has a simple and a beautiful nature. Your aunt was right. Don't spoil him. Don't influence him. That would be bad. My life as an artist depends on him. Harry, I trust you."
"What nonsense you talk!" said Lord Henry, smiling.
Then Dorian Gray entered.
"This is Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian, a friend.”
"My aunt has spoken to me about you."
"I promised to dine with her last Tuesday,” said Dorian, “and I forgot. I am too frightened to call."
Lord Henry studied him. Yes, he was handsome. The honesty and purity of youth were there. He was unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil worshipped him.
"Dorian, pose on the platform, and don't move too much or pay attention to what Lord Henry says. He has a bad influence over his friends, except on myself."
"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral from the scientific point of view. To influence a person is to give him one's soul. He does not think his natural thoughts or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are sins, are borrowed. He echoes another’s music, acts another’s part. The aim of life is self-development. We’re here to realize our nature. But people fear themselves. They’ve forgotten the duty to one's self. They feed the hungry and clothe the poor. But their souls starve. Courage has left our race. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are what rule us.”
"Turn your head a little to the right, Dorian, like a good boy," said the painter, deep in his work and aware only that a look had come into the lad's face he had never seen before.
"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, "I believe if one man were to live his life fully and give form to every feeling, the world would gain a fresh impulse of joy. But the bravest man is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage survives in our self-denial. We are punished for our refusals. An impulse we ignore poisons us. The body sins once and has done with its sin. For action purifies. Nothing remains then but the memory of a pleasure or the luxury of regret. The way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it. Fight it and your soul grows sick with longing, with desire for what it has made unlawful. The great events of the world take place in the brain, like the great sins of the world. You, Mr. Gray, with your youth and boyhood, have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, dreams whose memory might stain your cheek with shame—“
"Stop!" stammered Dorian, "stop! You confuse me. There is some answer to you, but I can’t find it. Let me think. Or not think."
For ten minutes he stood still. He was dimly conscious of fresh influences within him. Yet they seemed to have come from himself. Lord Henry had touched a secret chord now throbbing to curious pulses.
There were things in his boyhood he had not understood. He understood them now. It seemed he had been walking in fire. Why had he not known it?
With his smile, Lord Henry watched him. He knew when to say nothing. He had shot an arrow into the air. Had it hit the mark?
Basil painted with a bold touch and delicacy that comes from strength. He was unconscious of the silence.
"Basil, I am tired of standing," cried Dorian. "I must sit in the garden. The air is stuffy here."
"But you never sat better. You were perfectly still. And I have caught the effect I wanted. I don't know what Harry has said to you, but he has given you a wonderful expression. I suppose he has been paying you compliments. You mustn't believe what he says."
Dorian left. Lord Henry followed in the garden and found Dorian’s face drinking in the perfumed flowers, like wine. He put his hand on his shoulder.
"You are right to do that," he said. "Nothing cures the soul but the senses, just as nothing cures the senses but the soul."
Dorian looked afraid, as if suddenly awakened.
"Yes," continued Lord Henry, "You are a wonderful creation. You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know."
Dorian frowned and turned his head away. He could not help liking the tall, graceful young man standing by him. His low lazy voice was fascinating. But he was afraid and ashamed of being afraid.
Why had it been left for a stranger to reveal him to himself? Basil’s friendship had not changed him. Now someone had disclosed life's mystery. But why be afraid? He was not a schoolboy or a girl.
"Let us sit in the shade," said Lord Henry. "If you stay in the sun you will be spoiled."
"What can it matter?" laughed Dorian.
"Youth is the one thing worth having."
"I don't feel that, Lord Henry."
"When you are old and ugly and thought has lined your forehead, you will feel it terribly. Now you charm the world. Will it always be so? You have beauty, Mr. Gray. It has divine right. It makes princes of those who have it. You have a few years to live fully. When youth goes, beauty goes. Live! Enjoy new sensations. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We become ugly, remembering passions we feared and temptations never enjoyed. There is only youth!"
Dorian listened, open-eyed and wondering.
Then Basil made signs to follow. They turned to each other and smiled.
"You are glad you have met me, Mr. Gray," said Lord Henry, looking at him.
"Yes, I am glad now. Shall I always be glad?"
"’Always’ is a dreadful word. I shudder when I hear it. Women like to use it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last forever."
Basil stopped painting. "It’s finished," he cried at last.
Lord Henry studied it. It was a wonderful likeness.
"Mr. Gray, come and look at yourself." The lad started, as if awakened from a dream.
"Is it really finished?" he asked.
"Yes," said the painter. "You have sat well to-day."
"That’s due to me," said Lord Henry. "Isn't it, Mr. Gray?"
Dorian made no answer. He studied his picture. He felt joy, as if he had seen himself for the first time. He had never felt his beauty before. Basil’s compliments had seemed like mere words of friendship. But Lord Henry’s praise of brief youth aroused him. Gazing at the image, he feared when his face would be wrinkled. The life that made his soul would ruin his body. He would become ugly. He felt pain like a knife.
"Don't you like it?" cried Basil.
"Who wouldn't like it?” asked Henry. “I’d like to have it.”
"It is not my property, Harry." It’s Dorian's," answered the painter.
"How sad!" murmured Dorian, his eyes on his portrait. "I shall grow old and ugly. But this picture will stay young. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was always young and the picture that grew old! I would give my soul! Lord Henry is right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find I am growing old, I shall kill myself."
Basil turned pale and took his hand.
"Dorian, don't talk like that. Are you jealous of material things?"
"I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of your portrait. Why should it keep what I lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. If it were only the other way! If the picture could change and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day!"
"This is your doing, Harry," said the painter bitterly.
Harry shrugged his shoulders. "It is the real Dorian Gray."
“Do you like it?” asked Basil.
"I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself. I feel that."
“What absurd fellows you are,” said Henry. “Both of you! I wonder who defined man as rational. Man is many things, but not rational.
"And you know you have been a little silly, Mr. Gray. You don't object to being reminded that you are very young."
"I should have this morning, Lord Henry."
"You have lived since then,” said Lord Henry. "Let us go to the theatre to-night. I have promised to dine, but only with an old friend, so I can send him a note to say I am ill."
"It’s a bore putting on one's dress-clothes," muttered Basil. "And, when they’re on, they are horrid."
"Yes," answered Lord Henry dreamily, "Sin is the only color left."
"You must not say things like that before Dorian, Harry."
"Before which Dorian? The one here or in the picture?"
"Either."
"I should like to come to the theatre with you, Lord Henry," said the lad.
"Then you shall come; you, too, Basil."
"I must work."
"Well, then, you and I will go alone, Mr. Gray."
The painter studied the picture.
"I shall stay with the real Dorian," he said, sadly.
"Am I really like that?"
"Yes; just like that."
"How wonderful, Basil!"
"At least you are like it in appearance. But it will never change," sighed Basil. "Don't go to the theatre, Dorian. Dine with me."
"I can't, Basil."
"Why?"
"I promised Lord Henry to go with him."
"He won't like you more for keeping your promises. He always breaks his. I beg you don’t go."
"I must go, Basil.”
"Very well," said Basil. “Come tomorrow."
"Certainly."
"You won't forget?"
"Of course not," cried Dorian.
Harry left, thinking of Dorian. It was exciting to have influence. To project one's soul into a lovely form and hear one's views echoed back. There was a joy in that—perhaps the most satisfying left in an age limited and vulgar like our own, carnal in its pleasures and common in its aims. He was a marvelous type, too, or could be made into one. Grace was his; purity and beauty. There was nothing one could not do with him. He could be made a Titan or a toy. What a pity such beauty had to fade!
And Basil? Psychologically, he was interesting! His fresh way of looking at life was suggested by the image of someone unconscious of it. The woodland spirit showed herself, unafraid, because he had a wonderful vision. Shapes and patterns received symbolic value, like ideal images made real. Plato had analyzed it and Michelangelo carved it.
Yes. He would be to Dorian what the lad was to the painter of his portrait. He would dominate him—had already half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his. There was something fascinating in this son of love and death.
The next day they dined at his aunt’s home. He felt Dorian’s eyes on him. It made his wit keen and lent color to his imagination.
Dorian sat like under a spell.
Lord Henry rose. "I am going to the park," he cried.
As he went out the door, Dorian touched his arm.
"Let me come.”
"You promised Basil to see him," answered Lord Henry.
"I prefer you. No one talks as you do."
A month later, Dorian sat in the library of Lord Henry's house. It was a charming room, with silk Persian rugs.
“You filled me with a desire to know everything about life. After I met you, I wanted sensations. Danger delighted me. I remembered you said the search for beauty was the secret of life. So I walked London’s streets until an ugly hawker invited me into a theatre. He was a monster. Yet if I hadn't gone in I should have missed the romance of my life. You laugh.”
"I am not laughing, Dorian. But you should not say the romance of your life. You should say the first romance. There are rare things waiting for you. This is the beginning."
"Do you think my nature shallow?" cried Dorian angrily.
"I think your nature deep."
"How?"
"People who love only once are shallow. What they call loyalty and fidelity, I call lethargy or lack of imagination. Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the intellect: a confession of failure. But I don't want to interrupt you.”
"Well, the play was Romeo and Juliet. What awful players! But Juliet! Imagine a girl, hardly seventeen. What a voice. I love her. Night after night I see her play. First she is Rosalind, then, Imogen. I have seen her die in an Italian tomb and wander through Arden Forest, dressed as a pretty boy. Ordinary women lack mystery. How different an actress is!”
“But I have loved so many of them.”
“I wish I had not told you about Sibyl Vane.”
"But you will tell me everything you do."
"I believe that’s true. You have a strange influence. If I ever did a crime, I would confess to you. You would understand."
“When one is in love, one begins deceiving one's self and ends deceiving others. But tell me about her.”
"Sibyl? Shy and gentle like a child. She said I looked like a prince and called me Prince Charming. She thinks me a person in a play. She knows nothing of life. Tonight she’s Juliet and tomorrow another character.”
"When is she Sibyl Vane?"
"Never. She is all the great heroines of the world in one. She is more than an individual. I love her, and I must make her love me. Tell me how to charm her to love me!”
Lord Henry watched him with pleasure. How different he was from the shy frightened boy in Basil's studio! His nature had developed like a flower and borne blossoms of scarlet flame. Out of its hiding-place had crept his soul and desire met it on the way.
“I shall take a West End theatre and bring her out properly. She will make the world as mad as she has made me. You must see her act. Invite Basil. I haven’t seen him in a month. He annoys me with good advice."
Henry smiled. How mysterious were soul and body! The soul had its passion and the body its spirit. The senses could refine and the intellect degrade. Where did the fleshly impulse cease or the psychical impulse begin?
How shallow were the arbitrary definitions of psychologists! Was the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Was the body really in the soul? The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery, but so was their union.
He wondered if psychology could be so much a science that each spring of life could be shown us. But we misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience had no ethical value. It was just a name for our mistakes. Moralists valued it as a warning in the making of character. It taught us what to do or avoid. But there was no use in experience or conscience. Our future was like our past. The sin we disapprove we repeat with joy.
Dorian’s mad love for Sibyl Vane was of psychological interest. The sensuous instinct of boyhood had been changed by the imagination into something far from sense, so more dangerous. The passions about whose origin we fooled ourselves controlled us. Our weakest motives were those of whose nature we were conscious. When we thought we were experimenting on others we were really experimenting on ourselves.
He looked outside. The sky was like a faded rose. He thought of his friend's fiery-colored life and wondered how it would end.
When he arrived home he saw a telegram on the table. It was from Dorian. He was engaged to Sibyl Vane.
"I suppose you have heard the news, Basil?" said Henry as Basil arrived for dinner.
"No, Harry. What is it?
"Dorian is engaged.”
"But he’s far too sensible."
"Your portrait has quickened his appreciation of the personal appearance of other people. But here is Dorian. He will tell you more than I can."
"My dear Harry, my dear Basil. I have never been so happy. When you see Sibyl you will feel that the man who could wrong her would be a beast. I love her. Her trust makes me good. When I’m with her, I regret what you have taught me. I become different from what you have known me to be. The touch of her hand makes me forget you and all your wrong, fascinating, poisonous, delightful theories."
“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about," Henry answered. "But my theory belongs to Nature, not to me. Pleasure is Nature's test, her sign of approval. When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy."
"What do you mean by good?" asked Basil.
"Harmony with one's self. One's life is the important thing,” said Henry.
"But if one lives merely for one's self, Harry, one pays a terrible price," suggested the painter. “In remorse, in suffering, in knowing our degradation."
Lord Henry shrugged.
"I know what pleasure is," cried Dorian. "It is to adore someone."
“Women? They inspire us to plan masterpieces but prevent us from making them."
"Harry, you’re dreadful! I don't know why I like you so much."
“I represent the sins you lacked the courage to commit."
The painter was silent and gloomy. A sense of loss came over him. He felt Dorian would never be the same.
Later, they sat in the theatre. But the performance disappointed Henry.
“She’s beautiful, but can’t act.”
Dorian agreed her performance was oddly poor. After the final act, Dorian raced backstage to Sibyl. She explained that she could not pretend love now that she knew what real love was.
But Dorian felt betrayed.
“You have killed my love. Without your art you are nothing.”
Sibyl moaned. She threw herself at his feet like a trampled flower.
"Dorian, don't leave me!" she whispered. "I am sorry I didn't act well.”
“I can't see you again. You have disappointed me."
She wept silently as he left.
In his bedroom, his eye fell upon the Basil’s portrait. He studied it. In the dim light the face seemed changed. The expression looked different. Lines of cruelty showed round the mouth, like looking into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing.
He winced and glanced into an oval mirror framed in ivory Cupids, a present from Lord Henry. No line like that warped his red lips. What did it mean?
He fell into a chair and thought. He remembered he had wished to remain young and the portrait age with the burden of his sins.
Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. He dreamed of her as an artist, but she disappointed him. She was shallow and unworthy.
Yet regret came over him. He thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a child.
Why was he made like that? Why was such a soul given to him?
But he had suffered during the three terrible hours the play lasted. His life was worth hers. She had marred him for a moment, if he had wounded her for an age.
Besides, women were better suited for sorrow than men. Lord Henry told him that and Lord Henry knew what women were. Why should he trouble about her?
But what about the picture? It held the secret of his life and told his story. It taught him to love his own beauty. Would it teach him to hate his soul? Would he ever look at it again?
Yet it was watching him, with its beautiful marred face and cruel smile. A sense of pity, not for himself, but for his painted image, came over him. It had changed already and would change more. Its gold would fade. For every sin he made, a stain would wreck its fairness.
But he would not sin. The picture was his conscience. He would fight temptation. He would not see Lord Henry again. He would not listen to those subtle poisonous theories that in Basil’s garden first stirred within him the passion for impossible things.
The portrait had made him conscious how unjust and cruel he had been to Sibyl. It was not late to make amends. She could still be his wife. His unreal and selfish love would yield to a higher influence and nobler passion. Basil’s portrait would be his guide. There were drugs to lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of sin.
Finally, he wrote a passionate letter begging Sibyl’s forgiveness and accusing himself. When Dorian finished the letter, he felt forgiven.
Suddenly there came a knock on the door, and he heard Lord Henry's voice.
"My dear boy, I must see you. I am sorry for it all, Dorian," said Lord Henry as he entered. "But you must not think too much about it."
"Do you mean about Sibyl?" asked the lad.
"Yes."
"I was brutal, Harry. But it’s all right now."
"Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it like that! I was afraid to see you in remorse and tearing that nice curly hair of yours."
"I have got through all that," said Dorian, smiling. "I am happy now. I know what conscience is. It is not what you told me. Don't mock it, Harry, anymore. I want to be good. I can't bear my soul being ugly."
"A charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian! I congratulate you. But how are you going to begin?"
"By marrying Sibyl."
"Marrying Sibyl!" cried Lord Henry, amazed. "My dear Dorian, she’s dead. She took poison."
"Harry, it’s terrible!" cried the lad.
"Yes; tragic, but you must not get mixed up in it.”
"So I’ve murdered Sibyl," said Dorian; "murdered her.”
"You said to me she represented all the heroines of romance; if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."
"She will never come to life again," muttered the lad, burying his face in his hands.
"She has played her last part. But you must think of that lonely death as a wonderful scene in a tragedy. The girl never lived and so has never really died. To you at least she was a dream in Shakespeare's plays. Weep for Ophelia or Cordelia. But don't waste tears over Sibyl. She was less real than they."
Dorian looked up. "You have explained me to myself, Harry," he murmured with relief. “But I was afraid of it and could not say it to myself. How well you know me! But we will not talk again of what has happened. It has been an experience. That is all. I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvelous."
"Life has everything in store for you. There is nothing that you, with your good looks, will not be able to do."
"But suppose I became old and wrinkled? What then?"
"Ah, you must keep your good looks.”
"I am obliged for all you have said. You are my best friend. No one knows me like you."
"We are at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered Lord Henry, shaking his hand. "Good-bye.’
When Henry left, Dorian rushed to the screen and drew it back. There was no more change in the picture.
Poor Sibyl! How had she played that dreadful last scene? Had she cursed him as she died? No. She died for love of him. She atoned for everything by her sacrifice. He would not think any more of what she had made him go through. When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of love.
A wonderful tragic figure? Tears came to his eyes as he remembered her childlike look. He brushed them away hastily and looked again at the picture.
He felt the time had come for making his choice. Eternal youth, passion, wild joys and wilder sins—all these. The portrait would bear the burden of his shame.
He felt pain as he thought of the ruin in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed those painted lips that now smiled cruelly at him. He had admired its beauty. Would it change every time he yielded? Would it become a monster hidden in a locked room?
He thought of praying that the horrible sympathy between him and the picture might cease. It had changed in answer to a prayer. Perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain unchanged.
Yet, who would surrender the chance to stay always young? He drew the screen back in front of the picture, smiling. An hour later he was at the opera and Lord Henry was leaning over his chair.
Next morning, as he sat at breakfast, Basil was shown into the room.
"I am glad I have found you, Dorian," he said gravely. “I was worried about you when I heard the news. Naturally you visited the girl’s mother. How is she?”
"How do I know?" murmured Dorian Gray, sipping wine and looking bored. "I was at the opera. Don’t talk about horrid subjects. If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened.”
"You went to the opera while Sibyl was lying dead?”
"Stop, Basil! What is past is past. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, to control them."
"Dorian, this is horrible! You’ve changed completely. You look the same wonderful boy who used to come to my studio to sit for his picture. But you were simple and unspoiled then. Now you talk like you had no heart, no pity. It’s Harry's influence.”
"I owe more to Harry than to you. You only taught me to be vain."
"Well, I am punished for that—or shall be some day."
"I don't know what you mean, Basil. What do you want?"
"I want the Dorian Gray I painted," said the artist sadly.
"You’re too late. To be the spectator of one's own life, as Harry says, is to escape suffering. You have not realized how I have developed. I was a schoolboy when you knew me. I am a man now. I have new passions, new thoughts and new ideas. I am different, but you must not like me less. I am changed, but you must always be my friend. I am fond of Harry. But I know you are better. And how happy we used to be together! Don't leave me, Basil, and don't quarrel. I am what I am."
The painter felt oddly moved. The lad was dear to him, and he had been the turning point in his art.
"Well, Dorian," he said with a sad smile, "I won't speak to you again about this horrible thing. And you must come and sit for me again. I can't get on without you."
"It is impossible!"
"My dear boy, what nonsense!" he cried. "Don't you like what I did of you? Where is it? Why have you pulled the screen in front of it?"
Basil walked towards the corner of the room. Dorian rushed between the painter and the screen.
"Basil," he said, looking pale, "you must not look at it. I don't wish you to."
"Why shouldn't I look at it?" asked Basil, laughing.
"If you try to look at it, I will never speak to you again.”
So Basil left and Dorian looked round the room. He saw a large, purple satin cloth decorated with gold, which his grandfather had found in a convent. It may have been a pall for the dead. Now it would hide something with a corruption worse than death—something that would breed horrors but never die. What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the portrait. They would mar its beauty and eat away its grace. Yet it would always live.
He regretted he had not told Basil why he wished to hide the picture. Basil would have helped him resist Henry's influence. But it was too late. There were passions to be lived, dreams that would make the shadow of their evil real.
He passed behind the screen. His portrait judged him. He felt pain and covered the picture.
But he had to hide it better and chose a room locked since his boyhood. Lonely childhood memories returned as he looked round. He recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life. It seemed horrible to hide the fatal portrait here.
But there was no better place. He had the key and no one could enter. Hidden, the portrait could grow beastly and unclean. What did it matter? No one could see it. He himself would not see it.
Why should he watch the corruption of his soul? He kept his youth. That was enough. Besides, his nature might grow finer. There was no reason the future should be shameful. A love might purify him. The cruel look would leave the scarlet mouth, and he could show Basil’s masterpiece.
But that was impossible. Hour by hour the thing was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but not the hideousness of age. There would be the wrinkled throat, the cold, blue-veined hands, and the twisted body he remembered in his stern grandfather. The picture had to be hidden.
He had always an unspotted look. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian appeared. There was purity in his face that rebuked them for their lost innocence. They wondered how one could escape the stain of a sordid and sensual age.
Often, on returning home from long absences that caused suspicion among his friends he would creep upstairs to the locked room. He would open the door and stand, with a mirror, in front of his portrait. He looked first at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and then at the young face that laughed back from the mirror. The contrast increased his pleasure. He grew more pleased with his beauty and interested in the corruption of his soul.
He would examine, with care and terrible delight, the ugly lines on his face or around his sensual mouth, wondering which were more horrible, the signs of sin or age.
There were moments at night, when, sleepless in his scented room, or in an ill-famed tavern where, in disguise, he would go, he would think of his soul’s ruin with a selfish pity. But these moments were rare. Mostly he sought a new life that would have its principles, and, in the spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
The worship of the senses has often, and with justice, been decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger than they. But Dorian felt the senses were misunderstood. They remained savage because the world starved them or killed them by pain, instead of making them part of a new spirituality, with an instinct for beauty. As he reviewed man in history, a feeling of loss haunted him.
So much had been lost to little purpose! There had been self-torture and self-denial, from fear, whose result was a degradation worse than what was feared.
So Dorian believed. He wondered at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego as simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man had many lives and sensations, a complex creature that had within itself strange legacies of thought and passion, whose flesh was tainted with the maladies of the dead. He loved to view family portraits, whose blood flowed in his veins. Had a poisonous germ crept from body to body till it reached his? Were his actions the dreams the dead had not dared to realize?
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well, nearer in type and temperament, with an influence more conscious. There were times when it appeared to Dorian that history was merely the record of his life, not as he had lived it, but as he had imagined it. It seemed their lives had been his.
On the eve of his own thirty-eighth birthday, he walked home at night from Lord Henry's. Basil passed him in the mist. Fear overcame him.
"Dorian! Didn't you recognize me?" I have something to say to you."
Dorian smiled. "Don't talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays."
Basil followed Dorian into his library.
"It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is for your sake. Dreadful things are said against you in London. I don't believe these rumors when I see you. Sin writes itself across a man's face. And with your young, innocent face, I can't believe anything against you. Yet I hear what people whisper and I don't know what to say.”
"Stop, Basil. It’s enough for a man to have distinction and brains to be talked about. And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as moral, lead?”
"Dorian," cried Basil, "you led them there. Yet you smile. I want the world to respect you. Get rid of the people you associate with. You have a wonderful influence. Let it be for good, not evil. They say you corrupt every one. I say I know you’re incapable of evil. Know you? I wonder do I know you? First, I should have to see your soul."
"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, white with fear.
"Yes," answered Basil gravely. “But only God can do that."
A laugh of mockery came from the lips of the younger man.
"You shall see it yourself, tonight!" he cried, seizing a lamp. "Come upstairs, Basil. I keep a diary of my life and it never leaves the room where it is written. I shall show it to you."
"I shall come with you, Dorian, if you wish it.”
"You insist on knowing, Basil?" he asked in a low voice as they entered.
"Yes."
He glanced around with a puzzled look. The room looked as if it had not been lived in for years.
"So you think it is only God who sees the soul, Basil? Open that curtain and you’ll see mine. You won't? Then I must do it," said the young man, and he tore the curtain off.
The painter cried as he saw in the dim light the ugly face on the canvas grinning. Its expression filled him with disgust and loathing. Why had the portrait changed? He looked at Dorian with the eyes of a sick man.
"Years ago, when I was a boy," said Dorian, crushing the flower in his hand, "you met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. You introduced me to your friend, who explained the wonder of youth, and your portrait revealed the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment I made a wish.”
"I don't believe it’s my picture."
"Can't you see your ideal in it?" said Dorian bitterly.
"There was nothing evil in it, nothing shameful. You were like an ideal I shall never meet again. This is the face of a satyr."
"It is the face of my soul."
"What I must have worshipped! It has the eyes of a devil."
"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," cried Dorian with a gesture of despair.
Basil gazed at the portrait.
"If this is what you have done with your life, you must be worse than they say!”
He held the light to the canvas and studied it. Sin was eating it away like the rotting of a corpse. He hid his face in his hands.
"Dorian! What an awful lesson!"
He heard the young man sobbing at the window.
"Pray, Dorian," he murmured. “I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished."
Dorian looked with tear-dimmed eyes.
"It is too late, Basil.”
"It is never too late, Dorian. Let us kneel down and try to remember a prayer.”
Dorian glanced at the picture and felt hatred for Basil. His eye fell on a knife. He rushed at Basil and dug the knife into him. He did not even glance at the murdered man. The secret was not to realize the situation. The friend who had painted the fatal portrait that caused his misery had gone out of his life. That was enough.
What right had Basil to have spoken to him as he had done? Who had made him a judge over others?
There were opium dens where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of new sins. Ugliness once hated because it made things real became dear now for that reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The violence of disordered life was more vivid than the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song. It was what he needed to forget and be free.
Each man lived his life and paid a price for living it. The only pity was one had to pay so often for a single fault. Destiny never closed her accounts.
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or what the world calls sin, dominates every fibre of the body and cell of the brain, now alive with fearful impulses. Freedom of the will is lost. Men move like automatons. Choice is taken from them and conscience is killed, or, if it lives, lives to give rebellion its fascination and disobedience its charm. For all sins are sins of disobedience. When that angel fell from heaven, it was as a rebel.
Real life was chaos, but there was terrible logic in the imagination. It was what set remorse against sin and made each crime bear its misshapen brood instead of good.
"There is no use your telling me that you are going to be good," cried Lord Henry, dipping his white fingers into a red copper bowl filled with rose-water. "You are quite perfect. Don't change."
Dorian Gray shook his head.
"No, Harry, I have done many dreadful things in my life. I am not going to do any more. I began my good actions yesterday.
“I spared someone. She was a girl in a village. But I really loved her. I am sure I loved her. We planned to go away together this morning. But I chose to leave her as flowerlike as I had found her."
“From a moral point of view, I don’t think much of your act.”
“Don’t say that the first good thing I’ve done in years is really a sin, Harry.”
Then Dorian paused.
“What would you say if I said I killed Basil?”
"It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. Crime belongs to the lower classes. It’s to them what art is to us, a method of having rare sensations."
"Having sensations? Could a man who killed kill again? Don't say that."
"Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it too often," cried Lord Henry, laughing. "That is one of the secrets of life. But murder is a mistake. One should never do anything one cannot talk about after dinner.”
He lay back and looked with half-closed eyes as Dorian played the piano.
"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 go?—his own soul'?"
"Why do you ask me that, Harry?"
“There was a street preacher. I thought of telling him that art had a soul, but not man. I fear, however, he would not understand."
"Don't, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought and sold. It can be poisoned or made perfect. We each have a soul. I know it."
"Are you certain, Dorian?"
"Quite."
"Then it must be an illusion. The things one feels 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. 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 and I am wrinkled and worn. I would do anything to get back my youth, except take exercise or get up early or be respectable. There is nothing like youth. Life has shown them her latest wonder.
“Dorian, how happy you are! What a rare life you have had! Like the sound of music. It has not marred you. You are still the same."
"I am not the same, Harry."
"Yes, you are. Life is not ruled by will or intention but nerves and slowly built-up cells where thought hides and passion has its dreams. A color or perfume brings subtle memories with it. Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music.”
He felt a longing for the purity of his boyhood. Was there no hope for him?
With what pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days and he keep eternal youth! His failure had been due to that. Better for him that each sin of his life had brought a swift penalty. There was purification in punishment. Not "Forgive us our sins" but "Punish our sins” should be man’s prayer.
The mirror Lord Henry had given him many years ago was on the table. But now he loathed his beauty and stamped on the mirror. His beauty had ruined him, his beauty and the youth he prayed for. Otherwise his life might have been free from stain.
It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything.
A new life! That was what he wanted.
As he thought of the village girl, he wondered if the portrait in the locked room had changed. Perhaps if his life became pure, he could chase every sign of sin from the face. Perhaps they had already gone.
He took a lamp and crept upstairs. As he unbarred the door, a smile of joy passed his youthful face. Yes, he would be good, and the ugly thing hidden away would no longer frighten him.
He removed the cloth from the portrait and cried in pain. There was no change except a look of cunning in the eyes and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was more loathsome than before.
He trembled. Was his one good deed vanity? Or the desire for a new sensation? Or a passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are? Perhaps all these.
In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had denied himself. He recognized that now.
But only the picture was evidence. He would destroy it. It had given him pleasure to watch it change and grow old. But now it kept him awake at night, like a conscience. He would destroy it.
He saw the knife that had killed Basil. He had cleaned it many times. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and what it meant. It would kill the past. He would be free. It would kill this monstrous soul-life and, without its ugly warnings, he would find peace. He seized the knife and stabbed the picture.
There was a cry and a crash, awakeningthe servants. Two gentlemen outside heard the noise and hailed a policeman.
When they entered, the servants found the portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in his youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man with a knife in his heart. He was old and wrinkled. When they saw the rings on his fingers they knew who it was.

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