The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde's only novel follows a beautiful young man in Victorian London who, upon seeing his own portrait, wishes that the painting might age in his place. The wish is granted. Over eighteen years, Dorian Gray remains eternally youthful while the portrait hidden in his attic records every sin and cruelty upon its canvas, until the night he turns a knife upon it and discovers what bargains with fate truly cost.

The Preface

The artist creates beautiful things; his aim is to reveal art and conceal himself. The critic translates into another manner his impression of beautiful things. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming; those who find beautiful meanings in them are the cultivated. There is no moral or immoral book -- books are well written or badly written, and that is all. The nineteenth century's dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass; its dislike of romanticism is Caliban not seeing his reflection. No artist desires to prove anything. No artist has ethical sympathies. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for art. All art is at once surface and symbol; those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. It is the spectator, not life, that art mirrors. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Chapter I

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the summer wind stirred the garden trees, the heavy scent of lilac drifted through the open door. Lord Henry Wotton lay smoking on a divan of Persian saddle-bags, catching the gleam of laburnum blossoms through the window, while the sullen murmur of bees and the dim roar of London composed a languid backdrop. At the centre of the room, clamped to an easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary beauty; before it sat the painter Basil Hallward, a smile of pleasure upon his face.

Lord Henry declared it the finest portrait of modern times and urged Basil to exhibit it at the Grosvenor. Basil refused. He had put too much of himself into it, he said. Lord Henry laughed -- what could he mean? He bore no resemblance to this young Adonis. "Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins," Lord Henry observed. "Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face." The bishops in the Church looked delightful only because they never thought.

Basil explained that he did not mean a physical resemblance. Every portrait painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. In this canvas he feared he had shown the secret of his own soul. Pressed further by Lord Henry, he told the story: two months ago, at a party at Lady Brandon's, he had turned and seen Dorian Gray for the first time. A curious terror seized him -- the certainty that he had come face to face with a personality so fascinating it would absorb his whole nature, his very art. He had tried to flee, but Lady Brandon caught him and, characteristically, introduced them with an absurd little précis. They became friends at once. Laughter, Basil said, is not a bad beginning for a friendship.

Since that meeting, Dorian had become everything to his art -- not merely a model, but a motive for an entirely new manner in painting. "What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me," Basil said. His mere visible presence had revealed possibilities in form and colour that Basil had always sought and never found. The painter had drawn him as Paris in dainty armour, as Adonis with a boar-spear, crowned with lotus-blossoms on the prow of Adrian's barge. But the portrait he would not show -- because, without intending it, he had put into it some expression of his curious idolatry. "The world might guess it, and I will not bare my soul to their shallow prying eyes."

Lord Henry was fascinated. He insisted on meeting Dorian. Basil begged him, almost desperately, not to spoil the boy. "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 gives to my art whatever charm it possesses." He spoke slowly, as though the words were wrung from him against his will.

"What nonsense you talk!" said Lord Henry, smiling, and taking Basil by the arm, he almost led him into the house -- for the butler had just announced that Mr. Dorian Gray was in the studio.

Chapter II

They found Dorian seated at the piano, turning over Schumann's "Forest Scenes." He was wonderfully handsome -- finely curved scarlet lips, frank blue eyes, crisp gold hair. All the candour of youth was there, all its passionate purity. When he caught sight of Lord Henry, a faint blush coloured his cheeks.

Basil resumed painting while Lord Henry, ignoring Basil's pleas for him to leave, settled in to talk. What followed was a kind of seduction by language. "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray," Lord Henry began. "All influence is immoral -- because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul." He spoke of self-development as life's highest aim, of how people had forgotten the duty one owes to oneself, how the terror of society and the terror of God were the twin forces that governed them. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it," he declared. "Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."

Dorian stood motionless on the dais, lips parted, eyes strangely bright. The few words had touched some secret chord never struck before, and it was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses. Music had stirred him like that, but music was not articulate. Words -- mere words -- how terrible they were, how clear, and vivid, and cruel. One could not escape from them. And yet what subtle magic there was in them.

In the garden, Lord Henry pressed the theme further, warning Dorian of the brevity of youth with an eloquence that approached cruelty. "You have the most marvellous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having," he said. Some day, when thought had seared his forehead and passion branded his lips, he would feel it terribly. Beauty was a form of genius, higher than genius itself, for it needed no explanation. "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, and the vulgar. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. A new Hedonism -- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol." The common hill-flowers wither but blossom again; the laburnum will be as yellow next June. But we never get back our youth.

Dorian listened, open-eyed and wondering. A spray of lilac fell from his hand. A furry bee came and buzzed round it, then scrambled over the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that seizes us when some emotion we cannot name lays siege to the brain. After a time the bee flew away, creeping into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus.

Back in the studio, Basil completed the portrait. Dorian stepped down, stood before it, and for the first time the sense of his own beauty came upon him like a revelation. Basil's compliments had been mere friendly exaggeration. But now, gazing at the shadow of his own loveliness, Lord Henry's warning flashed across him with terrible clarity. Yes, there would come a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his eyes dim, the grace of his figure broken. The scarlet would pass from his lips and the gold steal from his hair. A sharp pang struck through him like a knife, and his eyes deepened into amethyst, misted with tears.

"How sad it is!" he murmured, his gaze fixed upon the portrait. "I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that -- for that -- I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!"

When Basil, in anguish at what Lord Henry's words had wrought, seized a palette-knife to destroy the canvas, Dorian snatched it away with a stifled sob. "Don't, Basil, don't! It would be murder!" The portrait was his now, and the painter coldly told him it would be sent home once varnished and framed. Lord Henry proposed the theatre; Dorian chose to go with him, leaving Basil behind. "I shall stay with the real Dorian," the painter said sadly. As the door closed, a look of pain came into his face.

Chapter III

The next day, Lord Henry called on his uncle Lord Fermor at the Albany to learn about Dorian's parentage. Lord Fermor was a genial old bachelor who had mastered the aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing: he lived in chambers because it was less trouble, took most meals at his club, and roundly abused whichever political party happened to be in office.

The story he told was romantic and tragic. Dorian's mother, the beautiful Margaret Devereux, had run away with a penniless young soldier -- a subaltern in a foot regiment. Her father, the mean old Lord Kelso, had arranged for a Belgian adventurer to provoke the husband into a duel. The young man was killed. Margaret died within a year, leaving behind a son and the Selby property, which came to her through her grandfather.

Walking to lunch at his aunt Lady Agatha's, Lord Henry meditated on this background. Behind every exquisite thing, there was something tragic. And how charming Dorian had been at dinner the night before -- talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence, in projecting one's soul into another's gracious form. He resolved to dominate Dorian -- had already, indeed, half done so.

At Lady Agatha's, the lunch party was a canvas for Lord Henry's wit. He sparred with the Duchess of Harley about Americans ("When good Americans die they go to Paris"; "And when bad Americans die?" "They go to America"), tormented the earnest Sir Thomas Burdon with paradoxes about brute reason and the East End, and declared that humanity takes itself too seriously -- "If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different." He told the old Duchess that the secret of remaining young was to repeat one's follies. He played with ideas, tossing them into the air and making them iridescent with fancy, and Dorian Gray, seated at the end of the table, never took his gaze off him, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.

As they left, Dorian murmured, "Let me come with you." He chose Lord Henry over Basil, who was waiting. "All I want now is to look at life," said Lord Henry. "You may come and look at it with me, if you care to."

Chapter IV

A month later, Dorian was reclining in a luxurious arm-chair in the little library of Lord Henry's house in Mayfair, flushed and trembling with excitement. He had fallen in love with an actress named Sibyl Vane. Lord Henry, late as always on principle -- his principle being that punctuality is the thief of time -- had not yet arrived, and the lad had been waiting impatiently, turning the pages of an illustrated Manon Lescaut. His hostess, Lady Henry, appeared instead -- a curious woman whose dresses always looked as if they had been designed in a rage and put on in a tempest. "I like Wagner's music better than anybody's," she told Dorian. "It is so loud that one can talk the whole time without other people hearing what one says." When Lord Henry at last arrived, she flitted out of the room like a bird of paradise that had been out all night in the rain. "Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair, Dorian," Henry murmured after her.

Then Dorian told his story. It had begun with Lord Henry's influence. Filled with a wild desire to know everything about life, a passion for sensations, he had wandered eastward one evening, losing himself in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares. He passed a wretched little theatre with gaudy playbills and flaring gas-jets. On impulse, amused by the monstrous vulgarity of the theatre's manager, he paid a guinea for the stage-box. The Romeo was a stout, husky-voiced old gentleman with corked eyebrows and a figure like a beer-barrel; Mercutio was played by the low comedian on friendly terms with the pit. But Juliet -- a girl of seventeen with a flowerlike face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, violet eyes that were wells of passion, and lips like the petals of a rose -- was the loveliest thing he had ever seen. Her voice was low at first, with deep mellow notes that fell singly upon one's ear; then it rose like a flute or a distant hautboy, and in the garden-scene had all the tremulous ecstasy that one hears just before dawn when nightingales are singing.

Night after night he returned. She was Rosalind one evening and Imogen the next. He had seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking poison from her lover's lips. He had watched her wander through the forest of Arden in hose and doublet. She had been mad, and innocent, and dying. Ordinary women never appealed to one's imagination -- they were limited to their century, stereotyped in their smiles, obvious in their manner. But an actress lived in a sphere of art where no glamour was impossible. She was all the great heroines of the world in one. He called her a genius. He loved her. He wanted to place her on a pedestal of gold and see the world worship the woman who was his. He had told her that he loved her, and she had said she was not worthy to be his wife.

Lord Henry advised him never to marry at all. "Men marry because they are tired; women, because they are curious: both are disappointed." But Dorian was beyond teasing. "When I am with her, I regret all that you have taught me. I become different from what you have known me to be." He added, with a strange earnestness: "You have a curious influence over me. If I ever did a crime, I would come and confess it to you. You would understand me." He insisted Lord Henry and Basil come to the theatre to see her act.

After Dorian left, Lord Henry reflected on him as a psychological study. The lad was premature -- gathering his harvest while it was yet spring. His soul and body were wonderfully blended. He was a marvellous type, and Lord Henry had made him premature by his influence -- that was something. Ordinary people waited till life disclosed its secrets; to the few, the elect, the mysteries were revealed early. Dorian's sudden love for Sibyl was a complex passion, sensuous instinct transformed by imagination into something the boy believed remote from sense. It was the passions about whose origin we deceive ourselves that tyrannize most strongly. When Dorian's telegram arrived that evening announcing his engagement, Lord Henry was amused but not surprised.

Chapter V

In a dingy sitting-room on the Euston Road, Sibyl Vane whispered to her tired, faded mother that she was happy. "Prince Charming rules life for us now," she said. Mrs. Vane, a former actress whose gestures had long since become a mode of second nature, counselled prudence and hinted at money -- Mr. Isaacs had advanced them fifty pounds. Sibyl heard nothing. She was free in her prison of passion. Her prince had come, and love was more than money.

Her brother James, a rough, thick-set lad of sixteen about to sail for Australia, was protective and suspicious. He walked with Sibyl through the park, sullen and heartsick at leaving home, while she prattled fantastical plans about gold-fields and bushrangers. She was only a year older than he was, but she knew so much more of life -- or believed she did. James hated the unknown gentleman who came to the theatre each night. "He is a gentleman," James muttered, "and I hate him for that." Through some curious race-instinct he could not account for, the word itself was poison to him.

At the Achilles Statue in the park, Sibyl caught a glimpse of golden hair in a passing carriage. "There he is! Prince Charming!" But a four-in-hand swept between them, and the carriage disappeared. James seized her arm roughly. "If he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him," he swore. She laughed it off -- he was being foolish, jealous, melodramatic.

Before he left for the docks, James confronted his mother. Were you married to my father? She sighed -- a sigh of relief that the dreaded moment had come. "No," she answered, wondering at the harsh simplicity of life. James made her promise to watch over Sibyl, and swore again that if the gentleman wronged his sister, he would track the man down. Mrs. Vane, familiar with the atmosphere of melodrama, was impressed by the passionate gesture. She remembered the phrase and thought they would all laugh at it some day.

Chapter VI

Lord Henry broke the news of Dorian's engagement to Basil over dinner at the Bristol. Basil was dismayed -- the boy was far too well-born, too sensible. "Marriage is hardly a thing that one can do now and then, Harry." Lord Henry was philosophical: he never approved or disapproved of anything. "We are not sent into the world to air our moral prejudices," he said. "If a personality fascinates me, whatever mode of expression that personality selects is absolutely delightful to me." He hoped Dorian would adore the girl for six months and then become fascinated by someone else -- he would be a wonderful study. Basil accused him of not meaning a word of it. Lord Henry laughed. "The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid for ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror."

Dorian arrived, radiant and flushed, throwing off his evening cape with its satin-lined wings. He told the story with breathless joy -- how Sibyl had kissed his hands and called herself unworthy, how he had taken his love out of poetry and found his wife in Shakespeare's plays. "Lips that Shakespeare taught to speak have whispered their secret in my ear. I have had the arms of Rosalind around me, and kissed Juliet on the mouth."

The dinner conversation turned to Lord Henry's paradoxes. "To be good is to be in harmony with one's self," he declared. "Discord is to be forced to be in harmony with others." He dismissed conscience as the trade-name of a firm, and celebrated individualism as having really the higher aim. When Basil suggested that living merely for one's self exacted a terrible price, Lord Henry shrugged: "Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich." Dorian insisted that love was the only pleasure -- "I know what pleasure is. It is to adore someone." "That is certainly better than being adored," Lord Henry replied, toying with fruit. "Being adored is a nuisance. Women treat us just as humanity treats its gods. They worship us, and are always bothering us to do something for them."

Finally Lord Henry ordered coffee and fine champagne and suggested they go to the theatre. "A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure," he mused. "It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" Basil, quieter, agreed to come, but a gloom settled over him. He drove to the theatre alone and watched the flashing lights of the brougham in front of him. A strange sense of loss came over him. Dorian Gray would never again be to him what he had been in the past. Life had come between them.

Chapter VII

The theatre was crowded and sweltering. The fat manager met them at the door with an oily tremulous smile. Dorian, introducing his friends to the dingy East End house, promised them a revelation. When Sibyl appeared as Juliet -- lovely to look at, shy as a fawn, blushing like a rose in a silver mirror -- Basil leaped to his feet to applaud.

But her acting was terrible. She spoke her lines with the artificial precision of a schoolgirl. The voice was exquisite, but the passion was false. The balcony scene was worse -- she overemphasized everything, her gestures absurdly mechanical. The uneducated audience lost interest and began whistling. After the second act, Lord Henry put on his coat: "She is quite beautiful, Dorian, but she can't act." Dorian, pale and bitter, insisted on staying alone.

After the curtain fell on a nearly empty house, Dorian rushed backstage and found Sibyl radiant, transfigured with joy. "How badly I acted tonight, Dorian!" she cried, smiling as though this were a triumph. She explained: before she met him, acting had been the only reality of her life. She had believed in the painted scenes, the borrowed words, the fictional passions. Then his love had freed her soul from prison. Tonight, for the first time, she had seen through the hollowness of the stage -- the hideous Romeo, the false moonlight, the vulgar scenery. She could not mimic a passion that burned her like fire. "Take me away, Dorian -- take me away with you, where we can be quite alone."

He flung himself on the sofa, his face turned from her. "You have killed my love," he muttered. She came to him, stroked his hair, pressed his hands to her lips. He pulled away with a shudder. "You used to stir my imagination. Now you don't even stir my curiosity. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. Without your art, you are nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, magnificent. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face."

She grew white and trembled, then crouched on the floor like a wounded thing, sobbing. "Don't leave me, don't leave me," she whispered, her little hands stretching blindly out. He turned on his heel. "I am going. I don't wish to be unkind, but I can't see you again. You have disappointed me." In a few moments he was out of the theatre.

He wandered through dimly lit streets past gaunt archways and evil-looking houses until, at dawn, he found himself at Covent Garden. The sky hollowed itself into a perfect pearl. Huge carts filled with nodding lilies rumbled down the empty street. A carter offered him cherries plucked at midnight, with the coldness of the moon still in them.

At home, passing through the library to his bedroom, his eye fell upon the portrait. In the dim light, the face appeared to have changed. A touch of cruelty had settled into the mouth. He examined his own face in a mirror -- no such line warped his red lips. Then, with a shock, he remembered what he had wished for in Basil's studio. Had the wish been fulfilled? It seemed monstrous even to think of. And yet, there was the portrait, with its cruel smile.

Cruelty! Had he been cruel? It was the girl's fault, not his. He had dreamed of her as a great artist, and she had disappointed him. She had been shallow and unworthy. And yet a feeling of infinite regret came over him as he thought of her lying at his feet sobbing like a child. He tried to dismiss it -- the picture had not changed, it was merely an illusion wrought on his troubled senses. But the cruel smile was still there in the morning light, more intensified even. A sense of infinite pity came over him, not for himself, but for the painted image of himself. For every sin he committed, a stain would fleck and wreck its fairness.

He resolved to go back to Sibyl, to marry her, to resist Lord Henry's poisonous theories. The portrait would be his conscience, the visible emblem of what sin did to the soul. He would not sin. He drew a screen in front of it and stepped into the garden, where the birds seemed to be telling the flowers about Sibyl.

Chapter VIII

He woke past noon. His valet had crept several times into the room; finally the bell rang, and Victor brought tea and letters on a tray of old Sèvres china. A dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to Dorian, but there was the unreality of a dream about it. He bathed in the onyx-paved bathroom, sat down to a light French breakfast by the open window, and felt perfectly happy -- until his eye fell on the screen.

Should he move it aside, after all? What was the use of knowing? But what if other eyes spied behind it and saw the horrible change? He locked both doors, drew the screen aside, and looked again. In the clear light of afternoon there could be no doubt. The portrait had altered. Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms on the canvas and the soul within him? He shuddered and felt afraid, but one thing the change had done: it had confirmed his resolve. There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep; but here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.

He wrote a passionate letter of apology, covering 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 a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.

Then Lord Henry arrived. "My letter -- don't be frightened -- was to tell you that Sibyl Vane is dead."

She had swallowed something in her dressing-room -- prussic acid or white lead, Lord Henry supposed. She seemed to have died instantaneously. A cry of pain broke from Dorian's lips. He leaped to his feet: "It is not true! It is a horrible lie!" But it was true, in all the morning papers. Lord Henry immediately turned practical -- there would be an inquest; Dorian must not be mixed up in it. "Things like that make a man fashionable in Paris. But in London people are so prejudiced."

Then a kind of calm settled over him. "So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," he said, half to himself, "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden." It seemed to him like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play, a Greek tragedy in which he had taken a great part but by which he had not been wounded.

Lord Henry, with terrible eloquence, helped him aestheticize the death. The girl had never really lived, he argued, and so had never really died. She was always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and left them lovelier for its presence. 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."

There was a long silence. The evening darkened in the room. Noiselessly, and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden.

"You have explained me to myself, Harry," Dorian said with a sigh of relief. "I felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it. How well you know me! But we will not talk again of what has happened. It has been a marvellous experience. That is all. I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as marvellous."

"Life has everything in store for you, Dorian," Lord Henry replied. "But you must keep your good looks. We live in an age that reads too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful. We cannot spare you."

Left alone, Dorian examined the portrait once more. No further change. It had received the news of Sibyl's death before he himself had known of it. The vicious cruelty in the mouth had appeared, no doubt, at the very moment she drank the poison. He felt that the time had come for making his choice -- or rather, life had made it for him, life and his own infinite curiosity about life. Eternal youth, infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins -- he was to have all these things. The portrait would bear the burden of his shame. That was all.

A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration in store for the fair face on the canvas. Once, in boyish mockery of Narcissus, he had kissed those painted lips that now smiled so cruelly at him. Morning after morning he had wondered at its beauty. Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, hidden in a locked room, shut out from sunlight? The pity of it! And yet who, knowing anything about life, would surrender the chance of remaining always young? He would never again tempt by prayer any terrible power. If the picture was to alter, it was to alter. When winter came upon it, he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of summer. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the coloured image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything.

He drew the screen back, smiling, and passed into his bedroom. An hour later he was at the opera, and Lord Henry was leaning over his chair.

Chapter IX

Basil came the next morning, distraught with grief, and found Dorian sipping pale-yellow wine from a delicate gold-beaded bubble of Venetian glass, looking dreadfully bored. "I called last night," Basil said, "and they told me you were at the opera. Of course, I knew that was impossible." But it was not impossible; it was fact. "You went to the opera while Sibyl Vane was lying dead in some sordid lodging?" Basil cried. "You can talk to me of other women being charming, and of Patti singing divinely, before the girl you loved has even the quiet of a grave to sleep in?"

Dorian cut him short. "What is done is done. What is past is past. It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

"Something has changed you completely," Basil said. "You look exactly the same wonderful boy who used to come to my studio. But you were simple, natural, and affectionate then. It is all Harry's influence."

Dorian confessed that Sibyl's death seemed to him like a wonderful tragic passage from some Jacobean play. She had always been a heroine. The last night she played, she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. "But," he added, "you must not think I have not suffered. If you had come yesterday at a particular moment, you would have found me in tears."

Basil asked whether Dorian's name would be mentioned at the inquest. Dorian shook his head. Sibyl had never told anyone his real name -- she had invariably called him Prince Charming.

Their conversation turned to the portrait. Basil wanted to see it -- he planned to exhibit it in Paris, at Georges Petit's gallery. Dorian flew into a panic. A cry of terror broke from his lips. He rushed between Basil and the screen, forbidding him to look, threatening to end their friendship if he touched it. "If you try to look at it, Basil, on my word of honour I will never speak to you again as long as I live."

Basil was thunderstruck -- the lad was pallid with rage, his pupils like disks of blue fire -- but relented. Instead, he made a confession of his own. From the moment they met, Dorian's personality had dominated him utterly. He had worshipped him, grown jealous of everyone who spoke to him. He had drawn Dorian as Paris in dainty armour, as Adonis, as a figure on Adrian's barge. All of that had been unconscious, ideal, remote. But when he decided to paint a realistic portrait, every flake and film of colour seemed to reveal his secret. He grew afraid that others would know of his idolatry. "I felt, Dorian, that I had told too much, that I had put too much of myself into it." That was why he had refused to exhibit it. But once the canvas left his studio, the fascination faded, and it seemed merely a very good likeness. "Art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him."

Dorian drew a long breath. The colour came back to his cheeks. The peril was over. He was safe for the time. He could not help feeling infinite pity for the painter who had made this strange confession, and wondered if he himself would ever be so dominated by the personality of a friend.

As Basil left, Dorian smiled to himself. How little Basil knew of the true reason! He sighed and touched the bell. The portrait must be hidden away at all costs. He could not run such a risk of discovery again. It had been mad to leave it, even for an hour, in a room to which any of his friends had access.

Chapter X

Dorian summoned his housekeeper, Mrs. Leaf, and asked for the key to the old schoolroom. She protested: the room was full of dust and cobwebs, hadn't been opened for five years, not since his lordship died. But Dorian insisted. He sent his valet away on an errand, then had Mr. Hubbard, the celebrated frame-maker of South Audley Street, carry the shrouded portrait upstairs. Hubbard was a florid, red-whiskered little man who made exceptions only for clients as charming as Dorian. "Might one look at the work of art, sir?" he asked when they reached the schoolroom. Dorian felt ready to leap upon him. "It would not interest you, Mr. Hubbard," he said, keeping his eye on the man.

The room had been built by Lord Kelso for the grandson whom, for his strange likeness to his mother, he had always hated. The Italian cassone with its fantastically painted panels, the satinwood bookcase with dog-eared schoolbooks, the ragged Flemish tapestry -- every detail recalled the stainless purity of his boyish life. It seemed horrible that this was where the fatal portrait would be hidden. But there was no safer place. He had the key, and no one else could enter. Beneath its purple pall, the face on the canvas could grow bestial, sodden, and unclean. What did it matter? No one would see it. He himself would not see it. Why should he watch the hideous corruption of his soul? He kept his youth -- that was enough.

He locked the door, pocketed the key, and returned to the library, where he found a note from Lord Henry and, beside it, a book bound in yellow paper with slightly torn covers. He began to read and could not stop. It was a novel without a plot and with only one character -- the psychological study of a young Parisian who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the passions and modes of thought of every century except his own. The style was that curious jewelled prose, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot and archaism and elaborate paraphrases, that characterized the French Symbolistes. There were metaphors as monstrous as orchids and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of a medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences produced in the mind of the lad a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming. Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green sky gleamed through the windows. He read on until he could read no more, then dressed for dinner and reached the club hours late.

"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried when he arrived, "but really it is entirely your fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was going." Lord Henry was pleased. "I didn't say I liked it, Harry," Dorian clarified. "I said it fascinated me. There is a great difference."

"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured Lord Henry.

Chapter XI

For years, Dorian could not free himself from the yellow book's influence. He procured nine large-paper copies of the first edition and had them bound in different colours to suit his various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed to have almost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were strangely blended, became a prefiguring type of himself. The whole book seemed to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.

But Dorian was more fortunate in one respect: he never knew that grotesque dread of mirrors and polished surfaces which came upon the novel's hero, for his beauty seemed never to leave him. It was with an almost cruel joy that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its tragic account of one who had lost what in others and the world he had most dearly valued.

Even those who heard the most evil rumours about his mode of life -- and from time to time strange whispers 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 entered the 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 innocence that they had tarnished.

Often, returning from mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture, he would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him, and stand with a mirror in front of the portrait, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, now at the fair young face that laughed back from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more enamoured of his own beauty, more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead and crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering 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 at night, lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of some ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, when he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. But such moments were rare. The curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him seemed to increase with gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

He was not reckless in his relations to society. Once or twice every month he threw open his beautiful house and had the most celebrated musicians charm his guests. His little dinners, in which Lord Henry always assisted, were noted for the careful selection of those invited, the exquisite decoration of the table, and the exotic flowers. 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 senses its highest realization. He was to be, as it were, the arbiter of a new hedonism that was to recreate the world.

He studied perfumes, distilling oils and burning odorous gums from the East, seeking to discover their true relations to the senses. He devised elaborate concerts in which mad Romani played on wild rebecs, Tunisians plucked at strained strings of monstrous lutes, and grinning negroes drummed on copper drums. He sat in his box at the opera listening to Tannhäuser, seeing in the prelude to that great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.

He turned to the study of jewels with the scholar's passion. Stories of precious stones obsessed him. He would sit in the gallery of his country house turning over the pages of Douce's Catalogue of the antiquities of the Crown, or follow the history of gems through monarchs and centuries. He appeared at a costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, wearing five hundred and sixty pearls.

Then he turned his attention to embroideries, tapestries, and ecclesiastical vestments. He collected dalmatics of white satin and pink silk damask, chasubles of cloth of gold, altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue silk. He had a special passion for vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church. In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his country house, he had stored many rare and beautiful specimens, including a cope that might have been worn at the coronation of some medieval bishop.

All these were to him modes of forgetfulness, means by which he could escape, for a season, from a fear that seemed at times 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 changing features 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 forget the hideous painted thing and be at ease. Then suddenly, some night, he would creep out of the house, go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day, until he was driven away. On his return he would sit in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, and sometimes filled with that pride of individualism which is half the fascination of sin.

He grew afraid that others might discover the portrait. He gave up his villa at Trouville and his house in Algiers. He was nearly blackballed from a West End club. Certain men of rank left rooms when he entered. Women who had adored him grew pallid with shame or horror when Dorian Gray came near. Yet his extraordinary personal beauty, his wealth, and his social position protected him. Society -- civilized society, at least -- is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.

He wandered through the portrait gallery of his country house at Selby Royal, studying his ancestors -- Philip Herbert, "caressed by the Court for his handsome face"; Lady Elizabeth Devereux with her gauze hood, pearls, and pink slashed sleeves; George Willoughby with his powdered hair and beauty-patches. Was the life of these people somehow a part of himself? And his own mother, with her Lady Hamilton face and moist wine-dashed lips -- he knew what he had got from her.

He read obsessively about the great sinners of history -- Filippo, Duke of Milan, who poisoned his wife's lips; Borgia on his white horse, riding beside a cavalcade of death; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death. 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.

Chapter XII

It was the eve of November the ninth, the night before Dorian's thirty-eighth birthday. He was walking home from Lord Henry's at about eleven o'clock when the fog was so dense that he could barely recognize his own house. He felt a strange sense of fear for which he could not account. Then, on his doorstep, he recognized Basil Hallward. Basil had been waiting and was about to leave for the midnight train to Paris. He insisted on coming inside. There was something he had to say.

In the library, over brandy-and-soda, Basil spoke haltingly at first, but with growing urgency. "The most dreadful things are being said against you in London," he began. "Things that I could hardly repeat to you." He laid out the charges with devastating specificity: the Duke of Berwick leaving rooms at Dorian's approach; Lord Staveley saying Dorian was a man no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and that no decent woman should sit in the same room with him; a boy in the Guards who had committed suicide, and Dorian was his great friend; Sir Henry Ashton forced to leave England with a tarnished name; Adrian Singleton and his dreadful end; Lord Kent's son, broken with shame; the young Duke of Perth disgraced; Lord Henry's own sister, Lady Gwendolen, whose children were taken from her because of Dorian. Women who adored him had been seen creeping at dawn out of dreadful houses. "Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face," Basil insisted. "It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even."

Dorian deflected every charge with contemptuous ease. The Duke of Berwick avoids me because I know his secrets, not because he knows mine. Adrian Singleton signed his own bills. Lord Kent's son married for money and was punished for it. "We are in the native land of the hypocrite." He reminded Basil of England's double standard: "I don't think that it is any business of mine what Berwick gets up to at his own club."

Basil pressed further. He could not believe the rumours, because to see Dorian's face was to see innocence itself. Yet the charges were so specific, so numerous. He had to know the truth. "I want to see your soul," he said.

At those words, Dorian started up from the sofa, turning almost white from fear. When Basil said that only God could see a man's soul, a bitter laugh of mockery broke from Dorian's lips. "You shall see it yourself, tonight!" he cried, and felt a terrible joy -- the madness of pride. "Come upstairs, Basil," he said. "I keep a diary of my life from day to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written. I shall show it to you." He took a light from the table and led Basil out of the library.

Chapter XIII

They climbed softly, as men do instinctively at night. In the decayed schoolroom -- dust everywhere, carpet in holes, a mouse scuttling behind the wainscoting -- Dorian tore the purple curtain from the portrait. Basil saw the hideous face grinning at him and recoiled. He recognized Dorian's features, horribly degraded but still bearing traces of beauty -- gold in the thinning hair, scarlet on the sensual mouth. He recognized his own brushwork, his own name in vermilion in the corner.

"Christ! what a thing I must have worshipped!" he cried. "It has the eyes of a devil."

"Each of us has heaven and hell in him, Basil," Dorian answered.

Dorian accused Basil and Lord Henry of his corruption: "You met me, flattered me, and taught me to be vain of my good looks. You finished a portrait that revealed to me the wonder of beauty. In a mad moment I made a wish." Basil tried desperately to rationalize -- mildew, mineral poison in the paints -- but Dorian told him: "I was wrong. It has destroyed me."

Basil fell to his knees in anguish. "I worshipped you too much. I am punished for it. You worshipped yourself too much. We are both punished." He urged Dorian to pray, to repent. "It is too late, Basil," Dorian whispered.

As Basil turned back toward the portrait, an uncontrollable feeling of hatred seized Dorian -- as though the grinning image on the canvas had whispered it into his ear. He spotted a knife on the painted chest, moved behind Basil, and stabbed him in the great vein behind the ear, crushing his head down on the table. He stabbed again and again. Blood pooled on the threadbare carpet. Then silence, broken only by the drip of blood.

He stepped onto the balcony. Below, a policeman walked his beat and a woman sang in a hoarse voice. The world was perfectly indifferent to murder. He went downstairs, hid Basil's coat and bag in a secret press in the wainscoting, then let himself out, rang his own bell, and told his drowsy valet he had forgotten his latch-key. The servant confirmed that Mr. Hallward had left at eleven for his train. Dorian asked to be woken at nine, then returned to the library and found a name in the Blue Book: Alan Campbell, 152, Hertford Street, Mayfair. Yes, that was the man he wanted.

Chapter XIV

The morning after, Dorian woke looking like a boy who had fallen asleep over flowers. His servant brought chocolate and drew back the olive-satin curtains. Gradually memory crept back, at first with vague dread, then with horrible distinctness. He dressed with unusual care, lingered over breakfast, and wrote two letters. One he put in his pocket; the other he sent to Alan Campbell at 152 Hertford Street, asking him to come at once on a matter of urgent importance.

While waiting, he sketched idly and noticed every face he drew bore a fantastic likeness to Basil Hallward. He picked up Gautier's Emaux et Camées and read the stanzas about Lacenaire, the murderer with the cool hand. He looked at his own white fingers and shuddered. He read the Venice stanzas and was reminded that Basil had been with him there. "Poor Basil! What a horrible way for a man to die!" The minutes became hours. He paced the room like a beautiful caged thing. Time crawled with feet of lead, while horrible thoughts raced nimbly ahead and dragged a hideous future from its grave.

Campbell arrived at last, stern and gaunt, his coal-black hair and olive skin making his pallor more pronounced. He had once been Dorian's closest intimate -- a brilliant Cambridge-trained chemist with his own laboratory, also an excellent musician. They had been inseparable for eighteen months, drawn together at first by music and by Dorian's magnetic presence. Then the intimacy ended abruptly. Whether a quarrel had taken place no one ever knew. Campbell avoided Dorian in society, grew melancholy, abandoned music for biology. He announced he never intended to enter Dorian's house again.

Dorian told him flatly: in a locked room at the top of this house, a dead man was seated at a table. He had been dead ten hours. He needed Campbell to use his chemistry to destroy the body utterly -- to change it and everything belonging to it into a handful of ashes. Campbell refused absolutely. Dorian admitted it was murder: "I killed him." Campbell still refused. He would not inform the police, but he would have nothing to do with it. Dorian appealed to him as a scientist -- what he was asked to do was merely what chemists did every day in dissecting-rooms.

Then Dorian wrote something on a piece of paper and slid it across the table. Campbell read it and went ghastly pale, falling back in his chair. The content was never revealed, but its power was absolute. "I am so sorry for you, Alan," Dorian murmured, "but you leave me no alternative. I have a letter already written and addressed. If you do not help me, the letter goes out. You know what the result will be."

Broken, Campbell asked whether there was a fire in the upstairs room, and wrote a list of chemicals. To keep his servant out of the house, Dorian sent him to Richmond to order orchids -- no white ones -- and asked Campbell with studied casualness: "How long will your experiment take, Alan?" Five hours. They carried the chest of chemicals upstairs. At the door, Dorian hesitated -- he caught sight of the portrait in the slanting light, and on one of its painted hands a loathsome red dew glistened, bright as blood newly spilled. He dragged the curtain across and left Campbell alone with the body.

After seven o'clock, Campbell emerged, pale but calm. The horrible smell of nitric acid hung in the room. But the thing that had been sitting at the table was gone. "Let us never see each other again," Campbell said, and left without looking back.

Chapter XV

That evening Dorian attended Lady Narborough's dinner, exquisitely dressed and wearing Parma violets, his manner easy and graceful as ever. Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part. He felt the terrible pleasure of a double life.

Lady Narborough was a clever woman with the remains of really remarkable ugliness, who had married off all her daughters and now devoted herself to French fiction and the pleasures of her table. The other guests were of that particular species that infests fashionable dinner-tables: Ernest Harrowden, a mediocrity thoroughly disliked by his friends; Lady Ruxton, an overdressed woman too plain for anyone to believe anything against her; the dowdy Lady Alice Chapman, whose face was one of those British faces that, once seen, are never remembered, and her husband, who imagined that inordinate joviality could atone for an entire lack of ideas.

Dorian was bored until Lord Henry arrived. At dinner, he could eat nothing but drank champagne eagerly. The conversation turned to Madame de Ferrol, a woman who had had four husbands. "When her third husband died," Lord Henry observed, "her hair turned quite gold from grief." The repartee flew: "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her." "Women love us for our defects." "I like men who have a future and women who have a past." "Moderation is a fatal thing. Enough is as bad as a meal. More than enough is as good as a feast."

After the ladies withdrew, Lord Henry turned to Dorian with quiet concern. He pressed about the previous night. Dorian had left the party early -- what had he done? Dorian grew flustered, stumbling over his own words: "Yes... No, I don't mean that." He gave a confused, contradictory account of his movements. "Something has happened to you, Dorian," Henry said. "Tell me what it is. You are not yourself tonight."

Dorian left the party early, claiming he had to go home. Back in his house, the terror returned. He opened the secret press in the wainscoting and retrieved Basil Hallward's coat and bag. He burned them in the fireplace -- three-quarters of an hour's work, the leather hissing and curling. He felt faint and sick and washed his hands with musk-scented vinegar.

Then his attention fixed on a Florentine cabinet of ebony inlaid with ivory and lapis lazuli. After a long internal struggle, he opened a hidden spring and took out a small Chinese box of black-and-gold lacquer, its sides patterned with curving waves and tasselled in plaited metal threads. He opened it. Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, with a curiously heavy smell. He hesitated for several moments, then put the box back. At midnight, dressed commonly with a muffler round his throat, he crept out, hailed a hansom in Bond Street, and gave a distant address. They drove rapidly toward the river.

Chapter XVI

The hansom carried him through streets that grew progressively squalid -- cold rain, blurred lamps, the moon hanging low in the sky like a yellow skull. Lord Henry's old phrase ran through his brain like a refrain: "To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." The hideous hunger for opium gnawed at him.

He arrived at a den near the docks -- a long, low room where Malays crouched by a charcoal stove and haggard women mocked a delirious old man. Upstairs he found Adrian Singleton, smooth-haired and ruined, lighting a pipe. "None of the chaps will speak to me now," Adrian said with a wan smile. "As long as one has this stuff, one doesn't want friends." Dorian felt a stab of guilt -- was Basil right that he destroyed everyone he touched? -- then rationalized it away. Each man lived his own life and paid his own price.

As he left, a woman at the bar called out: "There goes the devil's bargain!" When Dorian cursed at her, she screamed: "Prince Charming is what you like to be called, ain't it?"

At that name, a drowsy sailor leaped from his bench and rushed outside. On the dark quay, he seized Dorian, thrust him against a wall, and pressed a revolver to his temple. "You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," he said. "She was my sister. She killed herself. For years I have sought you."

Dorian, paralyzed with terror, asked: "How long ago did your sister die?" Eighteen years, James Vane answered. "Set me under the lamp," Dorian whispered, "and look at my face."

James dragged him into the gaslight and saw a face with all the bloom of boyhood -- a lad of twenty, far too young to have known Sibyl eighteen years ago. He released him in horror, crying, "My God! I would have murdered you!"

But moments later, the woman from the opium den appeared in the shadows. James protested that the man was little more than a boy. "Little more than a boy!" she hissed. "It's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what I am. They say he has sold himself to the devil for a pretty face." James Vane rushed to the corner, but Dorian had vanished into the night.

Chapter XVII

A week later, Dorian was sitting in the conservatory at Selby Royal, his country estate, where a house party was underway. At tea-time he sat with the Duchess of Monmouth -- "Gladys," a clever and pretty woman of no more than thirty -- and Lord Henry. The Duchess's husband was a jaded-looking man of sixty, bald and red-cheeked, devoted to collecting beetles. Lord Henry and the Duchess sparred brilliantly, trading paradoxes like fencing strokes.

"What of art?" she asked. "It is a malady." "Love?" "An illusion." "Religion?" "The fashionable substitute for belief." "What are you, Lord Henry?" "To define is to limit."

Dorian called Lord Henry "Prince Paradox." When Henry pivoted to mention that Dorian himself had once been called "Prince Charming," Dorian flinched as though struck. "Don't remind me of that," he said, and there was fear in his voice -- for the name carried terror now. James Vane had heard it in the opium den and nearly killed him for it.

Dorian said he had never searched for happiness, only pleasure, and had found it often -- too often. The Duchess said she was searching for peace. They left together to pick orchids, and Lord Henry, watching them go, murmured a warning to the Duchess about flirting disgracefully. She replied with martial metaphors: "Greek meets Greek, then." "I am on the side of the Trojans," he said. "They fought for a woman." "A burnt child loves the fire," she countered.

Then, from the far end of the conservatory, came a stifled groan and the heavy sound of a body striking the tiled floor. Everyone rushed over. Dorian was found lying face downward in a dead faint. He was carried to the blue drawing-room and revived. His first words were: "What has happened? Am I safe here, Harry?" He was trembling violently. He insisted on coming down for dinner -- "I must not be alone." For pressed against the conservatory window, like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.

Chapter XVIII

For two days Dorian did not leave the house. He lay in his darkened room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself. The consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him. He oscillated between believing the sailor's face had been real and convincing himself it was mere imagination -- a phantom conjured by a guilty conscience. He reasoned that the mask of youth had saved him; James Vane could not possibly have recognized a face so young as the man who ruined Sibyl eighteen years ago. And yet the thought that his own conscience could generate such fearful apparitions terrified him further. He relived the murder of Basil Hallward in his mind.

When Lord Henry arrived at six o'clock on the second day, he found Dorian weeping. By the third day, a crisp winter morning restored some of his composure. After breakfast he walked with the Duchess in the garden and then drove to join a shooting party.

At the edge of a pine wood, a hare bolted from a tussock. Dorian cried out: "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey. Let it live." Sir Geoffrey Clouston fired anyway. Two cries followed -- the hare shrieking in pain, and a man crying out in agony. A beater had been struck by the full charge. He was dead.

Dorian was deeply shaken, seeing the death as a terrible omen. Lord Henry dismissed his fears with characteristic ease: "The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian." But when Henry remarked casually that he should like to know someone who had committed a real murder, Dorian nearly fainted. He ordered his valet to pack for the night express to London and wrote a note asking Lord Henry to entertain his guests.

Then the head-keeper, Thornton, arrived. Dorian assumed the man wanted money for the dead beater's family. But Thornton explained that the dead man was no beater at all -- he was a stranger, apparently a sailor, tattooed on both arms, carrying some money and a six-shooter, with no identification whatsoever.

A wild hope seized him. He galloped to the Home Farm where the body had been laid out in an empty stable. He forced a farm-servant to pull back the handkerchief from the dead man's face. A cry of joy broke from his lips. It was James Vane. He rode home with tears in his eyes, for he knew he was safe.

Chapter XIX

Over dinner at Lord Henry's, Dorian announced that he was going to be good and had already begun his reformation. Lord Henry was sceptical and amused. "Pray, don't change, Dorian. You are quite perfect as you are."

Dorian told the story of Hetty Merton, a village girl who reminded him of Sibyl Vane -- beautiful, simple, ignorant of his identity. He had told her he was poor and she believed him. They had met in the country throughout a May, and planned to elope. But at the last moment Dorian had determined to leave her as flowerlike as he had found her, and broke things off.

Lord Henry immediately deflated this supposed virtue. "You gave her good advice and broke her heart. That was the beginning of your reformation." He suggested the novelty of self-denial was simply another sensation for Dorian, and that poor Hetty might now be floating dead in a mill-pond like Ophelia. Dorian protested angrily, but could not entirely refute the charge.

The conversation turned to Basil Hallward, whose disappearance still puzzled London. Scotland Yard believed he had left for Paris, Lord Henry mentioned, and his trunk had never been found. Alan Campbell had shot himself -- a curious end. Dorian, who knew the connection between these facts, said nothing.

Then Dorian asked directly: "Harry, did it ever occur to you that Basil was murdered?" Lord Henry dismissed the idea -- Basil had no enemies; he was too dull to inspire such hatred. Dorian pressed further: "What would you say, Harry, if I told you that I had murdered Basil?"

Lord Henry laughed. "I would say, my dear fellow, that you were posing for a character that doesn't suit you. All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime. It is not in you, Dorian, to commit a murder. I am sorry if I hurt your vanity by saying so, but I assure you it is true. Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders." The confession, offered in the plainest possible language, was simply not believed. Henry's philosophy had rendered the truth literally unthinkable for a man of Dorian's beauty and position.

Lord Henry asked about the portrait Basil had painted. Dorian said it was lost or stolen and that the memory of it was hateful. He quoted Hamlet: "Like the painting of a sorrow, a face without a heart."

Then Lord Henry asked, seemingly in passing: "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

Dorian started as if struck. The music jarred beneath his fingers. He asked why Henry was asking. Henry explained he had overheard a street-preacher near Marble Arch. Dorian replied with sudden, fierce earnestness: "Don't, Harry. The soul is a terrible reality. It can be bought, and sold, and bartered away. It can be poisoned, or made perfect. There is a soul in each one of us. I know it."

Lord Henry dismissed this as a charming illusion and delivered a long, lyrical speech praising Dorian's eternal youth. "Life has been your art," he said. "You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets." He mentioned wanting to introduce Dorian to young Lord Poole, who copied his neckties -- a suggestion that Dorian might corrupt yet another young man, repeating the cycle.

Before leaving, Dorian made one last plea. "You poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to anyone. It does harm."

"There is no such thing as that," Lord Henry replied. "Art has no influence upon action. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame." Dorian hesitated at the door as if he had something more to say, then sighed and left.

Chapter XX

Walking home through warm, lovely streets, Dorian was recognized by two young men in evening dress who whispered his name. He was tired of hearing it. He thought of Hetty Merton and wondered if the portrait had begun to change.

At home, he sat in the library and tried to think. Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood. He knew that he had tarnished himself, corrupted others, brought the fairest lives to shame. He wished not for forgiveness but for punishment -- "Smite us for our iniquities" rather than "Forgive us our sins."

He picked up the ornate mirror Lord Henry had once given him, gazed at his still-beautiful face, and was seized with loathing. His beauty had been a mask, his youth a mockery. He dashed the mirror to the floor.

Then he thought of his new life. He had spared Hetty. Perhaps the portrait had already begun to improve. He took a lamp and crept upstairs. He unlocked the door, pulled back the purple curtain, and looked.

It was worse than before. The eyes showed a look of cunning, the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The scarlet stain on the hand seemed brighter, like blood newly spilled, and had spread to the feet. The portrait had seen through his reformation and rendered its verdict. Through vanity he had spared the girl. In hypocrisy he had worn the mask of goodness. For curiosity's sake he had tried the denial of self. He recognized that now.

He took stock of his safety. James Vane lay in a nameless grave in Selby churchyard. Alan Campbell had shot himself in his laboratory but revealed nothing. The excitement over Basil's disappearance was fading. Nor was it Basil's death that weighed most upon his mind -- it was the living death of his own soul. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life; he could not forgive him that. The murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for Campbell, his suicide had been his own act. It was nothing to Dorian.

He considered confessing, but felt the idea was monstrous. Who would believe him? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. They would simply say he was mad. And yet -- was there not a duty to confess? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton. The portrait itself was the only evidence remaining, the one witness that could not be silenced.

He saw the knife -- the knife he had used to murder Basil Hallward, cleaned many times but still gleaming. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work and all that it meant. It would kill the past, and when the past was dead, he would be free. He seized the knife and stabbed the canvas.

A horrible cry rang through the house, and a crash. The servants came running. They knocked and called but received no answer. Finally they climbed to the roof and dropped onto the balcony. The windows yielded easily -- their bolts were old.

When they entered, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of their master as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.