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Summary
Author Notes
Flamboyant man-about-town, Oscar Wilde had a reputation that preceded him, especially in his early career. He was born to a middle-class Irish family (his father was a surgeon) and was trained as a scholarship boy at Trinity College, Dublin. He subsequently won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was heavily influenced by John Ruskin and Walter Pater, whose aestheticism was taken to its radical extreme in Wilde's work. By 1879 he was already known as a wit and a dandy; soon after, in fact, he was satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience.
Largely on the strength of his public persona, Wilde undertook a lecture tour to the United States in 1882, where he saw his play Vera open---unsuccessfully---in New York. His first published volume, Poems, which met with some degree of approbation, appeared at this time. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish lawyer, and within two years they had two sons. During this period he wrote, among others, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his only novel, which scandalized many readers and was widely denounced as immoral. Wilde simultaneously dismissed and encouraged such criticism with his statement in the preface, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
In 1891 Wilde published A House of Pomegranates, a collection of fantasy tales, and in 1892 gained commercial and critical success with his play, Lady Windermere's Fan He followed this comedy with A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). During this period he also wrote Salome, in French, but was unable to obtain a license for it in England. Performed in Paris in 1896, the play was translated and published in England in 1894 by Lord Alfred Douglas and was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.
Lord Alfred was the son of the Marquess of Queensbury, who objected to his son's spending so much time with Wilde because of Wilde's flamboyant behavior and homosexual relationships. In 1895, after being publicly insulted by the marquess, Wilde brought an unsuccessful slander suit against the peer. The result of his inability to prove slander was his own trial on charges of sodomy, of which he was found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labor. During his time in prison, he wrote a scathing rebuke to Lord Alfred, published in 1905 as De Profundis. In it he argues that his conduct was a result of his standing "in symbolic relations to the art and culture" of his time. After his release, Wilde left England for Paris, where he wrote what may be his most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), drawn from his prison experiences. Among his other notable writing is The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), which argues for individualism and freedom of artistic expression.
There has been a revived interest in Wilde's work; among the best recent volumes are Richard Ellmann's, Oscar Wilde and Regenia Gagnier's Idylls of the Marketplace , two works that vary widely in their critical assumptions and approach to Wilde but that offer rich insights into his complex character.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-"The Whole Story" format provides illustrations and annotations to the classic text. Ross's lively and sophisticated cartoons add interest, and historical information helps readers place the novel in proper context and gives insight into its characters. The problem with this attractive, glossy layout, however, is that the text and the quotes pulled from it are not always on the same page. Further, some illustrations and notations visually cut into the narrative and may distract readers. For example, a drawing appears on the first page along with the passage, "In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty," but that quote does not appear until the second page of the story. Useful as a supplement to the original novel, but not a replacement for it.-Karen Hoth, Marathon Middle/High School, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Wilde's sophisticated novel of the seemingly ageless Dorian Gray and the portrait that reflects his debauchery is presented unabridged and accompanied by adequate watercolor illustrations. Historical facts, biographical information, and supplemental photographs and art are included in the margins, though perhaps not as overwhelmingly as in previous volumes of the series. From HORN BOOK Fall 2001, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Guardian Review
The Picture of Dorian Gray , Oscar Wilde's eerie fable of the decadent young man whose portrait ages while he retains his youth, has inspired many works of fiction and performance, the latest being Matthew Bourne's dance drama, with Dorian updated to a superstar of modern billboard photography, an idol in blue jeans. Dorian Gray was clearly based on a living person, a member of Wilde's literary homosexual circle in the early 1890s when the story was first published. If Wilde's fiction is strange, the real life story of John Gray, Dorian's original, is even more bizarre. A young working-class poet of extraordinary beauty corrupts and is corrupted, in a lightning flash of conscience sees the error of his ways, travels to Rome to study for the priesthood, and ends his days a revered canon of the Roman Catholic church in Edinburgh. As an esoteric tale of sin and retribution, this is Oscar Wilde outdone. In Wilde's story, the boy Dorian is a "young Adonis" who looks as if he were made of "ivory and rose leaves". The description tallies with a contemporary photograph taken of John Gray standing in a garden wearing an immaculate white suit, white shoes and boater, meaningfully shooting an arrow from a bow. It is a reminder of how wrong it was to cast the saturnine Ioan Gruffudd as John Gray in the Stephen Fry movie Wilde : the real Gray was much blonder and more exquisite. He always appeared more youthful than he was. At 25 he could pass for a 15-year-old. Even as a venerable canon, he still looked like a large baby, soft-skinned and unlined. Wilde almost certainly first met him towards the end of 1889 at the house of the artists and designers Charles Ricketts ("Orchid") and Charles Shannon ("Marigold"), No 1 The Vale, Chelsea. Gray had already travelled a long way from his background in Bethnal Green, where his father was a carpenter and wheelwright. He had left school at 13 and become an apprentice metal-turner at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. Relentlessly upwardly mobile, he then entered the civil service as a clerk and was finally ensconced in the Foreign Office Library. By 1889, Gray was well in with the aesthetes and had contributed an article on the Goncourt brothers and a fairy story about a magic dragon to Ricketts and Shannon's journal, the Dial. Wilde's biographer Richard Ellmann sees the naming of his story The Picture of Dorian Gray as "a form of courtship". The Christian name, as would have been obvious in sophisticated circles, refers to the ancient Greek tribe, the Dorians, proselytes for the culture of paiderastia, sexual love between men. Gray was blatantly the surname of Wilde's own latest passion, like Dorian a "veritable Narcissus" - a boy so striking that strangers would lean out of their boxes at Covent Garden to fix him in their opera glasses. People in Wilde's own entourage started referring to young Gray as "Dorian". Ernest Dowson, for example, de scribes a gathering of Rhymers at which "Dorian" Gray reads "some very beautiful & obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism". Gray himself colluded, signing at least one of his letters to Wilde "Dorian", and seeming to enjoy his assumption of the role. But then, by February 1892, Gray began denying the association. He started proceedings for libel against the Star newspaper for suggesting that "Mr Gray", who "has cultivated his manner to the highest pitch of languor yet attained", was "the original Dorian of the same name". The Star retreated, made amends. A week later, a letter from Wilde, presumably written at Gray's instigation, appeared in the Daily Telegraph insisting that John Gray, an "extremely recent acquaintance", could not be described as a protege of Wilde's. Why the sudden distancing? First, because Gray was unnerved by the generally horrified reception given to Wilde's story, seen as "a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth" and a rallying cry for same-sex love in general, as the Wildean character, Lord Henry Wootton, addresses Dorian: "You, Mr Gray, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame." Shame! Dorian Gray was still being cited five years after publication in the notorious trials of Oscar Wilde - trials at which John Gray, by this time panic-stricken, hired his own lawyer to keep a watching brief. There was also, no doubt, an element of jealousy in Gray's withdrawal from the man he once regarded as his "beloved master and dear friend". Wilde had taken up with Lord Alfred Douglas, socially far superior to Gray, and was behaving with increasing sexual recklessness, in defiance of the law. Gray had a strong instinct for self-preservation. By 1893 he was referring to "the falling out with Oscar . . . it is absolute". Wilde himself lived to regret the separation. From prison, in De Profundis , he wrote to Alfred Douglas "when I compare my friendship with you with my friendship with such still younger men as John Gray and Pierre Louys I feel ashamed. My real life, my higher life, lay with them and such as them." The spiritual conflicts of those years, the years that Father Gray looked back on as his "course of sin", are suggested in the very best of the short stories he wrote, "The Person in Question". This obviously autobiographical tale, most likely written in 1892, was discovered years later in typescript in the Dominican Chaplaincy in Edinburgh and finally published in 1958. It is a doppelganger narrative about a young man haunted by the apparition of himself as he will be in 25 years' time if he continues on his hedonistic life. It opens in the Cafe Royal, that hall of mirrors much frequented by Gray, as indeed by Wilde, where "the person in question" orders exactly the lunch the indolent young man has ordered: a sardine, cold roast beef (very underdone), followed by some vegetable marrow and a small bottle of Niersteiner with soda water. From then on, wherever he goes he sees his double. The horrifying vision of his future leads to mania, as Gray's own psychological crisis brought him to the edge of suicide. During the crisis year of 1892, Gray was preparing a collection of his poems under the title Silverpoints . Originally Wilde had undertaken to finance it. In the end, the costs were underwritten by Gray's new protector, the wealthy Russian-born Jewish connoisseur and expert on matters Uranian, Marc-Andre Raffalovich, a man so ugly his own mother was said to have rejected him. "You are an angel to me," Gray told him. Wilde mocked him terribly, and this new liaison with Raffalovich was another factor in Gray's rift with Wilde. Influenced by the protective and circumspect Raffalovich, Gray left out his more obviously homoerotic poems when compiling Silverpoints . But the collection still has an overwhelming 1890s quality of decadence as, for instance, in "The Barber": I dreamed I was a barber; and there went Beneath my hand, oh! manes extravagant. Beneath my trembling fingers, many a mask Of many a pleasant girl. The tall slim volume was designed by Charles Ricketts in conscious imitation of a Persian saddle book with special binding, typography and floriated initial letters: the book itself as work of art. Ada Leverson described Gray's poems as "the tiniest rivulets of text meandering through the very largest meadows of margin", going on to suggest that Wilde might take a tip and publish "a book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts". Besides Gray's own poems, Silverpoints includes his translations from Mallarme, Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud. Gray had personal links with the French symbolists. In later years, his must have been the only church in Scotland to say an annual mass for the soul of Paul Verlaine. Gray came from a Methodist family. His original conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1890 had been half-hearted. But once he was established in a menage with Raffalovich, he became seriously devout. Soon Raffalovich himself was baptised in the church of the Jesuit Fathers in Farm Street. The two men were instrumental in converting the dying Aubrey Beardsley, and Gray wrote a somewhat self-congratulatory introduction to Beardsley's Last Letters , published in 1904. His own writing changed dramatically. Gray now turned away from the fin-de-siecle self-indulgences of Silverpoints to the muted, penitential tone of his religious translations, published under the title Spiritual Poems Once ordained, he removed himself as far as possible from the haunts of his old decadence. His aim was now to work "entirely among the hopeless poor" and he became assistant curate at St Patrick's Church in the Cowgate, a rough and dilapidated district in Edinburgh's Old Town inhabited mainly by Irish labourers. In 1906, he moved to his own parish and a wonderful new church, St Peter's, Morningside, designed by the Scottish Arts and Crafts architect Robert Lorimer. The church-building was financed mainly by Raffalovich, now settled in Edinburgh close to Father Gray. Their priest was adored by the parishioners, although they evidently found him rather baffling. It was not just a matter of the black sheets in the presbytery. Gray was a creature of "polished reserve". There are many references in memoirs of the period to his mask-like countenance, his enigmatic, heavy-lidded Mona Lisa eyes. He became a cult figure in church circles, appearing in Ronald Firbank's novel Inclinations as the eloquent and touching preacher Father Brown. One of Wilde's much-resented jibes about Raffalovich had focused on his literary aspirations: "Poor Andre! He came to London with the intention of founding a salon, and he has succeeded only in opening an eating house." In Edinburgh, Raffalovich got his own back. Sunday luncheons and Tuesday dinner parties at his house in Whitehouse Terrace became a famous meeting point in Scottish artistic and intellectual life. After lunch, the guests would be led into the study to admire Eric Gill's sculpture of Sebastian, the saint whose name Raffalovich took after his conversion. "I have the feeling," wrote one habitue, "that some of the guests were a little embarrassed by the martyr's nudity." Saint Sebastian was left by Gray to the Tate Gallery after Raffalovich's death. The friends died almost simultaneously, Raffalovich in February 1934, Gray - now Canon Gray - four months later. The funeral panegyric called Gray "a living example of priestly virtue", praising the "orderliness, regularity and punctuality of his life and household, his tranquil tidy soul". Gray faded from view until the early 1960s, when Father Brocard Sewell, a Carmelite friar and obsessive resurrectionist of forgotten figures of the 1890s, published a book of biographical essays. At the time, his more elderly parishioners remembered Canon Gray, but few were conscious of the Dorian connection, or of the cost to him in attaining his apparent plateau of tranquillity. However, there are hints in his last and most compelling work, Park: A Fantastic Story , published 1931-32, of a dangerously heightened self-consciousness, which remind me of Gray's comment in a rare unguarded moment to a fellow priest: "If I were to relax for a single moment, God knows what would happen to me." The central character, the Rev Dr Mungo Park, named after the great African explorer, is a 59-year-old priest, a mysterious figure with some "power of dissimulation" on account of "his peculiar position". The book is a futuristic fantasy, in the mode of William Morris's News from Nowhere and HG Wells's A Modern Utopia . Mungo Park, who has died, resurfaces to find himself in a world of black ascendancy, in which the degenerate white population inhabits caverns of the lower depths. Mungo Park knows quite well that he is dead, but keeps on tramping, just as Gray himself was an indefatigable walker, stumping through the country in his heavy hobnail boots, tramping on and away from the guilt of being Dorian. "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment," as Wilde explained the moral underlying The Picture of Dorian Gray The flamboyance of this paradox appeals to Matthew Bourne, who claims that the story of Dorian Gray has been high on his list of possible dance dramas for some time. He's been attracted by a number of themes in Wilde's story: the obsession with staying young, and the depravity and corruption beneath apparent perfection, especially in the worlds of politics and art. Bourne is fascinated by the risks we still run in the pursuit of beauty, and the way that reckless pleasure can rebound on itself. Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray ends at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, today, then runs at Sadler's Wells, London EC1, from September 2 to 14 (0844 412 4300; sadlerswells.com) Caption: article-doriangraynew.1 People in [Oscar Wilde]'s own entourage started referring to young Gray as "[Dorian Gray]". Ernest Dowson, for example, de scribes a gathering of Rhymers at which "Dorian" Gray reads "some very beautiful & obscure versicles in the latest manner of French Symbolism". Gray himself colluded, signing at least one of his letters to Wilde "Dorian", and seeming to enjoy his assumption of the role. Then, by February 1892, Gray began denying the association. He started proceedings for libel against the Star newspaper for suggesting that "Mr Gray", who "has cultivated his manner to the highest pitch of languor yet attained", was "the original Dorian of the same name". The Star retreated, made amends. A week later, a letter from Wilde, presumably written at Gray's instigation, appeared in the Daily Telegraph insisting that [John Gray], an "extremely recent acquaintance", could not be described as a protege of Wilde's. One of Wilde's much-resented jibes about Raffalovich had focused on his literary aspirations: "Poor Andre! He came to London with the intention of founding a salon, and he has succeeded only in opening an eating house." In Edinburgh, Raffalovich got his own back. Sunday luncheons and Tuesday dinner parties at his house in Whitehouse Terrace became a famous meeting point in Scottish artistic and intellectual life. After lunch, the guests would be led into the study to admire Eric Gill's sculpture of Sebastian, the saint whose name Raffalovich took after his conversion. "I have the feeling," wrote one habitue, "that some of the guests were a little embarrassed by the martyr's nudity." Saint Sebastian was left by Gray to the Tate Gallery after Raffalovich's death. - Fiona MacCarthy.
Booklist Review
Gr. 6^-12. For teens who find even steadily paced novels a struggle, the biting but often meandering discussions between Basil and Lord Henry in Wilde's classic can seem overwhelming and pointless. But this version's informative sidebars make the surreal tale of the beautiful young man who never ages one that teens can not only tackle but also begin to relish. When the story advances or twists, Tony Ross' colorful artwork emphasizes Wilde's absurdly witty take on Victorian provincialism. For scenes in which characters discuss aesthetics, sidebar illustrations with helpful captions explain how Wilde's philosophies influenced his characterizations. Even when the sidebars only remotely relate to the story, they provide a clear cultural outline of the mores that resulted in Wilde's public undoing and his untimely death. The supplemental information and illustrations may strike sharp YA readers as amusing or interesting, but they may be the sole reason weaker readers tackle the novel at all. --Roger Leslie
Excerpts
Excerpts
CHAPTER I The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures. As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. "It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said Lord Henry, languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place." "I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. "No: I won't send it anywhere." Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion." "I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit it I have put too much of myself into it." Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed. "Yes, I knew you would; but it is quite true, all the same." "Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you -- well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is some brainless, beautiful creature, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him. "You don't understand me, Harry," answered the artist. "Of course I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are -- my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks -- we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly." "Dorian Gray? Is that his name?" asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward. "Yes, that is his name. I didn't intend to tell it to you." "But why not?" "Oh, I can't explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance to one's life. I suppose you think me awful foolish about it?" "Not at all," answered Lord Henry, "not at all, my dear Basil. You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet -- we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke's -- we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it, much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me." "I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry," said Basil Hallward, strolling towards the door that led into the garden. "I believe that you are really a very good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose." "Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know," cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together, and ensconced themselves on a long bamboo seat that stood in the shade of a tall laurel bush. The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. In the grass, white daisies were tremulous. After a pause, Lord Henry pulled out his watch. "I am afraid I must be going, Basil," he murmured, "and before you go, I insist on your answering a question I put to you some time ago." "What is that?" said the painter, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground. "You know quite well." "I do not, Harry." "Well, I will tell you what it is. I want you to explain to me why you won't exhibit Dorian Gray's picture. I want the real reason." "I told you the real reason." "No you did not. You said it was because there was too much of yourself in it. Now, that is childish." "Harry," said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, "every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit the picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my soul." Lord Henry laughed. "And what is that?" he asked. "I will tell you," said Hallward; but an expression of perplexity came over his face. "I am all expectation, Basil," continued his companion, glancing at him. "Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry," answered the painter; "and I am afraid you will hardly understand it. Perhaps you will hardly believe it." Lord Henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from the grass, and examined it. "I am quite sure I shall understand it," he replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered disk, "and as for believing things, I can believe anything, provided that it is quite incredible." The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. A grasshopper began to chirrup by the wall, and like a blue thread a long thing dragon-fly floated past on its brown gauze wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward's heart beating, and wondered what was coming. "The story is simply this," and the painter after some time. "Two months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon's. You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stockbroker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge over-dressed dowagers and tedious Academicians, I suddenly became conscious that some one was looking at me. I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. You know I did not want any external influence in my life. I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. Then-- but I don't know how to explain it to you. Something seemed to tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. I grew afraid, and turned to quite the room. It was not conscience that made me do so; it was a sort of cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape." "Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all." "I don't believe that, Harry, and I don't believe you do either. However, whatever was my motive -- and it may have been pride, for I used to be very proud -- I certainly struggled to the door. There, of course, I stumbled against Lady Brandon. 'You are not going to run away so soon, Mr. Hallward?' she screamed out. You know her curiously shrill voice?" "Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty," said Lord Henry, pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers. "I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to Royalties, and people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend. I had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again. It was reckless of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him. perhaps it was not so reckless, after all. It was simply inevitable. We would have spoken to each other without any introduction. I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other." Excerpted from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
