The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Chapter 09

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Chapter nine.
For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the
memory of this book, or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that he never sought to free himself
from it. He procured from Paris no less than five

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large paper copies of the first edition, and had them
bound in different colors, so that they might suit his
various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over
which he seemed at times to have almost entirely lost control.
The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic

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temperament and the scientific temperament were so strangely blended, became
to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And
indeed the whole book seemed to him to contain the
story of his own life, written before he had lived it.
In one point, he was more fortunate than the book's

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fantastic hero. He never knew, never indeed had any cause
to know, that somewhat grotesque dread of mirrors and polished
metal services and still water, which came upon the young
Parisians so early in his life, and was occasioned by
the sudden decay of a beauty that had once apparently

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been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy,
and perhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure,
cruelty has its place. That he used to read the
latter part of the book, with its really tragic, if
somewhat overemphasized account of the sorrow and despair of one

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who had lost himself what in others and in the
world he had most valued. He, at any rate, had
no cause to fear that the boyish beauty that had
so fascinated Basil Hallward and many others beside him, seemed
to never leave him. Even those who had heard the

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most evil things against him, and from time to time
strange rumors about his mode of life crept through London
and became the chatter of 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

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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 innocence that they had tarnished.
They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he
was could have escaped the stain of an age that
was at once sordid and sensuous. He himself, on returning

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home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that
gave rise to such strain conjecture among those who were
his friends or thought that they were so, 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 that Basil Hallward had painted

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of him, looking now at the evil and aging face
on the canvas, and now at the fair, young face
that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The
very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense
of pleasure. He grew more and more enamored of his
own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of

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his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and
often with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines
that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy,
sensual mouth, Wondering sometimes which were the more horrible the
signs of sin, or the signs of age. He would

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place his white hands beside the coarse, bloated hands of
the picture and smile he mocked the misshapen body and
failing limbs. There were moments, indeed, at night, when lying
sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the
sordid room of the little, ill famed tavern near the docks, which,

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under an assumed name and in disguise it was his
habit to frequent 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
moments such as these were rare. The curiosity about life
that many years before Lord Henry had first stirred in

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him as they sat together in the garden of their friend,
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. Yet he was
not really reckless at any rate in his relations to society.

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Once or twice every month during the winter, and on
each Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw
open to the world his beautiful house and have the
most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests
with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, in
the setting of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were

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noted as much for the careful selection and placing of
those invited as for the exquisite taste shown in the
decoration of the table, with its subtle, symphonic arrangements of
exotic flowers and embroidered cloths and antique plate of gold
and silver. Indeed, there were many, especially among the very

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young men, who saw or fancied that they saw enduring gray,
the true realization of a type of which they had
often dreamed it Eaten or Oxford days, a type that
was to combine something of the real culture of the
scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner
of a citizen of the world. To them, he seemed

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to belong to those whom Dante describes as having sought
to make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty. Like Gautier,
he was one for whom the visible world existed, and
certainly to him life itself was the first, the greatest

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of the arts, and for it all the other arts
seemed to be but a preparation fashion by which she
is really fantastic. Comes for a moment, universal and dandyism,
which in its own way is an attempt to assert
the absolute modernity of beauty, had of course their fascination
for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles

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that he affected from time to time had their marked
influence on the young exquisites of the mayfair Balls and
the Paul Mall club Windows, who copied him in everything
that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm
of his graceful, though to him only half serious fobberies.

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For while he was but too ready to accept the
position that was almost immediately offered to him on his
coming of age, and found indeed a subtle pleasure in
the thought that he might really become to the London
of his own day, what to Imperial Neronian Rome, the
author of the Satiricon, had once been. Yet in his

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inmost heart he desired to be something more than a
mere arbiter elegantarium, to be consulted on the wearing of
a jewel, or the notting of a necktie, or the
conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new
scheme of life that would have its reasoned philosophy and

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its ordered principles, and find in the spiritualizing of the
senses its highest realization. The worship of the senses has often,
and with much justice, been decried men feeling a natural
instinct of terror about passions and sensations that seem stronger

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than ourselves, and that we are conscious of sharing with
the less highly organized forms of existence. But it appeared
to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses
had never been understood, and that they remained savage an
animal merely because the world had sought to starve them
into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of

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aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality, of
which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the
dominant characteristic. As he looked back upon man moving through history,
he was haunted by a feeling of loss. So much
had been surrendered and to such little purpose. There had

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been mad, wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self torture and
self denial whose origin was fear, and whose result was
a degradation infinitely more terrible than the fancied degradation from which,
in their ignorance they had sought to escape. Nature in
her wonderful irony, driving the anchorite out to herd with

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the wild animals of the desert, and giving to the
hermit the beasts of the field as his companions. Yes,
there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a
new hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save
it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having in

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our own day its curious revival. It was to have
its service of the intellect. Certainly, it was never to
accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice
of any mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was
to be experienced itself, and not the fruits of experience,

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sweet or bitter as they might be. Of the asceticism
that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar proflicacy that
dulls them. It was to know nothing, but it was
to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of
a life that is itself but a moment. There are

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few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn,
either after one of those dreamless knights that make one
almost enamored of death, or one of those knights of
horror and misshape and joy, when through the chambers of
the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and
instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,

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and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this
art being one might fancy, especially the art of those
whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually,
white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble.
Black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of the room

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and crouch there. Outside there is the stirring of birds
among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth
to their work, or the sigh and sob of the
wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the
silent house, as though it feared to awake the sleepers.
Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and

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by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored
to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world
in its antique pattern. The wan mears get back their
mimic life. The flameless papers stand where we have left them,
and beside them lies the half read book that we
had been studying, or the wired flower that we had

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worn at the ball, or the letter that we had
been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows
of the night. Come back the real life that we
had known. We have to resume it where we had
left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense

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of the necessity for the continuance of energy. In the
same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing.
It may be that our eyelids might open some morning
upon a world that had been refashioned, a new from
our pleasure in the darkness, a world in which things

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would have fresh shapes and colors and be changed, or
have other secrets. A world in which the past would
have little or no place, or survive at any rate
no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even
of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure

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their pain. It was the creation of such worlds as
these that seemed Dorian Gray to be the true object,
or among the true objects of life, And in his
search for sensations that would be at once new and
delightful and possess that element of strangeness that is so

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essential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of
thought that he knew to be really alien to his nature,
abandon himself to their subtle influences, and then, having as
it were, caught their color and satisfied his intellectual curiosity,
leave them with that curious indifference that is not incompatible

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with a real ardor of temperament, and that, indeed, according
to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition of it.
It was rumored of him once that he was about
to join the Roman Catholic Communion, and certainly the Roman
ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice,

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more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world,
stirred him as much as its superb rejection of the
evidence of the senses, as by the primitive simplicity of
its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy
that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down

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on a cold marble pavement, and with the priest in
his stiff flowered cope, slowly and with white hands, moving
aside the veil of the tabernacle, and raising aloft the
jeweled lantern shaped monstrance, with that pallid wafer that at
times one would fain think is indeed the panis seleastis

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the bread of angels or robe in the garments of
the passion of Christ, breaking the host into the chalice
and smiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers
that the grave boys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed
into the air like great gilt flowers, had their subtle
fascination for him. As he passed out, he used to

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look with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to
sit in the dim shadow of them, and listen to
men and women whispering through the tarnish grating the true
story of their lives. But he never fell into the
error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance

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of creed or system, or of mistaking for a house
in which to live, an inn that is but suitable
for the sojourn of a night, or for a few
hours of a night in which there are no stars,
and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvelous
power of making common things strange to us, and the

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subtle antimonianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him
for a season, And for a season he inclined to
the materialistic doctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and
found a curious pleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions
of men to some pearly cell in the brain, or

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some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception
of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
morbid or healthy, denormal or diseased. Yet, as has been
said of him before, no theory of life seemed to
him to be of any importance compared with life itself.

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He felt keenly conscious of how barren all intellectual speculation
is when separated from action and experiment. He knew that
the senses, no less than the soul, have their mysteries
to reveal, and so he would now study perfumes and

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the secrets of their manufacture. Distilling heavily scented oils and
burning odorous gums from the east, he saw that there
was no mood of the mind which had not its
counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover
their true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that

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made one mystical, and in ambergress that stirred one's passions,
and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances,
and in musk that troubled the brain, and in shampack
that stained the imagination, and seeking often to elaborate a
real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several influences

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of sweet smelling roots and scented pollen laden flowers, of
aromatic balms, and of dark and fragrant woods, of spikenard
that sickens, of hovenia that makes men mad, and of
aloes that are said to be able to expel melancholy
from the soul. At another time he devoted himself entirely

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to music, and in a long latticed room with a
vermilion and gold ceiling and walls of olive green lacquer,
he used to give curious concerts in which mad gypsies
tore wild music from little zithers or grave yellow shawled
Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while

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grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, or turbaned Indians
crouching upon scarlet mats, blew through long pipes of reed
or brass, and charmed or faint to charm great hooded
snakes and horrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill
discords of barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's

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Grace or show Pan's beautiful Sorrows, and the mighty harmonies
of Beethoven himself fell unheeded. On his ear, he collected
together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments
that could be found either in the tombs of dead
nations or among the few savage tribes that had survived

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contact with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them.
He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians
that women are not allowed to look at, and that
even youths may not see till they have been subjected
to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jards of the

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Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes
of human bones, such as alfondo d'aval heard in Chile.
And the sonorous green stones that are found near Cusco,
and give forth a note of singular sweetness. He had
painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken.

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The long clarin of the Mexicans, into which the performer
does not blow, but through which he inhales the air.
The harsh touret of the Amazon tribes that is sounded
by the sentinels who sit all day long in trees,
and that can be heard, it is said, at a
distance of three leagues. The teponazati that has two vibrating

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tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are
smeared with an elastic gum obtained from the milky substance
of plants. The yachtel bells of the Aztecs that are
hung in clusters like grapes. And a huge cylindrical drum
covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one
that Bernard Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into

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the Mexican temple, and of whose doleful sound he has
left us so vivid a description the fantastic care character
of these instruments fascinated him, and he had a curious
delight in the thought that art, like nature, has her monsters,
things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet after

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some time he wearied of them, and would sit in
his box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry,
listening in rapt pleasure to Tonhauser, and seeing in that
great work of art a presentation of the tragedy of
his own soul. On another occasion, he took up the
study of jewels and appeared at a costume ball as

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and de Joyez, Admiral of France, an a dress covered
with five hundred and sixty pearls. He would often spend
a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the
various stones that he had collected, such as the olive
green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight, the chemophame with

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its wirelike line of silver, the pistachio colored periodote, rose,
pink and wine yellow topazes, carbuncles of fiery scarlet with
tremulous four rayed stars, flame red cinema stones, orange and
violet spinnels, and amethysts, with their alternate layers of ruby

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and sapphire. He loved the red gold of the sunstones,
and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of
the milky opal. He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of
extraordinary size and richness of color, and had a turquoise
de la ville Roche that was the envy of all

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the connoisseurs. He discovered wonderful stories also about jewels. In
Alfonso's Clericalis Disciplina, a serpent was mentioned with the eyes
of real jacksonth and in the Romantic History of Alexander
he was said to have found snakes in the veil
of Jordan with collars of real emeralds growing on their backs.

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There was a gem in the brain of the dragon,
Philostratus told us, and by the exhibition of gold letters
and a scarlet robe, the monster could be thrown into
a magical sleep and slain. According to the great alchemists
Pierre de Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and
the agate of India made him eloquent. The Cornelian appeased anger,

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and the hyacinth provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away
the fumes of wine. The garnet cast out demons, and
the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color. The selenite
waxed and wand with the moon, and the melosus that
discovers thieves could be effected only by the blood of kids.

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Leonardus Camelis had seen a white stone taken from the
brain of a newly kid killed toad that was a
certain antidote against poison. The bezar that was found in
the heart of the Arabian deer was a charm that
could cure the plague in the nests of Arabian birds.
Was the aspellates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer

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from any danger of fire. The King of Celan rode
through his city with a large ruby in his hand
as the ceremony of his coronation. The gates of the
palace of John the Priest were made of sardius, with
the horn of the horned snake in wrought, so that

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no man might bring poison within. Over the gable were
two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles, so that
the gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night.
In Loge's strange Romance a Marguerite of America. It was

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that in the chamber of Marguerite were seen all the
chaste ladies of the world, in chaste out of silver,
looking through fair mirrors of chrysolites, carbuncle, sapphires, and green emeralds.
Marco Polo had watched the inhabitants of Zapango place a

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rose colored pearl in the mouth of the dead. A
sea monster had been nabbored of the pearl that the
diver brought to King Peroses, and had slain the thief,
and mourned for seven moons over his loss. When the
huns lured the king into the great pit, he flung
it away. Percopius tells the story, Nor was it ever

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found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred weight
of gold pieces for it. The king of Malabar had
shown a Venetian a rosary of one hundred four pearls,
one for every god that he worshiped. When the Duc
de Valentois, son of Alexander the sixth, visited Louis the

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twelfth of France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves,
according to Brantme, and his cap had double rows of
rubies that threw out a great light. Charles of England
had ridden in stirrups hung with three hundred and twenty
one diamonds. Richard the Second had a coat valued at

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thirty thousand marks, which was covered with ballast rubies. Hall
described Henry the eighth on his way to the tower
previous to his coronation, as wearing a jacket of raised gold,
the placard embroidered with diamonds and other rich stones, and
a great boarderrique about his neck of large balassees. The

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favorites of James the First wore ear rings of emeralds
set in gold Filigreine. Edward the Second gave to Gevston
a suit of red gold armor studded with jacksons, and
a collar of gold roses set with turquoise stones, and
a skull cap parsem with pearls. Henry the Second wore

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jeweled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk
gloves set with twelve rubies and fifty two great pearls.
The ducal hat of Charles the Rash, the last Duke
of Burgundy of his race, was studded with sapphires and
hung with pear shaped pearls. How exquisite life had once been,

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how gorgeous in its pomp and decoration. Even to read
of the luxury of the dead was wonderful. Then he
turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that
performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of
the northern nations of Europe. As he investigated the subject,

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and he always had extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed
for the moment. In whatever he took up, he was
almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that time
brought on beautiful and wonderful things. He at any rate,
had escaped. That summer followed summer, and the yellow jungkills

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bloomed and died many times, and knights of horror repeated
the story of their shame. But he was unchanged. No
winter marred his face or stained his flower like bloom.
How different it was with material things. Where had they
gone to? Where was the great crocus colored robe on

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which the gods fought against the giants that had been
worked for Athena. Where the huge valarium that Nero had
stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, on which were represented
the starry sky and Apollo driving chariot drawn by white,
gilt rained steeds. He longed to see the curious table

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napkins wrought by Eligabalus, on which were displayed all the
dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast.
The mortuary cloth of King Chiliperic with its three hundred
gold beads, The fantastic robes that excited with indignation of
the Bishop of Pontus and were figured with lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests, rocks, hunters,

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all in fact that a painter can copy from nature.
And the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on
the sleeves of which were embroidered the verses of a
song beginning Madame jesuito Joe, the musical accompaniment of the
words being wrought in gold thread, and each note a

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square shape in those days formed with four pearls. He
read of the poem that was prepared at the Palace
at Rhine for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy,
and was decorated with thirteen hundred and twenty one parrots
made embroidery and blazoned with the king's arms, and five

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hundred and sixty one butterflies, whose wings were similarly ornamented
with the arms of the queen. The whole worked in gold.
Catherine de Medici's had a morning bed made for her
of black velvet, powdered with crescents and sons. Its curtains
were of damask with leafy wreaths and garlands figured upon

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a gold and silver background, and fringed along the edges
with embroideries of pearls. And it stood in a room
hung with rows of the Queen's devices and cut black
velvet upon cloth of silver. Louis the four fourteenth had
gold embroidered karataides fifteen feet high in his apartment. The

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state bed of Sobieski, King of Poland, was made of
smer in a gold bricade embroidered in turquoises with verses
from the Koran. Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully
chased and profusely set with enameled and jeweled medallions. It
had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and

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the standard of Mohammed had stood under it, and so
for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most
exquisite specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work,
getting the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold thread

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palmates and stitched over with iridescent beetles wings, the Dhaka
gauzes that, from their transparency are known in the East
as woven air and running water and evening dew, strange
figured cloths from Java, elaborate yellow Chinese hangings, books bound
in tawny satins or fair blue silks and wrought with

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fleur de lis birds and images, veils of laces, worked
in hungry point Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish velvets, Georgian
work with its gilt coins, and Japanese focuses with their
green toned golds and their marvelously plumaged birds. He had

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a special pastern also for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he
had for everything connected with the service of the church.
In the long cedar chests that line the west gallery
of his house, he had stored away many rare and
beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the

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bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and
fine linen that she may hide the pallid, macerated body
that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for,
and wounded by self inflicted pain. He had a gorgeous
cope of crimson silk and gold thread damask, figured with

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repeating pattern of gold pomegranates set in six petalled formal blossoms,
beyond which on either side was the pine apple device
wrought in seed pearls. The orphies were divided into panels
representing scenes from the life of the virgin, and the
coronation of the virgin was figured in colored silks upon

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the hood. This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.
Another cope was of green velvet embroidered with heart shaped
groups of acanthus leaves, from which spread long stemmed white blossoms,
the details of which were picked out with silver thread
and colored crystals. The Morse bore a serah head in

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gold thread raised work. The orphreys were woven in a
diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with
medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was Saint Sebastian.
He had chozubles, also of amber colored silk and blue silk,
and gold bricade and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold,

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figured with representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ,
and embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems. Dalmatics
of white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips
and dolphins, and fleur de lis altar, frontals of crimson
velvet and blue linen, and many corporals chalice, vales and pseudaria.

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In the mystic offices to which these things were put,
there was something that quickened his imagination, for these things,
and everything that he collected in his lovely house were
to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which
he could escape for a season from the fear that
seemed to him at times to be almost too great

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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 had draped the purple and gold pall in front
of it as a curt For weeks he would not

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go there, would forget the hideous painted thing, would get
back his light heart, as wonderful joyousness, his passionate pleasure
in mere existence. 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

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he was driven away. On his return he would sit
in front of the picture, sometimes loathing it and himself,
but filled at other times with that pride of rebellion
that is half the fascination of sin, and smiling with
secret pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear
the burden that should have been his own. After a

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few years, he could not endure to be long out
of England, and gave up the villa that he had
shared at Trueville with Lord Henry, as well as the
little white walled in house at Algiers, where he had
more than once spent his winter. He hated to be
separated from the picture that was such a part of
his life, and he was also afraid that during his

(36:40):
absence someone might gain access to the room. In spite
of the elaborate bolts and bars that he had cause
to be placed upon a door, he was quite conscious
that this would tell them nothing. It was true that
the portrait still preserved under all the foulness and ugliness
of the face, its marks likeness to himself. But what

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could they learn from that? He would laugh at any
one who tried to taunt him. He had not painted it.
What was it to him? How vile and full of
shame it looked? Even if he told them, would they
believe it? Yet he was afraid. Sometimes, when he was
down at his great house in Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable

(37:23):
young men of his own rank who were his chief companions,
and astounding the country by the wanton luxury and gorgeous
splendor of his mode of life, he would suddenly leave
his guests and rush back to town to see that
the door had not been tampered with, and that the
picture was still there. What if it should be stolen?

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The mere thought made him cold with horror. Surely the
world would know his secret. Then, perhaps the world already
suspected it. For while he fascinated many, there were not
few who distrusted him. He was blackballed at a West
End club of which his birth and social position fully

(38:07):
entitled him to become a member, And on one occasion
when he was brought by a friend to the smoking
room of the Carlton, the Duke of Berwick, and another gentleman,
got up in a marked manner and went out. Curious
stories became current about him after he passed his twenty
fifth year. It was said that he had been seen

(38:28):
brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the
distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves
and corners and knew the mysteries of their trade. His
extraordinary absences became notorious, and when he used to reappear
again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners,
or pass him with a sneer, or look at him

(38:50):
with cold, searching eyes, as if they were determined to
discover his secret. Of such insolences and attempted slight he,
of course took no notice, and in the opinion of
most people, his frank, debonair manner, his charming, boyish smile,
and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth that seemed

(39:12):
never to leave him were in themselves a sufficient answer
to the calumnies, for so they called them, that were
circulated about him. It was remarked, however, that those who
had been most intimate with him appeared after a time
to shun him. Of all his friends or so called friends,

(39:34):
Lord Henry Wootten was the only one who remained loyal
to him. Women who had wildly adored him, and for
his sake had braved all social censure and set conventionate defiance,
were seen to grow pallid with shame or horror if
Dorian Gray entered the room. Yet these whispered scandals only

(39:56):
lent him in the eyes of many his strange and
danger charm. His great wealth was a certain element of
security society. Civilized society, at least, is never very ready
to believe anything to the detriment of those who are
both rich and charming. It feels instinctively that manners are

(40:18):
of more importance than morals, and the highest respectability is
of less value, in its opinion than the possession of
a good chef. And after all, it is a very
poor consolation to be told that the man who has
given one a bad dinner or poor wine is irreproachable

(40:39):
in his private life. Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone
for cold entrees, as Lord Henry remarked once in a
discussion on the subject, And there is possibly a good
deal to be said for his view. For the canons
of good society are or should be the same as
the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

(41:04):
It should have the dignity of a ceremony as well
as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of
a romantic play with a wit and beauty that makes
such plays charming. Is insincerity such a terrible thing, I
think not. It is merely a method by which we

(41:25):
can multiply our personalities. Such at any rate, was Dorian
Gray's opinion. He used to wonder at the shallow psychology
of those who conceive the ego in man as a
thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him,
man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations,

(41:50):
a complex, multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies
of thought and passion, and whose very flesh was tainted
with the monstrous maladies of the dead. He loved to
stroll through the gaunt portraits of those whose blood flowed
in his veins. Here was Philip Herbert described by Francis

(42:13):
Osborne in his Memoirs of the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth
and King James as the one who was caressed by
the court for his handsome face, which kept him not
long company. Was he Young Herbert's life that he sometimes
led had some strange, poisonous germ crept from body to

(42:36):
body till it had reached his own? Was it some
dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him
so subtly and almost without cause, give utterance in Basil
Hallward Studio to that mad prayer that had so changed
his life. Here, in gold embroidered red, doublet jeweled surcoat

(42:59):
and gilt edged rough and waistband stood Sir Anthony Chirrard,
with his silver and black armor piled at his feet.
What had this man's legacy been? Had the lover of
Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?
Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead

(43:22):
man had not dared to realize. Here from the fading
canvas smiled Lady Elizabeth Evere in her gauze hood, pearl
stomacher and pink slashed sleeves. A flower was in her
right hand, and her left clasped an enameled collar of
white and damask roses. On a table by her side

(43:47):
lay a mandolin and an apple. There were large green
rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. He knew her life
and the strange stories that were told about her lover.
Had he something of her temperament in him? Those oval,
heavy lidded eyes that seemed look curiously at him. What

(44:10):
of George Willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches,
How evil he looked. The face was saturnine and swarthy,
and a sensual lips seemed to be twisted with disdain.
Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
were so overladen with rings. He had been a Macaroni

(44:33):
of the eighteenth century, and the friend in his youth
of Lord Ferrars. What of the second Lord Chirard, the
companion of the Prince Regent in his wildest days, and
one of the witnesses at the secret marriage of Missus
fitz Herbert. How proud and handsome he was, with his
chestnut curls and insolent pose. What passions had he bequeathed?

(44:59):
The word had looked upon him as infamous? He had
led the Orgies at Carlton House, the star of the
Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the portrait
of his wife, a pallid, thin lipped woman in black.
Her blood also stirred within him. How curious it all seemed.

(45:19):
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in
one's own race, near perhaps in type and temperament, many
of them, and certainly with an influence of which one
was more absolutely conscious. There were times when it seemed
to Dorrian Gray that the whole of history was merely

(45:40):
the record of his own life, not as he lived
it in act and circumstance, but as his imagination had
created it for him, as it had been in his
brain and in his passions. He felt that he had
known them, all, those strange, terrible figures that had passed
across the stage of the world, and made sins so
so marvelous and evil, so full of wonder. It seemed

(46:04):
to him that, in some mysterious way their lives had
been his own. The hero of a dangerous novel that
had so influenced his life, had himself had this curious fancy.
In a chapter of the book, he tells how crowned
with laurel lest lightning might strike him. He had sat

(46:27):
as Tiberius in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful
books of Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him,
and the flute player mocked the swinger of the censer.
And as Caligula had caroused with the green shirted jockeys
in their stables and sopped in an ivory manger with

(46:48):
a jewel frontleted horse, And as Domitian had wandered through
a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round with haggard
eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to
end his days, and sick with that on we that
tedium vitae that comes on those to whom life denies nothing,

(47:09):
and had peered through a clear emerald at the red
shambles of the circus, And then, in a litter of
pearl and purple, drawn by silver shod mules, had carried
through the streets of pomegranate to a house of gold,
and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by.
And as the Lagabalus had painted his face with colors

(47:33):
and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the
Moon from Carthage and given her in a mystic marriage
to the Sun, over and over again. Dorian used to
read this fantastic chapter and the chapter immediately following, in
which the hero describes the curious tapestries that he had

(47:54):
woven for him from Gustave Moreau's designs, and on which
were pictured the off and beautiful forms of those whom
vice and blood and weariness had made monstrous or mad. Filippo,
Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and painted her
lips with a scarlet poison. Pietro Barbi, the Venetian known

(48:16):
as Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to
assume the title of Formosis, and whose tiara, valued at
two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the price of
a terrible sin. Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to
chase living men, and whose murdered body was covered with

(48:37):
roses by a harlot who had loved him, the Borgia
on his white horse, with Fratricide riding beside him, and
his mantle stained with the blood of Porotto. Pietro Urrario,
the young cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of
Sixtis the fourth, whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery,

(48:59):
and who had received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion
of white and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs,
and gilded a boy that he might serve her at
the feast. As Ganymede or Hylas Eslen, whose melancholy could
be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who
had a passion for red blood, as other men have

(49:21):
for red wine, the son of the Fiend, as was reported,
and one who had cheated his father at dice when
gambling with him for his own soul. Giambattist Deacibo, who
in mockery took the name of Innocent, and into whose
torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by
a Jewish doctor, Sigismondo Meltesta, the lover of Isota and

(49:46):
the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome
as the enemy of God. And man who straggled Polysenna
with a napkin and gave poison to Geneva d'Este in
a cup of emerald, and in honor of a shameful
passion built a pagan church for Christian worship. Charles the sixth,

(50:08):
who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a
leper had warned him of the insanity that was coming
on him, and who could only be soothed by Serisian
cards painted with the images of love and death and madness,
and in his trim jerkin and jeweled cap and acanthus
like curls, grinfonetto Baglioni, who slew Astore with his bride,

(50:32):
and sigmonetto with his page, and whose comeliness was such
that as he lay dying in the yellow piazza of Perugia,
those who had hated him could not choose but weep,
and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him. There was
a horrible fascination in them all. He saw them at night,

(50:55):
and they troubled his imagination. In the day, the Renaissance
knew of strange manners of poisoning, poisoning by a helmet
and a lighted torch, by an embroidered glove and a
jeweled fan, by a gilded pomander, and by an ambered chain.
Dorry and Gray had been poisoned by a book. There

(51:17):
were moments when he looked on evil simply as a
mode through which he could realize his own conception of
the beautiful end of chapter nine of the Picture of
Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, as recorded by John Gonzales

(51:40):
w w W dot John Gone dot com