The Wish (The Preface, Chapters 1–4)

THE PREFACE

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

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CHAPTER 1

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.

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. On a divan of Persian saddle-bags, smoking innumerable cigarettes, lay Lord Henry Wotton.

"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."

"I don't think I shall send it anywhere," the painter answered. "No, I won't send it anywhere. I have put too much of myself into it."

Lord Henry laughed. "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. Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face."

"You don't understand me, Harry. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul."

And Basil told him how he had met the young man, Dorian Gray, at a crush at Lady Brandon's. "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 someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself." Since then, Dorian had become everything to him. "He is absolutely necessary to me. His personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art. Don't take away from me the one person who gives to my art whatever charm it possesses. Harry, I trust you. Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad."

At that moment the butler announced that Mr. Dorian Gray was in the studio.

CHAPTER 2

Lord Henry looked at him. Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth's passionate purity.

While Basil painted, Lord Henry talked. "There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral. To influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. He becomes an echo of some one else's music. The aim of life is self-development. To realise one's nature perfectly, that is what each of us is here for. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."

Dorian, strangely stirred, felt that entirely fresh influences were at work within him. He went out with Lord Henry into the garden, and buried his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms. "Nothing can cure the soul but the senses," said Lord Henry, "just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. And beauty is a form of genius; is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. A new Hedonism, that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol."

When the portrait was finished, Dorian stood in front of it. When he saw it he drew back, and his cheeks flushed for a moment with pleasure. A look of joy came into his eyes, as if he had recognised himself for the first time. Then the sense of his own beauty came on him like a revelation; and with it, the remembrance of Lord Henry's words.

"How sad it is!" murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. "How sad it is! 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!"

Basil, wounded, seized a palette knife to destroy the canvas. Dorian tore the knife from his hand. "Don't, Basil, don't! It would be murder! I am in love with it, Basil. It is part of myself." And the portrait was sent to his house.

CHAPTER 3

The next day Lord Henry called on his uncle, Lord Fermor, and learned Dorian's history. His mother, Lady Margaret Devereux, an extraordinarily beautiful girl, had run away with a penniless young soldier; her father, Lord Kelso, had had him killed in a duel, it was said, by a Belgian brute he paid; and she died within a year, leaving the child. "So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage," thought Lord Henry. "Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic." He would make the boy his study. "He would seek to dominate him; he would make that wonderful spirit his own."

At his aunt's lunch, Lady Agatha's, he talked brilliantly, playing with ideas, tossing them into the air and transforming them, and Dorian, at the table, never took his eyes off him.

CHAPTER 4

A month later, Dorian came to Lord Henry's house. "Harry, I am in love." He had found, in a dingy little theatre in the East End, a girl of seventeen playing Juliet: Sibyl Vane. "Harry, imagine a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little, flowerlike face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark-brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion, lips that were like the petals of a rose. She was the loveliest thing I had ever seen in my life. Night after night I go to see her play. One evening she is Rosalind, and the next evening she is Imogen. I have seen her die in the gloom of an Italian tomb, sucking the poison from her lover's lips. Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. But an actress! How different an actress is!"

"And what is Sibyl Vane to you?" asked Lord Henry. "She is everything to me in life," said Dorian. "To-morrow night she will be Juliet. You must come and see her."

When he had gone, Lord Henry reflected that it was delightful to watch him. He had begun by vivisecting others; he had ended by vivisecting himself. "The lad was his own creation. He had made him premature." And that evening, when he came home, there was a telegram on the hall table. It was from Dorian Gray. It was to tell him that he was engaged to be married to Sibyl Vane.

(End of Episode 1 — continued in Episode 2: Sibyl Vane)