The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

  “I wonder what the rest of your life will be. Don’t spoil it by renunciations. At present you are a perfect type. Don’t make yourself incomplete. You are quite flawless now. You need not shake your head: you know you are. Besides, Dorian, don’t deceive yourself. Life is not governed by will or intention. Life is a question of nerves, and fibres, and slowly-built-up cells in which thought hides itself, and passion has its dreams. You may fancy yourself safe, and think yourself strong. But a chance tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings strange memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play—I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend. Browning writes about that somewhere; but our own senses will imagine them for us. There are moments when the odour of heliotrope passes suddenly across me, and I have to live the strangest year of my life over again.

  “I wish I could change places with you, Dorian. The world has cried out against us both, but it has always worshipped you. It always will worship you. You are the type of what the age is searching for, and what it is afraid it has found. I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days have been your sonnets.”

  Dorian rose up from the piano, and passed his hand through his hair. “Yes, life has been exquisite,” he murmured, “but I am not going to have the same life, Harry. And you must not say these extravagant things to me. You don’t know everything about me. I think that if you did, even you would turn from me. You laugh. Don’t laugh.”

  “Why have you stopped playing, Dorian? Go back and play the Nocturne over again. Look at that great honey-coloured moon that hangs in the dusky air. She is waiting for you to charm her, and if you play she will come closer to the earth. You won’t? Let us go to the Club, then. It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. There is someone at the Club who wants immensely to know you. Young Lord Poole, Bournmouth’s eldest son. He has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite delightful, and rather reminds me of you.”

  “I hope not,” said Dorian, with a touch of pathos in his voice. “But I am tired to-night, Harry. I won’t go to the Club. It is nearly eleven, and I want to go to bed early.”

  “Do stay. You have never played so well as to-night. There was something in your touch that was wonderful. It had more expression than I had ever heard from it before.”

  “It is because I am going to be good,” he answered, smiling. “I am a little changed already.”

  “Don’t change, Dorian; at any rate, don’t change to me. We must always be friends.”

  “Yet 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.”

  “My dear boy, you are really beginning to moralise. You will soon be going about warning people against all the sins of which you have grown tired. You are much too delightful to do that. Besides, it is no use. You and I are what we are, and will be what we will be. Come round tomorrow. I am going to ride at eleven, and we might go together. The Park is quite lovely now. I don’t think there have been such lilacs since the year I met you.”

  “Very well. I will be here at eleven,” said Dorian. “Good-night, Harry.” As he reached the door, he hesitated for a moment, as if he had something more to say. Then he sighed and went out.

  It was a lovely night, so warm that he threw his coat over his arm, and did not even put his silk scarf round his throat. As he strolled home, smoking his cigarette, two young men in evening dress passed him. He heard one of them whisper to the other, “That is Dorian Gray.” He remembered how pleased he used to be when he was pointed out, or stared at, or talked about. He was tired of hearing his own name now. Half the charm of the little village where he had been so often lately was that no one knew who he was. He had told the girl whom he had made love him that he was poor, and she had believed him. He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and told him that wicked people were always very old and very ugly. What a laugh she had! Just like a thrush singing. And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses, and her large hats. She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.

  When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him. He sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.

  Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood, his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption, and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?

  It was better not to think of the past. Nothing could alter that. It was of himself, and of his own future, that he had to think. Alan Campbell had shot himself one night in his laboratory, but had not revealed the secret that he had been forced to know. The excitement, such as it was, over Basil Hallward’s disappearance would soon pass away. It was already waning. He was perfectly safe there. Nor, indeed, was it the death of Basil Hallward that weighed most upon his mind. It was the living death of his own soul that troubled him. Basil had painted the portrait that had marred his life. He could not forgive him that. It was the portrait that had done everything. Basil had said things to him that were unbearable, and that he had yet borne with patience. The murder had been simply the madness of a moment. As for Alan Campbell, his suicide had been his own act. He had chosen to do it. It was nothing to him.

  A new life! That was what he wanted. That was what he was waiting for. Surely he had begun it already. He had spared one innocent thing, at any rate. He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.

  As he thought of Hetty Merton, he began to wonder if the portrait in the locked room had changed. Surely it was not still so horrible as it had been? Perhaps if his life became pure, he would be able to expel every sign of evil passion from the face. Perhaps the signs of evil had already gone away. He would go and look.

  He took the lamp from the table and crept upstairs. As he unlocked the door, a smile of joy flitted across his young face and lingered for a moment about his lips. Yes, he would be good, and the hideous thing that he had hidden away would no longer be a terror to him. He felt as if the load had been lifted from him already.

  He went in quietly, locking the door behind him, as was his custom, and dragged the purple hanging from the portrait. A cry of pain and indignation broke from him. He could see no change, unless that in the eyes there was a look of cunning, and in the mouth the curved wrinkle of the hypocrite. The thing was still loathsome, more loathsome if possible than before, and the scarlet dew that spotted the hand seemed brighter, and more like blood newly-spilt.

  Had it been merely vanity that had made him do his one good deed? Or the desire of a new sensation, as Lord Henry had hinted, with his mocking laugh? Or that passion to act a part that sometimes makes us do things finer than we are ourselves? Or, perhaps, all these?

  Why was the red stain larger than it had been? It seemed to have crept like a horrible disease over the wrinkled fingers. There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped; blood even on the hand that had not held the knife.

  Confess? Did it mean that he was to confess? To give himself up, and be put to death? He laughed. He felt that the idea was monstrous. Besides, who would believe him, even if he did confess? There was no trace of the murdered man anywhere. Everything belonging to him had been destroyed. He himself had burned what had been below-stairs. The w
orld would simply say he was mad. They would shut him up if he persisted in his story.

  Yet it was his duty to confess, to suffer public shame, and to make public atonement. There was a God who called upon men to tell their sins to earth as well as to Heaven. Nothing that he could do would cleanse him till he had told his own sin. His sin? He shrugged his shoulders. The death of Basil Hallward seemed very little to him. He was thinking of Hetty Merton.

  It was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more. At least he thought so. But who could tell?

  And this murder—was it to dog him all his life? Was he never to get rid of the past? Was he really to confess? No. There was only one bit of evidence left against him. The picture itself. That was evidence.

  He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? It had given him pleasure once to watch it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.

  He looked round, and saw the knife that had stabbed Basil Hallward. He had cleaned it many times, till there was no stain left upon it. It was bright, and glistened. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter’s work, and all that that meant. It would kill the past, and when that was dead he would be free. He seized it, and stabbed the canvas with it, ripping the thing right up from top to bottom.

  There was a cry heard, and a crash. The cry was so horrible in its agony that the frightened servants woke, and crept out of their rooms. Two gentlemen, who were passing in the square below, stopped, and looked up at the great house. They walked on till they met a policeman, and brought him back. The man rang the bell several times, but there was no answer. The house was all dark, except for a light in one of the top windows. After a time, he went away, and stood in the portico of the next house and watched.

  “Whose house is that, constable?” asked the elder of the two gentlemen.

  “Mr. Dorian Gray’s, Sir,” answered the policeman.

  They looked at each other, as they walked away, and sneered. One of them was Sir Henry Ashton’s uncle.

  Inside, in the servants’ part of the house, the half-clad domestics were talking in low whispers to each other. Old Mrs. Leaf was crying, and wringing her hands. Francis was as pale as death.

  After about a quarter of an hour, he got the coachman and one of the footmen and crept upstairs. They knocked, but there was no reply. They called out. Everything was still. Finally, after vainly trying to force the door, they got on the roof, and dropped down on to the balcony. The windows yielded easily: the 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 recognised who it was.

  NOTES

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  1. In late 2011, the kisses were cleaned off the stone and the tomb was encased in protective glass.

  2. Vyvyan Holland, Son of Oscar Wilde (1954; rpt. Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 76.

  3. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 584, hereafter cited in text as Ellmann.

  4. Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Holt, 2000), p. 447.

  5. Unsigned review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Daily Chronicle, June 30, 1890, rpt. in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 72.

  6. Unsigned review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, St. James’s Gazette, June 20, 1890; rpt. in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Beckson, pp. 68–69.

  7. Unsigned notice of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Scots Observer, July 5, 1890; rpt. in Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, ed. Beckson, p. 75.

  8. See Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 124–127; also Robert Mighall’s Introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. R. Mighall (East Rutherford, NJ: Viking Penguin, 2001), pp. xvii–xviii.

  9. Ross, who had “the face of Puck,” according to Wilde, remained Wilde’s most trusted friend and confidante long after their affair had cooled off. Much later, Ross became Wilde’s legal and literary executor. Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol” (1898), written shortly after his release from prison, was originally dedicated to Ross with the words, “When I came out of prison some met me with garments and spices and others with wise counsel. You met me with love.” The dedication was removed, at Ross’s urging, shortly before publication.

  10. See Neil McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (New York: Basic Books, 2005).

  11. Florence T. Gribbell, quoted in McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, p. 116.

  12. John Gray, letter to André Raffalovich, February 1899, quoted in McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, p. 132; for discussion of Gray’s “sin,” see also Jerusha Hull McCormack, John Gray: Poet, Dandy, Priest (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 1991), pp. 39–52.

  13. Complete Letters, p. 758.

  14. Queensberry’s scrawl is hard to decipher and often quoted differently. The club porter, and possibly Wilde too, believed up until Queensberry’s arraignment that the latter had written “ponce and sodomite.” On testifying to this effect during Queensberry’s arraignment on the charge of criminal libel, on March 2, 1895, the porter was interrupted by Queensberry, who interposed that he had written “posing as sodomite.”

  15. The 1861 Offences against the Person Act proscribed “buggery,” and Statute 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 proscribed “gross indecency.” While the sentence under the earlier legislation was harsher (life imprisonment), the burden of proof was higher; and from 1885 onward most “sodomites” were prosecuted under the later Act, which required merely proof of “indecency,” not sexual penetration.

  16. See Merlin Holland, The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde (New York: Perennial, 2004), p. 86. (The Real Trial was published in the United Kingdom in 2003 under the title Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde.)

  17. Queensberry’s plea of justification, entered on March 30, specifically accuses Wilde of writing “a certain immoral and obscene work in the form of a narrative entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray. . . designed and intended [as well as understood by its readers] . . . to describe the relations, intimacies and passions of certain persons of sodomitical and unnatural habits, tastes, and practices.” According to Queensberry’s plea, The Picture of Dorian Gray was “calculated to subvert morality and to encourage unnatural vice” (Holland, The Real Trial, Appendix A, pp. 290–291).

  18. Edward Marjoribanks, cited in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 450.

  19. French decadent novels were typically bound in yellow paper, and the “poisonous book” given by Lord Henry to Dorian, which comes to exert a powerful influence over him, is a yellow paperback.

  20. Mr. Justice Charles, quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1962; rpt. New York: Dover Publications, 1973), pp. 215–226.

  21. Quoted in Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 201; also quoted in Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 463, and McKenna, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde, p. 391. The legal scholar Leslie J. Moran has questioned whether this speech, as reported in modern biographical accounts, including purportedly factual accounts of Wilde’s trials, is a verbatim record or rather an editorial embellishment. See Moran’s “Transcripts and Truth: Writing the Trials of Oscar Wilde,” in Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 2008), pp. 243ff.

  22. See Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde, pp. 272–273.

  23. Some of these changes may have been instigated in response to a suggestion from Wilde’s publisher, George Lock, that Wilde “depict the misery in which [Dorian Gray] ends his days,” and also give “a little longer” to Lord Henry; letter to Oscar Wilde, July 7, 1890, printed in “Stuart Mason” [pseud. of Christopher Millard], Bibliography of Oscar Wilde (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), p. 105.

  24. Complete Letters, p. 428.

  25. For “They are the elect . . .” and “There is no such thing . . . ,” see Appendix below. “The true artist . . .” and “The artist is never morbid . . .” are quoted from “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” in Criticism: Historical Criticism, Intentions and the Soul of Man, ed. Josephine Guy, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 252.

  26. Complete Letters, p. 476.

  27. Complete Letters, p. 436.

  28. Walter Pater, “Style,” in his Appreciations (1889; Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1987), p. 20. Wilde reviewed Pater’s Appreciations, singling out the essay “Style” for special praise, in the Speaker in March 1890.

  29. Victor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. and intro. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 12.

  30. Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York: Knopf, 1995), p. 7.

  31. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry: The 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), pp. 188–190. Pater had first expressed these ideas, in nearly identical language, in 1868 in the course of reviewing the poetry of William Morris.