He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson
silk and gold-thread damask,
figured with a repeating pattern of golden
pomegranates set
in six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side
was the pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls.
The orphreys were divided into panels representing scenes from the life
of the Virgin, and the coronation of the Virgin was figured
in coloured silks upon 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 coloured crystals.
The morse bore a seraph's head in 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 St. Sebastian.
He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold brocade,
and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, 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 fleurs-de-lis; altar frontals
of crimson velvet and blue linen; and many corporals,
chalice-veils, and sudaria. In the mystic offices to which
such things were put, there was something that quickened
his imagination.
For these treasures, 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 to be borne.
Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had
spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible
portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life,
and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.
For weeks he would not go there, would forget the hideous painted thing,
and get back his light heart, his wonderful joyousness, his passionate
absorption 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 he was driven away.
On his return he would sit in front of the her times, with that pride
of individualism 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 few years he could not endure to be long out of England,
and gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry,
as well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they
had more than once spent the winter.
He hated to be separated from
the picture that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid
that during his absence some one might gain access to the room,
in spite of the elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon
the 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 marked likeness
to himself; but what 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 young men of his
own rank who were his chief companions, and astounding the county
by the wanton luxury and gorgeous splendour 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? 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 a few who distrusted him.
He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth
and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it
was said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into
the smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another
gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out.
Curious stories became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.
It was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors
in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted
with thieves and coiners 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 with cold searching eyes, as though they
were determined to discover his secret.
Of such insolences and attempted slights 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 never to leave him,
were in themselves a sufficient answer to the calumnies,
for so they termed them, that were circulated about him.
It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been
most intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.
Women who had wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved
all social censure and set convention at defiance, were seen
to grow pallid with shame or horror if Dorian Gray entered
the room.
Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many
his strange and dangerous 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 fascinating.
It feels instinctively that manners are of more importance than morals, and, in its opinion,
the highest respectability is of much less value 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 in his private life.
Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-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.
It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as
its unreality, and should combine the insincere character
of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays
delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing?
I think not. It is merely a method by which we 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,
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 cold picture-gallery of his
country house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood
flowed in his veins. Here was Philip Herbert, described by Francis Osborne,
in his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James,
as one who was
"caressed by the Court for his handsome face,
which kept him not long company."
Was it young Herbert's life that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous
germ crept from body to body till it had reached his own?
Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made
him so suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance,
in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed
his life?
Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat,
and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
with his silver-and-black armour 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 man
had not dared to realize? Here, from the fading canvas,
smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher,
and pink slashed sleeves.
A flower was in her right hand,
and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses.
On a table by her side 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 lovers. Had he something of her temperament in him? These oval,
heavy-lidded eyes seemed to look curiously at him.
What of George Willoughby, with his powdered hair and fantastic patches?
How evil he looked! The face was saturnine and swarthy,
and the 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 of the
eighteenth century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars.
What of the second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince
Regent in his wildest days, and one of the witnesses at
the secret marriage with Mrs. Fitzherbert? How proud and
handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and insolent pose!
What passions had he bequeathed? The world 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!
And his mother with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist,
wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got from her.
He had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty
of others. She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress.
There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilled
from the cup she was holding. The carnations of the painting
had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth
and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever he
went.
Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,
nearer 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 appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole
of history was merely the record of his own life, not as he had 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 sin so marvellous
and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious
way their lives had been his own.
The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how,
crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat,
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 supped
in an ivory manger with 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 ennui, that terrible
taedium vitae, that comes on those to whom life denies nothing; 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,
been carried through the Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold
and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus,
had painted his face with colours, and plied the distaff among the women,
and brought the Moon from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage
to the Sun.
Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter,
and the two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some
curious tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured
the awful 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
that her lover might suck death from the dead thing he fondled;
Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the Second,
who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus,
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 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 Perotto;
Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence,
child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by
his debauchery, and who 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 at the feast as Ganymede
or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured only by
the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood,
as other men have 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; Giambattista Cibo,
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 Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini,
whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man,
who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison
to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a
shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles VI, 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, when his brain had sickened and grown strange,
could only be soothed by Saracen cards painted with the images
of love and death and madness; and, in his trimmed jerkin
and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto Baglioni,
who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto 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, 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 jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander and by an amber chain.
Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book. There were moments when
he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize
his conception of the beautiful.
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