Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Open Original Text

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray
 
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Author: Oscar Wilde

 
Release date: October 1, 1994 [eBook #174]
 Most recently updated: September 17, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/174

Credits: Judith Boss. HTML version by Al Haines.

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY ***

The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

Contents

 THE PREFACE
 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.

THE PREFACE

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and
conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate
into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful
things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
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. They are the elect to whom
beautiful things mean only beauty.

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. The moral life of man forms part of
the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in
the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove
anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has
ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable
mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express
everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an
art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the
point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the
musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the
type. 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.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with
himself. 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.

OSCAR WILDE

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 flamelike as theirs; and now and then
the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long
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 Tokyo 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 

Next