The Preface
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art
It is the spectator, and not life, that are really mirrors
Chapter I
'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'
Basil - When I like people immensely I never tell their names to anyone. It is like surrendering a part of them. I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvelous to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going. If I did, I would lose all my pleasure. It is a silly habit, I dare say, but somehow it seems to bring a great deal of romance into one's life. I suppose you think me awfully foolish about it?
Basil - I believe that you are really a good husband, but that you are thoroughly ashamed of your own virtues. You are an extraordinary fellow. You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose
'Harry,' said Basil Hallward, looking him straighten the face, 'every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself
I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. I quite sympathize with the rage of the English democracy against what they call the vices of the upper orders. The masses feel that drunkenness, stupidity, and immorality should be their own special property, and that if any one of us makes an ass of himself he is poaching on their preserve. When poor Southward got into the Divorce Court, their indignation was quite magnificent
Basil - Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I never cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never known anything about it. But the world might guess it; and I will not bare my soul to their shallow, prying eyes. My heart shall never be put under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing, Harry — too much of myself!
Harry - Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions
Harry - I think you will tire first, all the same. Some day you will look at your friend, and he will seem to you to be a little out of drawing, or you won't like his tone of colour, or something. You will bitterly reproach him in your own heart, and seriously think that he has behaved very badly to you. The next time he calls, you will be perfectly cold and indifferent. It will be a great pity, for it will alter you. What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that is leaves one so unromantic
Chapter II
Harry - All influence is immoral — immoral from the scientific point of view
Dorian - Why?
Harry - Because 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. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actors of a part that has not been written from him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly — that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course they are charitable. They feed the hungry, and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion — these are the two things that govern us
'Stop!' faltered Dorian Gray, 'stop! you bewilder me. I don't know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it. Don't speak. Let me think. Or, rather, let me try not to think'
Harry - you have the most marvelous youth, and youth is the one thing worth having.
Dorian - I don't feel that, Lord Henry.
Harry - No, you don't feel it now. Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Now, wherever you go, you charm the world. Will it always be so? … You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr Gray. Don't frown. You have. And Beauty is a form of Genius — is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in the dark waters of the silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it
Harry - For there is such a little time that your youth will last — such a little time. The common hill-flowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be people stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never back get our youth
A furry bee came and buzzed around it for a moment. Then it began to scramble all over the oval stellated globe of the tiny blossoms. He watched it with that strange interest in trivial things that we try to develop when things of high import make us afraid, or hewn we are stirred by some new emotion for which we cannot find expression, or when some thought that terrifies us lays sudden siege to the brain and calls on us to yield
Chapter III
Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin. He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow…. There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence. No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some gracious form and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into another as thought it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that — perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims
Chapter IV
Harry - Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing
Harry - Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense
Chapter V
Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them
Chapter VI
Lord Henry - The reason we all like to think so well of others is that we are all afraid of ourselves. The basis of optimism is sheer terror. We think that we are generous because we credit our neighbour with the possession of those virtues that are likely to be a benefit to us. We praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets
Harry - Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come between them…
Chapter IX
Dorian - you are awfully unjust, Basil. You come down here to console me. That is charming of you. You find me consoled, and you are furious. How like a sympathetic person! You remind me of a story Harry told me about a certain philanthropist who spent twenty years of his life in trying to get some grievance redressed, or some unjust law altered — I forget exactly what it was. Finally he succeeded, and thong could exceed his disappointment. He had absolutely nothing to do, almost died of ennui, and became a confirmed misanthrope
Basil - I worshipped you. I grew jealous of every one to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. when you were away for me you were still present in my art…. Of course I never let you know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become wonderful to my eyes — too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of keeping them…
Chapter X
Dorian - I am so sorry, Harry, but it is entirely your fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me that I forgot how the time was going.
Harry - Yes: I thought you would like it.
Dorian - I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated me. There is a great different.
Harry - Ah, you have discovered that?
Chapter XV
Lady Narborough - don't tell me that you have exhausted Life. When a man says that one known that Life has exhausted him
Chapter XVI
There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates a nature, that every fibre of the body, as every cell of the brain, seems to be instinct with fearful impulses. Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible ends as automatons move. Choice is taken from them, and conscious is either killed, or, if it lives at all, lives but to give rebellion its fascination, and disobedience its charm. For all sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning-star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell
Chapter XVII
Harry - It is a kind of sad truth, but we have lost the faculty of giving lovely names to things. Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions. My one quarrel is with words. That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for
Gladys - You are a sceptic.
Harry - Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
Gladys - What are you?
Harry - To define is to limit
Chapter XVIII
The next day he did not leave the house, and, indeed, spent most of the time in his own room, sick with a wild terror of dying, and yet indifferent to life itself
With subtle and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die. Shallow sorrows and shallow loves lives on. The loves and sorrows that are great are destroyed by their own plentitude
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY: https://www.goodreads.com/search?q=the+picture+of+dorian+gray&qid=uQFzdU5OwH
Photo by Buse Doga Ay on Unsplash