The old gentleman growled approvingly and rang the bell for his servant.
Lord Henry passed up the low arcade into Burlington Street and turned his
steps in the direction of Berkeley Square.
So that was the story of Dorian Gray's parentage.
Crudely as it had been told to him, it had yet stirred him
by its suggestion of a strange, almost modern romance.
A beautiful woman risking everything for a mad passion.
A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous,
treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then
a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death,
the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and
loveless man. Yes; it was an interesting background.
It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were. Behind every
exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.
. . . And how charming he had been at dinner the night before,
as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure
he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades
staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face.
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 though 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.... He was a marvellous type, too, this lad,
whom by so curious a chance he had met in Basil's studio,
or could be fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate.
Grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such
as old Greek marbles kept for us. There was nothing that one
could not do with him. He could be made a Titan or a toy.
What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade!
. . . And Basil? From a psychological point of view,
how interesting he was! The new manner in art, the fresh
mode of looking at life, suggested so strangely by the merely
visible presence of one who was unconscious of it all;
the silent spirit that dwelt in dim woodland, and walked unseen
in open field, suddenly showing herself, Dryadlike and not afraid,
because in his soul who sought for her there had been wakened
that wonderful vision to which alone are wonderful things revealed;
the mere shapes and patterns of things becoming, as it were,
refined, and gaining a kind of symbolical value, as though
they were themselves patterns of some other and more perfect
form whose shadow they made real: how strange it all was!
He remembered something like it in history. Was it not Plato,
that artist in thought, who had first analyzed it?
Was it not Buonarotti who had carved it in the coloured marbles
of a sonnet-sequence? But in our own century it was strange.
. . . Yes; he would try to be to Dorian Gray what, without knowing it,
the lad was to the painter who had fashioned the wonderful portrait.
He would seek to dominate him--had already, indeed,
half done so. He would make that wonderful spirit his own.
There was something fascinating in this son of love and
death.
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