The Picture of Dorian Gray

In a studio saturated with the heavy scent of roses, where the summer breeze carries the rich odor of lilacs and the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn, the painter Basil Hallward contemplates his masterpiece: a life-size portrait of a young man of extraordinary beauty. Lord Henry Wotton, stretched out on a divan of Persian saddle-bags, smoking innumerable cigarettes, observes the scene with that languor which is his entire way of being in the world. He urges Basil to exhibit the painting, but the painter refuses: he has put too much of himself into it, too much of that secret idolatry he harbors for the sitter, a certain Dorian Gray, whose mere visible presence has revealed to him an entirely new mode of art. Basil begs Lord Henry not to spoil the young man, not to influence him, for his influence would be pernicious—but it is already too late; the butler announces that Dorian is in the studio, and Lord Henry, smiling, asks to be introduced.

Dorian is there, seated at the piano, turning the pages of some Schumann, with his scarlet lips, his clear blue eyes, his crisp gold hair—everything about him inspires trust, blending the candor of youth with the passionate purity of adolescence. Lord Henry begins to speak, and the words do their work. All influence is immoral, he says in his musical voice, for to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. The aim of life is self-development. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Dorian listens, his lips parted, his eyes strangely bright, as though a secret chord that had never been touched before were beginning to throb within him. Then Lord Henry leads him into the garden and delivers his terrible panegyric on youth: Beauty is a form of Genius, indeed higher than Genius, as it needs no explanation; but what the gods give, they quickly take away. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. Live the wonderful life that is in you, always seek out new sensations, a new Hedonism, that is what the century requires.

When the portrait is finished and Dorian sees himself for the first time, the sense of his own beauty comes upon him like a revelation—and immediately, Lord Henry's warning turns like a dagger. He will grow old, horrible, hideous, but this painting will remain forever young. If it could only change, if it were he who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old—for that, for that he would give everything, his very soul. The vow is uttered in tears, kneeling upon the divan, and Basil, who nearly destroyed the canvas with a palette knife, does not comprehend what has just been sealed.

A month passes. Dorian falls madly in love with Sibyl Vane, a young actress barely seventeen years of age, playing Shakespeare in a wretched East End theater. She is Juliet, Rosalind, Imogen—all the great heroines of the world in one person. He calls her his life; he wants to make Romeo jealous. But on the night he brings Lord Henry and Basil to see her perform, Sibyl is atrocious: real love has killed the art within her, and she can no longer feign passion now that she is living it. Dorian brutally abandons her, leaving her collapsed on the theater floor. Upon returning home, he notices an expression of cruelty on the portrait he had never seen before—a line at the corner of the mouth, as if the canvas had sneered. The mad wish has been fulfilled. The next day, Lord Henry informs him that Sibyl has killed herself by swallowing poison. Dorian feels a strangely superficial sorrow, as though he were witnessing the marvelous epilogue of a tragedy that did not wound him in the least.

This is the turning point, the moment where turning back is no longer possible, though Dorian does not yet know it. He locks the portrait in an old schoolroom, beneath a pall, and plunges into an enthralling novel given to him by Lord Henry—a poisonous book that becomes the breviary of his new existence. His life spirals. Forever maintaining the polished facade of a young man of high society, he haunts the most infamous dens of London, seeking increasingly refined pleasures and ever rarer sensations. He surrounds himself with precious objects, jewels, perfumes, tapestries, musical instruments, and passes through feverish infatuations for Catholicism, Darwinism, gems, and embroideries, as if each new passion could replace the last and stifle the memory of the rotting canvas upstairs. For the portrait, little by little, grows hideous. The marks of time inscribe themselves upon it, but above all the stigmata of sin—the mouth twists, the eyes become heavy and glazed, the hands appear stained. Dorian often returns to contemplate it with a pleasure tinged with horror, for he, in his mirror, remains the same radiant adolescent Basil had painted.

The years pass and rumors swell. It is whispered in the clubs that Dorian Gray consorts with foreign sailors in sordid taverns, that he has been seen in the worst opium dens of Whitechapel, that young men of good family have been ruined by his friendship. But no one can prove a thing, for that unwrinkled face belies any accusation. One evening, Basil Hallward comes to see him. He has heard the most dreadful rumors, he wants to understand, he demands to see Dorian's soul. Then Dorian leads him upstairs to the locked room and shows him the portrait—the hideous, ravaged, unrecognizable canvas upon which is etched every vice, every cruelty, every cowardice accumulated over eighteen years. A deadly hatred for the man who painted this image seizes Dorian, against the one he holds responsible for what he has become. He grabs a knife and plunges it into Basil's neck, then again, and again. The painter slumps, his head on the table, and blood slowly spreads across the floor.

Dorian disposes of the corpse by blackmailing a former friend, Alan Campbell, a chemist capable of dissolving a body in acid. Campbell obeys, ashen, then commits suicide shortly after. Dorian returns to his pleasures—above all opium, which he has made a habit of smoking in the dens of Limehouse. But one night, in one of these hovels, a woman of the streets calls him by the nickname Sibyl Vane used to give him: Prince Charming. A sailor leaps from the shadows: it is James Vane, Sibyl's brother, who has sought to avenge his sister for eighteen years. He seizes Dorian by the throat, but hesitates when he sees that twenty-year-old face—how could this adolescent be the man who destroyed Sibyl nearly two decades earlier? Dorian escapes him thanks to the eternal youth granted by the portrait. Yet fear takes root. During a shooting party in the country, a beater is accidentally shot in the thicket. Dorian discovers it is James Vane—fate has done its work, and the threat is extinguished along with a body carried away on a stretcher.

Delivered, Dorian resolves to change his life. He wants to be good; he wants the portrait to recover its original innocence. He begins by sparing a young country girl he could have seduced and ruined like so many others. He then goes upstairs to see the canvas, his heart beating with hope—but the portrait is more hideous than ever, and a new wrinkle of hypocrisy has formed, for this belated goodness is but one more vanity, a mere caprice of curiosity. Dorian then realizes there is no redemption. He seizes the knife that killed Basil—the same one, always the same—and drives it into the canvas. A harrowing cry rings out through the house, so dreadful that the servants rush up and send for the police. When they force the door of the locked room, the portrait is there upon the wall, resplendent in its youth and beauty, just as it was on the day of its creation. And on the floor lies an old man, wrinkled, withered, repulsive in visage, a knife in his heart—he is recognizable only by his rings.