The Picture of Dorian Gray
1890
Reading Edition
A Reconstruction of the Uncensored Wording of the Lippincott’s Text
A Note on the Text
Acknowledgments
Danny Morrison: Oscar Wilde: Trapped by his own Words
The Picture of Dorian Gray
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Notes
The Author
On this Book
Acknowledgments
The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (quoted as Lipppincott’s) on both sides of the Atlantic in 1890. This edition presents a reconstruction of the uncensored text. It first came out as part of a translation of Wilde’s novel into German in 2000 which was reissued in a revised and extended edition by Elsinor Verlag in April 2012, with acts of censorship and self-censorship being placed in the context of the genesis of the novel. The current text like the first printing follows certain American conventions of spelling because copy-editing and censorship alike were done by the editors at Philadelphia as high-lighted in Appendix A to The Picture of Dorian Gray. An Annotated, Uncensored Edition (edited by Nicholas Frankel, The Belknap Harvard University Press, 2011, pp. 261-263). While semantics were not necessarily affected by such changes, nor by normalising the capitals in Wilde’s typescript, which, following Frankel’s policy, have also been restored, the rhythm of Wilde’s prose certainly was by inserting more dashes and parentheses where he had wanted to put commas in most cases. Here, this edition follows Frankel’s policy to restore the punctuation Wilde had authorized in the typescript of the novel (cf. Frankel, pp. 266-271). All other changes relative to censorship or self-censorship are marked by numerals in the text and documented in endnotes.
Since both the afterword and the editorial apparatus were made available online in English by the journal OSCHOLARS (“May I Say Nothing”) in early 2013, it is now time to issue an inexpensive reading-text suitable for the classroom with line numbers, highlighting the acts of censorship and self-censorship. At the same time, a bilingual travelling exhibition is being prepared featuring key passages of the genesis of the novel as well as those sentences that made it part of legal history, too. People and institutions interested in showing the exhibition are kindly asked to approach the editor through the publisher.
Finally, it should be said that the pioneer in this field ofWilde studies, the German scholar, teacher and politician Wilfried Edener, published his critical edition of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) [Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1964], systematically displaying the divergences between the two texts issued in Wilde’s lifetime, exactly fifty years ago, in 1964.
Jörg W. Rademacher,
Leer, East Frisia, 16th May 2014
My sincere thanks are due to a number of individuals who have helped me in various ways to prepare this edition: Antonio Ballesteros González (Madrid), Peter te Boekhorst (Münster), Frank Focken (East Frisia), Hans Walter Gabler (Munich), Merlin Holland (France), Werner Huber (Vienna), Sandra Mayer (Vienna), Danny Morrison (Belfast), Alex Mulcahy (Verl), Thomas Pago (Coesfeld), David Pierce (York), Hermann Josef Real (Beckum), David Rose (Paris), Peter Staengle (Heidelberg), Wolfhard Steppe (Guizerix, France), Wolfgang Streit (Munich), Michael Szczekalla (Aix-la-Chapelle) as well as, last but not least, my wife Antje.
Oscar Wilde died twice. Of course his final resting place was in Père Lachaise, Paris, where he had succumbed to meningitis in 1900. But he had already died in London, his spirit crushed by a prison sentence of two years hard labour (1895-1897) on a charge of gross indecency, this humiliation, this downfall having destroyed the brilliant, flamboyant Anglo-Irish writer.
Unwittingly, Wilde had forged some of the nails for his own coffin, in his own hand, by his own words, when he submitted the manuscript of The Portrait of Dorian Gray to the American publication, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, in spring 1890. In this first version homosexual themes border on the explicit. But the second version, the British-published book of 1891, was a more circumspectly crafted text and included a Preface which attempted to negotiate his way around the initial criticisms that Dorian Gray was scandalous and immoral. Damaging quotes from the Lippincott’s version, along with compromising letters, and the prospect of testimony from young male prostitutes, would later be used against Wilde in court by Edward Carson to discredit him and pave the way for his prosecution on charges of committing indecent acts.
Carson, like Wilde, a Protestant Dubliner and former student of Trinity College, was the leading barrister of his era. He was not only Wilde’s Nemesis but, later, when he rose to political prominence, that of Irish nationalists. What a contrast between the lives of Wilde and Carson! One, a gifted artist who would hardly hurt a fly and who brought joy to thousands of readers and theatre-goers and who would, after his death, be exonerated; the other, a skilled lawyer and consummate politician who would engage in illegal activity, threaten the will of Parliament and bring immense suffering to the Irish nation, the repercussions of which are still felt today.
From 1911 Edward Carson became involved in subversion against the British government, opposed democratic Home Rule for Ireland, helped raise an illegal, paramilitary army (armed from Germany) and threatened civil war – all with impunity! When the First World War broke out, Carson’s (Protestant) Ulster Volunteer Force largely converted into the British army’s 36th (Ulster) Division; Carson became British Attorney General, a member of the War Cabinet and First Lord of the Admiralty. He was to symbolize the partition of Ireland, the man who sabotaged his country’s independence.
Dorian Gray is the story of a young man selling his soul in a Faustian pact in exchange for eternal youth. The plot is quite staid: “all conversation and no action”, as Wilde described it. Overtly, it is a novel of ideas about aesthetics, and the relation of passion to art. Wilde, a married family man but a practising, covert homosexual for the four years prior to 1891, could not help but use his art to promulgate his ideas.
Those ideas (that it is right – healthier and cathartic – to give in to temptations of the flesh) certainly aren’t as monstrous as that suggested by Dostoyevsky’s Smerdyakov’s character, that “Everything is permitted”, but they did outrage the Victorian establishment, Wilde’s enemies and jealous critics. Wilde’s unique wit, his affectation of speech, manner and eccentricity of dress, which was often ridiculed, incensed this section of society, the philistine majority, who allegedly practised self-denial, and who viewed him as immoral and degenerate, but lacked the opportunity to humble and humiliate him.
It was a combination of Wilde’s own hubris, and the encouragement of his lover, which set the scene.
One of those who read and was beguiled by Dorian Gray was Lord Alfred Douglas, a handsome young man, nicknamed ‘Bosie’, a spoilt and self-indulgent brat. He and Wilde were introduced in June 1891 and thereafter began an affair, often acting quite incautiously, though it was Alfred who was reckless and publicly flaunted himself so that they would be recognized as ‘Oscar Wilde and his boy’. Alfred’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was outraged at what he considered was the corrupting of this son (though it was actually Alfred who introduced Wilde to the subterranean world of male prostitution), and when Wilde was challenged by Queensberry in June 1894 he denied the allegations. But in February 1895 the Marquess threw down the gauntlet in the form of a calling card left in Wilde’s club, basically publicly accusing him of being a sodomite. Against wiser counsels, Wilde sued and Queensberry was arrested and charged with criminal libel.
However, during the trial, which began on 3rd April 1895, the tables were turned and Edward Carson, who was brilliant, eloquent and forensic in regard to highlighting ‘immorality’ in Wilde’s work, including the Lippincott’s version of Dorian Gray, easily demonstrated Wilde’s licentious life and that he had an insatiable sexual appetite and predilection for young men. When Carson announced that he would produce male prostitutes as his witnesses who would testify to having had sex with Wilde, Wilde dropped the prosecution. Not only did the court costs bankrupt him but the court ruled that the accusation that he was a sodomite was “true in substance and in fact”, and this triggered the next stage of the tragedy – his arrest on twenty-five counts of gross indecencies and conspiracy to commit gross indecencies.
His first trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. (To be fair, at this stage Edward Carson appealed to the Solicitor General for clemency but was told it was too late as the case was now “too politicized” to stop. This is a reference to speculation that the British Prime Minister, the Earl of Rosebery, had had a homosexual affair and was being threatened with exposure if he failed aggressively to prosecute Wilde.)
At the second trial, in May 1895, which heard lurid details and allegations of hotel sex with male prostitutes, Wilde and his co-accused, Alfred Taylor, were convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.
Imprisonment broke Wilde. He experienced hunger, insomnia, disease, bouts of dysentery, loneliness, desertion, and the death of his mother. When being transferred in prison stripes to Reading Gaol a crowd gathered around him on the railway platform and jeered and spat at him. He wrote that he knew that when he would be released from prison that there was “nothing before me but a life of a pariah – of disgrace and penury and contempt.”
His tragedy was the second occasion within a few years of a prominent Irish figure being brought down on the issue of morality. Charles Stewart Parnell, the greatest Irish politician of his era, was leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster and appeared to be on the verge of achieving a measure of Home Rule (the Second Home Rule Bill). But, in 1890, in a London divorce case Parnell was named as co-respondent, as living with another man’s wife with whom he had two children. The subsequent fallout from the scandal, especially in Catholic Ireland, destroyed Parnell and bitterly divided his party. Meantime, others had become disillusioned with the failure of constitutional politics to deliver and were to go down the separatist road which would eventually lead to the 1916 Easter Rising and the formation of the IRA. Although the Irish Parliamentary Party had recovered by 1900 and looked again as if its lobbying at Westminster would finally result in the passing of a Home Rule Act, onto the stage strode Sir Edward Carson to thwart their Irish aspirations.
Wilde was released in May 1897 and immediately went into exile, unaware that history and public opinion would exonerate him. His writings are celebrated, his plays constantly performed and attract new admirers, his life is the object of biographers, and his epigrams (used to blacken him at this trial) are regularly quoted in books, in film and in the media. In Ireland and Britain today homosexuality has been decriminalized and gay partnerships/marriages are recognized. In another ironic twist, the newspaper symbolic of Rupert Murdoch’s modern global media empire, the News of the World, which throughout its 168-year-old history specialized in scandal, salacious stories and prurience, and which rejoiced in Wilde’s imprisonment and downfall, itself was brought down by scandal in 2011 and court cases! Police revealed that the newspaper was involved in widespread phone hacking of royal, public and celebrity figures, of the families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and of the families of teenage girls who had been raped and murdered.
Against this history, in hindsight, who truly was the more moral but Saint Oscar?
Jörg W. Rademacher, in this reading-text of a critically edited text of the novel, in as forensically a manner as Carson indicted Wilde, liberates Wilde from the censuring and self-censorship Wilde himself, for motives of self-protection, futilely wrought on his novel in the various stages of production. Rademacher, as he explains in his afterword (English text available on the website of OSCHOLARS under the heading of “May I Say Nothing”), distills the variant texts to produce a new edition of the old but original Dorian, a reconstruction of the uncensored wording of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It presents us with a unique insight into the parturition of a work, the struggle that takes place between true, unencumbered, artistic freedom and powerful social forces which compromise such work – for better or worse, but rarely for better.
Danny Morrison, Belfast
The studio was filled with the rich odor 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 usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like 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 who, in 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 black-crocketed spires of the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive, and 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 he 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. The Grosvenor is the only place.”
“I don’t think I will 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. And yet, you are quite right about it. It is my best work.”1
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 his long legs out on the divan and shook with laughter.
“Yes, I knew you would laugh; 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 this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you – well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that. But Beauty, real Beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don’t think. A Bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and consequently he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is a brainless, beautiful thing, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don’t flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him.”
“You don’t understand me, Harry. Of course I am not like him. I know that perfectly well. Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. You shrug your shoulders? I am telling you the truth. There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one’s fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit quietly and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are, my fame, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks; we will all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”
“Dorian Gray? is that his name?” said Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.
“Yes; that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”
“But why not?”
“Oh, I can’t explain. When I like people immensely I never tell their names to any one. It seems like surrendering a part of them. You know how I love secrecy. It is the only thing that can make modern life wonderful or mysterious to us. The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town 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?”
“Not at all,” answered Lord Henry, laying his hand upon his shoulder; “not at all, my dear Basil. You seem to forget that I am married, and the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties. I never know where my wife is, and my wife never knows what I am doing. When we meet, – we do meet occasionally, when we dine out together, or go down to the Duke’s, – we tell each other the most absurd stories with the most serious faces. My wife is very good at it, much better, in fact, than I am. She never gets confused over her dates, and I always do. But when she does find me out, she makes no row at all. I sometimes wish she would; but she merely laughs at me.”
“I hate the way you talk about your married life, Harry,” said Basil Hallward, shaking his hand off, and strolling towards the door that led into the garden. “I believe that you are really a very 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.”
“Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know,” cried Lord Henry, laughing; and the two young men went out into the garden together, and for a time they did not speak.
After a long pause Lord Henry pulled out his watch. “I am afraid I must be going, Basil,” he murmured, “and before I go I insist on your answering a question I put to you half an hour ago.”2
“What is that?” asked Basil Hallward, keeping his eyes fixed on the ground.
“You know quite well.”
“I do not, Harry.”
“Well, I will tell you what it is.”
“Please don’t.”
“I must. I want you to explain to me why you won’t exhibit Dorian Gray’s picture. I want the real reason.”
“I told you the real reason.”
“No, you did not. You said it was because there was too much of yourself in it. Now, that is childish.”
“Harry,” said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of 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 colored canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown with it the secret of my own soul.”
Lord Harry laughed. “And what is that?” he asked.
“I will tell you,” said Hallward; and an expression of perplexity came over his face.
“I am all expectation, Basil,” murmured his companion, looking at him.
“Oh, there is really very little to tell, Harry,” answered the young painter; “and I am afraid you will hardly understand it. Perhaps you will hardly believe it.”
Lord Henry smiled, and, leaning down, plucked a pink-petalled daisy from the grass, and examined it. “I am quite sure I shall understand it,” he replied, gazing intently at the little golden white-feathered disk, “and I can believe anything, provided that it is incredible.”
The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air. A grasshopper began to chirrup in the grass, and a long thin dragon-fly floated by on its brown gauze wings. Lord Henry felt as if he could hear Basil Hallward’s heart beating, and he wondered what was coming.
“Well, this is incredible,” repeated Hallward, rather bitterly, – “incredible to me at times. I don’t know what it means. The story is simply this. Two months ago I went to a crush at Lady Brandon’s. You know we poor painters have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages. With an evening coat and a white tie, as you told me once, anybody, even a stock-broker, can gain a reputation for being civilized. Well, after I had been in the room about ten minutes, talking to huge overdressed dowagers and tedious Academicians, I suddenly became conscious that someone was looking at me. I turned half-way round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious instinct of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself. I did not want any external influence in my life. You know yourself, Harry, how independent I am by nature. My father destined me for the army. I insisted on going to Oxford. Then he made me enter my name at the Middle Temple. Before I had eaten half a dozen dinners I gave up the Bar, and announced my intention of becoming a painter. I have always been my own master; had at least always been so, till I met Dorian Gray. Then – but I don’t know how to explain it to you. Something seemed to tell me that I was on the verge of a terrible crisis in my life. I had a strange feeling that Fate had in store for me exquisite joys and exquisite sorrows. I knew that if I spoke to Dorian I would become absolutely devoted to him, and that I ought not to speak to him. I grew afraid, and turned to quit the room. It was not conscience that made me do so: it was cowardice. I take no credit to myself for trying to escape.”
“Conscience and cowardice are really the same things, Basil. Conscience is the trade-name of the firm. That is all.”
“I don’t believe that, Harry. However, whatever was my motive, and it may have been pride, for I used to be very proud, I certainly struggled to the door. There, of course, I stumbled against Lady Brandon. ‘You are not going to run away so soon, Mr. Hallward?’ she screamed out. You know her shrill horrid voice?”
“Yes; she is a peacock in everything but beauty,” said Lord Henry, pulling the daisy to bits with his long, nervous fingers.
“I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to Royalties, and people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and hooked noses. She spoke of me as her dearest friend. I had only met her once before, but she took it into her head to lionize me. I believe some picture of mine had made a great success at the time, at least had been chattered about in the penny newspapers, which is the nineteenth-century standard of immortality. Suddenly I found myself face to face with the young man whose personality had so strangely stirred me. We were quite close, almost touching. Our eyes met again. It was mad of me, but I asked Lady Brandon to introduce me to him. Perhaps it was not so mad, after all. It was simply inevitable. We would have spoken to each other without any introduction. I am sure of that. Dorian told me so afterwards. He, too, felt that we were destined to know each other.”
“And how did Lady Brandon describe this wonderful young man? I know she goes in for giving a rapid précis of all her guests. I remember her bringing me up to a most truculent and red-faced old gentleman covered all over with orders and ribbons, and hissing into my ear, in a tragic whisper which must have been perfectly audible to everybody in the room, something like ‘Sir Humpty Dumpty – you know – Afghan Frontier – Russian intrigues: very successful man – wife killed by an elephant – quite inconsolable – wants to marry a beautiful American widow – everybody does nowadays – hates Mr. Gladstone – but very much interested in beetles: ask him what he thinks of Schouvaloff.’ I simply fled. I like to find out people for myself. But poor Lady Brandon treats her guests exactly as an auctioneer treats his goods. She either explains them entirely away, or tells one everything about them except what one wants to know. But what did she say about Mr. Dorian Gray?”
“Oh, she murmured, ‘Charming boy – poor dear mother and I quite inseparable – engaged to be married to the same man – I mean married on the same day – how very silly of me! Quite forget what he does – afraid he – doesn’t do anything – oh, yes, plays the piano – or is it the violin, dear Mr. Gray?’ We could neither of us help laughing, and we became friends at once.”
“Laughter is not a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is the best ending for one,” said Lord Henry, plucking another daisy.
Hallward buried his face in his hands. “You don’t understand what friendship is, Harry,” he murmured, “or what enmity is, for that matter. You like every one; that is to say, you are indifferent to every one.”
“How horribly unjust of you!” cried Lord Henry, tilting his hat back, and looking up at the little clouds that were drifting across the hollowed turquoise of the summer sky, like ravelled skeins of glossy white silk. “Yes; horribly unjust of you. I make a great difference between people. I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their characters, and my enemies for their brains. A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me. Is that very vain of me? I think it is rather vain.”
“I should think it was, Harry. But according to your category I must be merely an acquaintance.”
“My dear old Basil, you are much more than an acquaintance.”
“And much less than a friend. A sort of brother, I suppose?”
“Oh, brothers! I don’t care for brothers. My elder brother won’t die, and my younger brothers seem never to do anything else.”
“Harry!”
“My dear fellow, I am not quite serious. But I can’t help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that we can’t 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 classes. They 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 preserves. When poor Southwark got into the Divorce Court, their indignation was quite magnificent. And yet I don’t suppose that ten per cent of the lower orders live with their own wives.”3
“I don’t agree with a single word that you have said, and, what is more, Harry, I don’t believe you do either.”
Lord Henry stroked his pointed brown beard, and tapped the toe of his patent-leather boot with a tasselled malacca cane. “How English you are, Basil! If one puts forward an idea to a real Englishman, – always a rash thing to do, – he never dreams of considering whether the idea is right or wrong. The only thing he considers of any importance is whether one believes it oneself. Now, the value of an idea has nothing whatsoever to do with the sincerity of the man who expresses it. Indeed, the probabilities are that the more insincere the man is, the more purely intellectual will the idea be, as in that case it will not be colored by either his wants, his desires, or his prejudices. However, I don’t propose to discuss politics, sociology, or metaphysics with you. I like persons better than principles. Tell me more about Dorian Gray. How often do you see him?”
“Every day. I couldn’t be happy if I didn’t see him every day. Of course sometimes it is only for a few minutes. But a few minutes with somebody one worships mean a great deal.”
“But you don’t really worship him?”
“I do.”
“How extraordinary! I thought you would never care for anything but your painting, your art, I should say. Art sounds better, doesn’t it?”
“He is all my art to me now. I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the history of the