A picture-story retelling, after Oscar Wilde (1891)
A gothic tale of vanity and conscience, with two suicides, a murder and a death. Each is shown by the moment before or after, with shadow and stillness and never anything gruesome. The opium den is shown as murky atmosphere only.
1On a hot summer afternoon, the scent of roses and lilac drifted through Basil Hallward's London studio. Lord Henry Wotton lay smoking on the divan, gazing at the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary beauty. 'It is your best work, Basil,' he said languidly. 'You must certainly send it to the Grosvenor.'2But Basil shook his head. He would not send it anywhere. Harry laughed and teased him, since the rugged, black-haired painter looked nothing like the ivory-and-rose youth on the canvas. 'I know you will laugh at me,' Basil replied, 'but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it.'3Out on a bamboo seat beneath the laurel, Basil confessed that since meeting Dorian Gray at Lady Brandon's party he had painted him every day. When the butler announced Dorian, Basil gripped Harry's arm. 'Don't spoil him. Don't try to influence him. Your influence would be bad. Mind, Harry, I trust you.'4Inside, Dorian Gray sat at the piano leafing through Schumann. When he turned, golden-haired and blue-eyed, a faint blush rose in his cheeks. Lord Henry saw at once why Basil worshipped him: all the candour and purity of youth was in that face. When Basil asked Harry to leave, Dorian begged him to stay.5Dorian stepped onto the platform to pose while Basil painted in silence. From the divan, Lord Henry talked softly of living fully and fearlessly. 'The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it,' he said. Dorian stood motionless, lips parted, eyes strangely bright, as if some secret chord within him had been struck.6Stifled, Dorian fled to the garden and buried his face in the lilacs. Harry followed and spoke of youth as the only thing worth having, of the senses, and of how swiftly beauty withers into wrinkles. 'Time is jealous of you,' he warned. The lilac spray fell from Dorian's hand, and he listened, open-eyed and afraid.7Back in the studio, Basil declared the portrait finished. Dorian looked at it and felt his own beauty come over him like a revelation, then a stab of pain. 'This picture will remain always young,' he murmured. 'If it were only the other way! For that I would give everything. I would give my soul for that!'8Dorian turned bitterly on Basil and flung himself weeping onto the divan. Rather than let the picture spoil their lives, Basil seized a long palette knife to rip the canvas. Dorian leapt up, tore the knife from his hand and hurled it across the room. 'Don't, Basil, don't!' he cried. 'It would be murder!'9When Harry proposed the theatre, Basil begged Dorian to stay and dine with him instead, but after a glance at Harry, Dorian said he must go. 'I shall stay with the real Dorian,' Basil said sadly. As the door closed behind the two, the painter flung himself down on a sofa, and a look of pain came into his face.10Next day Lord Henry called on his gruff uncle, Lord Fermor, in the Albany to learn about Dorian's family. The old man remembered it well: beautiful Lady Margaret Devereux had run away with a penniless young soldier. Her father, Lord Kelso, paid a brute to insult the husband, who was killed in a duel at Spa. "The girl died, too, died within a year."11Walking toward Berkeley Square, Lord Henry turned the crude tale over in his mind: a mad passion, a treacherous killing, a child born in pain. It made Dorian more perfect. Just as the boy had unknowingly transformed Basil's art, Harry decided he would shape Dorian himself. "He could be made a Titan or a toy."12At Aunt Agatha's lunch Harry arrived late and soon held the whole table, from the ample duchess to a stiff Radical MP. When the duchess asked how to be young again, he told her to repeat her follies. "The only things one never regrets are one's mistakes." Laughing, the guests followed his dazzling praise of folly, while Dorian watched him as if under a spell.13When the duchess swept out and the party broke up, Lord Henry announced he was going to the park. At the door Dorian touched his arm. "Let me come with you," he murmured, begging him to keep talking. Harry smiled and said that he only wanted to look at life now, and that Dorian might come and look at it with him.14A month after the portrait was finished, Dorian waited in Lord Henry's Mayfair library. When Harry strolled in late, as usual, Dorian blushed and confessed that he was in love with an actress named Sibyl Vane. "No one has heard of her," he said. "People will some day. She is a genius."15Wandering the grimy East End, Dorian had stumbled on a gaudy little theatre run by a flamboyant, five-times-bankrupt manager, and there watched a girl of seventeen play Juliet and Rosalind. On the third night he went backstage. Shy and wondering, Sibyl refused to call him 'my Lord'. "You look more like a prince," she said. "I must call you Prince Charming."16Alone again, Lord Henry mused that the lad was largely his own creation, a fascinating experiment in passion, and he did not care how it ended. Returning home past midnight, he found a telegram waiting on the hall table. Dorian Gray was engaged to be married to Sibyl Vane.17In their dingy Euston Road lodgings, Sibyl buried her face in her mother's lap. "I love him," she said simply. Faded Mrs. Vane fretted about money owed to the manager, and wondered whether this nameless young man was rich. Then rough, brown-haired James came in, asking his sister for one last walk before he sailed for Australia.18In Hyde Park, Sibyl suddenly cried out: Prince Charming was driving past in an open carriage. James seized her arm and demanded to see him, but a great four-in-hand rolled between, and the carriage was gone. "As sure as there is a God in heaven," Jim said, "if he ever does you any wrong, I shall kill him."19That evening James forced his mother to admit she had never married his father, a gentleman. He kissed her goodbye and swore to track down and kill any man who wronged his sister. Then trunks were carried down, and as his cab rattled away, Mrs. Vane waved her tattered lace handkerchief from the window, disappointed that the grand scene had been wasted.20At the Bristol, Lord Henry told a dismayed Basil the news before Dorian arrived, flushed and handsome, to tell them how he had kissed Rosalind. Harry teased about pleasure, but Dorian would not listen. "Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good." Following the brougham to the theatre alone in a hansom, Basil felt he had lost his friend.21On the night of the play the shabby theatre was crowded and stiflingly hot. Dorian brought Harry and Basil to see Sibyl act and sat with them in a box above the noisy pit. "What a place to find one's divinity in!" Lord Henry murmured.22Sibyl came on as Juliet to wild applause, lovely as a fawn, but she spoke every line as if it meant nothing to her. At the balcony scene her stiff, schoolgirl recital killed the poetry, and the restless crowd began to talk and whistle.23When the second act ended in a storm of hisses, Harry said she was beautiful but could not act. Dorian, his heart breaking, begged his friends to leave him alone. Lord Henry and Basil went quietly out, and Dorian sat through the rest of the play to almost empty benches.24Afterwards Dorian rushed to the greenroom and found Sibyl alone and radiant with joy. She explained that loving him had shown her the stage was a hollow sham. "I have grown sick of shadows," she cried. "You are more to me than all art can ever be."25Dorian answered coldly that she had killed his love. Without her art, he said, she was nothing: "A third-rate actress with a pretty face." Sibyl flung herself at his feet and begged him not to leave her, but he looked down at her with disdain and walked out.26All night he wandered through dark, evil-smelling slums. At dawn he found himself at Covent Garden, where carts heaped with lilies rumbled down the empty street. A carter gave him cherries, and the scent of the flowers seemed to ease his pain.27At home in the early sunlight he saw a touch of cruelty around the portrait's mouth that was not in his mirror. He remembered his mad wish in the studio and shuddered. He drew a screen in front of the picture and resolved to go back to Sibyl, marry her and try to love her again.28It was long past noon when Dorian woke. In the sunlit library he told his valet he was at home to no one, locked both doors and drew aside the gilt leather screen. It was perfectly true. The portrait had altered, and a touch of cruelty still curled round the painted lips.29The hours chimed past as he lay staring at the picture in sickened horror. Then he saw how cruel he had been to Sibyl. It was not too late. He wrote her a passionate letter begging her forgiveness, covering page after page with wild words of sorrow, and when it was finished he felt forgiven.30Lord Henry came knocking and Dorian let him in, eager to announce that he would marry Sibyl after all. Lord Henry took both his hands. His letter that morning had carried the news: Sibyl Vane had poisoned herself in her dressing room after the play. "Dead! Sibyl dead! It is not true!" Dorian cried.31As dusk crept in, Lord Henry calmly turned grief into art: the girl had never really lived, so she had never really died. "Don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane." Dorian felt relief. Left alone, he chose eternal youth and secret pleasures, letting the portrait bear his shame, and an hour later he was at the opera.32Next morning Basil Hallward hurried in, heartbroken, and found Dorian at breakfast sipping pale wine from Venetian glass, talking of Patti singing divinely. "You went to the opera while Sibyl Vane was lying dead?" Basil cried. Dorian answered that he could not repeat an emotion. He was a man now, and must be seen from an artistic point of view.33When Basil went to look at his portrait, Dorian leapt before the screen, white with terror: touch it, and their friendship was over. Basil, who wanted to show it in Paris, confessed he had once worshipped Dorian and feared the painting revealed it. Dorian smiled, safe for now. When Basil left, he resolved the picture must be hidden.34Dorian sent for the frame-maker and asked old Mrs. Leaf for the key of the schoolroom, which had stayed locked since his grandfather died. Alone again, he took a purple satin coverlet stiff with gold embroidery and went behind the screen. The gold hair and blue eyes were unchanged, but the mouth had grown cruel. His own soul seemed to be judging him, and he flung the pall over it.35Mr. Hubbard, the florid frame-maker of South Audley Street, and his rough young assistant puffed up the front staircase with the shrouded picture. At the top, Dorian unlocked the old schoolroom his grandfather had built to keep him out of sight. There stood the painted cassone he had hidden in as a boy, and every lonely moment of his childhood came back to him.36The picture was leaned against the wall, still shrouded. "Might one look at the work of art, sir?" asked Mr. Hubbard. Dorian started, keeping his eyes fixed on the man, ready to leap on him and throw him to the ground if he dared lift the hanging. "It would not interest you, Mr. Hubbard," he said.37Dorian locked the door and pocketed the key; no eye but his would ever see his shame. Downstairs he tore up a newspaper report of Sibyl's inquest, then opened the yellow book Lord Henry had sent. It was a poisonous book, and he read on until the sky turned copper-green and he could read no more, arriving at the club nearly an hour late.38For years Dorian could not free himself from the yellow book, and never tried to. Strange rumours about his life crept through the London clubs, yet his face stayed as fresh and young as the day Basil painted it. On Wednesday evenings he opened his beautiful house, and Lord Henry helped him choose the guests.39After his long, mysterious absences he would creep up to the locked room, draw back the purple-and-gold pall, and hold a mirror beside the portrait. The painted face grew older and coarser with every sin, while the face in the glass laughed back, young and fair. He placed his white hands beside the bloated painted ones, and smiled.40He went from passion to passion. He distilled heavy perfumes and gave strange concerts on instruments from dead nations. He spent whole days arranging his jewels, once wearing five hundred and sixty pearls to a costume ball, and filled cedar chests with tapestries and church vestments. Every treasure helped him forget, for a while, the thing upstairs.41Then, without warning, he would slip out at night under a false name and go down to dreadful places near the docks, staying for days until he was driven away. Soon whispers spread that he had been seen brawling with sailors. At his club, two gentlemen rose and walked out pointedly when he entered, and old friends began to avoid him.42In time he could not bear to be far from the picture. In the middle of a house party in Nottinghamshire he would suddenly leave his guests and rush back to London just to make sure the barred door had not been touched. What if someone stole it? Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.43On the foggy night of the ninth of November, the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, Dorian was walking home when a man with a bag hurried past him in the mist. It was Basil Hallward, leaving for Paris by the midnight train. A strange fear seized Dorian, but Basil caught his arm: "Dorian! What an extraordinary piece of luck!"44By the blazing library fire Basil spoke gravely of the dreadful things said in London: the young Guardsman who had killed himself, the friends ruined, Harry's sister Lady Gwendolen disgraced. "I wonder do I know you?" he said. "Before I could answer that, I should have to see your soul. But only God can do that."45With a bitter laugh Dorian snatched up the lamp. "You shall see it yourself, to-night!" Basil, who had missed his train, followed him up the dark staircase, both treading softly as men do at night, while the lamp threw fantastic shadows on the walls and a rising wind rattled the windows.46In the dusty, long-locked schoolroom Dorian tore the curtain from its rod. Basil cried out in horror. A leering, bloated face grinned from the canvas, still with some gold in the thinning hair and scarlet on the mouth. It was Dorian, and in the corner Basil's own name was signed in vermilion. "It is the face of my soul," said Dorian.47Basil sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands. "Pray, Dorian, pray," he begged. But as Dorian glanced at the picture, a hatred he could not control came over him, as if the grinning lips had whispered it. Something glimmered on the painted chest: a knife he had left there days before.48It was done quickly. Afterwards the room was utterly silent. The fog had blown away, the fallen candle lay cold on the threadbare carpet, and the figure at the table bent forward as if asleep. On the portrait's painted hand a small red stain had appeared, as though the canvas had sweated blood.49Dorian crept downstairs, locked Basil's bag and coat in a secret press in the library wall, then slipped out of his own front door and rang the bell. His drowsy valet Francis let him in. "Mr. Hallward called, sir. He stayed till eleven, and then went away to catch his train." "Oh! I am sorry I didn't see him."50The next morning Dorian dressed with more than his usual care, ate a long, calm breakfast and sent a note to Alan Campbell, a chemist who had once been his close friend. Campbell came, pale and cold. "I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray." Told of a dead man upstairs, he flatly refused to help.51When begging failed, Dorian wrote a few words on a sheet of paper and pushed it across the table. Campbell read it and turned ghastly white. "You leave me no alternative," Dorian murmured, his hand on Campbell's shoulder. Broken, Campbell sent for his chest of chemicals.52At the attic door Dorian saw that he had left the portrait uncovered. On one painted hand gleamed a wet red dew, as if the canvas had sweated blood. Without looking at the dead man, he flung the gold-and-purple hanging over the picture and fled. Hours later Campbell left, and only the smell of nitric acid remained.53That night Dorian glittered at Lady Narborough's dull dinner, eating nothing and drinking champagne while Lord Henry declared, "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love her." Asked where he had gone last night, Dorian stumbled over his answer. At home he burned Basil's coat and bag, opened a hidden box of green opium paste, and slipped out in plain clothes into the night.54A cold rain fell as Dorian's hansom rattled east through fog-choked slums toward the river. Lying back with his hat pulled low, he kept repeating Lord Henry's words: "To cure the soul by means of the senses." He meant to buy forgetfulness for Basil's murder in the opium dens by the docks.55In a squalid den by the quay, Dorian found Adrian Singleton, once his young friend, now a ruin whom no one would speak to. At the bar a painted woman pocketed Dorian's money, then jeered as he left: "Prince Charming is what you like to be called, ain't it?" Behind her, a sailor dozing at a table sprang up and rushed out after him.56Hurrying along the drizzling quay, Dorian cut through a dark archway. A hand seized his throat and slammed him against the wall, and a revolver clicked at his head. "You wrecked the life of Sibyl Vane," the sailor growled, "and Sibyl Vane was my sister." He was James Vane, and he had hunted 'Prince Charming' for years.57Dorian gasped one question: how long ago had his sister died? "Eighteen years," said James. With a flash of triumph, Dorian cried, "Set me under the lamp and look at my face!" In the wavering light James saw a lad of barely twenty. Horrified, he lowered the pistol and begged forgiveness, and Dorian walked calmly away.58As James stood trembling, the painted woman slid out of the shadows. "It's nigh on eighteen years since Prince Charming made me what I am," she hissed, swearing that he had sold himself to the devil for a pretty face and had hardly aged. James broke from her and ran to the corner, but Dorian Gray had vanished.59A week later Dorian sat at tea in the lamp-lit conservatory at Selby Royal with his guests. Lord Henry traded quick lines with his flirtatious cousin, the Duchess of Monmouth. "I give the truths of to-morrow," he said. "I prefer the mistakes of to-day," she answered, and when she asked Dorian whether he had found pleasure, he laughed: "Often. Too often."60Dorian went to fetch the duchess some orchids from the far end of the conservatory. Moments later the others heard a stifled groan and a heavy fall, and Lord Henry found him lying face down on the tiles in a deathlike swoon. Pressed against the dark glass like a white handkerchief, he had seen the face of James Vane watching him.61He forced himself down to dinner and was wildly, recklessly gay, but terror kept running through him. For days afterwards he hid in his room, shaking whenever the tapestry stirred, seeing the sailor's face whenever he shut his eyes, and remembering Basil. When Lord Henry came in at six one evening, he found him crying as if his heart would break.62On the third day the clear winter air brought back his courage, and he joined the shooting party. When a hare started up from the grass, Dorian cried, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey. Let it live." Sir Geoffrey laughed and fired into the alders. Two cries rang out, a hare's and a man's, and the beaters ran to the thicket.63That afternoon, while Dorian was making ready to flee to town, the head-keeper Thornton came to his room about the dead man. Dorian took up his chequebook to help the family, but Thornton said nobody knew who he was. "Seems like a sailor, sir," he said, "tattooed on both arms." The pen fell from Dorian's hand.64Dorian galloped through the dusk to the Home Farm, where the body lay on sacking in an empty stable by the light of one candle. He could not lift the handkerchief himself and ordered a farm-servant to do it. Then a cry of joy broke from him: the dead man was James Vane. He rode home with tears in his eyes, because he knew he was safe.65One May evening, over strawberries at Harry's table, Dorian said he meant to be good. He had spared Hetty, a village girl as lovely as Sibyl, and left her crying in her apple orchard. Harry smiled and called it vanity, then wondered if she was floating like Ophelia in a mill-pond. "You mock at everything," Dorian cried.66In the music room Dorian played Chopin, then asked what Harry would say if he confessed to murdering Basil. Harry laughed that all crime was vulgar and not in him at all. Later, lazily, he asked what it profits a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul. The music jarred. "The soul is a terrible reality," Dorian said.67Harry praised his unchanged youth and waved off Dorian's plea never to lend that yellow book again. Dorian agreed to ride with him in the morning. At the door he stopped, as if he had something more to say. Then he sighed and went out, and the confession never came.68On a warm May night Dorian strolled home with his coat over his arm. Two young men passed and whispered, “That is Dorian Gray,” and he found he was tired of his own name. James Vane lay in a nameless grave and Alan Campbell had shot himself. He was safe, he told himself, and wanted only a new life.69Alone in his library, he took up the carved mirror Lord Henry had given him years ago, framed in laughing white Cupids. He loathed the lovely face in it. It was his beauty that had ruined him, he thought, and he flung the mirror down and crushed it into silver splinters beneath his heel.70Hoping his good deed had softened the portrait, he crept upstairs with the lamp and dragged the purple hanging away. A cry broke from him. The face was worse: cunning in the eyes, a hypocrite's sneer on the mouth, and the red stain spreading over the wrinkled fingers. His goodness, he saw, had been only vanity.71The picture was the last evidence against him, and it had been like a conscience. He saw the knife that had killed Basil Hallward, cleaned many times until it shone. As it had killed the painter, so it would kill the painter's work, and he would be free. He seized it and stabbed the canvas.72A terrible cry woke the house. Francis and two other servants found the door locked, so they climbed onto the roof and dropped to the balcony. On the wall hung their master as they remembered him, young and beautiful. On the floor lay a withered old man in evening dress, a knife in his heart. Only his rings told them who he was.
Adapted from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, public domain. Pictures are AI illustrations drawn for this edition.
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