The Picture Of Dorian Gray

 

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 terry 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 detined to fade!...