The Picture of Dorian GrayWersja dostosowana do wieku

The day the book about Dorian Gray came out in book form, it lay in the hand like something cool and slightly foreign. The cover was rough grey, the color of cigarette ash. The spine was in light parchment, and over it gleamed gold letters and small patterns drawn by Charles Ricketts. For those who wanted something even finer, there was a special edition with more elaborate gold embossing, only 250 copies, each signed.

The author had said the story would cause a stir. He was right. The story had first appeared on a hundred pages in a monthly magazine, but now it was being judged as if it were a great masterpiece.

The newspapers cut and clipped, stood on tiptoe and whispered. The author, who liked to write sparkling letters, said he had received over two hundred reviews. He answered only three of them out loud. But in his thoughts he carried far more replies, and they later flowed out into a longer essay about art and society, where he said how he thought things ought to be.

He wrote that a work of art was the unique result of a unique temperament. The beauty in a work comes from the creator being who he is. And the day an artist begins to ask what others want, and tries to give it to them, that day he ceases to be an artist. He thought it was rude, even insolent, that the public—which in practice was represented by the journalist—should lecture the artist about art.

In this country, he said, it was the arts that the public did not care about that had survived best from what he called brutal and persistent attempts to control the one who creates. He used poetry as an example: we could have great poetry precisely because most people did not read it, and therefore could not interfere.

But the novel and the theater, which many cared about, had suffered. The result was, he thought, ridiculous: nowhere was such bad prose written, such tired work in novel form. Trying to write for the popular taste was both too easy and too difficult. Too easy, because the demands for plot, style and psychology could be met by almost anyone. Too difficult, because the artist then had to do violence to his own mind—not write for joy, but to amuse the half-educated, and therefore had to let go of the individual, forget cultivation, extinguish style and give up everything that was valuable.

The one thing people really did not like was the new. Every time someone expanded what art could be about, they became angry and afraid, and then they took out two words: "unintelligible" and "immoral." When they said "unintelligible," they meant: here is something beautiful that is new. When they said "immoral," they meant: here is something beautiful that is true. The words were used vaguely, like cobblestones thrown by an angry mob.

He claimed that no real poet or prose writer of the nineteenth century had escaped being stamped as "immoral" by the British public.

The artist was not frightened. The true artist believed in himself, for he was himself. And if an artist in England created a work that was immediately praised in the press for being completely understandable and very moral, he would himself begin to doubt whether he had even been himself in the work and whether the work was therefore unworthy.

He also turned to three words critics liked to use about what they did not understand: "exotic," "unhealthy" and "morbid." He said: It is the people who are morbid. The artist never is. "Exotic" was for him merely the rage of the fungus against the orchid—the fragile, beautiful thing that lives long while the moss around it rots. And what the public called an "unhealthy" novel was always a beautiful and healthy work of art.

Then, one June day in 1890, the St. James's Gazette printed an unsigned review. It had the headline "A Study in Puppydom." The writer began by reminding that in the 1870s people had talked about this author. In the 1880s he had tried poetry, the public had tried to read it, and then everyone had forgotten him or only remembered him as the deceased editor of a women's magazine—a role the reviewer thought he was particularly unsuited for, judging by the text he had had printed in Lippincott's Magazine and which now a large publishing house was not ashamed to spread in Great Britain.

The reviewer said that he, in order not to offend decent noses and because he was not curious about filth, would not go into the story. That would only be to advertise it. Perhaps the authorities or a vigilance society would care to take legal action, but he hoped they would not. The great question was how a young man with decent abilities, who at university had had the chance to associate with gentlemen, could put his name to such a stupid and vulgar work.

He advised everyone: do not read the book hoping for wit and clever ideas. The writer, he said, waved cheap learning borrowed from French decadent authors, like a drooling schoolmaster, and plagued the reader with dry tirades about the beauty of the body and the decay of the soul.

The reviewer divided the book's young men into puppies. Puppy number one was the painter who painted Dorian Gray. Puppy number two was the critic, a polite lord who knew everything and was bored with everything. Puppy number three was the original himself, attended by puppy number one in a "romantic friendship." The puppies talked.

One about his art. One about his sins and pleasures. One about himself and his face, "brainless and beautiful." They picked daisies, drank something with strawberries in it, and made sure the sun did not ruin their skin.

The youngest made a pretty little grimace when he was called disobedient.

The reviewer even quoted the warnings puppy number two read to the beautiful boy: the gods had been good, but time was jealous, lilies and roses would wither from his cheeks. Everything was like Horace, he thought; always useful to have a classical education, and it would surely impress the Americans.

In the reviewer's version, what was said in the studio was this: The painter said he admired the young man, and the young man answered sourly that he was worth less than an ivory god or a silver faun on a shelf. Such things the painter would always like, but how long would he like the human being? Until the first wrinkle, perhaps. Then the thought lit up: If only it were the other way around!

If the picture could bear what I must bear, and I could remain as I am!

The reviewer scoffed: Other writers could have made that beautiful, romantic, amusing. But that this man, he said, made it boring and disgusting—that was a feat. The promising young man in the story would, after these pages, plunge into simple and cheap perversity, end up being cut off by both fast women and bad men, and finally commit murder.

The new thing with some critics was apparently that everything had to end in blood—it was a fashion. The picture grew uglier with every ugly act, but the original's face remained calm. That was how the novel told the story, he thought, and it was done lamely.

Why was it written? Not to give pleasure, because it was clumsy and stupid.

Perhaps to shock, so people would say "ugh!" and talk. Perhaps to be noticed, whatever the cost. Or was it because the author enjoyed writing about disgusting material? He compared the "frank heathen" who likes dirt, with the puritan who is crazy for purity. Both loved filth, and both should be thrown on the fire—not because they were dangerous, but because they were incurably stupid.

The author answered calmly the next day. He wrote to the editor that he had read the criticism and would not discuss the story's merits and faults. He said the country was free, and ordinary English criticism was quite free and easy. But one thing he did not understand: how a work of art could be criticized morally. Art and ethics were two spheres, he said, completely separate.

When they were confused, what we got was something resembling the old woman who always stuck her nose in other people's business—the only original joke the middle class had ever created.

What he disliked most, however, was that the newspaper had put up posters all over town with large letters: "MR. OSCAR WILDE'S LATEST ADVERTISEMENT: A BAD CASE." Was "A Bad Case" his book, or was it the government's situation?

He could not know. But the word "advertisement" was both stupid and unnecessary. He said it without vanity, though he would not scold vanity: of all men in England, he was the one who needed advertising least. He was tired of being advertised all the time. He got no thrilling happiness from seeing his name in a newspaper.

He had written for his own pleasure. He did not care whether the book became popular. What was really advertisement, he said, was the newspaper's cunning article. The English masses never cared about a work of art until they were told it was immoral. Their article, he wrote, would probably increase sales of the magazine. It was only a pity he had no share in it.

The editor answered with a tone that both bit and smiled. In the column next to it, he said, was the best answer the author could give to the criticism of his "sugary and nauseating" story. The author thought one could not judge a work morally; they were completely aware of the difference between ethics and aesthetics, and therefore they had used most of their space to say that the book was boring and stupid.

The author pretended they had advertised it; they had, if anyone was tempted by a book they had just warned against for being unbearable.

The story was corrupt, but not dangerous, because it was so slow and foolish. The author wrote that he had written for his own pleasure. The editor congratulated him: there was apparently no greater triumph for an aesthete than to discover a pleasure that outsiders could neither share nor understand. And the author of Dorian Gray was, he said, the only one who would find pleasure in that book.

The author answered again the next day. He said that yesterday's letter was not his best answer. Now he had to say that the article was the most unfair attack on a writer in many years. The person who had written it was so full of ill will that he could barely hide it. He seemed completely without any idea of what state of mind one should approach a work of art with.

To say that a book should be "thrown on the fire"—that was foolish; that was what you did with newspapers. He had already said what he thought about false ethics as criticism, but since the critic had now strayed onto literary ground, he would say a few words about the method.

The reviewer began by hacking away with violent eagerness, because the main characters in the story were puppies.

They were puppies. Did he really think literature was going downhill when Thackeray wrote about puppyhood? The author thought puppies were very interesting, both artistically and psychologically. They were much more interesting than proper young ladies and gentlemen, and he had thought that Lord Henry Wotton was an excellent counterweight to the boring ideals in the half-theological novels he saw around him.

Then the critic hinted at something nasty about grammar and learning. The author answered: In prose, correctness must always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical rhythm. If there were peculiarities in the syntax of Dorian Gray, they were put there intentionally to show the value of a particular artistic view. The critic gave no examples, and the author doubted that anything like that existed in the book.

When it came to learning, it was always difficult—even for the most modest—to remember that others did not know as much as oneself. Could a casual reference to Suetonius or Petronius really be interpreted as an attempt to frighten an innocent and poorly educated public with superior knowledge?

He would think that the most ordinary student was familiar with the Lives of the Caesars and the Satyricon.

He further explained that the critic had written that the characters in the story had no counterparts in life, that they were "casual revelations of the non-existent." Exactly! If they existed close at hand, they were not worth writing about. The artist's task is to invent, not to refer. Life, he said, with its raw realism, always destroys art's subject. The higher pleasure in literature is to realize what does not exist.

Finally he added that the newspaper had taken Shakespeare's comedy and turned it into journalism, and in that process destroyed it. It hurt the people. When such a high authority cried out that this was an evil book that should be crushed by the authorities, the public would flock to read it. And then they would find that it was a story with a moral.

The moral was: all excess, as well as all renunciation, carries its own punishment. The painter Basil Hallward, who worshipped the physical too much, died by the hand of the one he had given a sick vanity.

Dorian Gray, who had lived only for feelings and pleasure, tried to kill his conscience—and killed himself. Lord Henry Wotton wanted only to be a spectator of life.

He found that those who refrain from the fight are wounded more deeply than those who fight. Yes, there was a terrible moral in Dorian Gray, he said, a moral that the prudes would not see, but that everyone with a healthy mind would find. Was this an artistic fault? He was afraid so. It was the only fault in the book.

The editor answered, with a new blend of irony and seriousness. He could understand that the author was angry about their descriptions of "The Three Puppies and the Magic Picture," but he asked not to be misunderstood. They had certainly not suggested that the book should be prosecuted by the authorities, even though legal action had been taken against books with far less dubious content. They had said they hoped it would be left alone.

The author had, like a young lady with her first novel printed at friends' urging, brought forward "personal ill will" as an explanation for the criticism. This was unusual from such an experienced literary gentleman. They had no personal envy.

They could well rebuke a work they thought was stupid and offensive without being called malicious—especially when it was written by someone who could clearly do better. As for the literary side, they stated: the author said the book was moral because the evil die.

They would not be rude and quote what Mr. Charles Surface had said to Mr. Joseph Surface. They contented themselves with saying that any critic had the right to point out that something was boring and weak in its treatment. Such was Dorian Gray, they thought. The dryness and weakness were not saved by the book constantly hinting—not weakly—at disgusting sins and abominable crimes.

The author wrote once more. When the newspaper continued, though more softly, its attacks, they gave him the right and duty to answer. He said they had not suggested, but insinuated, that the authorities should intervene. When they wrote that they did not know whether a case would be brought, and added that authors of far milder books had experienced prosecution, then the suggestion hung in the air.

More important, however, was that a newspaper of their weight pretended there was a reasonable ground for authorities to control the imagination—to introduce censorship over literature. Such thoughts were monstrous. He and all writers he knew protested. Every critic who thought this reasonable showed that he was incapable of understanding what literature is, and what the artist's rights are.

In the third and final answer in the same matter, the author went a step deeper. He said that if he himself were to criticize his book, he would say that it was overcrowded with sensation and too paradoxical in style, especially in the dialogues. But boring it was not. Those who called it that might acquit themselves of ill will, but condemned themselves for something worse: lack of literary instinct.

He sighed over the general cultural picture in the country. Had he been French, no critic with self-respect would have criticized from an ethical standpoint.

If one did, he would make himself dumber in the eyes of his own readers and writers. He reminded the editor of the newspapers' own attacks on puritanism; it was never more destructive than when it interfered with art.

Instead of encouraging such things, the newspaper should teach its critics to distinguish between art and life. He refused any attempt to limit what art could deal with. Limitation belonged to action. To art belonged everything that is, and everything that is not. Not even an editor in London had the right to bind that freedom.

Then a new voice came. A "London editor" pointed out in the same newspaper something else: the claim that the author did not need advertising did not fit with his friends and publishers having sent out a postcard to editorial offices across the city—a boastful text that called the novel "strong, strange, picture-beautiful, mighty, tragic, cruel, complete, phenomenal, brilliant and remarkable."

That was not bad—for being "against advertising." The author answered quickly again, with words carefully weighed. He had not known anything like that was sent out. He had written to the agents, the publishers Ward and Lock, to ask them to withdraw it.

No, he thought publishers should never express an opinion about the value of what they publish.

That was the critic's business. He added that the only thing that ever prejudiced him against a book was lack of literary style. But he understood that an ordinary critic would be irritated by a premature and unnecessary eulogy from the publisher. The publisher was only an intermediary. It was not his task to anticipate the verdict.

He could not resist poking a little, too. The letter-writer had said that the word "complete," used about a story, was pure "puff jargon." Here, he said, the letter-writer exaggerated. What was important was that his story was not a "novelette." Such a word did not exist in English.

It was only slang from Fleet Street. He also thanked the editor for asking him to say what kind of rights literature thought it had.

The question was strange for such a newspaper. Literature's rights, he answered, are the rights of the intellect. He recalled a sentence by Renan: he would rather live under a military dictatorship than under the church's—because the first only limits action, the latter thought itself. "You say a work of art is a form of action: It is not. It is the highest form of thought," he wrote.

The world around them also answered. The Daily Chronicle called the month's issue of the magazine painfully boring and dirty, and said it was the author's story that was unclean. It was "hatched in the leprous French decadent literature," a poisonous book, heavy with raw, stinking spirits from a moral corpse. It was, they wrote, a gluttonous study in mental and physical decay, laid on a young, radiant, golden man.

It could have been both terrible and fascinating, if not for the effeminate lightness, the learned false truths, the theatrical cynicism, the foolish mysticism and the painted surface of cheap learning.

Here was a book that, in their opinion, taught that when you feel too angelic, you should hurry out and make yourself an animal. For one of the characters says: "Nothing can cure the soul except the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses except the soul." According to their reading, the book was a mockery of all warm impulses in human nature, a kind of breakdown of the barriers that civilization, art and religion have built between man and animal.

The author answered this newspaper as well. He said a mysterious advertisement he kept seeing asked him to "vamp up" something. He did not know what "to vamp" meant, and did not wish to enter into the language of the journals. The real difficulty in writing his story had been to keep an all-too-obvious moral down, so it did not take over the artistic.

The idea of a young man who gave his soul for eternal youth was old, but he had given it new form, and it was artistically difficult to let the moral remain subordinate.

He thought it was too obvious and hoped to correct this when the book came out in a new version as a complete volume. What then was the moral?

Not what the newspaper attributed to him. The real moral, he said, was that all excess, as much as all renunciation, gets its punishment. This law was not set up as a general principle in the book. It was dramatically attached to the individual people in the story.

He also rejected that Dorian Gray was cold and calculating. No, he was impulsive, romantic, and his whole life haunted by an excessive conscience that troubled his pleasures and reminded him that youth and pleasure were not everything. That he finally destroyed the picture was not because he was inconsistent, but because he finally wanted to get rid of the conscience that had followed him all those years.

In trying to kill his conscience, he killed himself. He also refuted that the story dripped with learning. The book references—Petronius' Satyricon, Gautier's Emaux et Camées—were known to any reasonably educated reader. Le Conso's Clericalis Disciplina and such were mere curiosities, and it was fine not to know them.

He also added something about the colors that had come from the aesthetic movement: strange, subtle hues, almost mystical in tone. They were a reaction against clumsy primary colors in a surely respectable but less cultivated time. His story was an essay in decorative art, he said, a reaction against raw realism. "It is poisonous, if you will, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect. And it is perfection we artists strive for."

Worse than any review was perhaps the attack in the Scots Observer. There it said that the story was false art, false to human nature, false to morality, and should be left to the police criminal investigation or a closed court session. They asked him directly: If he could only write for exiled noblemen and perverted telegraph boys, he should rather sew clothes, for his own and the public's sake.

The author answered measuredly but firmly. The same people had admitted that the text bore the mark of a man with brain, art and style, yet still claimed he wrote for the most depraved and illiterate. He said that such groups almost never read anything but newspapers, and would hardly understand anything of his.

Why does a writer write at all?

For the joy of creating. The artist works with his eye on the object, nothing else interests him. He is indifferent to others. He wrote because it gave him the greatest artistic pleasure. If the work pleased a few, he was satisfied.

If not, it did not make him suffer. He did not want to be a popular novelist. That was far too easy. The critic, however, committed an unforgivable crime: to confuse the artist with his material. For that there was no excuse.

The author leaned in one of his letters on Keats, who had said that Shakespeare took as much joy in imagining the evil Iago as the pure Imogen. Such are the conditions for any artist: he stands at a distance from his material, creates it, observes it. The further away the material is, the more freely he can work. A reviewer had said that the author did not make it clear whether he preferred virtue or vice.

But an artist, said the author, has no moral sympathies. Virtue and vice are for him what colors are on the painter's palette—no more, no less. He sees that they can be used for certain effects, and he uses them.

To keep his own story tight, he had to put in an atmosphere of moral depravity around Dorian Gray. Otherwise the story would be without meaning and the plot without outcome.

To keep this clear, he had kept the depravity itself vague, unclear—and let the moral signs be seen through the effect: the painted face that grew ugly, and the hidden features that became more disgusting with each page, while the living face remained beautiful. The true moral of Dorian Gray, he wrote, was that whoever wastes his life in raw sensuality will suffer, just as surely as whoever wastes it in sentimentality.

In the week that followed, the newspaper also printed a small editorial note. They defended the reviewer's right to find the atmosphere of the book unbearable, even if the artist had succeeded in creating it. It was a slightly cold sentence, but it showed the direction. Other voices joined in. A letter-writer thought the author must be hurting when the leading Christian newspapers now praised him for having written a moral book.

The author answered that such praise did not hurt him.

If a work was rich and lively, right and complete, some with a sense for art would see its beauty. Others, who were more receptive to ethics than aesthetics, would see its morality. It would fill the cowardly with terror, and make the unclean embarrassed. It is the spectator, not life, that art mirrors, he wrote. The critics who saw a moral message were really reading their own minds. Those who saw sins no one could name saw first and foremost themselves.

The correspondence continued for a few weeks. Then the author wrote again, now more tired. He said he could not participate in a new round dance in the newspapers about art. He did not even know what qualifications some people had to speak about such an important topic. But he used the occasion to correct one thing: it had been said that it must have hurt him that a part of the public attributed a lot of morality to his story.

That was not true. He liked that the ethical beauty of a work was seen, simply because it existed. He reminded of Flaubert. The author of Madame Bovary and Salammbô had been right to teach those who called the one "immoral" and the other "inaccurate." Not only right in the ordinary sense, but artistically right—and that was everything. The critic must educate the public. The artist must educate the critic.

He added something more personal. Of two hundred and sixteen printed voices about Dorian Gray, he had taken public notice of three. One was that in the Scots Observer, because it made claims about his intention that had to be corrected. The second was the article in the St. James's Gazette, which was so offensively written that it deserved quick and sharp reprimand.

The third was the mild attack in the Daily Chronicle.

That letter was written out of pure defiance. He did not quite remember what they had said—perhaps that Dorian Gray was "poisonous." It suited him, he said, to remind them with alliteration: poisonous or not, the book was at least perfect. The rest he had left alone. He had not even read half of them. It was sad, but one grows tired even of praise.

Meanwhile, others wrote about the story itself, as if it were a mirror that could be moved and angled. Light, a magazine for the occult and mystical, saw in the book a strange new figure that would capture attention much like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde did—but with a more lasting and good effect. They called the story a deep psychological study along entirely new paths, written by someone who had hunted for sensual beauty and drunk deeply from that well.

But what a spiritual lesson had been drawn out! Dorian was a modern Narcissus, bewitched by his own beautiful face, lured toward an abyss of sensual pleasure, and from there to an even deeper sewer of criminality.

He was first introduced as an innocent, slightly feminine youth with unusual beauty. Then his eyes were opened to his own charm—and to a reflection that began to get dirty from words whispered by a cynic.

The author showed, they thought, how the "animal soul" in him grew, seeking only its own pleasure. The quiet, little voice of the higher was smothered. It was traded for a tickle of the heart that lasted briefly and wanted more. And the author showed all this through a trick that gave an outward picture of the inner transformation: the painting that grew uglier with every dirty deed.

Dorian kept his youth.

But the picture became rotten. It went from a small shadow at the corner of the mouth, to heavy, slack features in cheeks and eyes. At first he was terrified. Then he got used to it. He began to bring out the canvas after new excesses to see the "update."

He became more and more in love with his own beauty, and more occupied with his own soul's corrosion. Never, they thought, did he truly repent. The picture, hidden behind a red cloth in a locked chamber up under the roof, cast a spell over him.

Many came near him and were fascinated—to their harm. He destroyed not only women who could have lived well.

He also destroyed young, real men who could have kept a clean course. With his beautiful body, which walked around the world innocent in appearance, he murdered souls in secret. It all came from a seed that fell from a friend's tongue—a man who himself made no visible mistakes, but who gladly smeared other souls with poison. "The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it," this gentleman said.

As wise as wrapping oneself trustingly in a boa constrictor, thought Light. Dorian followed the advice carefully, and the temptation only grew stronger. The author even let a book poison him. "He was poisoned by a book," it said. Sometimes Dorian saw evil actions as a way to realize beauty.

Others chose a strict tone. Punch, which loved to be witty, called the book the author's wildest and most "authorish." They recommended reading it in one long stretch past midnight if one could stand it. Those who were weaker should take it in small drops in daylight, they thought. Dorian represented the soul, and the soul went into the desert.

In the end it became a "devil-baked soul," they wrote. "So Dorian stuck a knife into it, as any ordinary mortal could have done." When he lay dead and terrible on the floor, the picture was beautiful again. Had the author intended an allegory?

The ending, they said, was completely off the mark.

Did it mean that suicide cleanses? Perhaps he had meant nothing at all, only excitement, or to show how easy it was to frighten respectable Mrs. Grundy with a ghost. "There is more poison than perfection in Dorian Gray," they sighed, and added that the idea itself was good. Nathaniel Hawthorne, they said, could have done it splendidly.

The author here had chosen a sensual and decorative style, learned from Mademoiselle de Maupin, but without Gautier's strength he had wasted a good seed with clumsy handling. The decoration was applied with a trowel.

The love of antique objects and catalogs made it all feel like a museum tour. They thought that truer art would have avoided both the glittering buds on the style's tree and the stench in the soul's cellar.

At the same time they leaned back and spoke about the times: man was again seeking the mysterious after a flood of realism. From old legends via Scheherazade's stories to Stevenson, Crawford and Haggard, people had always liked the impossible. Perhaps our time was coarse and material, but also hungry for the spiritual. Within this pattern, this novel also belonged.

Another critic, Anne H. Wharton, pointed to the same thing: The author had entered the field where impossible stories live, side by side with Balzac, Faust and John Inglesant. The book had the advantage that it managed to make the impossible probable, by being a symbolic truth about the soul. She would perhaps not call it as dramatically successful as Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but she noticed that the characters in this story lived richer, were happier in their brighter moments. Where Stevenson's figures sometimes seemed strictly unhappy, in this story there were sunnier corners, gardens with golden laburnum in June, clematis that scattered like stars in purple over walls, moons that poured silver and suns that poured gold—until sin touched everything.

She even quoted Lord Henry, who said about his wife's absence: "The man my wife ran away with played Chopin wonderfully. Poor Victoria! I was very fond of her. The house is quite lonely without her." Such things were sardonic, but also amusing. And above it all stood the main achievement: despite everything, the supernatural seemed plausible.

Several described the plot itself like this: Dorian Gray was a radiantly beautiful young man. A painter, Basil Hallward, fell in love with him in the way artists fall in love with what gives them a new view. Basil painted and painted. Never had he painted so well. A friend, Lord Henry Wotton, met Dorian and also saw the radiant youth.

But where Basil wanted to shield and keep him pure, Henry spoke differently. He gave a speech—almost like a sermon. Youth, he said, is the golden thing. Youth never comes again.

In youth, the senses are divinely strong.

Let them be enjoyed without restraint. Virtue was often only cowardice. People were too stupid or shy to seize the gifts of the morning of life. Before they knew it, the morning was over. Dorian, who was without equal in beauty, must lift himself above caution. He must follow every natural impulse. The tragedy of old age was not old age, but that one was still young in longings and regrets. He must live so that when dusk came, he could say he had tasted everything.

The words struck Dorian. He became aware of both the value and the transience of what he had taken for granted. He looked at the portrait the painter had just finished. It was his youth, captured and made eternal. Then he made a mad prayer: that it might be the picture and not he that grew old; that it might take the punishment for his future faults.

The prayer was answered. From then on, the picture showed his soul's fall, while his face remained impossibly young. At first he was frightened. Then he got used to it. He locked the picture in a chamber upstairs in the house, shielded it with a heavy curtain, and went to it in secret.

No one else knew. He was alone with his secret, as with a murder he could not name. For every evil act, a new shadow appeared in the portrait. Once he saw the lips become slightly reddish and heavy. Later he saw bitterness in the eyes. He began to play with it, sought new ways of being—not because he liked everything, but to gather experiences, like a collector after the thrill of the hunt, and throw them away again.

The story ate its way out of hiding completely without his face revealing anything. Rumors began to circulate. A gentlemen's club in the west turned its back on him, some voted him out. When he walked into a smoking room at the Carlton, the Duke of Berwick and another man rose markedly and left the room. The man who had always had an open smile and free, youthful charm answered with the same warmth—as if smiles could smooth over rumors. He was rich, always friendly in company, with a calm, ingratiating voice. But none of it stopped the whispering.

The day the painter discovered the truth, he was shocked to the core. He had been strict with Dorian before, asked him to turn back. Now he saw what his friend's life had become. He dared to say it aloud. And the beautiful model, who had once posed with innocence on his brow, unleashed something entirely different.

In a room where the light stood high and cold, he did something that cannot be attacked with words.

He killed the painter—he who had loved him most purely, he who had given him the picture. Afterward he was calmer than before. He got the practical matters cleared away with cold cleverness: an old acquaintance, who knew a bit too much chemistry, was lured into something he did not understand the scope of, and in a hidden place everything was dissolved in dark liquids.

But the night did not disappear for that reason. There were still a couple of situations when something soft in him stirred. He spared a life. He dreamed of starting anew. Perhaps he could do one good deed, he thought, and see it as a first step.

He went up to the room under the roof again, late in the evening with wind in the windows. He expected to see a hint of lightening on the canvas. Perhaps a taste of forgiveness? He saw only something more hideous than ever. The contempt in the corners of the mouth had become coarser.

The boy's gaze, once radiant, was now dull and suspicious. In a stinking mixture of disgust and fear, he grabbed the knife, he who no longer had control over what was inside him. He drove the blade into the picture, cut it up. The cut. And in that moment he fell dead. The picture regained the beautiful figure it had had the day Basil put the last stroke. On the floor lay an unrecognizable, ugly old man—with the knife in his heart. The servants recognized him only by his ring.

Many a reader wondered: Was this atonement? Was this just a shock? Some, like Punch, complained that the ending was "wrong," that allegories do not work that way. Others thought it was no allegory. It was a story. It told that wounds do not disappear because one does one soft thing in one moment. And that destroying what one hates in oneself with violence is to turn the weapon inward.

The strict Athenæum wrote that the author's paradoxes could be entertaining in company, but grew tiresome when they rolled out too often. The text, they said, was "unmanly, nauseating, shameful," even if it was not directly indecent—and it was boring. The Speaker saw a strong idea, almost perfect in its core, but thought the author lacked precision in descriptions. It was as if the strokes were too dainty, too many small strips of paint, and thus lost power.

They compared it with Dr.

Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and asked him to read how Stevenson with a few clear glances set a whole mood. At the same time, they pointed to passages in the author's last chapter that were immediately strong, where a simple sentence carried great weight: "The park is quite lovely now. I don't think there have been such lilacs since the year I met you." Such small things, placed rightly, were what showed a writer's way to something greater, they thought.

Julian Hawthorne, another voice, said that the book differed from ordinary English novels. It did not have the usual heroes and heroines of different stations, malicious minor characters and Sunday advice in rectories. The author was original and daring. The book would be noticed regardless. It had color. It had conversations full of wit. Lord Henry was an elegant devil, a Mephistopheles with silk ribbons, who covered vice with politeness. He was the best-written figure in the book, even if he was not new as a type. Dorian was almost new. He just did not quite solidify. He never became entirely real, thought Hawthorne—the portrait was more real than the man.

Walter Pater, who could write about art as if it were conversation, also had his say. He saw in the author's form something of an excellent talker: the dialogues lived. There was here a warm and playful sense of life, a companionship that almost canceled out the crudeness of the paradoxes. The author's critical essays—like "The Decay of Lying"—were almost unique in how they could be half joke, full conviction.

Alongside them came a novel where one could measure theory against practice. The author protested against realism.

Life followed, he thought, art when life was awake. In the novel he mostly kept to his aesthetic program, but let glimpses of the ordinary slip in: a low theater, love and sorrow in people without fine polish. He managed it well.

He tried to present a tender, careful epicureanism, Pater thought, but stumbled a little. To lose the moral sense was to become less organized. And yet—as a story, partly supernatural, the book was artistically very successful. Epicurean refinements were only decoration around a center, like exotic flowers around a central figure.

All the pleasant detail, Pater said, had the effect of "better realism": it lifted the supernatural, almost like Poe, but with a grace Poe never reached.

He added that the author could hardly mean that Lord Henry was a true master of the doctrine of pleasure, any more than Dorian's miserable end could be an ideal. The painter Hallward, with his ability to idealize, was closer to a real goal for those who want to live well: He secured sensations, gentle memories and hope in a way Dorian wasted away.

Still, it was all extremely well told.

Pater quoted a sentence from the painter: "I sometimes think that only two moments are important in the history of the world: when a new medium for art arises, and when a new personality for art arises. Antinous was such for late sculpture. Dorian Gray's face will one day be that for me." Pater saw a naked moral line under all the decoration: vice and crime make people coarse and ugly.

Then came a trial where the book was brought up as a kind of evidence, because a lord had written a card with a crude claim about the author's life. In the first round, the author's lawyer asked the jury to hear the story like this: a youth lives a bad life without his face showing it. A picture, painted by a friend, takes the punishment.

Finally the youth stabs the picture and dies—the sign finally appears in his own face. Was that evidence of any scandal at all? The book had been on shop shelves for five years. The lawyer expected that the other side would find few lines in it that went further than novels had to in describing life's passions and fashion.

The other side's man put the author on the witness stand with questions that cut. "Is there such a thing as an immoral book?" he asked. "No," answered the author. "Books are well written or badly written.

That is all." "So, no matter how immoral it is, if it is well written, it is a good book?" pressed the lawyer. "Yes, if it is written in such a way that it creates a sense of beauty. If it is badly written, it creates only disgust."

The lawyer read out the book's preface. The author said it expressed his view. He also said that "no work of art puts forward views; views belong to people who are not artists."

When the lawyer called a passage in the book a description of "feelings from one man to another" and asked if it was "right or wrong," the author replied that it was "the most perfect description" of how an artist feels when he meets a beautiful personality that becomes necessary in his life and art.

"Have you ever loved a young man in that way?" was the next. "Not 'madly,'" he said, "I prefer 'love.'" When the lawyer tried to drag him down to "level," the author smiled two words he knew would make the room roar: "I have never given worship to anyone except myself."

During the proceedings, the other side also wanted to point out the book that had poisoned Dorian—A Rebours by Huysmans. The author refused to be cross-examined on another man's work. The judge stopped the attempt. The outcome of the first round was inconclusive; the jury could not agree. In the next round, his books were not mentioned. The judge in the first summing-up had, by the way, said something wise: "Judge no man by his books," the lawyer quoted Coleridge. The judge preferred to say: "Do not confuse a man with the characters he creates." That a novelist puts disgusting sentences in the mouth of a villain does not mean he shares them.

In another newspaper, The Star, the author Robert Buchanan wrote in defense. He asked whether those who cried "pagan shamelessness" really believed that the author's paradoxes were a serious attack on morality. Two thirds of his work was irony, Buchanan thought. It was only because people had been told that the author was "evil" that they now read everything as evil. Dorian Gray, he said, was at bottom a moral work, because it showed what selfish pleasure and sensuality do to a beautiful soul. It was useless to discuss this with those who were colorblind. A little knowledge of literature—or a little gentleness—would have been good.

Meanwhile, the book lived its own life. The first version, printed in Lippincott's Magazine in 1890, had thirteen chapters. Later the chapters were rearranged into twenty. The author added a preface, a handful of short sentences that said things like "there is no moral or immorality in books." He had also removed some passages.

Among other things, the painter in the magazine version had said more directly how he "worshipped" Dorian and "longed" for him. This was tightened. A sweet, old-fashioned housekeeper who called him "Master Dorian" and thought foreigners did not understand jam (they called it "compote") appears in the first version, with a bunch of keys and a little scene about a room up under the roof.

A sentence or two were retouched. These were small administrative things in a large text, but they also told of fine-tuning after feedback—and of an author who listened to a teacher like Pater and toned down what a few might misunderstand.

Much happened with the book also in print shops around the world. A version in America bore other names on its spine; some were called the Savoy Series, some the Seaside Library. A private printing slipped out in a small circle. In Paris, the rights were later bought by a new publisher, who decorated the edition with illustrations and had it printed in French with enticing titles.

It went into German translation in Leipzig and Minden. It was put into Swedish in Stockholm, into Russian in Moscow, into Dutch in Amsterdam, into Polish in Warsaw, into Italian in Milan and Palermo—and more. There was a feeling that this story, sharp and round at the same time, could not be stopped on an island.

After the storm had raged and calmed, there was again room to hear the author's own voice softly. He could be lazy, he said about himself, and liked it. "Cultured idleness" he called it. He did not like newspaper disputes. If he had been involved in many, he had actually only answered three in writing.

The rest he looked for in the waste bin and gave a quiet grave. He also laughed a little in secret at an idea he got over a wine bottle with a friend: that the editor of one of the newspapers might have written all the angry letters to himself, as a kind of puppet theater.

Perhaps it was true. Perhaps he had put on different masks and pulled the strings to show the middle class and "northern seriousness" as he saw it.

"If that is so, I congratulate him," wrote the author. "He has captured lack of style, which suits such a play. I was fooled. I bear no grudge. The comedy is over when the secret is out.

Drop the curtain, and put the puppets to bed. The shelf is the right place for them. Set them there for a while.

You can take them out again later and entertain us. They do their tricks well. And if they are a little unreal, I am not the one to complain about unreality in art. The only thing I do not understand is why you gave the marionettes such strange and improbable names."

Behind all this lay a nerve that almost all the texts touched, even those that disliked the book: the relationship between art and morality. When someone asked the author to choose, he almost always answered: Art's task is not to preach. It is to create beauty. It does not create by calculating what "helps" or "harms." It is in itself, like the butterfly in its flight. He did not say everything works out neatly. He said art and ethics were different worlds. He begged that they not be confused. He called art the highest form of thought. And he said it mirrors the spectator, not life.

Therefore the images remain: a canvas that takes on everything a face lets go. A young smile that does not lose its shine, until the knife slides the wrong way. A painter who wanted to capture something he could not own. A friend who pointed to a new hedonism, where the only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.

And a daring author who wrote that perhaps his text was "poisonous"—but that it was also "perfect."

Those who read and grimaced said there was more poison than perfection. Those who read and laughed a little quietly perhaps saw that they themselves stood in the mirror. Those who read and thought perhaps saw that the moral lay there, shy but clear: All excess and all renunciation carry their own punishment, and whoever only wants to be a spectator of life ends more wounded than one who dares to fight.

When all is said, there also remains a simple truth that the judge said in a quiet courtroom: Do not confuse a man with the characters he creates. What happens inside a story is fiction's way of evoking truths. It takes colors from the palette, light and shadow, white and black, virtues and vices, and paints with a free hand.

That freedom the author defended from the first day, in a country that liked to shout "unintelligible" or "immoral" at the new.

The regrets and enthusiasm, pride and shame, together created one of the most talked-about books of its time. If anyone still thinks this is a defense of sin or a lewd display, then that is exactly what the author pointed out: It is the spectator, not life, that art mirrors.

And while the pictures are packed away in galleries and shelf edges in old libraries fill with new cover colors, there remains a quiet moment in the air. There stands an old lady in black silk at the doorstep and says "Master Dorian." She has a little portrait in her brooch of her deceased husband, and mittens that rustle when she wrings her hands.

She fetches jam (for she dislikes the word "compote," it is too French) and gives the boy the key he asks for.

He says he still likes jam, and that she must always call him "Master Dorian." It is little in a big story. But perhaps it is such small sounds that make everything else serious. For when he goes up the attic stairs with the key, he carries his secret alone. It is light as metal in his hand. It is heavy as metal in his heart.

Somewhere later, one spring, a voice says in a park: "There haven't been such lilacs since the year I met you." A whole story is hidden in that. If someone asks whether this is admonition or embellishment, someone answers: It is shaped, and it is beautiful. If someone asks whether it is thought or action, the author answers undaunted: It is thought.

Honest and ugly, pure and twisted, seductive and glittering—it was all in the brushstrokes. Perhaps that is why Dorian Gray refuses to sink. Not because it sails calmly on a straight morality, but because it illustrates the tension between what people are, what art is, and how words and images between them can mirror whoever sees.

In the aftermath of the struggle lie a few sentences that became like photographs from that time. One with a straight back said: "A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament." Another said: "It is the spectator, not life, that art mirrors." A third said that literature's rights are the rights of the intellect. And a fourth, more teasing than wise, said that he had never worshipped anyone except himself.

A couple of hundred newspapers folded and became fish wrap. But the book remained on tables in salons, in libraries, in suitcases. It was carried through the city by boys in hats, it was whispered about in clubs. It was cried out as dangerous, it was read as moral. It bit, it bloomed, and it refused to be just one thing.

What remains? Perhaps this: An old question about what art is allowed. A new answer that says art is allowed everything, as long as it is true to its own beauty. And a story that shows what happens when beauty becomes a goal in itself without soul—and when the soul tries to tear down its own mirror. Sometimes even that mirror can mirror us better than we dare.