道林.格雷的画像 英文版 The Picture of Dorian Gray
奥斯卡.王尔德 Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER IX Page 1
remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy--andperhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, crueltyhas its place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, withits really tragic, if somewhat over-emphasized, account of the sorrowand despair of one who had himself lost!
For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory ofthis book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he neversought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less thanfive large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound indifferent colors, so that they might suit his various moods and thechanging fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to havealmost entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful youngParisian, in whom the romantic temperament and the scientifictemperament were so strangely blended, became to him a kind ofprefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed tohim to contain the story of his own life, written before he had livedit.
In one point he was more fortunate than the book's fantastic hero.He never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhatgrotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and stillwater, which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, andwas occasioned by the sudden decay of a beauty that had once,apparently, been so remarkable. It was with an almost cruel joy--andperhaps in nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, crueltyhas its place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, withits really tragic, if somewhat over-emphasized, account of the sorrowand despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and in theworld, he had most valued.
He, at any rate, had no cause to fear that. The boyish beauty thathad so fascinated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, seemednever to leave him. Even those who had heard the most evil thingsagainst him (and from time to time strange rumors about his mode oflife crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs) couldnot believe anything to his dishonor when they saw him. He hadalways the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world.Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered theroom. There was something in the purity of his face that rebukedthem. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the innocence thatthey had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and gracefulas he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at oncesordid and sensuous.
He himself, on returning home from one of those mysterious andprolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture amongthose who were his friends, or thought that they were so, would creepup-stairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that neverleft him, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait thatBasil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and agingface on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed backat him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrastused to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and moreenamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in thecorruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, andoften with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines thatseared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensualmouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, thesigns of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white handsbeside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mockedthe misshapen body and the failing limbs.
in the settling of which Lord Henry always assistedhim, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing ofthose invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration ofthe table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in hisown delicately-scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the littleill-famed tavern near the Docks, which, under an assumed name, and indisguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin hehad brought upon his soul, with a pity that was all the more poignantbecause it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare.That curiosity about life that, many years before, Lord Henry hadfirst stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of theirfriend, seemed to increase with gratification. The more he knew, themore he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenousas he fed them.
Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations tosociety. Once or twice every month during the winter, and on eachWednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to theworld his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians ofthe day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. Hislittle dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assistedhim, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing ofthose invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration ofthe table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers,and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver.Indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, whosaw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization ofa type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a typethat was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar withall the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of theworld. To them he seemed to belong to those whom Dante describes ashaving sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty. "Like Gautier, he was one for whom "the visible world existed. "
And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, ofthe arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but apreparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes fora moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is anattempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course,their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particularstyles that he affected from time to time, had their marked influenceon the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall clubwindows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried toreproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him onlyhalf-serious, fopperies.
For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that wasalmost immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found,indeed, a subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really becometo the London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome theauthor of the "Satyricon" had once been, yet in his inmost heart hedesired to be something more than a mere arbiter elegantiarum, to beconsulted on the wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, orthe conduct of a cane. He sought to elaborate some new schemeof life that would have its reasoned philosophy and its orderedprinciples and find in the spiritualizing of the senses its highestrealization.
The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, beendecried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions andsensations that seem stronger than ourselves, and that we areconscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms ofexistence. But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature ofthe senses had never been understood, and that they had remainedsavage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve theminto submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at makingthem elements of a new spirituality, of which a fine instinct forbeauty was to be the dominant characteristic. As he looked back uponman moving through History, he was haunted by a feeling of loss. Somuch had been surrendered! and to such little purpose! There hadbeen mad wilful rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose origin was fear, and whose result was a degradationinfinitely more terrible than that fancied degradation from which, intheir ignorance, they had sought to escape, Nature in her wonderfulirony driving the anchorite out to herd with the wild animals of thedesert and giving to the hermit the beasts of the field as hiscompanions.
Yes, there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new hedonismthat was to re-create life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomelypuritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival. Itwas to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was neverto accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice ofany mode of passionate experience. Its aim, indeed, was to beexperience itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitteras they might be. Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as ofthe vulgar profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing. Butit was to teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a lifethat is itself but a moment.
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn,either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almostenamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapenjoy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms moreterrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life thatlurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduringvitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art ofthose whose minds have been troubled with the malady of revery.Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appearto tremble. Black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of theroom, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birdsamong the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, orthe sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, andwandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake thesleepers. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and bydegrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and wewatch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wanmirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand wherewe have left them, and beside them lies the half-read book thatwe had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at theball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we hadread too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unrealshadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. Wehave to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us aterrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in thesame wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it maybe, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that hadbeen re-fashioned anew for our pleasure in the darkness, a world inwhich things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, orhave other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or noplace, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation orregret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and thememories of pleasure their pain.
It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to DorianGray to be the true object, or among the true objects, of life; andin his search for sensations that would be at once new anddelightful, and possess that element of strangeness that is soessential to romance, he would often adopt certain modes of thoughtthat he knew to be really alien to his nature, abandon himself totheir subtle influences, and then, having, as it were, caught theircolor and satisfied his intellectual curiosity, leave them with thatcurious indifference that is not incompatible with a real ardor oftemperament, and that indeed, according to certain modernpsychologists, is often a condition of it.
It was rumored of him once that he was about to join the RomanCatholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a greatattraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than allthe sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by itssuperb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitivesimplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the humantragedy that it sought to symbolize. He loved to kneel down on thecold marble pavement, and with the priest, in his stiff floweredcope, slowly and with white hands moving aside the veil of thetabernacle, and raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrancewith that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeedthe "panis caelestis, " the bread of angels, or, robed in the garmentsof the Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice, andsmiting his breast for his sins. The fuming censers, that the graveboys, in their lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great giltflowers, had their subtle fascination for him. As he passed out, heused to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sitin the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and womenwhispering through the tarnished grating the true story of theirlives.
But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectualdevelopment by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or ofmistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitablefor the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in whichthere are no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with itsmarvellous power of making common things strange to us, and thesubtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him fora season; and for a season he inclined to the materialisticdoctrines of the Darwinismus movement in Germany, and found a curiouspleasure in tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearlycell in the brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in theconception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certainphysical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased. Yet, ashas been said of him before, no theory of life seemed to him to be ofany importance compared with life itself. He felt keenly consciousof how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated fromaction and experiment. He knew that the senses, no less than thesoul, have their mysteries to reveal.
seemed to recall to them the innocence thatthey had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and gracefulas he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at oncesordid and sensuous.metal surfaces, and stillwater, which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, andwas occasioned by the sudden.
And so he would now study perfumes, and the secrets of theirmanufacture, distilling heavily-scented oils, and burning odorousgums from the East. He saw that there was no mood of the mind thathad not its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself todiscover their true relations, wondering what there was infrankincense that made one mystical, and in ambergris that stirredone's passions, and in violets that woke the memory of dead romances,and in musk that troubled the brain, and in champak that stained theimagination; and seeking often to elaborate a real psychology ofperfumes, and to estimate the several influences of sweet-smellingroots, and scented pollen-laden flowers, of aromatic balms, and ofdark and fragrant woods, of spikenard that sickens, of hovenia thatmakes men mad, and of aloes that are said to be able to expelmelancholy from the soul.
At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a longlatticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad gypsiestore wild music from little zithers, or grave yellow-shawledTunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, whilegrinning negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums, or turbanedIndians, crouching upon scarlet mats, blew through long pipes of reedor brass, and charmed, or feigned to charm, great hooded snakes andhorrible horned adders. The harsh intervals and shrill discords ofbarbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, andChopin's beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethovenhimself, fell unheeded on his ear. He collected together from allparts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found,either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribesthat have survived contact with Western civilizations, and loved totouch and try them. He had the mysterious juruparis of the Rio NegroIndians, that women are not allowed to look at, and that even youthsmay not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging,and the earthen jars of the Peruvians that have the shrill cries ofbirds, and flutes of human bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard inChili, and the sonorous green stones that are found near Cuzco andgive forth a note of singular sweetness. He had painted gourdsfilled with pebbles that rattled when they were shaken; the longclarin of the Mexicans, into which the performer does not blow, butthrough which he inhales the air; the harsh tur?of the Amazontribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who sit all day long intrees, and that can be heard, it is said, at a distance of threeleagues; the teponaztli, that has two vibrating tongues of wood,and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an elastic gumobtained from the milky juice of plants; the yotl-bells of theAztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge cylindricaldrum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the one thatBernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican temple, andof whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a description. Thefantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felta curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has hermonsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices. Yet,after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at theOpera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt pleasure to"Tannh鋟ser, " and seeing in that great work of art a presentation ofthe tragedy of his own soul.
On another occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at acostume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dresscovered with five hundred and sixty pearls. He would often spend awhole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stonesthat he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turnsred by lamplight, the cymophane with its wire-like line of silver,the pistachio-colored peridot, rose-pink and wine-yellow topazes,carbuncles of fiery scarlet with tremulous four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet spinels, and amethysts withtheir alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. He loved the red goldof the sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the brokenrainbow of the milky opal. He procured from Amsterdam three emeraldsof extraordinary size and richness of color, and had a turquoise dela vieille roche that was the envy of all the connoisseurs.
He discovered wonderful stories, also, about jewels. In Alphonso's"Clericalis Disciplina" a serpent was mentioned with eyes of realjacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander he was said to havefound snakes in the vale of Jordan "with collars of real emeraldsgrowing on their backs. " There was a gem in the brain of the dragon,Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition of golden letters and ascarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into a magical sleep, andslain. According to the great alchemist Pierre de Boniface, thediamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India made himeloquent. The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth provokedsleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine. The garnetcast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her color.The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus, thatdiscovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids.Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of anewly-killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison. Thebezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charmthat could cure the plague. In the nests of Arabian birds was theaspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from anydanger by fire.