In this passage from Oscar Wilde's novel The
Picture of Dorian Gray, the title character comes in contact with a
fascinating book.
His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.
What was it, he wondered. He went towards the little,
pearl-coloured octagonal stand that had always looked to him like the work
of some strange Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the
volume, flung himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves.
After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that
he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the
delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show
before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real
to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.
It was a novel without a plot and with only one character,
being, indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian
who spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his
own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through which
the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere artificiality those
renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural
rebellions that wise men still call sin. The style in which it was written
was that curious jewelled style, vivid and obscure at once, full of argot
and of archaisms, of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases,
that characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French
school of Symbolistes. There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids
and as subtle in colour. The life of the senses was described in the terms
of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading
the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions
of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense
seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence
of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was
of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the
mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie,
a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and
creeping shadows.
Cloudless, and pierced by one solitary star, a copper-green
sky gleamed through the windows. He read on by its wan light till he could
read no more. Then, after his valet had reminded him several times of the
lateness of the hour, he got up, and going into the next room, placed the
book on the little Florentine table that always stood at his bedside and
began to dress for dinner.
It was almost nine o'clock before he reached the
club, where he found Lord Henry sitting alone, in the morning-room, looking
very much bored.
"I am so sorry, Harry," he cried, "but
really it is entirely your fault. That book you sent me so fascinated me
that I forgot how the time was going."
"Yes, I thought you would like it," replied
his host, rising from his chair.
"I didn't say I liked it, Harry. I said it fascinated
me. There is a great difference."
"Ah, you have discovered that?" murmured
Lord Henry. And they passed into the dining-room.
CHAPTER 11
For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from
the influence of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that he never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no
less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound
in different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the
changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost
entirely lost control. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the
romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became
to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book
seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had
lived it.
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