The Picture of Dorian Gray
A portrait that stays young forever, and the man who does not
Page 1
In a big airy studio in London, filled with the rich smell of roses drifting in through an open door, the painter Basil Hallward was putting the last touches to a portrait of a remarkably handsome young man. Lounging nearby, smoking cigarette after cigarette, was Basil's friend Lord Henry Wotton, who talked lazily of how youth was the one thing worth having, and how soon it always went. The sitter was Dorian Gray himself, young and golden-haired and so beautiful that Basil had been almost afraid to finish the picture, for fear of losing something in painting it. When the portrait was done and set before him, Dorian looked at his own perfect young face and understood, for the first time, that one day he would be old and ugly, while the painted face stayed exactly as it was now. The thought frightened him more than he could say.
Page 2
Dorian had taken to visiting a small, shabby theatre in a poor part of London, drawn back again and again by one actress. Her name was Sibyl Vane, and she was so young and so lovely, and she acted with such truth, that Dorian forgot he was watching a play at all. Night after night he watched her become Rosalind, then Imogen, then Juliet leaning from her balcony, speaking words centuries old as though she had only just thought of them. The theatre itself was ugly and badly lit, full of orange-peel and loud customers in the cheap seats, but none of that mattered once she stepped into the light. Dorian told himself he had never seen real beauty until he saw her act, and before long he knew he loved her — not for who she was, but for all the wonderful women she could become.
Page 3
Sibyl lived with her mother and her brother James in two poor rooms above a pawnbroker's shop. She was so happy about her 'Prince Charming,' as she called Dorian, not even knowing his real name, that she could talk of nothing else. James, who was about to sail away on a long voyage, did not share her joy. He was a serious, rough young man who had grown up watching his family struggle, and he did not trust a fine gentleman who came courting an actress and would not say who he was. Before he left for the ship, he found a quiet moment with his sister and made her a promise, half a warning: if this man ever did her any wrong, James would follow him to the ends of the earth and make him pay for it with his life. Sibyl only laughed and told him he worried too much.
Page 4
Dorian brought his friends Basil and Henry to see Sibyl act one evening, eager to show them the wonder he had found. But that night something had gone wrong with her acting — she moved stiffly, spoke her lines as though she barely believed them, and the audience grew restless and began to laugh. Dorian, burning with shame in front of his friends, went straight to her dressing room afterward. Sibyl tried to explain: now that she truly loved him, she said, she could no longer pretend to love someone invented on a stage — she had lost the one thing that made her art alive, and gained something better. Dorian did not want to hear it. He told her coldly that she had killed his love along with her art, that without her gift she was nothing to him, and he walked out and left her there alone, crying among the painted scenery.
Page 5
The next morning Dorian meant to find Sibyl and make everything right between them. Instead, Lord Henry arrived with terrible news: Sibyl Vane was dead. She had gone to the theatre that night as usual, and when she did not come out, they found she had swallowed poison in her dressing room, alone. Dorian, shaken, remembered the portrait Basil had painted of him, now standing behind a screen in the corner of his library, and went to look at it. He found, to his horror, that the face in the picture had changed — a new, faint line of cruelty had appeared at the corner of the painted mouth, exactly where his own mouth had curled when he spoke his last cold words to Sibyl. Dorian understood then that the portrait would carry every wrong thing he did, while his own face stayed as young and untouched as ever. He had the screen placed more carefully, so no one would ever see.
Page 6
Years went by. Dorian Gray stayed exactly as young and beautiful as he had been the day the portrait was finished, and London admired him for it, never guessing why. But in secret, away from his fine friends, he had begun slipping down into the poorer parts of the city at night — into low taverns and opium dens along the river, where no one who mattered would ever see his face. There, among sailors and addicts half-lost in smoke and dream, he sought out every pleasure and every vice he could find, telling himself it did not matter, since nothing ever showed on his own skin. Only the locked portrait upstairs in his house grew older and uglier with every secret thing he did, until it was no longer the face of a beautiful young man at all, but of someone Dorian could hardly bear to look at.
Page 7
Basil Hallward had heard ugly rumors about Dorian for years and refused to believe them, until one night he came to Dorian's house to ask him plainly whether they were true. Dorian, in a strange mood, decided to show him the truth instead of denying it, and led him up to the old locked schoolroom at the top of the house, where the portrait had stood hidden and untouched for years. When Basil pulled back the curtain and saw what the painting had become — old, bloated, and evil in a way no ordinary painting could be — he staggered back in horror and begged Dorian, as the one who had made him what he was, to pray, to repent, to change while there was still time. Something in Basil's pity and his horror, both at once, filled Dorian with a sudden, blinding hatred. He snatched up the first sharp thing within reach and turned on the man who had painted him, and by the time it was over, Basil Hallward was dead on the floor.
Page 8
Years after his sister's death, James Vane came back to London, still carrying his old promise. He had never learned Dorian's real name, only that people called him 'Prince Charming,' and he had spent years at sea turning the name over in his mind. One night, outside an opium den by the river, James saw a man leaving who was pointed out to him as Sibyl's 'Prince Charming,' and he followed him into a dark lane, finally seizing him and swearing he would die for what he had done to Sibyl. But Dorian, thinking fast, begged him to look properly in the light — and when James dragged him under a gas lamp, he saw a face far too young to belong to a man who had wronged his sister eighteen years before. Confused and ashamed, James let him go, and Dorian slipped away into the dark, badly shaken but safe.
Page 9
Some time later, Dorian was staying at Selby Royal, his country house, for a shooting party with fashionable friends. He had begun, in his own strange way, to hope he might change and live differently. But James Vane had followed him there, unseen, and was hiding in the woods at the edge of the grounds, still watching for his chance at the man he believed had ruined his sister. During the shoot, one of the beaters flushed a hare out of the undergrowth; a guest fired at it, and the shot went wide, into the very thicket where James was crouched, hidden among the bracken. There was a short cry, and when the beaters went to look, they found a man lying dead among the undergrowth — a stranger nobody at the party could name. Dorian, standing with the other guests, felt a cold wave of relief and horror together, though he said nothing of why.
Page 10
In the end, Dorian Gray tried to tell himself he could still become a better man. But when he went up alone to the locked schoolroom and looked at the portrait once more, he found no sign of change in its cruel, ancient, hateful face — if anything, there seemed a new look of cunning in it, as though it mocked him for hoping at all. He understood then that the portrait would never let him go, and that killing Basil had freed him from nothing. In sudden despair and loathing, of the painting and of himself, he snatched up the very knife that had killed Basil Hallward and drove it into the canvas, meaning to destroy the thing once and for all. A cry was heard from the locked room. When the servants broke down the door, they found, hanging on the wall, a splendid portrait of their master exactly as they had always known him, young and beautiful — and on the floor, a dead man, withered and loathsome of face. It was the rings on his hand that told them, at last, who he was.
About this story
- Audience: general readers
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