feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_5_part_1.txt
feat_book_id: The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 11
feat_summary_id: chapter 11
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 11", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210228142327/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doriangray/section6/", "summary": "Under the influence of the \"yellow book,\" Dorian's character begins to change. He orders nearly a dozen copies of the first edition and has them bound in different colors to suit his shifting moods. Years pass. Dorian remains young and beautiful, but he is trailed by rumors that he indulges in dark, sordid behavior. Most people cannot help but dismiss these stories, since Dorian's face retains an unblemished look of \"purity\" and \"innocence. Dorian delights in the ever-widening gulf between the beauty of his body and the corruption of his soul. He reflects that too much of human experience has been sacrificed to \"asceticism\" and pledges to live a life devoted to discovering \"the true nature of the senses. Always intellectually curious, Dorian keeps up on the theories of the day--from mysticism to antinomianism to Darwinism--but he never lets these theories dominate him or interfere with his experiences. He devotes himself to the study of beautiful things: perfumes and their psychological effects, music, jewelry, embroideries, and tapestries. Dorian continues to watch the painted image of himself age and deteriorate. Sometimes the sight of the portrait fills him with horror, while other times he reflects joyfully on the burdens that his body has been spared. But he fears that someone will break into his house and steal the painting; he knows many men who whisper of scandal behind his back and would delight in his downfall", "analysis": "In the eighteen years that pass over the course of these two chapters, Dorian undergoes a profound psychological and behavioral transformation, though he remains the same physically. Although his behavior is, in part, a function of the Gothic nature of Wilde's tale--his mysterious, potentially dangerous behavior contributes to the novel's darkness--Dorian does not simply devolve into a villain. Though he exhibits inhuman behavior as he carelessly tosses aside his proteges , he never completely sheds his conscience. This divide further manifests itself in that when Dorian looks at the painting of his dissipated self, he \"sometimes loath it and himself,\" while at other times he is overwhelmed by \"that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smil with secret pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.\" This tension points to the conflicted nature of Dorian's character. We might consider Dorian's search for artistic and intellectual enlightenment--much of which is catalogued in Chapter Eleven--an attempt to find refuge from the struggle between mindless egotism and gnawing guilt. Indeed, Dorian lives a life marked by fear and suspicion. He finds it difficult to leave London, giving up the country villa he shares with Lord Henry for fear that someone will stumble upon the dreaded portrait in his absence. One can argue that Dorian turns to the study of perfumes, jewels, musical instruments, and tapestries as a source of comfort. Certainly Dorian's greatest reason for indulging in the studies that Wilde describes at length is his disenchantment with the age in which he lives. Commonly referred to as the fin-de-siecle  period, the 1890s in England and Europe were marked by a world-weary sensibility that sought to free humanity from \"the asceticism that deadens the senses.\" In art, this so-called asceticism referred primarily to artistic styles known as naturalism and realism, both of which aimed at reproducing the world as it is and ascribed a moral purpose to art. Dorian, taking the teachings of Lord Henry and the mysterious yellow book as scripture, believes that hedonism is the means by which he will rise above the \"harsh, uncomely puritanism\" of his age. This philosophy counters \"any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience,\" which echoes the Preface's insistence that artists should not make distinctions between virtue and vice. According to this line of thinking, an experience is valuable in and of itself, regardless of its moral implications. Certainly, as Dorian lives his life under the rubric of aesthetic philosophy, he comes to appreciate the seductive beauty of the darker side of life, feeling \"a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.\" A possible seed of Dorian's undoing might be his intellectual development. Dorian is supposedly the personification of a type--a perfect blend of the scholar and the socialite--who lives his life, as Lord Henry dictates, as an individualist. Indeed, we are told that \"no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself.\" But, paradoxically, even the tenets of Dorian's \"new Hedonism\" prove constricting. It appears that he may have allowed himself to be too strongly influenced by Lord Henry and the yellow book, and that the philosophy of hedonism, meant to spare its followers from the conformities of dulling Victorian morality, may have simply become another, equally limiting doctrine."}
text: 
  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.
  
  In one point he was more fortunate than the novel's fantastic hero.  He
  never knew--never, indeed, had any cause to know--that somewhat
  grotesque dread of mirrors, and polished metal surfaces, and still
  water which came upon the young Parisian so early in his life, and was
  occasioned by the sudden decay of a beau that had once, apparently,
  been so remarkable.  It was with an almost cruel joy--and perhaps in
  nearly every joy, as certainly in every pleasure, cruelty has its
  place--that he used to read the latter part of the book, with its
  really tragic, if somewhat overemphasized, account of the sorrow and
  despair of one who had himself lost what in others, and the world, he
  had most dearly valued.
  
  For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and
  many others besides him, seemed never to leave him.  Even those who had
  heard the most evil things against him--and from time to time strange
  rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the
  chatter of the clubs--could not believe anything to his dishonour when
  they saw him.  He had always the look of one who had kept himself
  unspotted from the world.  Men who talked grossly became silent when
  Dorian Gray entered the room.  There was something in the purity of his
  face that rebuked them.  His mere presence seemed to recall to them the
  memory of the innocence that they had tarnished.  They wondered how one
  so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an
  age that was at once sordid and sensual.
  
  Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged
  absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were
  his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep
  upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left
  him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil
  Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on
  the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him
  from the polished glass.  The very sharpness of the contrast used to
  quicken his sense of pleasure.  He grew more and more enamoured of his
  own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul.
  He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and
  terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead
  or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which
  were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age.  He would
  place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture,
  and smile.  He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.
  
  There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own
  delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little
  ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in
  disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he
  had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant
  because it was purely selfish.  But moments such as these were rare.
  That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as
  they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase
  with gratification.  The more he knew, the more he desired to know.  He
  had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.
  
  Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to
  society.  Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each
  Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the
  world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the
  day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art.  His little
  dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were
  noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited,
  as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the 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, who saw, or fancied that they saw,
  in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often
  dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of
  the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and
  perfect manner of a citizen of the world.  To them he seemed to be of
  the company of those whom Dante describes as having 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, of the
  arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation.
  Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment
  universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert
  the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for
  him.  His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to
  time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of
  the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in
  everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of
  his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.
  
  For, while he was but too ready to accept the position that was almost
  immediately offered to him on his coming of age, and found, indeed, a
  subtle pleasure in the thought that he might really become to the
  London of his own day what to imperial Neronian Rome the author of the
  Satyricon once had been, yet in his inmost heart he desired to be
  something more than a mere _arbiter elegantiarum_, to be consulted on the
  wearing of a jewel, or the knotting of a necktie, or the conduct of a
  cane.  He sought to elaborate some new scheme of life that would have
  its reasoned philosophy and its ordered principles, and find in the
  spiritualizing of the senses its highest realization.
  
  The worship of the senses has often, and with much justice, been
  decried, men feeling a natural instinct of terror about passions and
  sensations that seem stronger than themselves, and that they are
  conscious of sharing with the less highly organized forms of existence.
  But it appeared to Dorian Gray that the true nature of the senses had
  never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal
  merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or
  to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a
  new spirituality, of which a fine instinct for beauty was to be the
  dominant characteristic.  As he looked back upon man moving through
  history, he was haunted by a feeling of loss.  So much had been
  surrendered! and to such little purpose!  There had been mad wilful
  rejections, monstrous forms of self-torture and self-denial, whose
  origin was fear and whose result was a degradation infinitely more
  terrible than that fancied degradation from which, in their ignorance,
  they had sought to escape; Nature, in her wonderful irony, driving out
  the anchorite to feed with the wild animals of the desert and giving to
  the hermit the beasts of the field as his companions.
  
  Yes:  there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism
  that was to recreate life and to save it from that harsh uncomely
  puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.  It was
  to have its service of the intellect, certainly, yet it was never to
  accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any
  mode of passionate experience.  Its aim, indeed, was to be experience
  itself, and not the fruits of experience, sweet or bitter as they might
  be.  Of the asceticism that deadens the senses, as of the vulgar
  profligacy that dulls them, it was to know nothing.  But it was to
  teach man to concentrate himself upon the moments of a life that 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 us almost enamoured of
  death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through
  the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality
  itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques,
  and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one
  might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled
  with the malady of reverie.  Gradually white fingers creep through the
  curtains, and they appear to tremble.  In black fantastic shapes, dumb
  shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there.  Outside,
  there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men
  going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down
  from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it
  feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from
  her purple cave.  Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by
  degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we
  watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.  The wan
  mirrors get back their mimic life.  The flameless tapers stand where we
  had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been
  studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the
  letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often.
  Nothing seems to us changed.  Out of the unreal shadows of the night
  comes back the real life that we had known.  We have to resume it where
  we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the
  necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of
  stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids
  might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in
  the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh
  shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in
  which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate,
  in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of
  joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
  
  It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray
  to be the true object, or amongst the true objects, of life; and in his
  search for sensations that would be at once new and delightful, and
  possess that element of strangeness that is so essential to romance, he
  would often adopt certain modes of thought that he knew to be really
  alien to his nature, abandon himself to their subtle influences, and
  then, having, as it were, caught their colour and satisfied his
  intellectual curiosity, leave them with that curious indifference that
  is not incompatible with a real ardour of temperament, and that,
  indeed, according to certain modern psychologists, is often a condition
  of it.
  
  It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman
  Catholic communion, and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great
  attraction for him.  The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all
  the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb
  rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity
  of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it
  sought to symbolize.  He loved to kneel down on the cold marble
  pavement and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered dalmatic, slowly
  and with white hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or
  raising aloft the jewelled, lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid
  wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the "_panis
  caelestis_," the bread of angels, or, robed in the garments of the
  Passion of Christ, breaking the Host into the chalice and smiting his
  breast for his sins.  The fuming censers that the grave boys, in their
  lace and scarlet, tossed into the air like great gilt flowers had their
  subtle fascination for him.  As he passed out, he used to look with
  wonder at the black confessionals and long to sit in the dim shadow of
  one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn
  grating the true story of their lives.
  
  But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual
  development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of
  mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable
  for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which
  there are no stars and the moon is in travail.  Mysticism, with its
  marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle
  antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a
  season; and for a season he inclined to the materialistic doctrines of
  the _Darwinismus_ movement in Germany, and found a curious pleasure in
  tracing the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the
  brain, or some white nerve in the body, delighting in the conception of
  the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions,
  morbid or healthy, normal or diseased.  Yet, as has been said of him
  before, no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance
  compared with life itself.  He felt keenly conscious of how barren all
  intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment.
  He knew that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual
  mysteries to reveal.
  
  And so he would now study perfumes and the secrets of their
  manufacture, distilling heavily scented oils and burning odorous gums
  from the East.  He saw that there was no mood of the mind that had not
  its counterpart in the sensuous life, and set himself to discover their
  true relations, wondering what there was in frankincense that made one
  mystical, and in ambergris that stirred one's passions, and in violets
  that woke the memory of dead romances, and in musk that troubled the
  brain, and in champak that stained the imagination; and seeking often
  to elaborate a real psychology of perfumes, and to estimate the several
  influences of sweet-smelling roots and scented, pollen-laden flowers;
  of aromatic balms and of dark and fragrant woods; of spikenard, that
  sickens; of hovenia, that makes men mad; and of aloes, that are said to
  be able to expel melancholy from the soul.
  
  At another time he devoted himself entirely to music, and in a long
  latticed room, with a vermilion-and-gold ceiling and walls of
  olive-green lacquer, he used to give curious concerts in which mad
  gipsies tore wild music from little zithers, or grave, yellow-shawled
  Tunisians plucked at the strained strings of monstrous lutes, while
  grinning Negroes beat monotonously upon copper drums and, crouching
  upon scarlet mats, slim turbaned Indians blew through long pipes of
  reed or brass and charmed--or feigned to charm--great hooded snakes and
  horrible horned adders.  The harsh intervals and shrill discords of
  barbaric music stirred him at times when Schubert's grace, and Chopin's
  beautiful sorrows, and the mighty harmonies of Beethoven himself, fell
  unheeded on his ear.  He collected together from all parts of the world
  the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of
  dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact
  with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them.  He had
  the mysterious _juruparis_ of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not
  allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been
  subjected to fasting and scourging, and the earthen jars of the
  Peruvians that have the shrill cries of birds, and flutes of human
  bones such as Alfonso de Ovalle heard in Chile, and the sonorous green
  jaspers that are found near Cuzco and give forth a note of singular
  sweetness.  He had painted gourds filled with pebbles that rattled when
  they were shaken; the long _clarin_ of the Mexicans, into which the
  performer does not blow, but through which he inhales the air; the
  harsh _ture_ of the Amazon tribes, that is sounded by the sentinels who
  sit all day long in high trees, and can be heard, it is said, at a
  distance of three leagues; the _teponaztli_, that has two vibrating
  tongues of wood and is beaten with sticks that are smeared with an
  elastic gum obtained from the milky juice of plants; the _yotl_-bells of
  the Aztecs, that are hung in clusters like grapes; and a huge
  cylindrical drum, covered with the skins of great serpents, like the
  one that Bernal Diaz saw when he went with Cortes into the Mexican
  temple, and of whose doleful sound he has left us so vivid a
  description.  The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated
  him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like
  Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous
  voices.  Yet, after some time, he wearied of them, and would sit in his
  box at the opera, either alone or with Lord Henry, listening in rapt
  pleasure to "Tannhauser" and seeing in the prelude to that great work
  of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
  
  On one occasion he took up the study of jewels, and appeared at a
  costume ball as Anne de Joyeuse, Admiral of France, in a dress covered
  with five hundred and sixty pearls.  This taste enthralled him for
  years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him.  He would often
  spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various
  stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that
  turns red by lamplight, the cymophane with its wirelike line of silver,
  the pistachio-coloured 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 with their
  alternate layers of ruby and sapphire.  He loved the red gold of the
  sunstone, and the moonstone's pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow
  of the milky opal.  He procured from Amsterdam three emeralds of
  extraordinary size and richness of colour, and had a turquoise _de la
  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 real
  jacinth, and in the romantic history of Alexander, the Conqueror of
  Emathia was said to have found in the vale of Jordan snakes "with
  collars of real emeralds growing on their backs." There was a gem in
  the brain of the dragon, Philostratus told us, and "by the exhibition
  of golden letters and a scarlet robe" the monster could be thrown into
  a magical sleep and slain.  According to the great alchemist, Pierre de
  Boniface, the diamond rendered a man invisible, and the agate of India
  made him eloquent.  The cornelian appeased anger, and the hyacinth
  provoked sleep, and the amethyst drove away the fumes of wine.  The
  garnet cast out demons, and the hydropicus deprived the moon of her
  colour.  The selenite waxed and waned with the moon, and the meloceus,
  that discovers thieves, could be affected only by the blood of kids.
  Leonardus Camillus had seen a white stone taken from the brain of a
  newly killed toad, that was a certain antidote against poison.  The
  bezoar, that was found in the heart of the Arabian deer, was a charm
  that could cure the plague.  In the nests of Arabian birds was the
  aspilates, that, according to Democritus, kept the wearer from any
  danger by fire.
  
  The King of Ceilan rode through his city with a large ruby in his hand,
  as the ceremony of his coronation.  The gates of the palace of John the
  Priest were "made of sardius, with the horn of the horned snake
  inwrought, so that no man might bring poison within." Over the gable
  were "two golden apples, in which were two carbuncles," so that the
  gold might shine by day and the carbuncles by night.  In Lodge's
  strange romance 'A Margarite of America', it was stated that in the
  chamber of the queen one could behold "all the chaste ladies of the
  world, inchased out of silver, looking through fair mirrours of
  chrysolites, carbuncles, sapphires, and greene emeraults." Marco Polo
  had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-coloured pearls in the
  mouths of the dead.  A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that
  the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned
  for seven moons over its loss.  When the Huns lured the king into the
  great pit, he flung it away--Procopius tells the story--nor was it ever
  found again, though the Emperor Anastasius offered five hundred-weight
  of gold pieces for it.  The King of Malabar had shown to a certain
  Venetian a rosary of three hundred and four pearls, one for every god
  that he worshipped.
  
  When the Duke de Valentinois, son of Alexander VI, visited Louis XII of
  France, his horse was loaded with gold leaves, according to Brantome,
  and his cap had double rows of rubies that threw out a great light.
  Charles of England had ridden in stirrups hung with four hundred and
  twenty-one diamonds.  Richard II had a coat, valued at thirty thousand
  marks, which was covered with balas rubies.  Hall described Henry VIII,
  on his way to the Tower previous to his coronation, as wearing "a
  jacket of raised gold, the placard embroidered with diamonds and other
  rich stones, and a great bauderike about his neck of large balasses."
  The favourites of James I wore ear-rings of emeralds set in gold
  filigrane.  Edward II gave to Piers Gaveston a suit of red-gold armour
  studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with
  turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap _parseme_ with pearls.  Henry II wore
  jewelled gloves reaching to the elbow, and had a hawk-glove sewn with
  twelve rubies and fifty-two great orients.  The ducal hat of Charles
  the Rash, the last Duke of Burgundy of his race, was hung with
  pear-shaped pearls and studded with sapphires.
  
  How exquisite life had once been!  How gorgeous in its pomp and
  decoration!  Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.
  
  Then he turned his attention to embroideries and to the tapestries that
  performed the office of frescoes in the chill rooms of the northern
  nations of Europe.  As he investigated the subject--and he always had
  an extraordinary faculty of becoming absolutely absorbed for the moment
  in whatever he took up--he was almost saddened by the reflection of the
  ruin that time brought on beautiful and wonderful things.  He, at any
  rate, had escaped that.  Summer followed summer, and the yellow
  jonquils bloomed and died many times, and nights of horror repeated the
  story of their shame, but he was unchanged.  No winter marred his face
  or stained his flowerlike bloom.  How different it was with material
  things!  Where had they passed to?  Where was the great crocus-coloured
  robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked
  by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena?  Where the huge velarium
  that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail
  of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a
  chariot drawn by white, gilt-reined steeds?  He longed to see the
  curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were
  displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast;
  the mortuary cloth of King Chilperic, with its three hundred golden
  bees; the fantastic robes that excited the indignation of the Bishop of
  Pontus and were figured with "lions, panthers, bears, dogs, forests,
  rocks, hunters--all, in fact, that a painter can copy from nature"; and
  the coat that Charles of Orleans once wore, on the sleeves of which
  were embroidered the verses of a song beginning "_Madame, je suis tout
  joyeux_," the musical accompaniment of the words being wrought in gold
  thread, and each note, of square shape in those days, formed with four
  pearls.  He read of the room that was prepared at the palace at Rheims
  for the use of Queen Joan of Burgundy and was decorated with "thirteen
  hundred and twenty-one parrots, made in broidery, and blazoned with the
  king's arms, and five hundred and sixty-one butterflies, whose wings
  were similarly ornamented with the arms of the queen, the whole worked
  in gold."  Catherine de Medicis had a mourning-bed made for her of
  black velvet powdered with crescents and suns.  Its curtains were of
  damask, with leafy wreaths and garlands, figured upon a gold and silver
  ground, and fringed along the edges with broideries of pearls, and it
  stood in a room hung with rows of the queen's devices in cut black
  velvet upon cloth of silver.  Louis XIV had gold embroidered caryatides
  fifteen feet high in his apartment.  The state bed of Sobieski, King of
  Poland, was made of Smyrna gold brocade embroidered in turquoises with
  verses from the Koran.  Its supports were of silver gilt, beautifully
  chased, and profusely set with enamelled and jewelled medallions.  It
  had been taken from the Turkish camp before Vienna, and the standard of
  Mohammed had stood beneath the tremulous gilt of its canopy.
  
  And so, for a whole year, he sought to accumulate the most exquisite
  specimens that he could find of textile and embroidered work, getting
  the dainty Delhi muslins, finely wrought with gold-thread palmates and
  stitched over with iridescent beetles' wings; the Dacca gauzes, that
  from their transparency are known in the East as "woven air," and
  "running water," and "evening dew"; strange figured cloths from Java;
  elaborate yellow Chinese hangings; books bound in tawny satins or fair
  blue silks and wrought with _fleurs-de-lis_, birds and images; veils of
  _lacis_ worked in Hungary point; Sicilian brocades and stiff Spanish
  velvets; Georgian work, with its gilt coins, and Japanese _Foukousas_,
  with their green-toned golds and their marvellously plumaged birds.
  
  He had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed
  he had for everything connected with the service of the Church.  In the
  long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house, he had
  stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the
  raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and
  fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by
  the suffering that she seeks for and wounded by self-inflicted pain.
  He possessed a gorgeous cope of crimson silk and gold-thread damask,
  figured with a repeating pattern of golden pomegranates set in
  six-petalled formal blossoms, beyond which on either side was the
  pine-apple device wrought in seed-pearls. The orphreys were divided
  into panels representing scenes from the life of the Virgin, and the
  coronation of the Virgin was figured in coloured silks upon the hood.
  This was Italian work of the fifteenth century.  Another cope was of
  green velvet, embroidered with heart-shaped groups of acanthus-leaves,
  from which spread long-stemmed white blossoms, the details of which
  were picked out with silver thread and coloured crystals.  The morse
  bore a seraph's head in gold-thread raised work.  The orphreys were
  woven in a diaper of red and gold silk, and were starred with
  medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian.
  He had chasubles, also, of amber-coloured silk, and blue silk and gold
  brocade, and yellow silk damask and cloth of gold, figured with
  representations of the Passion and Crucifixion of Christ, and
  embroidered with lions and peacocks and other emblems; dalmatics of
  white satin and pink silk damask, decorated with tulips and dolphins
  and _fleurs-de-lis_; altar frontals of crimson velvet and blue linen; and
  many corporals, chalice-veils, and sudaria.  In the mystic offices to
  which such things were put, there was something that quickened his
  imagination.
  
  For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely
  house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he
  could escape, for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times
  to be almost too great to be borne.  Upon the walls of the lonely
  locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with
  his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him
  the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the
  purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.  For weeks he would not go there,
  would forget the hideous painted thing, and get back his light heart,
  his wonderful joyousness, his passionate absorption in mere existence.
  Then, suddenly, some night he would creep out of the house, go down to
  dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields, and stay there, day after day,
  until he was driven away.  On his return he would sit in front of the
  picture, sometimes loathing it and himself, but filled, at other
  times, with that pride of individualism that is half the
  fascination of sin, and smiling with secret pleasure at the misshapen
  shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own.
  
  After a few years he could not endure to be long out of England, and
  gave up the villa that he had shared at Trouville with Lord Henry, as
  well as the little white walled-in house at Algiers where they had more
  than once spent the winter.  He hated to be separated from the picture
  that was such a part of his life, and was also afraid that during his
  absence some one might gain access to the room, in spite of the
  elaborate bars that he had caused to be placed upon the door.
  
  He was quite conscious that this would tell them nothing.  It was true
  that the portrait still preserved, under all the foulness and ugliness
  of the face, its marked likeness to himself; but what could they learn
  from that?  He would laugh at any one who tried to taunt him.  He had
  not painted it.  What was it to him how vile and full of shame it
  looked?  Even if he told them, would they believe it?
  
  Yet he was afraid.  Sometimes when he was down at his great house in
  Nottinghamshire, entertaining the fashionable young men of his own rank
  who were his chief companions, and astounding the county by the wanton
  luxury and gorgeous splendour of his mode of life, he would suddenly
  leave his guests and rush back to town to see that the door had not
  been tampered with and that the picture was still there.  What if it
  should be stolen?  The mere thought made him cold with horror.  Surely
  the world would know his secret then.  Perhaps the world already
  suspected it.
  
  For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him.
  He was very nearly blackballed at a West End club of which his birth
  and social position fully entitled him to become a member, and it was
  said that on one occasion, when he was brought by a friend into the
  smoking-room of the Churchill, the Duke of Berwick and another
  gentleman got up in a marked manner and went out.  Curious stories
  became current about him after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.  It
  was rumoured that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a
  low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with
  thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade.  His
  extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear
  again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners, or pass
  him with a sneer, or look at him with cold searching eyes, as though
  they were determined to discover his secret.
  
  Of such insolences and attempted slights he, of course, took no notice,
  and in the opinion of most people his frank debonair manner, his
  charming boyish smile, and the infinite grace of that wonderful youth
  that seemed never to leave him, were in themselves a sufficient answer
  to the calumnies, for so they termed them, that were circulated about
  him.  It was remarked, however, that some of those who had been most
  intimate with him appeared, after a time, to shun him.  Women who had
  wildly adored him, and for his sake had braved all social censure and
  set convention at defiance, were seen to grow pallid with shame or
  horror if Dorian Gray entered the room.
  
  Yet these whispered scandals only increased in the eyes of many his
  strange and dangerous charm.  His great wealth was a certain element of
  security.  Society--civilized society, at least--is never very ready to
  believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and
  fascinating.  It feels instinctively that manners are of more
  importance than morals, and, in its opinion, the highest respectability
  is of much less value than the possession of a good _chef_.  And, after
  all, it is a very poor consolation to be told that the man who has
  given one a bad dinner, or poor wine, is irreproachable in his private
  life.  Even the cardinal virtues cannot atone for half-cold _entrees_, as
  Lord Henry remarked once, in a discussion on the subject, and there is
  possibly a good deal to be said for his view.  For the canons of good
  society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art.  Form is
  absolutely essential to it.  It should have the dignity of a ceremony,
  as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of
  a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful
  to us.  Is insincerity such a terrible thing?  I think not.  It is
  merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.
  
  Such, at any rate, was Dorian Gray's opinion.  He used to wonder at the
  shallow psychology of those who conceive the ego in man as a thing
  simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence.  To him, man was a
  being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform
  creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and
  passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies
  of the dead.  He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery
  of his country house and look at the various portraits of those whose
  blood flowed in his veins.  Here was Philip Herbert, described by
  Francis Osborne, in his Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and
  King James, as one who was "caressed by the Court for his handsome
  face, which kept him not long company."  Was it young Herbert's life
  that he sometimes led?  Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body
  to body till it had reached his own?  Was it some dim sense of that
  ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and almost without cause,
  give utterance, in Basil Hallward's studio, to the mad prayer that had
  so changed his life?  Here, in gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled
  surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard,
  with his silver-and-black armour piled at his feet.  What had this
  man's legacy been?  Had the lover of Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him
  some inheritance of sin and shame?  Were his own actions merely the
  dreams that the dead man had not dared to realize?  Here, from the
  fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl
  stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves.  A flower was in her right hand,
  and her left clasped an enamelled collar of white and damask roses.  On
  a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple.  There were large
  green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes.  He knew her life, and
  the strange stories that were told about her lovers.  Had he something
  of her temperament in him?  These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to
  look curiously at him.  What of George Willoughby, with his powdered
  hair and fantastic patches?  How evil he looked!  The face was
  saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with
  disdain.  Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
  were so overladen with rings.  He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
  century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars.  What of the
  second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his
  wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
  Fitzherbert?  How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls
  and insolent pose!  What passions had he bequeathed?  The world had
  looked upon him as infamous.  He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
  The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast.  Beside him hung the
  portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black.  Her blood,
  also, stirred within him.  How curious it all seemed!  And his mother
  with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew
  what he had got from her.  He had got from her his beauty, and his
  passion for the beauty of others.  She laughed at him in her loose
  Bacchante dress.  There were vine leaves in her hair.  The purple
  spilled from the cup she was holding.  The carnations of the painting
  had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and
  brilliancy of colour.  They seemed to follow him wherever he went.
  
  Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,
  nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
  with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious.  There
  were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history
  was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act
  and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it
  had been in his brain and in his passions.  He felt that he had known
  them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
  stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of
  subtlety.  It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
  been his own.
  
  The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
  himself known this curious fancy.  In the seventh chapter he tells how,
  crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
  Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
  Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the
  flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
  caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
  an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
  wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
  with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
  days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible _taedium vitae_, that comes
  on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear
  emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of
  pearl and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the
  Street of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero
  Caesar as he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with
  colours, and plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon
  from Carthage and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.
  
  Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the
  two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious
  tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and
  beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made
  monstrous or mad:  Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and
  painted her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death
  from the dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as
  Paul the Second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of
  Formosus, and whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was
  bought at the price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used
  hounds to chase living men and whose murdered body was covered with
  roses by a harlot who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse,
  with Fratricide riding beside him and his mantle stained with the blood
  of Perotto; Pietro Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence,
  child and minion of Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by his
  debauchery, and who received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white
  and crimson silk, filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy
  that he might serve at the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose
  melancholy could be cured only by the spectacle of death, and who had a
  passion for red blood, as other men have for red wine--the son of the
  Fiend, as was reported, and one who had cheated his father at dice when
  gambling with him for his own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery
  took the name of Innocent and into whose torpid veins the blood of
  three lads was infused by a Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the
  lover of Isotta and the lord of Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome
  as the enemy of God and man, who strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and
  gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in a cup of emerald, and in honour of a
  shameful passion built a pagan church for Christian worship; Charles
  VI, who had so wildly adored his brother's wife that a leper had warned
  him of the insanity that was coming on him, and who, when his brain had
  sickened and grown strange, could only be soothed by Saracen cards
  painted with the images of love and death and madness; and, in his
  trimmed jerkin and jewelled cap and acanthuslike curls, Grifonetto
  Baglioni, who slew Astorre with his bride, and Simonetto with his page,
  and whose comeliness was such that, as he lay dying in the yellow
  piazza of Perugia, those who had hated him could not choose but weep,
  and Atalanta, who had cursed him, blessed him.
  
  There was a horrible fascination in them all.  He saw them at night,
  and they troubled his imagination in the day.  The Renaissance knew of
  strange manners of poisoning--poisoning by a helmet and a lighted
  torch, by an embroidered glove and a jewelled fan, by a gilded pomander
  and by an amber chain.  Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book.  There
  were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he
  could realize his conception of the beautiful.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 11
target: Under the influence of the "yellow book," Dorian's character begins to change. He orders nearly a dozen copies of the first edition and has them bound in different colors to suit his shifting moods. Years pass. Dorian remains young and beautiful, but he is trailed by rumors that he indulges in dark, sordid behavior. Most people cannot help but dismiss these stories, since Dorian's face retains an unblemished look of "purity" and "innocence. Dorian delights in the ever-widening gulf between the beauty of his body and the corruption of his soul. He reflects that too much of human experience has been sacrificed to "asceticism" and pledges to live a life devoted to discovering "the true nature of the senses. Always intellectually curious, Dorian keeps up on the theories of the day--from mysticism to antinomianism to Darwinism--but he never lets these theories dominate him or interfere with his experiences. He devotes himself to the study of beautiful things: perfumes and their psychological effects, music, jewelry, embroideries, and tapestries. Dorian continues to watch the painted image of himself age and deteriorate. Sometimes the sight of the portrait fills him with horror, while other times he reflects joyfully on the burdens that his body has been spared. But he fears that someone will break into his house and steal the painting; he knows many men who whisper of scandal behind his back and would delight in his downfall
feat_summary_analysis: In the eighteen years that pass over the course of these two chapters, Dorian undergoes a profound psychological and behavioral transformation, though he remains the same physically. Although his behavior is, in part, a function of the Gothic nature of Wilde's tale--his mysterious, potentially dangerous behavior contributes to the novel's darkness--Dorian does not simply devolve into a villain. Though he exhibits inhuman behavior as he carelessly tosses aside his proteges , he never completely sheds his conscience. This divide further manifests itself in that when Dorian looks at the painting of his dissipated self, he "sometimes loath it and himself," while at other times he is overwhelmed by "that pride of individualism that is half the fascination of sin, and smil with secret pleasure at the misshapen shadow that had to bear the burden that should have been his own." This tension points to the conflicted nature of Dorian's character. We might consider Dorian's search for artistic and intellectual enlightenment--much of which is catalogued in Chapter Eleven--an attempt to find refuge from the struggle between mindless egotism and gnawing guilt. Indeed, Dorian lives a life marked by fear and suspicion. He finds it difficult to leave London, giving up the country villa he shares with Lord Henry for fear that someone will stumble upon the dreaded portrait in his absence. One can argue that Dorian turns to the study of perfumes, jewels, musical instruments, and tapestries as a source of comfort. Certainly Dorian's greatest reason for indulging in the studies that Wilde describes at length is his disenchantment with the age in which he lives. Commonly referred to as the fin-de-siecle  period, the 1890s in England and Europe were marked by a world-weary sensibility that sought to free humanity from "the asceticism that deadens the senses." In art, this so-called asceticism referred primarily to artistic styles known as naturalism and realism, both of which aimed at reproducing the world as it is and ascribed a moral purpose to art. Dorian, taking the teachings of Lord Henry and the mysterious yellow book as scripture, believes that hedonism is the means by which he will rise above the "harsh, uncomely puritanism" of his age. This philosophy counters "any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience," which echoes the Preface's insistence that artists should not make distinctions between virtue and vice. According to this line of thinking, an experience is valuable in and of itself, regardless of its moral implications. Certainly, as Dorian lives his life under the rubric of aesthetic philosophy, he comes to appreciate the seductive beauty of the darker side of life, feeling "a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices." A possible seed of Dorian's undoing might be his intellectual development. Dorian is supposedly the personification of a type--a perfect blend of the scholar and the socialite--who lives his life, as Lord Henry dictates, as an individualist. Indeed, we are told that "no theory of life seemed to him to be of any importance compared with life itself." But, paradoxically, even the tenets of Dorian's "new Hedonism" prove constricting. It appears that he may have allowed himself to be too strongly influenced by Lord Henry and the yellow book, and that the philosophy of hedonism, meant to spare its followers from the conformities of dulling Victorian morality, may have simply become another, equally limiting doctrine.