Picture of Dorian Gray Fashion Shmoop
The Picture of Dorian Grayness
by Oscar Wilde
The Flick of Dorian Gray Full Text: Chapter 11 : Folio 2
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Oft, on returning home from ane of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange theorize amidst those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would pitter-patter upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the cardinal that never left him at present, and stand up, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking at present at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed dorsum 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 ain soul. He would examine with infinitesimal care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible please, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling brow or crawled effectually 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 easily of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen torso and the declining limbs.
There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the niggling ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in disguise, information technology was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a compassion that was all the more poignant considering it was purely selfish. Merely moments such as these were rare. That curiosity near life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, equally 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 charge per unit in his relations to society. One time 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 accept the most historic musicians of the day to amuse his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were noted every bit much for the conscientious selection and placing of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the ornament of the tabular array, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and argent. Indeed, at that place were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Grey the true realization of a blazon of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the existent culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the globe. To them he seemed to exist of the visitor of those whom Dante describes as having sought to "brand themselves perfect past the worship of beauty." Similar Gautier, he was ane for whom "the visible world existed."
And, certainly, to him life itself was the get-go, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be just a training. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own mode, is an effort to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of class, 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 guild windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the adventitious charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.
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