finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_5_part_2.txt
The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 12
chapter 12
{"name": "Chapter 12", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210228142327/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doriangray/section6/", "summary": "On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, Dorian runs into Basil on a fog-covered street. He tries to pass him unrecognized, but Basil calls out to him and accompanies him home. Basil mentions that he is about to leave for a six-month stay in Paris but felt it necessary to stop by and warn Dorian that terrible rumors are being spread about his conduct. Basil reminds Dorian that there are no such things as \"secret vices\": sin, he claims, \"writes itself across a man's face. Having said these words, he demands to know why so many of Dorian's friendships have ended disastrously. We learn that one boy committed suicide, and others had their careers or reputations ruined. Basil chastises Dorian for his influence over these unfortunate youths and urges him to use his considerable sway for good rather than evil. He adds that he wonders if he knows Dorian at all and wishes he were able to see the man's soul. Dorian laughs bitterly and says that the artist shall have his wish. He promises to show Basil his soul, which, he notes, most people believe only God can see. Basil decries Dorian's speech as blasphemous, and he begs Dorian to deny the terrible charges that have been made against him. Smiling, Dorian offers to show Basil the diary of his life, which he is certain will answer all of Basil's questions", "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."}

It was on the ninth of November, the eve of his own thirty-eighth
birthday, as he often remembered afterwards.

He was walking home about eleven o'clock from Lord Henry's, where he
had been dining, and was wrapped in heavy furs, as the night was cold
and foggy.  At the corner of Grosvenor Square and South Audley Street,
a man passed him in the mist, walking very fast and with the collar of
his grey ulster turned up.  He had a bag in his hand.  Dorian
recognized him.  It was Basil Hallward.  A strange sense of fear, for
which he could not account, came over him.  He made no sign of
recognition and went on quickly in the direction of his own house.

But Hallward had seen him.  Dorian heard him first stopping on the
pavement and then hurrying after him.  In a few moments, his hand was
on his arm.

"Dorian!  What an extraordinary piece of luck!  I have been waiting for
you in your library ever since nine o'clock. Finally I took pity on
your tired servant and told him to go to bed, as he let me out.  I am
off to Paris by the midnight train, and I particularly wanted to see
you before I left.  I thought it was you, or rather your fur coat, as
you passed me.  But I wasn't quite sure.  Didn't you recognize me?"

"In this fog, my dear Basil?  Why, I can't even recognize Grosvenor
Square.  I believe my house is somewhere about here, but I don't feel
at all certain about it.  I am sorry you are going away, as I have not
seen you for ages.  But I suppose you will be back soon?"

"No:  I am going to be out of England for six months.  I intend to take
a studio in Paris and shut myself up till I have finished a great
picture I have in my head.  However, it wasn't about myself I wanted to
talk.  Here we are at your door.  Let me come in for a moment.  I have
something to say to you."

"I shall be charmed.  But won't you miss your train?" said Dorian Gray
languidly as he passed up the steps and opened the door with his
latch-key.

The lamplight struggled out through the fog, and Hallward looked at his
watch.  "I have heaps of time," he answered.  "The train doesn't go
till twelve-fifteen, and it is only just eleven.  In fact, I was on my
way to the club to look for you, when I met you.  You see, I shan't
have any delay about luggage, as I have sent on my heavy things.  All I
have with me is in this bag, and I can easily get to Victoria in twenty
minutes."

Dorian looked at him and smiled.  "What a way for a fashionable painter
to travel!  A Gladstone bag and an ulster!  Come in, or the fog will
get into the house.  And mind you don't talk about anything serious.
Nothing is serious nowadays.  At least nothing should be."

Hallward shook his head, as he entered, and followed Dorian into the
library.  There was a bright wood fire blazing in the large open
hearth.  The lamps were lit, and an open Dutch silver spirit-case
stood, with some siphons of soda-water and large cut-glass tumblers, on
a little marqueterie table.

"You see your servant made me quite at home, Dorian.  He gave me
everything I wanted, including your best gold-tipped cigarettes.  He is
a most hospitable creature.  I like him much better than the Frenchman
you used to have.  What has become of the Frenchman, by the bye?"

Dorian shrugged his shoulders.  "I believe he married Lady Radley's
maid, and has established her in Paris as an English dressmaker.
Anglomania is very fashionable over there now, I hear.  It seems silly
of the French, doesn't it?  But--do you know?--he was not at all a bad
servant.  I never liked him, but I had nothing to complain about.  One
often imagines things that are quite absurd.  He was really very
devoted to me and seemed quite sorry when he went away.  Have another
brandy-and-soda? Or would you like hock-and-seltzer? I always take
hock-and-seltzer myself.  There is sure to be some in the next room."

"Thanks, I won't have anything more," said the painter, taking his cap
and coat off and throwing them on the bag that he had placed in the
corner.  "And now, my dear fellow, I want to speak to you seriously.
Don't frown like that.  You make it so much more difficult for me."

"What is it all about?" cried Dorian in his petulant way, flinging
himself down on the sofa.  "I hope it is not about myself.  I am tired
of myself to-night. I should like to be somebody else."

"It is about yourself," answered Hallward in his grave deep voice, "and
I must say it to you.  I shall only keep you half an hour."

Dorian sighed and lit a cigarette.  "Half an hour!" he murmured.

"It is not much to ask of you, Dorian, and it is entirely for your own
sake that I am speaking.  I think it right that you should know that
the most dreadful things are being said against you in London."

"I don't wish to know anything about them.  I love scandals about other
people, but scandals about myself don't interest me.  They have not got
the charm of novelty."

"They must interest you, Dorian.  Every gentleman is interested in his
good name.  You don't want people to talk of you as something vile and
degraded.  Of course, you have your position, and your wealth, and all
that kind of thing.  But position and wealth are not everything.  Mind
you, I don't believe these rumours at all.  At least, I can't believe
them when I see you.  Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's
face.  It cannot be concealed.  People talk sometimes of secret vices.
There are no such things.  If a wretched man has a vice, it shows
itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the
moulding of his hands even.  Somebody--I won't mention his name, but
you know him--came to me last year to have his portrait done.  I had
never seen him before, and had never heard anything about him at the
time, though I have heard a good deal since.  He offered an extravagant
price.  I refused him.  There was something in the shape of his fingers
that I hated.  I know now that I was quite right in what I fancied
about him.  His life is dreadful.  But you, Dorian, with your pure,
bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth--I can't
believe anything against you.  And yet I see you very seldom, and you
never come down to the studio now, and when I am away from you, and I
hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I
don't know what to say.  Why is it, Dorian, that a man like the Duke of
Berwick leaves the room of a club when you enter it?  Why is it that so
many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or invite you to
theirs?  You used to be a friend of Lord Staveley.  I met him at dinner
last week.  Your name happened to come up in conversation, in
connection with the miniatures you have lent to the exhibition at the
Dudley.  Staveley curled his lip and said that you might have the most
artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl
should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the
same room with.  I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked
him what he meant.  He told me.  He told me right out before everybody.
It was horrible!  Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?  There
was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide.  You were
his great friend.  There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England
with a tarnished name.  You and he were inseparable.  What about Adrian
Singleton and his dreadful end?  What about Lord Kent's only son and
his career?  I met his father yesterday in St. James's Street.  He
seemed broken with shame and sorrow.  What about the young Duke of
Perth?  What sort of life has he got now?  What gentleman would
associate with him?"

"Stop, Basil.  You are talking about things of which you know nothing,"
said Dorian Gray, biting his lip, and with a note of infinite contempt
in his voice.  "You ask me why Berwick leaves a room when I enter it.
It is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows
anything about mine.  With such blood as he has in his veins, how could
his record be clean?  You ask me about Henry Ashton and young Perth.
Did I teach the one his vices, and the other his debauchery?  If Kent's
silly son takes his wife from the streets, what is that to me?  If
Adrian Singleton writes his friend's name across a bill, am I his
keeper?  I know how people chatter in England.  The middle classes air
their moral prejudices over their gross dinner-tables, and whisper
about what they call the profligacies of their betters in order to try
and pretend that they are in smart society and on intimate terms with
the people they slander.  In this country, it is enough for a man to
have distinction and brains for every common tongue to wag against him.
And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead
themselves?  My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land
of the hypocrite."

"Dorian," cried Hallward, "that is not the question.  England is bad
enough I know, and English society is all wrong.  That is the reason
why I want you to be fine.  You have not been fine.  One has a right to
judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends.  Yours seem to
lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity.  You have filled them
with a madness for pleasure.  They have gone down into the depths.  You
led them there.  Yes:  you led them there, and yet you can smile, as
you are smiling now.  And there is worse behind.  I know you and Harry
are inseparable.  Surely for that reason, if for none other, you should
not have made his sister's name a by-word."

"Take care, Basil.  You go too far."

"I must speak, and you must listen.  You shall listen.  When you met
Lady Gwendolen, not a breath of scandal had ever touched her.  Is there
a single decent woman in London now who would drive with her in the
park?  Why, even her children are not allowed to live with her.  Then
there are other stories--stories that you have been seen creeping at
dawn out of dreadful houses and slinking in disguise into the foulest
dens in London.  Are they true?  Can they be true?  When I first heard
them, I laughed.  I hear them now, and they make me shudder.  What
about your country-house and the life that is led there?  Dorian, you
don't know what is said about you.  I won't tell you that I don't want
to preach to you.  I remember Harry saying once that every man who
turned himself into an amateur curate for the moment always began by
saying that, and then proceeded to break his word.  I do want to preach
to you.  I want you to lead such a life as will make the world respect
you.  I want you to have a clean name and a fair record.  I want you to
get rid of the dreadful people you associate with.  Don't shrug your
shoulders like that.  Don't be so indifferent.  You have a wonderful
influence.  Let it be for good, not for evil.  They say that you
corrupt every one with whom you become intimate, and that it is quite
sufficient for you to enter a house for shame of some kind to follow
after.  I don't know whether it is so or not.  How should I know?  But
it is said of you.  I am told things that it seems impossible to doubt.
Lord Gloucester was one of my greatest friends at Oxford.  He showed me
a letter that his wife had written to him when she was dying alone in
her villa at Mentone.  Your name was implicated in the most terrible
confession I ever read.  I told him that it was absurd--that I knew you
thoroughly and that you were incapable of anything of the kind.  Know
you?  I wonder do I know you?  Before I could answer that, I should
have to see your soul."

"To see my soul!" muttered Dorian Gray, starting up from the sofa and
turning almost white from fear.

"Yes," answered Hallward gravely, and with deep-toned sorrow in his
voice, "to see your soul.  But only God can do that."

A bitter laugh of mockery broke from the lips of the younger man.  "You
shall see it yourself, to-night!" he cried, seizing a lamp from the
table.  "Come:  it is your own handiwork.  Why shouldn't you look at
it?  You can tell the world all about it afterwards, if you choose.
Nobody would believe you.  If they did believe you, they would like me
all the better for it.  I know the age better than you do, though you
will prate about it so tediously.  Come, I tell you.  You have
chattered enough about corruption.  Now you shall look on it face to
face."

There was the madness of pride in every word he uttered.  He stamped
his foot upon the ground in his boyish insolent manner.  He felt a
terrible joy at the thought that some one else was to share his secret,
and that the man who had painted the portrait that was the origin of
all his shame was to be burdened for the rest of his life with the
hideous memory of what he had done.

"Yes," he continued, coming closer to him and looking steadfastly into
his stern eyes, "I shall show you my soul.  You shall see the thing
that you fancy only God can see."

Hallward started back.  "This is blasphemy, Dorian!" he cried.  "You
must not say things like that.  They are horrible, and they don't mean
anything."

"You think so?"  He laughed again.

"I know so.  As for what I said to you to-night, I said it for your
good.  You know I have been always a stanch friend to you."

"Don't touch me.  Finish what you have to say."

A twisted flash of pain shot across the painter's face.  He paused for
a moment, and a wild feeling of pity came over him.  After all, what
right had he to pry into the life of Dorian Gray?  If he had done a
tithe of what was rumoured about him, how much he must have suffered!
Then he straightened himself up, and walked over to the fire-place, and
stood there, looking at the burning logs with their frostlike ashes and
their throbbing cores of flame.

"I am waiting, Basil," said the young man in a hard clear voice.

He turned round.  "What I have to say is this," he cried.  "You must
give me some answer to these horrible charges that are made against
you.  If you tell me that they are absolutely untrue from beginning to
end, I shall believe you.  Deny them, Dorian, deny them!  Can't you see
what I am going through?  My God! don't tell me that you are bad, and
corrupt, and shameful."

Dorian Gray smiled.  There was a curl of contempt in his lips.  "Come
upstairs, Basil," he said quietly.  "I keep a diary of my life from day
to day, and it never leaves the room in which it is written.  I shall
show it to you if you come with me."

"I shall come with you, Dorian, if you wish it.  I see I have missed my
train.  That makes no matter.  I can go to-morrow. But don't ask me to
read anything to-night. All I want is a plain answer to my question."

"That shall be given to you upstairs.  I could not give it here.  You
will not have to read long."



Chapter 12
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, Dorian runs into Basil on a fog-covered street. He tries to pass him unrecognized, but Basil calls out to him and accompanies him home. Basil mentions that he is about to leave for a six-month stay in Paris but felt it necessary to stop by and warn Dorian that terrible rumors are being spread about his conduct. Basil reminds Dorian that there are no such things as "secret vices": sin, he claims, "writes itself across a man's face. Having said these words, he demands to know why so many of Dorian's friendships have ended disastrously. We learn that one boy committed suicide, and others had their careers or reputations ruined. Basil chastises Dorian for his influence over these unfortunate youths and urges him to use his considerable sway for good rather than evil. He adds that he wonders if he knows Dorian at all and wishes he were able to see the man's soul. Dorian laughs bitterly and says that the artist shall have his wish. He promises to show Basil his soul, which, he notes, most people believe only God can see. Basil decries Dorian's speech as blasphemous, and he begs Dorian to deny the terrible charges that have been made against him. Smiling, Dorian offers to show Basil the diary of his life, which he is certain will answer all of Basil's questions
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.