finished_summaries/sparknotes/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_7_part_1.txt
The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 15
chapter 15
{"name": "Chapter 15", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210228142327/https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doriangray/section8/", "summary": "That evening, Dorian goes to a dinner party, at which he flirts with bored noblewomen. Reflecting on his calm demeanor, he feels \"keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. Lady Narborough, the hostess, discusses the sad life of her daughter, who lives in a region of the countryside that has not witnessed a scandal since the time of Queen Elizabeth. Dorian finds the party tedious and brightens only when he learns Lord Henry will be in attendance. During dinner, after Lord Henry has arrived, Dorian finds it impossible to eat. Lord Henry asks him what is the matter. Lady Narborough suggests that Dorian is in love, though Dorian assures her that she is wrong. The party-goers talk wittily about marriage, and the ladies then leave the gentlemen to their \"politics and scandal. Lord Henry and Dorian discuss a party to be held at Dorian's country estate. Lord Henry then casually asks about Dorian's whereabouts the night before; Dorian's calm facade cracks a bit and he snaps out a strange, defensive response. Rather than join the women upstairs, Dorian decides to go home early. Once Dorian arrives home, he retrieves Basil's belongings from the wall compartment and burns them. He goes to an ornate cabinet and, opening one of its drawers, draws out a canister of opium. At midnight, he dresses in common clothes and hires a coach to bring him to a London neighborhood where the city's opium dens prosper", "analysis": "Chapters Fifteeen-Sixteen When Lord Henry alludes to the \"in de siecle\"  in Chapter Fifteen, he refers more to the sensibilities that flourished in the 1890s than the chronological time period. In this decade, many people in continental Europe and England felt an unshakable sense of discontent. The values that once seemed to structure life and give it meaning were apparently lost. Two main reasons for this disenchantment were linked to the public functions of art and morality, which, in Victorian England, seemed inextricably connected. Art, it was thought, should function as a moral barometer; to the minds of many, this dictum left room for only the most restrictive morals and the most unimaginative art. The term \"fin de siecle\" therefore came to describe a mode of thinking that sought to escape this disenchantment and restore beauty to art and reshape  public understandings of morality. In a way, though Dorian lives a life very much in tune with fin-de-siecle thinking, he rejects Victorian morals in favor of self-determined ethics based on pleasure and experience, and he retains--and is tortured by--a very Victorian mind-set. Indeed, by viewing the painting of himself as \"the most magical of mirrors,\" Dorian disavows the tenets of aestheticism that demand that art be completely freed of its connection to morality. The picture becomes the gauge by which Dorian measures his downfall and serves as a constant reminder of the sins that plague his conscience. If we understand Dorian as a victim of this Victorian circumstance, we can read his drastic course of action in a more sympathetic light. Indeed, by Chapter Sixteen, he is a man desperate to forget the sins for which he believes he can never be forgiven. As he sinks into the sordidness of the London docks and their opium dens, he reflects: Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.  Here, Dorian's thoughts echo French poets like Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, who believed that the description of intense experience was the key to true beauty, even  when the experience itself was something sordid, ugly, or grotesque. Indeed, in this trip to the opium den, Dorian intends to do nothing less than \"cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.\" Of course, what Dorian finds in the opium den has a far less curative effect than he hopes. The presence of Adrian Singleton, a young man whose downfall and subsequent drug addiction is at least partially Dorian's fault, pains Dorian's conscience and makes it impossible for him to \"escape from himself.\" The reintroduction of James Vane makes this idea of escape quite literal. The avenging brother is, admittedly, a rather weak  plot device that Wilde added to his 1891 revision of the novel. If Dorian fears and wishes to escape from himself, we can consider James the physical incarnation of that fear: James exists to precipitate the troubled Dorian's final breakdown."}

That evening, at eight-thirty, exquisitely dressed and wearing a large
button-hole of Parma violets, Dorian Gray was ushered into Lady
Narborough's drawing-room by bowing servants.  His forehead was
throbbing with maddened nerves, and he felt wildly excited, but his
manner as he bent over his hostess's hand was as easy and graceful as
ever.  Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to
play a part.  Certainly no one looking at Dorian Gray that night could
have believed that he had passed through a tragedy as horrible as any
tragedy of our age.  Those finely shaped fingers could never have
clutched a knife for sin, nor those smiling lips have cried out on God
and goodness.  He himself could not help wondering at the calm of his
demeanour, and for a moment felt keenly the terrible pleasure of a
double life.

It was a small party, got up rather in a hurry by Lady Narborough, who
was a very clever woman with what Lord Henry used to describe as the
remains of really remarkable ugliness.  She had proved an excellent
wife to one of our most tedious ambassadors, and having buried her
husband properly in a marble mausoleum, which she had herself designed,
and married off her daughters to some rich, rather elderly men, she
devoted herself now to the pleasures of French fiction, French cookery,
and French _esprit_ when she could get it.

Dorian was one of her especial favourites, and she always told him that
she was extremely glad she had not met him in early life.  "I know, my
dear, I should have fallen madly in love with you," she used to say,
"and thrown my bonnet right over the mills for your sake.  It is most
fortunate that you were not thought of at the time.  As it was, our
bonnets were so unbecoming, and the mills were so occupied in trying to
raise the wind, that I never had even a flirtation with anybody.
However, that was all Narborough's fault.  He was dreadfully
short-sighted, and there is no pleasure in taking in a husband who
never sees anything."

Her guests this evening were rather tedious.  The fact was, as she
explained to Dorian, behind a very shabby fan, one of her married
daughters had come up quite suddenly to stay with her, and, to make
matters worse, had actually brought her husband with her.  "I think it
is most unkind of her, my dear," she whispered.  "Of course I go and
stay with them every summer after I come from Homburg, but then an old
woman like me must have fresh air sometimes, and besides, I really wake
them up.  You don't know what an existence they lead down there.  It is
pure unadulterated country life.  They get up early, because they have
so much to do, and go to bed early, because they have so little to
think about.  There has not been a scandal in the neighbourhood since
the time of Queen Elizabeth, and consequently they all fall asleep
after dinner.  You shan't sit next either of them.  You shall sit by me
and amuse me."

Dorian murmured a graceful compliment and looked round the room.  Yes:
it was certainly a tedious party.  Two of the people he had never seen
before, and the others consisted of Ernest Harrowden, one of those
middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies,
but are thoroughly disliked by their friends; Lady Ruxton, an
overdressed woman of forty-seven, with a hooked nose, who was always
trying to get herself compromised, but was so peculiarly plain that to
her great disappointment no one would ever believe anything against
her; Mrs. Erlynne, a pushing nobody, with a delightful lisp and
Venetian-red hair; Lady Alice Chapman, his hostess's daughter, a dowdy
dull girl, with one of those characteristic British faces that, once
seen, are never remembered; and her husband, a red-cheeked,
white-whiskered creature who, like so many of his class, was under the
impression that inordinate joviality can atone for an entire lack of
ideas.

He was rather sorry he had come, till Lady Narborough, looking at the
great ormolu gilt clock that sprawled in gaudy curves on the
mauve-draped mantelshelf, exclaimed:  "How horrid of Henry Wotton to be
so late!  I sent round to him this morning on chance and he promised
faithfully not to disappoint me."

It was some consolation that Harry was to be there, and when the door
opened and he heard his slow musical voice lending charm to some
insincere apology, he ceased to feel bored.

But at dinner he could not eat anything.  Plate after plate went away
untasted.  Lady Narborough kept scolding him for what she called "an
insult to poor Adolphe, who invented the _menu_ specially for you," and
now and then Lord Henry looked across at him, wondering at his silence
and abstracted manner.  From time to time the butler filled his glass
with champagne.  He drank eagerly, and his thirst seemed to increase.

"Dorian," said Lord Henry at last, as the _chaud-froid_ was being handed
round, "what is the matter with you to-night? You are quite out of
sorts."

"I believe he is in love," cried Lady Narborough, "and that he is
afraid to tell me for fear I should be jealous.  He is quite right.  I
certainly should."

"Dear Lady Narborough," murmured Dorian, smiling, "I have not been in
love for a whole week--not, in fact, since Madame de Ferrol left town."

"How you men can fall in love with that woman!" exclaimed the old lady.
"I really cannot understand it."

"It is simply because she remembers you when you were a little girl,
Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry.  "She is the one link between us and
your short frocks."

"She does not remember my short frocks at all, Lord Henry.  But I
remember her very well at Vienna thirty years ago, and how _decolletee_
she was then."

"She is still _decolletee_," he answered, taking an olive in his long
fingers; "and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an
_edition de luxe_ of a bad French novel.  She is really wonderful, and
full of surprises.  Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary.
When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief."

"How can you, Harry!" cried Dorian.

"It is a most romantic explanation," laughed the hostess.  "But her
third husband, Lord Henry!  You don't mean to say Ferrol is the fourth?"

"Certainly, Lady Narborough."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"Well, ask Mr. Gray.  He is one of her most intimate friends."

"Is it true, Mr. Gray?"

"She assures me so, Lady Narborough," said Dorian.  "I asked her
whether, like Marguerite de Navarre, she had their hearts embalmed and
hung at her girdle.  She told me she didn't, because none of them had
had any hearts at all."

"Four husbands!  Upon my word that is _trop de zele_."

"_Trop d'audace_, I tell her," said Dorian.

"Oh! she is audacious enough for anything, my dear.  And what is Ferrol
like?  I don't know him."

"The husbands of very beautiful women belong to the criminal classes,"
said Lord Henry, sipping his wine.

Lady Narborough hit him with her fan.  "Lord Henry, I am not at all
surprised that the world says that you are extremely wicked."

"But what world says that?" asked Lord Henry, elevating his eyebrows.
"It can only be the next world.  This world and I are on excellent
terms."

"Everybody I know says you are very wicked," cried the old lady,
shaking her head.

Lord Henry looked serious for some moments.  "It is perfectly
monstrous," he said, at last, "the way people go about nowadays saying
things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely
true."

"Isn't he incorrigible?" cried Dorian, leaning forward in his chair.

"I hope so," said his hostess, laughing.  "But really, if you all
worship Madame de Ferrol in this ridiculous way, I shall have to marry
again so as to be in the fashion."

"You will never marry again, Lady Narborough," broke in Lord Henry.
"You were far too happy.  When a woman marries again, it is because she
detested her first husband.  When a man marries again, it is because he
adored his first wife.  Women try their luck; men risk theirs."

"Narborough wasn't perfect," cried the old lady.

"If he had been, you would not have loved him, my dear lady," was the
rejoinder.  "Women love us for our defects.  If we have enough of them,
they will forgive us everything, even our intellects.  You will never
ask me to dinner again after saying this, I am afraid, Lady Narborough,
but it is quite true."

"Of course it is true, Lord Henry.  If we women did not love you for
your defects, where would you all be?  Not one of you would ever be
married.  You would be a set of unfortunate bachelors.  Not, however,
that that would alter you much.  Nowadays all the married men live like
bachelors, and all the bachelors like married men."

"_Fin de siecle_," murmured Lord Henry.

"_Fin du globe_," answered his hostess.

"I wish it were _fin du globe_," said Dorian with a sigh.  "Life is a
great disappointment."

"Ah, my dear," cried Lady Narborough, putting on her gloves, "don't
tell me that you have exhausted life.  When a man says that one knows
that life has exhausted him.  Lord Henry is very wicked, and I
sometimes wish that I had been; but you are made to be good--you look
so good.  I must find you a nice wife.  Lord Henry, don't you think
that Mr. Gray should get married?"

"I am always telling him so, Lady Narborough," said Lord Henry with a
bow.

"Well, we must look out for a suitable match for him.  I shall go
through Debrett carefully to-night and draw out a list of all the
eligible young ladies."

"With their ages, Lady Narborough?" asked Dorian.

"Of course, with their ages, slightly edited.  But nothing must be done
in a hurry.  I want it to be what _The Morning Post_ calls a suitable
alliance, and I want you both to be happy."

"What nonsense people talk about happy marriages!" exclaimed Lord
Henry.  "A man can be happy with any woman, as long as he does not love
her."

"Ah! what a cynic you are!" cried the old lady, pushing back her chair
and nodding to Lady Ruxton.  "You must come and dine with me soon
again.  You are really an admirable tonic, much better than what Sir
Andrew prescribes for me.  You must tell me what people you would like
to meet, though.  I want it to be a delightful gathering."

"I like men who have a future and women who have a past," he answered.
"Or do you think that would make it a petticoat party?"

"I fear so," she said, laughing, as she stood up.  "A thousand pardons,
my dear Lady Ruxton," she added, "I didn't see you hadn't finished your
cigarette."

"Never mind, Lady Narborough.  I smoke a great deal too much.  I am
going to limit myself, for the future."

"Pray don't, Lady Ruxton," said Lord Henry.  "Moderation is a fatal
thing.  Enough is as bad as a meal.  More than enough is as good as a
feast."

Lady Ruxton glanced at him curiously.  "You must come and explain that
to me some afternoon, Lord Henry.  It sounds a fascinating theory," she
murmured, as she swept out of the room.

"Now, mind you don't stay too long over your politics and scandal,"
cried Lady Narborough from the door.  "If you do, we are sure to
squabble upstairs."

The men laughed, and Mr. Chapman got up solemnly from the foot of the
table and came up to the top.  Dorian Gray changed his seat and went
and sat by Lord Henry.  Mr. Chapman began to talk in a loud voice about
the situation in the House of Commons.  He guffawed at his adversaries.
The word _doctrinaire_--word full of terror to the British
mind--reappeared from time to time between his explosions.  An
alliterative prefix served as an ornament of oratory.  He hoisted the
Union Jack on the pinnacles of thought.  The inherited stupidity of the
race--sound English common sense he jovially termed it--was shown to be
the proper bulwark for society.

A smile curved Lord Henry's lips, and he turned round and looked at
Dorian.

"Are you better, my dear fellow?" he asked.  "You seemed rather out of
sorts at dinner."

"I am quite well, Harry.  I am tired.  That is all."

"You were charming last night.  The little duchess is quite devoted to
you.  She tells me she is going down to Selby."

"She has promised to come on the twentieth."

"Is Monmouth to be there, too?"

"Oh, yes, Harry."

"He bores me dreadfully, almost as much as he bores her.  She is very
clever, too clever for a woman.  She lacks the indefinable charm of
weakness.  It is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image
precious.  Her feet are very pretty, but they are not feet of clay.
White porcelain feet, if you like.  They have been through the fire,
and what fire does not destroy, it hardens.  She has had experiences."

"How long has she been married?" asked Dorian.

"An eternity, she tells me.  I believe, according to the peerage, it is
ten years, but ten years with Monmouth must have been like eternity,
with time thrown in.  Who else is coming?"

"Oh, the Willoughbys, Lord Rugby and his wife, our hostess, Geoffrey
Clouston, the usual set.  I have asked Lord Grotrian."

"I like him," said Lord Henry.  "A great many people don't, but I find
him charming.  He atones for being occasionally somewhat overdressed by
being always absolutely over-educated. He is a very modern type."

"I don't know if he will be able to come, Harry.  He may have to go to
Monte Carlo with his father."

"Ah! what a nuisance people's people are!  Try and make him come.  By
the way, Dorian, you ran off very early last night.  You left before
eleven.  What did you do afterwards?  Did you go straight home?"

Dorian glanced at him hurriedly and frowned.

"No, Harry," he said at last, "I did not get home till nearly three."

"Did you go to the club?"

"Yes," he answered.  Then he bit his lip.  "No, I don't mean that.  I
didn't go to the club.  I walked about.  I forget what I did.... How
inquisitive you are, Harry!  You always want to know what one has been
doing.  I always want to forget what I have been doing.  I came in at
half-past two, if you wish to know the exact time.  I had left my
latch-key at home, and my servant had to let me in.  If you want any
corroborative evidence on the subject, you can ask him."

Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders.  "My dear fellow, as if I cared!
Let us go up to the drawing-room. No sherry, thank you, Mr. Chapman.
Something has happened to you, Dorian.  Tell me what it is.  You are
not yourself to-night."

"Don't mind me, Harry.  I am irritable, and out of temper.  I shall
come round and see you to-morrow, or next day.  Make my excuses to Lady
Narborough.  I shan't go upstairs.  I shall go home.  I must go home."

"All right, Dorian.  I dare say I shall see you to-morrow at tea-time.
The duchess is coming."

"I will try to be there, Harry," he said, leaving the room.  As he
drove back to his own house, he was conscious that the sense of terror
he thought he had strangled had come back to him.  Lord Henry's casual
questioning had made him lose his nerve for the moment, and he wanted
his nerve still.  Things that were dangerous had to be destroyed.  He
winced.  He hated the idea of even touching them.

Yet it had to be done.  He realized that, and when he had locked the
door of his library, he opened the secret press into which he had
thrust Basil Hallward's coat and bag.  A huge fire was blazing.  He
piled another log on it.  The smell of the singeing clothes and burning
leather was horrible.  It took him three-quarters of an hour to consume
everything.  At the end he felt faint and sick, and having lit some
Algerian pastilles in a pierced copper brazier, he bathed his hands and
forehead with a cool musk-scented vinegar.

Suddenly he started.  His eyes grew strangely bright, and he gnawed
nervously at his underlip.  Between two of the windows stood a large
Florentine cabinet, made out of ebony and inlaid with ivory and blue
lapis.  He watched it as though it were a thing that could fascinate
and make afraid, as though it held something that he longed for and yet
almost loathed.  His breath quickened.  A mad craving came over him.
He lit a cigarette and then threw it away.  His eyelids drooped till
the long fringed lashes almost touched his cheek.  But he still watched
the cabinet.  At last he got up from the sofa on which he had been
lying, went over to it, and having unlocked it, touched some hidden
spring.  A triangular drawer passed slowly out.  His fingers moved
instinctively towards it, dipped in, and closed on something.  It was a
small Chinese box of black and gold-dust lacquer, elaborately wrought,
the sides patterned with curved waves, and the silken cords hung with
round crystals and tasselled in plaited metal threads.  He opened it.
Inside was a green paste, waxy in lustre, the odour curiously heavy and
persistent.

He hesitated for some moments, with a strangely immobile smile upon his
face.  Then shivering, though the atmosphere of the room was terribly
hot, he drew himself up and glanced at the clock.  It was twenty
minutes to twelve.  He put the box back, shutting the cabinet doors as
he did so, and went into his bedroom.

As midnight was striking bronze blows upon the dusky air, Dorian Gray,
dressed commonly, and with a muffler wrapped round his throat, crept
quietly out of his house.  In Bond Street he found a hansom with a good
horse.  He hailed it and in a low voice gave the driver an address.

The man shook his head.  "It is too far for me," he muttered.

"Here is a sovereign for you," said Dorian.  "You shall have another if
you drive fast."

"All right, sir," answered the man, "you will be there in an hour," and
after his fare had got in he turned his horse round and drove rapidly
towards the river.



Chapter 15
That evening, Dorian goes to a dinner party, at which he flirts with bored noblewomen. Reflecting on his calm demeanor, he feels "keenly the terrible pleasure of a double life. Lady Narborough, the hostess, discusses the sad life of her daughter, who lives in a region of the countryside that has not witnessed a scandal since the time of Queen Elizabeth. Dorian finds the party tedious and brightens only when he learns Lord Henry will be in attendance. During dinner, after Lord Henry has arrived, Dorian finds it impossible to eat. Lord Henry asks him what is the matter. Lady Narborough suggests that Dorian is in love, though Dorian assures her that she is wrong. The party-goers talk wittily about marriage, and the ladies then leave the gentlemen to their "politics and scandal. Lord Henry and Dorian discuss a party to be held at Dorian's country estate. Lord Henry then casually asks about Dorian's whereabouts the night before; Dorian's calm facade cracks a bit and he snaps out a strange, defensive response. Rather than join the women upstairs, Dorian decides to go home early. Once Dorian arrives home, he retrieves Basil's belongings from the wall compartment and burns them. He goes to an ornate cabinet and, opening one of its drawers, draws out a canister of opium. At midnight, he dresses in common clothes and hires a coach to bring him to a London neighborhood where the city's opium dens prosper
Chapters Fifteeen-Sixteen When Lord Henry alludes to the "in de siecle"  in Chapter Fifteen, he refers more to the sensibilities that flourished in the 1890s than the chronological time period. In this decade, many people in continental Europe and England felt an unshakable sense of discontent. The values that once seemed to structure life and give it meaning were apparently lost. Two main reasons for this disenchantment were linked to the public functions of art and morality, which, in Victorian England, seemed inextricably connected. Art, it was thought, should function as a moral barometer; to the minds of many, this dictum left room for only the most restrictive morals and the most unimaginative art. The term "fin de siecle" therefore came to describe a mode of thinking that sought to escape this disenchantment and restore beauty to art and reshape  public understandings of morality. In a way, though Dorian lives a life very much in tune with fin-de-siecle thinking, he rejects Victorian morals in favor of self-determined ethics based on pleasure and experience, and he retains--and is tortured by--a very Victorian mind-set. Indeed, by viewing the painting of himself as "the most magical of mirrors," Dorian disavows the tenets of aestheticism that demand that art be completely freed of its connection to morality. The picture becomes the gauge by which Dorian measures his downfall and serves as a constant reminder of the sins that plague his conscience. If we understand Dorian as a victim of this Victorian circumstance, we can read his drastic course of action in a more sympathetic light. Indeed, by Chapter Sixteen, he is a man desperate to forget the sins for which he believes he can never be forgiven. As he sinks into the sordidness of the London docks and their opium dens, he reflects: Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of Art, the dreamy shadows of Song.  Here, Dorian's thoughts echo French poets like Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, who believed that the description of intense experience was the key to true beauty, even  when the experience itself was something sordid, ugly, or grotesque. Indeed, in this trip to the opium den, Dorian intends to do nothing less than "cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." Of course, what Dorian finds in the opium den has a far less curative effect than he hopes. The presence of Adrian Singleton, a young man whose downfall and subsequent drug addiction is at least partially Dorian's fault, pains Dorian's conscience and makes it impossible for him to "escape from himself." The reintroduction of James Vane makes this idea of escape quite literal. The avenging brother is, admittedly, a rather weak  plot device that Wilde added to his 1891 revision of the novel. If Dorian fears and wishes to escape from himself, we can consider James the physical incarnation of that fear: James exists to precipitate the troubled Dorian's final breakdown.