He lives the poetry that he cannot write.The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.""I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large, gold-topped bottle that stood on the table."It must be, if you say it.And now I am off.Imogen is waiting for me.Don't forget about to-morrow.Good-bye."As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began to think.Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as Dorian Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.He was pleased by it.
It made him a more interesting study.He had been always enthralled by the methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that science had seemed to him trivial and of no import.And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others.Human life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating.Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.And, yet, what a great reward one received! How wonderful the whole world became to one!
To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional coloured life of the intellect--to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they were in unison, and at what point they were at discord--there was a delight in that! What matter what the cost was? One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.
He was conscious--and the thought brought a gleam of pleasure into his brown agate eyes--that it was through certain words of his, musical words said with musical utterance, that Dorian Gray's soul had turned to this white girl and bowed in worship before her.To a large extent the lad was his own creation.He had made him premature.That was something.
Ordinary people waited till life disclosed to them its secrets, but to the few, to the elect, the mysteries of life were revealed before the veil was drawn away.Sometimes this was the effect of art, and chiefly of the art of literature, which dealt immediately with the passions and the intellect.
But now and then a complex personality took the place and assumed the office of art, was indeed, in its way, a real work of art, life having its elaborate masterpieces, just as poetry has, or sculpture, or painting.
