A few years in which really to live. When my youth goes, my beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for me, or have to
Content myself with those mean triumphs that the memory of me past will make bitterer than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings me nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of me, and I will become sallow and hollow cheeked, and dull-eyed. I will suffer horribly. How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrid, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June…. If it was only the other way! If it was I who were to be always young, and the picture that were to grow old! For this—for this—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give!’
How long will people worship me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I
Suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. This picture has taught me that. Lord Henry is perfectly right.
Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I will kill myself ‘I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait he has painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. Oh, If it was only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day,—mock me horribly! I will give up even your soul to be like that forever! I want eternal youth!
How come you acted so horribly! It was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was. You have no idea what I suffered.’ ‘You are ill, I suppose. When you are ill you shouldn’t act. You make yourself ridiculous. My friends were bored. I was bored.’ ‘Yes,’ he cried, ‘you have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were wonderful, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid. My God! How mad I was to love you! What a fool I have been! You are nothing to me now. I will never see you again. I will never think of you. I will never mention your name. You don’t know what you were to me, once. Why, once …. Oh, I can’t bear to think of it! I wish I had never laid eyes upon you! You have spoiled the romance of my life. How little you can know of love, if you say it mars your art! What are you without your art? Nothing. I would have made you famous, splendid, and magnificent. The world would have worshipped you, and you would have belonged to me. What are you now? A third-rate actress with a pretty face.’ ‘I am going,’ he said at last, in his calm, clear voice. You have disappointed me.’
‘So I have murdered Sibyl Vane,’ said Dorian Gray, half to him, — ‘murdered her as certainly as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. And the roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden. And to-night I am to dine with you, and then go on to the Opera, and sup somewhere, I suppose, afterwards. How extraordinarily dramatic life is! If I had read all this in a book, Harry, I think I would have wept over it. Somehow, now that it has happened actually, and to me, it seems far too wonderful for tears. Here is the first passionate love-letter I have ever written in my life. Strange, that my first passionate love letter should have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I wonder, those white silent people we call the dead? Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen? Oh, Harry,
How I loved her once! It seems years ago to me now. She was everything to me. Then came that dreadful night—was it really only last night?—when she played so badly, and my heart almost broke. She explained it all to me. It was terribly pathetic. But I was not moved a bit. I thought her shallow. Then something happened that made me afraid. I can’t tell you what it was, but it was awful. I said I would go back to her. I felt I had done wrong. And now she is dead. She would have done that for me. She had no right to kill herself. It was selfish of her.
