Indeed, I should be sorry to look like him. Don't flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him." He is some brainless beautiful creature who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. "Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and as a natural consequence he always looks absolutely delightful." How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. "The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face." But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. "Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you- well, of course you have an intellectual expression and all that. Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made out of ivory and rose-leaves." "Yes, I knew you would but it is quite true, all the same. Lord Henry stretched himself out on the divan and laughed. "I know you will laugh at me,"he replied,"but I really can't exhibit it. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion." It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. "Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy, opium-tainted cigarette. He answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. "I don't think I shall send it anywhere,"
Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. "You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. "It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," But he suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.Īs the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive.
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