an, from the moment I met you, your personality had the most
extraordinary influence over me. I was dominated, soul, brain, and power
by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal
whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream. I worshipped
you. I grew jealous of everyone to whom you spoke. I wanted to have you
all to myself. I was only happy when I was with you. When you were away
from me you were still present in my art.... Of course I never let you
know anything about this. It would have been impossible. You would not
have understood it. I hardly understood it myself. I only knew that I
had seen perfection face to face, and that the world had become
wonderful to my eyes--too wonderful, perhaps, for in such mad worships
there is peril, the peril of losing them, no less than the peril of
keeping them.... Weeks and weeks went on, and I grew more and more
absorbed in you. Then came a new development. I had drawn you as Paris
in dainty armour, and as Adonis with huntsman's cloak and polished
boar-spear. Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms you had sat on the prow of
Adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile. You had leant over
the still pool of some Greek woodland, and seen in the water's silent
silver the marvel of your own face. And it had all been what art should
be, unconscious, ideal, and remote. One day, a fatal day I sometimes
think, I determined to paint a wonderful portrait of you as you actually
are, not in the costume of dead ages, but in your own dress and in your
own time. Whether it was the Realism of the method, or the mere wonder
of your own personality, thus directly presented to me without mist or
veil, I cannot tell. But I know that as I worked at it, every flake and
film of colour seemed to me to reveal my secret. I grew afraid that
others would know of my idolatry. I felt, Dorian, that I had told too
much, that I had put too much of myself into it. Then it was that I
resolved never to allow the picture to be exhibited. You were a little
annoyed; but then you did not realise all that it meant to me. Harry, to
whom I talked about it, laughed at me. But I did not mind that. When the
picture was finished, and I sat alone with it, I felt that I was
right.... Well, after a few days the thing left my studio, and as soon
as I had got rid of the intolerable fascination of its presence it
seemed to me that I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen
anything in it, more