a fresh
school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic
spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of
soul and body--how much that is! We in our madness have separated the
two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is
void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember
that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price
but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have
ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian
Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and
for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I
had always looked for and always missed."

"Basil, this is extraordinary! I must see Dorian Gray."

Hallward got up from the seat and walked up and down the garden. After
some time he came back. "Harry," he said, "Dorian Gray is to me simply
a motive in art. You might see nothing in him. I see everything in
him. He is never more present in my work than when no image of him is
there. He is a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I find
him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of
certain colours. That is all."

"Then why won't you exhibit his portrait?" asked Lord Henry.

"Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of
all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never
cared to speak to him. He knows nothing about it. He shall never know
anything about it. But the world might guess it, and I will not bare
my soul to their shallow prying eyes. My heart shall never be put
under their microscope. There is too much of myself in the thing,
Harry--too much of myself!"

"Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion
is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."

"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create
beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We
live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of
autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I
will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall
never see my portrait of Dorian Gray."

"I think you are wrong, Basil, but I won't argue with you. It is only
the intellectually lost who ever argue. Tell me, is Dorian Gray very
fon