feat_summary_path: finished_summaries/gradesaver/The Picture of Dorian Gray/section_5_part_0.txt
feat_book_id: The Picture of Dorian Gray.chapter 8
feat_summary_id: chapter 8
feat_summary: {"name": "Chapter 8", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20210421171214/https://www.gradesaver.com/the-picture-of-dorian-gray/study-guide/summary-chapter-8", "summary": "Dorian is awoken by Victor, his servant, after having slept until 1:15 in the afternoon. He sees that he has received a letter from Lord Henry, but leaves it unopened. He feels refreshed and eats breakfast happily, the previous night feeling like nothing more than a dream. His pleasant afternoon is interrupted, however, when he sees the screen that he has thrown over the portrait. He thinks himself foolish for imagining that the painting might have changed, but decides to check it again just to make sure. Nervous that he might be acting strangely, he throws Victor out of the room, locks all of the doors, and draws the curtains. Sure enough, \"It was perfectly true. The painting had altered.\" He wonders how this could possible, whether there is a scientific explanation, or a darker, metaphysical cause for the change. The cruel expression on the face in the portrait reminds him of his poor treatment of Sibyl. Stricken with guilt, Dorian writes her a passionate love letter, filling \"page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain.\" Writing the letter is deeply cathartic. As soon as he finishes, Lord Henry arrives. Dorian tells him that although he saw Sibyl and was brutal towards her, he doesn't regret any of it, since \"It has taught me how to know myself better.\" Henry is delighted to find Dorian in good spirits, but when the young man tells him that he plans to cleanse his soul by marrying the poor actress, it is clear that there has been a misunderstanding. Sibyl Vane, as Henry had written to Dorian in the unopened letter, has killed herself with poison. Henry says that there will be an inquest, but that Dorian has nothing to worry about since nobody saw him go backstage or leave the theater, and since Sibyl never even told anyone her fiancA's real name. Henry urges Dorian not to get involved with the situation, as such a scandal would destroy his reputation. He asks Dorian to come see the opera with him that night. After his initial shock passes, Dorian responds to the news of Sibyl's death with a strange detachment. \"So I have murdered Sibyl Vane,\" he thinks, \"as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that.\" Under Henry's direction, Dorian comes to appreciate Sibyl's death as \"a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.\" Dorian is briefly disturbed by his emotional detachment, but Henry soon assuages his guilt, saying that life's tragedies often \"hurt us by...their entire lack of style.\" Since Sibyl died so dramatically, and for such a pure purpose as love, the situation is actually one, Henry believes, that Dorian should take satisfaction and pleasure in. Henry goes so far as to state that since the girl was only ever alive on stage, and since Dorian's love for her was rooted in his admiration for the various heroines she portrayed, that \"The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died...don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than are.\" Dorian thanks Henry for being such a good and true friend. Henry leaves, and Dorian again looks at the picture. The mean sneer has not shifted, making Dorian think that it had \"received the news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.\" After further contemplation, Dorian consoles himself by thinking that since the picture displays his true character, it must \"bear the burden of his shame,\" thus leaving him to enjoy a guilt-free life. He sees no reason to consider why the picture changes, and decides to allow himself to simply be entertained by its progress. The chapter ends with Dorian leaving to meet Lord Henry at the opera.", "analysis": "Once again, Dorian displays alarming capriciousness and a disturbing blindness to his own vanity. He writes to Sibyl in a passion, taking all of the blame for his actions, but the narrator comments that \"there is a luxury in self-reproach.\"  He takes pleasure in his confession, privately praising his own \"selflessness\".  He falls into a brief spell of grief upon hearing the news of Sibyl's suicide, but proves to be far from inconsolable. Lord Henry, playing the devil to Dorian's Faust, shows him the means by which to transform his pain and guilt into a new, pleasurable experience, for which only the portrait will pay the price. In this chapter, the symbolic significance of the portrait is clearly spelled out for us: \"here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin...an ever present sign of the ruin men bring upon their souls.\"  This realization prompts Dorian to exclaim that he \"can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous.\"  Dorian fears physical ugliness; in other words, it is vanity, not morality, that defines Dorian's relationship with his soul.  A similar type of selfishness appears when Dorian writes his love letter to Sibyl.  We are told that \"There is a luxury in self-reproach...When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.\"  Even in the throes of guilt, Dorian does not need Sibyl to grant the forgiveness that only she can rightly give, nor does it occur to him that Sibyl would do anything other than immediately accept his apology and agree to be his wife. Dorian's comment that Sibyl's death seems \"to be like simply a wonderful ending to a wonderful play\" continues the theme of life imitating art.  It also recalls Dorian's obsession with the characters that Sibyl portrayed.  He became disappointed in her when she tried to be her own person, and rejected the falseness of playing a role.  Now, her death has given Dorian the ability to once again view Sibyl as a character in a play.  When Lord Henry encourages this interpretation of the tragedy, he ensures that Dorian passes the point of no return on his descent into immorality. Dorian's statement that he has \"murdered her...as if I had cut her little throat with a knife\" not only displays a disturbing tendency to relish in unnecessarily morbid details, but also foreshadows Basil's murder in chapter 13, and recalls Basil's threat to destroy the painting with a knife in chapter 2.  The image of death by stabbing hovers in the air throughout the novel. This chapter also contains the closest thing Wilde offers as to an explanation of how the portrait has acquired such metaphysical properties.  However, it is not actually an explanation at all, but merely idle conjecture from Dorian: \"Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what the soul thought, they realized? - that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, darker reason?\"  Dorian is briefly disturbed by the possibility that black magic is at work, but he soon shrugs off this fear, and the question of how and why the portrait changes is never again raised."}
text: 
  It was long past noon when he awoke.  His valet had crept several times
  on tiptoe into the room to see if he was stirring, and had wondered
  what made his young master sleep so late.  Finally his bell sounded,
  and Victor came in softly with a cup of tea, and a pile of letters, on
  a small tray of old Sevres china, and drew back the olive-satin
  curtains, with their shimmering blue lining, that hung in front of the
  three tall windows.
  
  "Monsieur has well slept this morning," he said, smiling.
  
  "What o'clock is it, Victor?" asked Dorian Gray drowsily.
  
  "One hour and a quarter, Monsieur."
  
  How late it was!  He sat up, and having sipped some tea, turned over
  his letters.  One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought by
  hand that morning.  He hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside.
  The others he opened listlessly.  They contained the usual collection
  of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes
  of charity concerts, and the like that are showered on fashionable
  young men every morning during the season.  There was a rather heavy
  bill for a chased silver Louis-Quinze toilet-set that he had not yet
  had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely
  old-fashioned people and did not realize that we live in an age when
  unnecessary things are our only necessities; and there were several
  very courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders
  offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the
  most reasonable rates of interest.
  
  After about ten minutes he got up, and throwing on an elaborate
  dressing-gown of silk-embroidered cashmere wool, passed into the
  onyx-paved bathroom.  The cool water refreshed him after his long
  sleep.  He seemed to have forgotten all that he had gone through.  A
  dim sense of having taken part in some strange tragedy came to him once
  or twice, but there was the unreality of a dream about it.
  
  As soon as he was dressed, he went into the library and sat down to a
  light French breakfast that had been laid out for him on a small round
  table close to the open window.  It was an exquisite day.  The warm air
  seemed laden with spices.  A bee flew in and buzzed round the
  blue-dragon bowl that, filled with sulphur-yellow roses, stood before
  him.  He felt perfectly happy.
  
  Suddenly his eye fell on the screen that he had placed in front of the
  portrait, and he started.
  
  "Too cold for Monsieur?" asked his valet, putting an omelette on the
  table.  "I shut the window?"
  
  Dorian shook his head.  "I am not cold," he murmured.
  
  Was it all true?  Had the portrait really changed?  Or had it been
  simply his own imagination that had made him see a look of evil where
  there had been a look of joy?  Surely a painted canvas could not alter?
  The thing was absurd.  It would serve as a tale to tell Basil some day.
  It would make him smile.
  
  And, yet, how vivid was his recollection of the whole thing!  First in
  the dim twilight, and then in the bright dawn, he had seen the touch of
  cruelty round the warped lips.  He almost dreaded his valet leaving the
  room.  He knew that when he was alone he would have to examine the
  portrait.  He was afraid of certainty.  When the coffee and cigarettes
  had been brought and the man turned to go, he felt a wild desire to
  tell him to remain.  As the door was closing behind him, he called him
  back.  The man stood waiting for his orders.  Dorian looked at him for
  a moment.  "I am not at home to any one, Victor," he said with a sigh.
  The man bowed and retired.
  
  Then he rose from the table, lit a cigarette, and flung himself down on
  a luxuriously cushioned couch that stood facing the screen.  The screen
  was an old one, of gilt Spanish leather, stamped and wrought with a
  rather florid Louis-Quatorze pattern.  He scanned it curiously,
  wondering if ever before it had concealed the secret of a man's life.
  
  Should he move it aside, after all?  Why not let it stay there?  What
  was the use of knowing? If the thing was true, it was terrible.  If it
  was not true, why trouble about it?  But what if, by some fate or
  deadlier chance, eyes other than his spied behind and saw the horrible
  change?  What should he do if Basil Hallward came and asked to look at
  his own picture?  Basil would be sure to do that.  No; the thing had to
  be examined, and at once.  Anything would be better than this dreadful
  state of doubt.
  
  He got up and locked both doors.  At least he would be alone when he
  looked upon the mask of his shame.  Then he drew the screen aside and
  saw himself face to face.  It was perfectly true.  The portrait had
  altered.
  
  As he often remembered afterwards, and always with no small wonder, he
  found himself at first gazing at the portrait with a feeling of almost
  scientific interest.  That such a change should have taken place was
  incredible to him.  And yet it was a fact.  Was there some subtle
  affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form
  and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him?  Could it be
  that what that soul thought, they realized?--that what it dreamed, they
  made true?  Or was there some other, more terrible reason?  He
  shuddered, and felt afraid, and, going back to the couch, lay there,
  gazing at the picture in sickened horror.
  
  One thing, however, he felt that it had done for him.  It had made him
  conscious how unjust, how cruel, he had been to Sibyl Vane.  It was not
  too late to make reparation for that.  She could still be his wife.
  His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would
  be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil
  Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would
  be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the
  fear of God to us all.  There were opiates for remorse, drugs that
  could lull the moral sense to sleep.  But here was a visible symbol of
  the degradation of sin.  Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men
  brought upon their souls.
  
  Three o'clock struck, and four, and the half-hour rang its double
  chime, but Dorian Gray did not stir.  He was trying to gather up the
  scarlet threads of life and to weave them into a pattern; to find his
  way through the sanguine labyrinth of passion through which he was
  wandering.  He did not know what to do, or what to think.  Finally, he
  went over to the table and wrote a passionate letter to the girl he had
  loved, imploring her forgiveness and accusing himself of madness.  He
  covered page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of
  pain.  There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we
  feel that no one else has a right to blame us.  It is the confession,
  not the priest, that gives us absolution.  When Dorian had finished the
  letter, he felt that he had been forgiven.
  
  Suddenly there came a knock to the door, and he heard Lord Henry's
  voice outside.  "My dear boy, I must see you.  Let me in at once.  I
  can't bear your shutting yourself up like this."
  
  He made no answer at first, but remained quite still.  The knocking
  still continued and grew louder.  Yes, it was better to let Lord Henry
  in, and to explain to him the new life he was going to lead, to quarrel
  with him if it became necessary to quarrel, to part if parting was
  inevitable.  He jumped up, drew the screen hastily across the picture,
  and unlocked the door.
  
  "I am so sorry for it all, Dorian," said Lord Henry as he entered.
  "But you must not think too much about it."
  
  "Do you mean about Sibyl Vane?" asked the lad.
  
  "Yes, of course," answered Lord Henry, sinking into a chair and slowly
  pulling off his yellow gloves.  "It is dreadful, from one point of
  view, but it was not your fault.  Tell me, did you go behind and see
  her, after the play was over?"
  
  "Yes."
  
  "I felt sure you had.  Did you make a scene with her?"
  
  "I was brutal, Harry--perfectly brutal.  But it is all right now.  I am
  not sorry for anything that has happened.  It has taught me to know
  myself better."
  
  "Ah, Dorian, I am so glad you take it in that way!  I was afraid I
  would find you plunged in remorse and tearing that nice curly hair of
  yours."
  
  "I have got through all that," said Dorian, shaking his head and
  smiling.  "I am perfectly happy now.  I know what conscience is, to
  begin with.  It is not what you told me it was.  It is the divinest
  thing in us.  Don't sneer at it, Harry, any more--at least not before
  me.  I want to be good.  I can't bear the idea of my soul being
  hideous."
  
  "A very charming artistic basis for ethics, Dorian!  I congratulate you
  on it.  But how are you going to begin?"
  
  "By marrying Sibyl Vane."
  
  "Marrying Sibyl Vane!" cried Lord Henry, standing up and looking at him
  in perplexed amazement.  "But, my dear Dorian--"
  
  "Yes, Harry, I know what you are going to say.  Something dreadful
  about marriage.  Don't say it.  Don't ever say things of that kind to
  me again.  Two days ago I asked Sibyl to marry me.  I am not going to
  break my word to her.  She is to be my wife."
  
  "Your wife!  Dorian! ... Didn't you get my letter?  I wrote to you this
  morning, and sent the note down by my own man."
  
  "Your letter?  Oh, yes, I remember.  I have not read it yet, Harry.  I
  was afraid there might be something in it that I wouldn't like.  You
  cut life to pieces with your epigrams."
  
  "You know nothing then?"
  
  "What do you mean?"
  
  Lord Henry walked across the room, and sitting down by Dorian Gray,
  took both his hands in his own and held them tightly.  "Dorian," he
  said, "my letter--don't be frightened--was to tell you that Sibyl Vane
  is dead."
  
  A cry of pain broke from the lad's lips, and he leaped to his feet,
  tearing his hands away from Lord Henry's grasp.  "Dead!  Sibyl dead!
  It is not true!  It is a horrible lie!  How dare you say it?"
  
  "It is quite true, Dorian," said Lord Henry, gravely.  "It is in all
  the morning papers.  I wrote down to you to ask you not to see any one
  till I came.  There will have to be an inquest, of course, and you must
  not be mixed up in it.  Things like that make a man fashionable in
  Paris.  But in London people are so prejudiced.  Here, one should never
  make one's _debut_ with a scandal.  One should reserve that to give an
  interest to one's old age.  I suppose they don't know your name at the
  theatre?  If they don't, it is all right.  Did any one see you going
  round to her room?  That is an important point."
  
  Dorian did not answer for a few moments.  He was dazed with horror.
  Finally he stammered, in a stifled voice, "Harry, did you say an
  inquest?  What did you mean by that?  Did Sibyl--? Oh, Harry, I can't
  bear it!  But be quick.  Tell me everything at once."
  
  "I have no doubt it was not an accident, Dorian, though it must be put
  in that way to the public.  It seems that as she was leaving the
  theatre with her mother, about half-past twelve or so, she said she had
  forgotten something upstairs.  They waited some time for her, but she
  did not come down again.  They ultimately found her lying dead on the
  floor of her dressing-room. She had swallowed something by mistake,
  some dreadful thing they use at theatres.  I don't know what it was,
  but it had either prussic acid or white lead in it.  I should fancy it
  was prussic acid, as she seems to have died instantaneously."
  
  "Harry, Harry, it is terrible!" cried the lad.
  
  "Yes; it is very tragic, of course, but you must not get yourself mixed
  up in it.  I see by _The Standard_ that she was seventeen.  I should have
  thought she was almost younger than that.  She looked such a child, and
  seemed to know so little about acting.  Dorian, you mustn't let this
  thing get on your nerves.  You must come and dine with me, and
  afterwards we will look in at the opera.  It is a Patti night, and
  everybody will be there.  You can come to my sister's box.  She has got
  some smart women with her."
  
  "So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," said Dorian Gray, half to himself,
  "murdered her as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife.
  Yet 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.  Suddenly something happened that
  made me afraid.  I can't tell you what it was, but it was terrible.  I
  said I would go back to her.  I felt I had done wrong.  And now she is
  dead.  My God!  My God!  Harry, what shall I do?  You don't know the
  danger I am in, and there is nothing to keep me straight.  She would
  have done that for me.  She had no right to kill herself.  It was
  selfish of her."
  
  "My dear Dorian," answered Lord Henry, taking a cigarette from his case
  and producing a gold-latten matchbox, "the only way a woman can ever
  reform a man is by boring him so completely that he loses all possible
  interest in life.  If you had married this girl, you would have been
  wretched.  Of course, you would have treated her kindly.  One can
  always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.  But she would
  have soon found out that you were absolutely indifferent to her.  And
  when a woman finds that out about her husband, she either becomes
  dreadfully dowdy, or wears very smart bonnets that some other woman's
  husband has to pay for.  I say nothing about the social mistake, which
  would have been abject--which, of course, I would not have allowed--but
  I assure you that in any case the whole thing would have been an
  absolute failure."
  
  "I suppose it would," muttered the lad, walking up and down the room
  and looking horribly pale.  "But I thought it was my duty.  It is not
  my fault that this terrible tragedy has prevented my doing what was
  right.  I remember your saying once that there is a fatality about good
  resolutions--that they are always made too late.  Mine certainly were."
  
  "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific
  laws.  Their origin is pure vanity.  Their result is absolutely _nil_.
  They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions
  that have a certain charm for the weak.  That is all that can be said
  for them.  They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they
  have no account."
  
  "Harry," cried Dorian Gray, coming over and sitting down beside him,
  "why is it that I cannot feel this tragedy as much as I want to?  I
  don't think I am heartless.  Do you?"
  
  "You have done too many foolish things during the last fortnight to be
  entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian," answered Lord Henry with
  his sweet melancholy smile.
  
  The lad frowned.  "I don't like that explanation, Harry," he rejoined,
  "but I am glad you don't think I am heartless.  I am nothing of the
  kind.  I know I am not.  And yet I must admit that this thing that has
  happened does not affect me as it should.  It seems to me to be simply
  like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.  It has all the terrible
  beauty of a Greek tragedy, a tragedy in which I took a great part, but
  by which I have not been wounded."
  
  "It is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an
  exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's unconscious egotism, "an
  extremely interesting question.  I fancy that the true explanation is
  this:  It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such
  an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their
  absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack
  of style.  They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.  They give us
  an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.
  Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of
  beauty crosses our lives.  If these elements of beauty are real, the
  whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.  Suddenly
  we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the
  play.  Or rather we are both.  We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder
  of the spectacle enthralls us.  In the present case, what is it that
  has really happened?  Some one has killed herself for love of you.  I
  wish that I had ever had such an experience.  It would have made me in
  love with love for the rest of my life.  The people who have adored
  me--there have not been very many, but there have been some--have
  always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them,
  or they to care for me.  They have become stout and tedious, and when I
  meet them, they go in at once for reminiscences.  That awful memory of
  woman!  What a fearful thing it is!  And what an utter intellectual
  stagnation it reveals!  One should absorb the colour of life, but one
  should never remember its details.  Details are always vulgar."
  
  "I must sow poppies in my garden," sighed Dorian.
  
  "There is no necessity," rejoined his companion.  "Life has always
  poppies in her hands.  Of course, now and then things linger.  I once
  wore nothing but violets all through one season, as a form of artistic
  mourning for a romance that would not die.  Ultimately, however, it did
  die.  I forget what killed it.  I think it was her proposing to
  sacrifice the whole world for me.  That is always a dreadful moment.
  It fills one with the terror of eternity.  Well--would you believe
  it?--a week ago, at Lady Hampshire's, I found myself seated at dinner
  next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole
  thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future.  I had
  buried my romance in a bed of asphodel.  She dragged it out again and
  assured me that I had spoiled her life.  I am bound to state that she
  ate an enormous dinner, so I did not feel any anxiety.  But what a lack
  of taste she showed!  The one charm of the past is that it is the past.
  But women never know when the curtain has fallen.  They always want a
  sixth act, and as soon as the interest of the play is entirely over,
  they propose to continue it.  If they were allowed their own way, every
  comedy would have a tragic ending, and every tragedy would culminate in
  a farce.  They are charmingly artificial, but they have no sense of
  art.  You are more fortunate than I am.  I assure you, Dorian, that not
  one of the women I have known would have done for me what Sibyl Vane
  did for you.  Ordinary women always console themselves.  Some of them
  do it by going in for sentimental colours.  Never trust a woman who
  wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who
  is fond of pink ribbons.  It always means that they have a history.
  Others find a great consolation in suddenly discovering the good
  qualities of their husbands.  They flaunt their conjugal felicity in
  one's face, as if it were the most fascinating of sins.  Religion
  consoles some.  Its mysteries have all the charm of a flirtation, a
  woman once told me, and I can quite understand it.  Besides, nothing
  makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.  Conscience makes
  egotists of us all.  Yes; there is really no end to the consolations
  that women find in modern life.  Indeed, I have not mentioned the most
  important one."
  
  "What is that, Harry?" said the lad listlessly.
  
  "Oh, the obvious consolation.  Taking some one else's admirer when one
  loses one's own.  In good society that always whitewashes a woman.  But
  really, Dorian, how different Sibyl Vane must have been from all the
  women one meets!  There is something to me quite beautiful about her
  death.  I am glad I am living in a century when such wonders happen.
  They make one believe in the reality of the things we all play with,
  such as romance, passion, and love."
  
  "I was terribly cruel to her.  You forget that."
  
  "I am afraid that women appreciate cruelty, downright cruelty, more
  than anything else.  They have wonderfully primitive instincts.  We
  have emancipated them, but they remain slaves looking for their
  masters, all the same.  They love being dominated.  I am sure you were
  splendid.  I have never seen you really and absolutely angry, but I can
  fancy how delightful you looked.  And, after all, you said something to
  me the day before yesterday that seemed to me at the time to be merely
  fanciful, but that I see now was absolutely true, and it holds the key
  to everything."
  
  "What was that, Harry?"
  
  "You said to me that Sibyl Vane represented to you all the heroines of
  romance--that she was Desdemona one night, and Ophelia the other; that
  if she died as Juliet, she came to life as Imogen."
  
  "She will never come to life again now," muttered the lad, burying his
  face in his hands.
  
  "No, she will never come to life.  She has played her last part.  But
  you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply
  as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean tragedy, as a wonderful
  scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur.  The girl never really
  lived, and so she has never really died.  To you at least she was
  always a dream, a phantom that flitted through Shakespeare's plays and
  left them lovelier for its presence, a reed through which Shakespeare's
  music sounded richer and more full of joy.  The moment she touched
  actual life, she marred it, and it marred her, and so she passed away.
  Mourn for Ophelia, if you like.  Put ashes on your head because
  Cordelia was strangled.  Cry out against Heaven because the daughter of
  Brabantio died.  But don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane.  She was
  less real than they are."
  
  There was a silence.  The evening darkened in the room.  Noiselessly,
  and with silver feet, the shadows crept in from the garden.  The
  colours faded wearily out of things.
  
  After some time Dorian Gray looked up.  "You have explained me to
  myself, Harry," he murmured with something of a sigh of relief.  "I
  felt all that you have said, but somehow I was afraid of it, and I
  could not express it to myself.  How well you know me!  But we will not
  talk again of what has happened.  It has been a marvellous experience.
  That is all.  I wonder if life has still in store for me anything as
  marvellous."
  
  "Life has everything in store for you, Dorian.  There is nothing that
  you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do."
  
  "But suppose, Harry, I became haggard, and old, and wrinkled?  What
  then?"
  
  "Ah, then," said Lord Henry, rising to go, "then, my dear Dorian, you
  would have to fight for your victories.  As it is, they are brought to
  you.  No, you must keep your good looks.  We live in an age that reads
  too much to be wise, and that thinks too much to be beautiful.  We
  cannot spare you.  And now you had better dress and drive down to the
  club.  We are rather late, as it is."
  
  "I think I shall join you at the opera, Harry.  I feel too tired to eat
  anything.  What is the number of your sister's box?"
  
  "Twenty-seven, I believe.  It is on the grand tier.  You will see her
  name on the door.  But I am sorry you won't come and dine."
  
  "I don't feel up to it," said Dorian listlessly.  "But I am awfully
  obliged to you for all that you have said to me.  You are certainly my
  best friend.  No one has ever understood me as you have."
  
  "We are only at the beginning of our friendship, Dorian," answered Lord
  Henry, shaking him by the hand.  "Good-bye. I shall see you before
  nine-thirty, I hope.  Remember, Patti is singing."
  
  As he closed the door behind him, Dorian Gray touched the bell, and in
  a few minutes Victor appeared with the lamps and drew the blinds down.
  He waited impatiently for him to go.  The man seemed to take an
  interminable time over everything.
  
  As soon as he had left, he rushed to the screen and drew it back.  No;
  there was no further change in the picture.  It had received the news
  of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself.  It was
  conscious of the events of life as they occurred.  The vicious cruelty
  that marred the fine lines of the mouth had, no doubt, appeared at the
  very moment that the girl had drunk the poison, whatever it was.  Or
  was it indifferent to results?  Did it merely take cognizance of what
  passed within the soul?  He wondered, and hoped that some day he would
  see the change taking place before his very eyes, shuddering as he
  hoped it.
  
  Poor Sibyl!  What a romance it had all been!  She had often mimicked
  death on the stage.  Then Death himself had touched her and taken her
  with him.  How had she played that dreadful last scene?  Had she cursed
  him, as she died?  No; she had died for love of him, and love would
  always be a sacrament to him now.  She had atoned for everything by the
  sacrifice she had made of her life.  He would not think any more of
  what she had made him go through, on that horrible night at the
  theatre.  When he thought of her, it would be as a wonderful tragic
  figure sent on to the world's stage to show the supreme reality of
  love.  A wonderful tragic figure?  Tears came to his eyes as he
  remembered her childlike look, and winsome fanciful ways, and shy
  tremulous grace.  He brushed them away hastily and looked again at the
  picture.
  
  He felt that the time had really come for making his choice.  Or had
  his choice already been made?  Yes, life had decided that for
  him--life, and his own infinite curiosity about life.  Eternal youth,
  infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder
  sins--he was to have all these things.  The portrait was to bear the
  burden of his shame: that was all.
  
  A feeling of pain crept over him as he thought of the desecration that
  was in store for the fair face on the canvas.  Once, in boyish mockery
  of Narcissus, he had kissed, or feigned to kiss, those painted lips
  that now smiled so cruelly at him.  Morning after morning he had sat
  before the portrait wondering at its beauty, almost enamoured of it, as
  it seemed to him at times.  Was it to alter now with every mood to
  which he yielded?  Was it to become a monstrous and loathsome thing, to
  be hidden away in a locked room, to be shut out from the sunlight that
  had so often touched to brighter gold the waving wonder of its hair?
  The pity of it! the pity of it!
  
  For a moment, he thought of praying that the horrible sympathy that
  existed between him and the picture might cease.  It had changed in
  answer to a prayer; perhaps in answer to a prayer it might remain
  unchanged.  And yet, who, that knew anything about life, would
  surrender the chance of remaining always young, however fantastic that
  chance might be, or with what fateful consequences it might be fraught?
  Besides, was it really under his control?  Had it indeed been prayer
  that had produced the substitution?  Might there not be some curious
  scientific reason for it all?  If thought could exercise its influence
  upon a living organism, might not thought exercise an influence upon
  dead and inorganic things?  Nay, without thought or conscious desire,
  might not things external to ourselves vibrate in unison with our moods
  and passions, atom calling to atom in secret love or strange affinity?
  But the reason was of no importance.  He would never again tempt by a
  prayer any terrible power.  If the picture was to alter, it was to
  alter.  That was all.  Why inquire too closely into it?
  
  For there would be a real pleasure in watching it.  He would be able to
  follow his mind into its secret places.  This portrait would be to him
  the most magical of mirrors.  As it had revealed to him his own body,
  so it would reveal to him his own soul.  And when winter came upon it,
  he would still be standing where spring trembles on the verge of
  summer.  When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid
  mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood.
  Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade.  Not one pulse of
  his life would ever weaken.  Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be
  strong, and fleet, and joyous.  What did it matter what happened to the
  coloured image on the canvas?  He would be safe.  That was everything.
  
  He drew the screen back into its former place in front of the picture,
  smiling as he did so, and passed into his bedroom, where his valet was
  already waiting for him.  An hour later he was at the opera, and Lord
  Henry was leaning over his chair.
  
  
  
feat_summary_name: Chapter 8
target: Dorian is awoken by Victor, his servant, after having slept until 1:15 in the afternoon. He sees that he has received a letter from Lord Henry, but leaves it unopened. He feels refreshed and eats breakfast happily, the previous night feeling like nothing more than a dream. His pleasant afternoon is interrupted, however, when he sees the screen that he has thrown over the portrait. He thinks himself foolish for imagining that the painting might have changed, but decides to check it again just to make sure. Nervous that he might be acting strangely, he throws Victor out of the room, locks all of the doors, and draws the curtains. Sure enough, "It was perfectly true. The painting had altered." He wonders how this could possible, whether there is a scientific explanation, or a darker, metaphysical cause for the change. The cruel expression on the face in the portrait reminds him of his poor treatment of Sibyl. Stricken with guilt, Dorian writes her a passionate love letter, filling "page after page with wild words of sorrow and wilder words of pain." Writing the letter is deeply cathartic. As soon as he finishes, Lord Henry arrives. Dorian tells him that although he saw Sibyl and was brutal towards her, he doesn't regret any of it, since "It has taught me how to know myself better." Henry is delighted to find Dorian in good spirits, but when the young man tells him that he plans to cleanse his soul by marrying the poor actress, it is clear that there has been a misunderstanding. Sibyl Vane, as Henry had written to Dorian in the unopened letter, has killed herself with poison. Henry says that there will be an inquest, but that Dorian has nothing to worry about since nobody saw him go backstage or leave the theater, and since Sibyl never even told anyone her fiancA's real name. Henry urges Dorian not to get involved with the situation, as such a scandal would destroy his reputation. He asks Dorian to come see the opera with him that night. After his initial shock passes, Dorian responds to the news of Sibyl's death with a strange detachment. "So I have murdered Sibyl Vane," he thinks, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife. Yet the roses are not less lovely for all that." Under Henry's direction, Dorian comes to appreciate Sibyl's death as "a wonderful ending to a wonderful play." Dorian is briefly disturbed by his emotional detachment, but Henry soon assuages his guilt, saying that life's tragedies often "hurt us by...their entire lack of style." Since Sibyl died so dramatically, and for such a pure purpose as love, the situation is actually one, Henry believes, that Dorian should take satisfaction and pleasure in. Henry goes so far as to state that since the girl was only ever alive on stage, and since Dorian's love for her was rooted in his admiration for the various heroines she portrayed, that "The girl never really lived, and so she has never really died...don't waste your tears over Sibyl Vane. She was less real than are." Dorian thanks Henry for being such a good and true friend. Henry leaves, and Dorian again looks at the picture. The mean sneer has not shifted, making Dorian think that it had "received the news of Sibyl Vane's death before he had known of it himself." After further contemplation, Dorian consoles himself by thinking that since the picture displays his true character, it must "bear the burden of his shame," thus leaving him to enjoy a guilt-free life. He sees no reason to consider why the picture changes, and decides to allow himself to simply be entertained by its progress. The chapter ends with Dorian leaving to meet Lord Henry at the opera.
feat_summary_analysis: Once again, Dorian displays alarming capriciousness and a disturbing blindness to his own vanity. He writes to Sibyl in a passion, taking all of the blame for his actions, but the narrator comments that "there is a luxury in self-reproach."  He takes pleasure in his confession, privately praising his own "selflessness".  He falls into a brief spell of grief upon hearing the news of Sibyl's suicide, but proves to be far from inconsolable. Lord Henry, playing the devil to Dorian's Faust, shows him the means by which to transform his pain and guilt into a new, pleasurable experience, for which only the portrait will pay the price. In this chapter, the symbolic significance of the portrait is clearly spelled out for us: "here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin...an ever present sign of the ruin men bring upon their souls."  This realization prompts Dorian to exclaim that he "can't bear the idea of my soul being hideous."  Dorian fears physical ugliness; in other words, it is vanity, not morality, that defines Dorian's relationship with his soul.  A similar type of selfishness appears when Dorian writes his love letter to Sibyl.  We are told that "There is a luxury in self-reproach...When Dorian had finished the letter, he felt that he had been forgiven."  Even in the throes of guilt, Dorian does not need Sibyl to grant the forgiveness that only she can rightly give, nor does it occur to him that Sibyl would do anything other than immediately accept his apology and agree to be his wife. Dorian's comment that Sibyl's death seems "to be like simply a wonderful ending to a wonderful play" continues the theme of life imitating art.  It also recalls Dorian's obsession with the characters that Sibyl portrayed.  He became disappointed in her when she tried to be her own person, and rejected the falseness of playing a role.  Now, her death has given Dorian the ability to once again view Sibyl as a character in a play.  When Lord Henry encourages this interpretation of the tragedy, he ensures that Dorian passes the point of no return on his descent into immorality. Dorian's statement that he has "murdered her...as if I had cut her little throat with a knife" not only displays a disturbing tendency to relish in unnecessarily morbid details, but also foreshadows Basil's murder in chapter 13, and recalls Basil's threat to destroy the painting with a knife in chapter 2.  The image of death by stabbing hovers in the air throughout the novel. This chapter also contains the closest thing Wilde offers as to an explanation of how the portrait has acquired such metaphysical properties.  However, it is not actually an explanation at all, but merely idle conjecture from Dorian: "Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms, that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas, and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what the soul thought, they realized? - that what it dreamed, they made true? Or was there some other, darker reason?"  Dorian is briefly disturbed by the possibility that black magic is at work, but he soon shrugs off this fear, and the question of how and why the portrait changes is never again raised.