第37章

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? Idon'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.