The First Cruelty

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

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Mid-shot inside a shabby theatre: three men in evening dress sit in a gilded private box, an older painter and a sharper-featured cynic flanking a young golden-haired man with a serene smile; all three gaze down and left toward a dim pasteboard stage where a girl barely out of childhood performs beneath hissing gas-jets, the gilded box the only brightness in a smoke-black room. — He had brought his painter and his cynic into the unaccustomed gloom, the better to display what he had acquired.

Wide night street scene in photogravure etching style: a small figure in evening dress descends the steps of a dim, shabby theatre into wet fog; distant gas-lamps glow dull orange; the dark silhouette of a barrel-organ stands across the road; yellowing playbills cling to the façade behind him. — He walked out into an indifferent night, where a barrel-organ still played a tune that had been fashionable two summers ago.

Intimate interior: a young man in evening dress stands before a large gilt-framed portrait of himself; candlelight picks out the gold of the frame and a faint, newly settled line at the corner of the painted mouth. — He had believed beauty was a varnish laid over daily life; the painted face was about to teach him that varnish can be the more truthful of two surfaces.

He had meant to be generous, and generosity, when one is very young, is indistinguishable from display. Dorian brought his two admirers — the painter who had made him and the cynic who was busy unmaking everyone else — to a cheap theatre in a shabby street, that they might sit in the unaccustomed gloom and watch a girl barely out of childhood enact the great catastrophes of the heart. He had told them she was everything. He had told them she was the only reason for being alive, or at least the only reason for being seen to be alive, which in his set came to the same thing. The novelist in the box was to be the witness, the painter the priest, the cynic the god at whose altar they all idly burned a little incense. He was, in short, exhibiting her, as one exhibits a newly acquired masterpiece to guests at a private view, expecting their murmurs of tribute and the small, gratified envy of connoisseurs. The play was a tomb, the props were pasteboard, the audience was unlovely, the air smelt of orange peel and gas; but he sat with the serene smile of a man who knows that, whatever the frame, the picture within is the only thing that matters. Or so he thought. Then the curtain rose, and the picture within was not there.

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Sibyl Vane opened her mouth and produced nothing. She mouthed her lines like a sleepwalker describing a dream she could not quite remember. She forgot her entrances, mistimed her exits, and delivered the most agonized speeches with the air of a young lady rehearsing a parlour recitation for an elderly aunt. The audience, used to a great deal worse, hardly noticed. Her mother, a comfortable dragon of a woman who had spent her life in the business of breeding pretty illusions for other people's entertainment, watched from the wings with the pinched, professional anguish of a trainer whose pony has suddenly refused the jump. But Dorian noticed. Dorian, who had come to see a goddess, saw instead a girl. A girl, moreover, who had betrayed him in the most unforgivable manner possible: not by wickedness, not by unfaithfulness, but by the simple and absolute crime of being ordinary in his presence. He had given her his soul, or what passed for his soul at twenty — which was really only the lovely, empty idea of a soul — and she had replied with amateur theatricals. He felt the slow, delicious chill of humiliation curdling into something colder, and the colder thing was far more beautiful. He rose, he said the unforgivable things, and he said them in a voice so exquisitely modulated that they sounded almost like music. He told her she had killed his love by killing her art, which was only his way of saying that she had failed to keep the contract of being his mirror. He told her she was nothing. He meant it beautifully, and that, as the cynic in the next box would have been the first to point out, was the whole trouble. She wept. He walked out. Outside, the London night was damp and indifferent, and somewhere a barrel-organ played a tune that had been fashionable two summers ago.

Returning to the room where the secret of his life hung in a gilded frame, Dorian noticed, with the pleased horror of a man who has at last caught his reflection in an unforgiving glass, that something had changed. A faint line, no more than the ghost of a crease, had settled about the mouth of the painted face — the mouth of a man who has said cruel things beautifully, and meant every one of them. The face in the canvas was no longer quite the face he wore each morning above the pillow. It had begun to record, as a ledger records debts, the things he had been doing and saying while his living features remained as young and as smooth as a river pebble. He stared. He was not yet afraid; he was only deliciously interested. A new sensation, and a new sensation, as he had been taught, was worth any price. He did not know, as he stood there congratulating himself upon the elegance of his suffering and the depth of his disillusion, that the bargain he had made was not a metaphor at all, but a contract signed in the only ink that does not fade. Beauty, he had supposed, was a kind of varnish to be laid over the unsightly grain of daily life. He was about to learn that varnish, applied to a portrait, can in time become the more truthful of the two surfaces — and that the smile preserved on canvas is often the one the living face, having grown tired of keeping, has quietly passed on to someone, or something, else to wear.