The Picture of Dorian Gray By Oscar Wilde

The portrait which Basil Hallward painted of Dorian Gray revealed the face of an Adonis, and, when he saw the finished picture of himself, the beautiful young aesthete exclaimed: ‘Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me, and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now!’ His perverse aspiration was strangely fulfilled. Abandoning himself to every sin which his profiligate mind could devise, the wealth and exquisite young man brought misery and disgrace on all who accepted his companionship, but Dorian Gray still wore the outward appearance of serene beauty. It was upon the portrait, locked away in his attic, that the marks of degeneration mysteriously appeared, for the painting of Adonis slowly transformed into the likeness of a satyr. This celebrated fantasy is developed as vividly as one of Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre narratives, and the climax is fulfilled in murder and suicide.