The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde: 250+ Titles in One Edition. Оскар Уайльд

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      with the brief dialogue that follows, were spoken in a thoroughly artificial manner. The voice was exquisite, but from the point of view of tone it was absolutely false. It was wrong in color. It took away all the life from the verse. It made the passion unreal.

      Dorian Gray grew pale as he watched her. Neither of his friends dared to say anything to him. She seemed to them to be absolutely incompetent. They were horribly disappointed.

      Yet they felt that the true test of any Juliet is the balcony scene of the second act. They waited for that. If she failed there, there was nothing in her.

      She looked charming as she came out in the moonlight. That could not be denied. But the staginess of her acting was unbearable, and grew worse as she went on. Her gestures became absurdly artificial. She overemphasized everything that she had to say. The beautiful passage, —

      Thou knowest the mask of night is on my face,

       Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek

       For that which thou hast heard me speak tonight, —

      was declaimed with the painful precision of a schoolgirl who has been taught to recite by some second-rate professor of elocution. When she leaned over the balcony and came to those wonderful lines, —

      Although I joy in thee,

       I have no joy of this contract tonight:

       It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;

       Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be

       Ere one can say, “It lightens.” Sweet, good-night!

       This bud of love by summer’s ripening breath

       May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet, —

      she spoke the words as if they conveyed no meaning to her. It was not nervousness. Indeed, so far from being nervous, she seemed absolutely self-contained. It was simply bad art. She was a complete failure.

      Even the common uneducated audience of the pit and gallery lost their interest in the play. They got restless, and began to talk loudly and to whistle. The Jew manager, who was standing at the back of the dress-circle, stamped and swore with rage. The only person unmoved was the girl herself.

      When the second act was over there came a storm of hisses, and Lord Henry got up from his chair and put on his coat. “She is quite beautiful, Dorian,” he said, “but she can’t act. Let us go.”

      “I am going to see the play through,” answered the lad, in a hard, bitter voice. “I am awfully sorry that I have made you waste an evening, Harry. I apologize to both of you.”

      “My dear Dorian, I should think Miss Vane was ill,” interrupted

       Hallward. “We will come some other night.”

      “I wish she was ill,” he rejoined. “But she seems to me to be simply callous and cold. She has entirely altered. Last night she was a great artist. Tonight she is merely a commonplace, mediocre actress.”

      “Don’t talk like that about any one you love, Dorian. Love is a more wonderful thing than art.”

      “They are both simply forms of imitation,” murmured Lord Henry. “But do let us go. Dorian, you must not stay here any longer. It is not good for one’s morals to see bad acting. Besides, I don’t suppose you will want your wife to act. So what does it matter if she plays Juliet like a wooden doll? She is very lovely, and if she knows as little about life as she does about acting, she will be a delightful experience. There are only two kinds of people who are really fascinating, — people who know absolutely everything, and people who know absolutely nothing. Good heavens, my dear boy, don’t look so tragic! The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming. Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful. What more can you want?”

      “Please go away, Harry,” cried the lad. “I really want to be alone.- -Basil, you don’t mind my asking you to go? Ah! can’t you see that my heart is breaking?” The hot tears came to his eyes. His lips trembled, and, rushing to the back of the box, he leaned up against the wall, hiding his face in his hands.

      “Let us go, Basil,” said Lord Henry, with a strange tenderness in his voice; and the two young men passed out together.

      A few moments afterwards the footlights flared up, and the curtain rose on the third act. Dorian Gray went back to his seat. He looked pale, and proud, and indifferent. The play dragged on, and seemed interminable. Half of the audience went out, tramping in heavy boots, and laughing. The whole thing was a fiasco. The last act was played to almost empty benches.

      As soon as it was over, Dorian Gray rushed behind the scenes into the greenroom. The girl was standing alone there, with a look of triumph on her face. Her eyes were lit with an exquisite fire. There was a radiance about her. Her parted lips were smiling over some secret of their own.

      When he entered, she looked at him, and an expression of infinite joy came over her. “How badly I acted tonight, Dorian!” she cried.

      “Horribly!” he answered, gazing at her in amazement, — “horribly! It was dreadful. Are you ill? You have no idea what it was. You have no idea what I suffered.”

      The girl smiled. “Dorian,” she answered, lingering over his name with long-drawn music in her voice, as though it were sweeter than honey to the red petals of her lips, — “Dorian, you should have understood. But you understand now, don’t you?”

      “Understand what?” he asked, angrily.

      “Why I was so bad tonight. Why I shall always be bad. Why I shall never act well again.”

      He shrugged his shoulders. “You are ill, I suppose. When you are ill you shouldn’t act. You make yourself ridiculous. My friends were bored. I was bored.”

      She seemed not to listen to him. She was transfigured with joy. An ecstasy of happiness dominated her.

      “Dorian, Dorian,” she cried, “before I knew you, acting was the one reality of my life. It was only in the theatre that I lived. I thought that it was all true. I was Rosalind one night, and Portia the other. The joy of Beatrice was my joy, and the sorrows of Cordelia were mine also. I believed in everything. The common people who acted with me seemed to me to be godlike. The painted scenes were my world. I knew nothing but shadows, and I thought them real. You came, — oh, my beautiful love! — and you freed my soul from prison. You taught me what reality really is. Tonight, for the first time in my life, I saw through the hollowness, the sham, the silliness, of the empty pageant in which I had always played. Tonight, for the first time, I became conscious that the Romeo was hideous, and old, and painted, that the moonlight in the orchard was false, that the scenery was vulgar, and that the words I had to speak were unreal, were not my words, not what I wanted to say. You had brought me something higher, something of which all art is but a reflection. You have made me understand what love really is. My love! my love! I am sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be. What have I to do with the puppets of a play? When I came on tonight, I could not understand how it was that everything had gone from me. Suddenly it dawned on my soul what it all meant. The knowledge was exquisite to me. I heard them hissing, and I smiled. What should they know of love? Take me away, Dorian — take me away with you, where we can be quite alone. I СКАЧАТЬ