TPoDG ch. 14

"'Your life? Good heavens! what a life that is! You have gone from corruption to corruption, and now you have culminated in crime. In doing what I am going to do, what you force me to do, it is not of your life that I am thinking'" (176).

This is a good example of how former friends of Dorian have turned against him. Campbell is so angry towards him, though that is understandable since he has been threatened with some unknown terrible thing. This makes sense as to Campbell's anger, as shown when Dorian yelled at Basil, "'it is because I know everything about his life, not because he knows everything about mine'" (155). This is how dramatically people who once loved Dorian now hate him. It is not totally clear why, other than that he gets to know too much about people and they feel threatened. However, friends often know each other's secrets. Unless they know nothing of Dorian, then their sudden hatred of him does not make sense. Friend do not suddenly hate friends because of some scandal they are involved in. They live with it and accept them. There is no way to real explanation yet as to why Dorian's friends turn so much away from him as to snap at him and say, "I had intended never to enter your house again, Gray" (171). The use of his last name shows how Campbell is trying to distance himself. But the real question is why? What did Dorian do to him?

"What was that loathsome red dew that gleamed, wet and glistening, on one of the hands, as though the canvas had sweated blood? How horrible it was!- more horrible, it seemed to him for the moment, than the silent thing that he knew was stretched across the table, the thing whose grotesque, misshappen shadow on the spotted carpet showed him that it had not stirred, but was still there, as he had left it" (178).

That is very typical of Dorian to think that the blood on his hands was more terrible than the body of his murdered friend and admirer. He even describes his friend as grotesque, which is not usually the way a person would describe even such a bloody corpse that had once been their friend. He does not see Basil as a friend. Dorian probably will hate Basil more now because he caused the blood on the picture's hands, and that picture is very precious to him. The soiled picture will probably be blamed on Basil, as everything is blamed on Basil, because Henry is too influential to be blamed.