ution. In one the soul of Dr. Jekyll appears under different
exteriors; in the other some fine influence passes from the soul of
Dorian Gray into his portrait and there works a gradual and subtle
change upon the pictured lineaments. Although. Mr. Wilde's extravaganza
is far less dramatic than that of Mr. Stevenson, it has the advantage of
richer colouring and a more human setting, if we may so express it. The
characters in "The Picture of Dorian Gray," enjoy life more than Mr.
Stevenson's creations, who seem to have had so dull a time of it at the
best that they might have been expected to welcome a tragedy, as a
relief to the tedium of their daily lives. Mr. Utterson, we are told,
was good but he was evidently not particularly happy,[29] which was the
case with the other personages of the drama, with the exception of those
who were signally wretched. On the other hand, Mr. Wilde's characters
are happy during their little day. Their world is a luxurious, perfumed
land of delight, until sin transforms it, and, even after Lord Henry has
corrupted the nature of Dorian Gray with evil books and worldly
philosophy, he occasionally drinks of the waters of Lethe and enjoys
some fragments of what may be called happiness, while Lord Henry himself
seems to derive a certain satisfaction from the practice of his
Mephistophelian art and in his entire freedom from the restraints of
conscience. In a tale of the impossible it is not required that the
writer should be true to life, animate or inanimate, yet in the fact
that there are glimpses of light through the clouds that surround his
_dramatis personae_, that they inhabit a world in which the laburnum
hangs out yellow clusters in June, and the clematis robes itself with
purple stars, and the sun sheds gold and the moon silver, despite the
tragedy that touches the lives of its inhabitants, is not Mr. Wilde
quite as true to nature as to art?

The reader may reasonably question the author's good taste in displaying
at such length his knowledge of antique decoration and old-world crime
as in Chapter IX,[30] which, besides being somewhat tiresome, clogs the
dramatic movement of the story. Yet, on the other hand, it must be
admitted that none but an artist and an apostle of the beautiful could
have so sympathetically portrayed the glowing hues and perfumes of the
garden in which Dorian Gray had first presented to his lips the cup of
life, and none other could have so pictured the luxurious