power, but to the beauty
that made her worthy to be loved, his eyes were blind, his heart was
insensible. The tragedy of the story, the climax of the situation, is
not the death of Sybil Vane, nor even the pitiless murder of the friend
who dared to give Dorian Gray good counsel, but the disclosure that
Dorian's soul, once open to all good influences, had, by yielding to the
malign domination of his evil genius, passed beyond the reach of love,
pity or remorse.

It is needless to say that Dorian Gray is not a very substantial
character. The most entertaining, though not the most exemplary,
personage of the story is Lord Henry Wotton, who by his preaching and
practice of the doctrine of hedonism leads Dorian Gray into all known
and unknown evil, until finally his darkling shadow outreaches in
depravity the imagination of his tempter. When his victim has sunk so
low in sin that the world shuns him, Lord Henry still enjoys his gay,
conscienceless existence, and continues to utter the persiflage that
constitutes much of the attraction of the book as well of his society.
Debonair, witty, learned, giving expression to aphorisms as keen as the
sayings of Thackeray's characters, with the moral element eliminated,
and as cynical as those of Norris, with exquisite taste and the
fascination of a finished man of the world, Lord Henry belongs as truly,
on the material side of his nature, to the life of to-day, as he
appertains on its spiritual side to the region of Pluto. A gay child of
the great London social world, he hovers airily around and about the
emotions of life, declaring that death is the only thing that ever
terrifies him, and that death and vulgarity are the only facts in the
nineteenth century that one cannot explain away. The climax of Lord
Henry's sardonic worldliness is reached when he becomes the spectator of
his own domesticity, if he may be said to have any, and speaks to Dorian
of his divorce from his wife as one of the latest sensations of London,
remarking _apropos_ of his music, "The man with whom my wife ran away
played Chopin exquisitely. Poor Victoria! I was very fond of her. The
house is rather lonely without her."

Lord Henry is so entirely true to himself and the worst that is in him
that towards the close of the book, when Dorian announces that he is
"going to be good," and begs his friend not to poison another young life
with the book with which he had corrupted his, we find ourselves
trembling for