den youth, which
might be horrible and fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its
studied insincerity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its
flippant philosophisings and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity
which is over all Mr. Wilde's elaborate Wardour-street aestheticism and
obtrusively cheap scholarship.

Mr. Wilde says his book has "a moral." The "moral," so far as we can
collect it, is that man's chief end is to develop his nature to the
fullest by "always searching for new sensations," that when the soul
gets sick the way to cure it is to deny the senses nothing, for
"nothing," says one of Mr. Wilde's characters, Lord Henry Wotton, "can
cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but
the soul." Man is half angel and half ape, and Mr. Wilde's book has no
real use if it be not to inculcate the "moral" that when you feel
yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than rush out and
make a beast of yourself. There is not a single good and holy impulse of
human nature, scarcely a fine feeling or instinct that civilization, art
and religion have developed throughout the ages as part of the barriers
between Humanity and Animalism that is not held up to ridicule and
contempt in "Dorian Gray," if, indeed, such strong words can be fitly
applied to the actual effect of Mr. Wilde's airy levity and fluent
impudence. His desperate effort to vamp up a "moral" for the book at the
end is, artistically speaking, coarse and crude, because the whole
incident of Dorian Gray's death is, as they say on the stage, "out of
the picture." Dorian's only regret is that unbridled indulgence in every
form of secret and unspeakable vice, every resource of luxury and art,
and sometimes still more piquant to the jaded young man of fashion,
whose lives "Dorian Gray" pretends to sketch, by every abomination of
vulgarity and squalor is--what? Why, that it will leave traces of
premature age and loathsomeness on his pretty facy, rosy with the
loveliness that endeared youth of his odious type to the paralytic
patricians of the Lower Empire.

Dorian Gray prays that a portrait of himself which an artist (who raves
about him as young men do about the women they love not wisely but too
well) has painted may grow old instead of the original. This is what
happens by some supernatural agency, the introduction of which seems
purely farcical, so that Dorian goes on enjoying unfading youth year
after year