his physical life.

The only occult explanation of the catastrophe which befalls him is,
that he commits astral suicide by the murderous attack he ignorantly
makes upon that which represented to him his own soul. The blow reverts
to his physical body, and he falls dead.

There is in this book a wonderful spiritual insight into the inner life
of the human being. Arising, in all probability from that intuition we
all more or less possess; a sort of flash of truth upon the mind, which
is not known at the moment to be really true, but is supposed to be the
mere weaving of a graceful prolific fancy. A similar power lay at the
back of Mr. R. Stevenson's creation of Dr. Jekyll, casting upon the tale
so powerful a spiritual light, that all readers were held by the spell
of its enchantment. The same feeling of being under a spell fills the
reader of "The Picture of Dorian Gray." The same subtle, spiritual
effect of the _aura of evil_ flows out from the book--especially at
those moments when Dorian is contemplating the image of his soul's
corruption, not, in this instance, that the evil so powerfully felt
poisons the mind as poor Dorian was poisoned for life by his French
novel; but one gets a feeling of painful horror, and sickening disgust,
it is not easy to shake off. One seems to have glanced momentarily into
the deepest abysses of hell, and to have drawn back totally sickened by
a subtle effluvium. This singular power possessed by both these writers
reveals a certain growth or development in them of the spiritual nature,
which need not necessarily, as yet, convert either of these gentlemen
into saints, or angels, although doubtless they are both very good Men.

The lesson taught by Mr. Oscar Wilde's powerful story is of the highest
spiritual import; and if it can be, not _believed_ merely, but accepted
as a literal fact, a mysterious verity in the life of a human being,
that the invisible soul within the body, that alone which lives after
death, is deformed, bestialised, and even murdered by a life of
persistent evil, it ought to have the most beneficial effect upon
society.

Let him depict the soul as he may, except in the case of Basil Hallward,
Mr. Wilde never rises above the animal soul in man. It is the animal
soul alone, dominated by a refined but perverted intellect, seeking an
animal gratification in sensuous beauty, which he puts before us. Dorian
Gray suffocated in its infancy the only germ of spiritual soul