ABSTRACT
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 feelingor instinct that civilisation, 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
loathsome sensualness on his pretty face, rosy with the loveliness that endeared youth of his odious type to the paralytic patricians of the Lower Empire.
