ABSTRACT
Dorian Gray, as the finished work of a literary exquisite, must command a certain attention. It is the very genius of affectation crystalised in a syrup of words. Reading it, we move in a heavy atmosphere of warm incense and slumbering artificial light. We thread our way through a mob of courtier epigrams, all bowing, all murmuring to the white lily of beauty, all forced to premature growth in the hothouse of a somewhat sickly fancy. We long to push on to the light, and the blowing wind, and the clean air of honest commonplace that Mr. Wilde’s cultured puppets cry faugh! to. The author and his following have nothing in common with the lilac and violet they belaud. Their most fragrant speech stirs no one of the breezy plumes: nor is the spirit of the dank ghostly wood an open secret to them. Not for them is ‘A green thought in a green shade,’ but rather that comfortable mystic pessimism, which ‘the bliss of being sad made melancholy.’ Power is here, but rather the inventive power of the engineer than the creative force of the artist. Still, to say that only an age that had produced the wild study of Dr. Jekyl’s dual personality could give birth to a Dorian Gray is not necessarily to disparage the latter. That shrewd knowledge of the weight and value of words that Mr. Stevenson has taught us, has pierced the cuticle of many a man of letters who would be loth to acknowledge his teacher. But that disciples may outdo their masters is an obvious truism, and Dorian Gray may remain a psychical curiosity when Dr. Jekyl is forgotten. It is at least undeniably clever, and even brilliant-as a sick man’s eye. Looking at it from the point of view of dramatic possibilities, we are bound to recognise in it great attractions, saving, alone, in its almost utter lack of true humanity. As a book, it isfrom cover to finish, an elaborate work of art, extremely clever, wonderfully ingenious, and even fascinating; but not convincing, from that same absence of human interest.
