l his care,
is, of course, possible; but if a writer is to be called to account for
all the misapplications, or distortions, of his philosophy, writing may
as well come to an end. Yet, inconceivable as it may sound, a critic
very properly held in popular esteem recently gave it as his opinion
that the teaching of Walter Pater was responsible for the tragic career
of the author of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Certainly that remarkable
man was an "epicurean"--but one, to quote Meredith, "whom Epicurus would
have scourged out of his garden"; and the statement made by the critic
in question that _The Renaissance_ is the book referred to in _The
Picture of Dorian Gray_ as having had a sinister influence over its hero
is so easily disposed of by a reference to that romance itself that it
is hard to understand its ever having been made. Here is the passage
describing the demoralizing book in question:

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.... It
was the strangest book he had ever read. It seemed to him that in
exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of
the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had
dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he
had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being,
indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who
spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except
his own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods
through which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their
mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called
virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call
sin. The style in which it was written was that curious jewelled
style, vivid and obscure at once, full of _argot_ and of archaisms,
of technical expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that
characterizes the work of some of the finest artists of the French
school of _Decandents._ There were in it metaphors as monstrous as
orchids, and as evil in colour. The life of the senses was described
in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times
whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval
saint or the morb