work, is the best work of my
life. But in some curious way ... his personality has suggested to
me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I
see things differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was
hidden from me before."[33]

Dorian himself, though certainly a quite unsuccessful experiment in
Epicureanism, in life as a fine art, is (till his inward spoiling takes
visible effect suddenly, and in a moment, at the end of his story) a
beautiful creation. But his story is also a vivid, though carefully
considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a very plain
moral, pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse
and ugly. General readers, nevertheless, will probably care less for
this moral, less for the fine, varied, largely appreciative culture of
the writer, in evidence from page to page, than for the story itself,
with its adroitly managed supernatural incidents, its almost equally
wonderful applications of natural science; impossible, surely, in fact,
but plausible enough in fiction. Its interest turns on that very old
theme; old because based on some inherent experience or fancy of the
human brain, of a double life: of Doeppelgaenger--not of two _persons_, in
this case, but of the man and his portrait; the latter of which, as we
hinted above, changes, decays, is spoiled, while the former, through a
long course of corruption, remains, to the outward eye, unchanged, still
in all the beauty of a seemingly immaculate youth--"the devil's
bargain." But it would be a pity to spoil the reader's enjoyment by
further detail. We need only emphasise once more, the skill, the real
subtlety of art, the ease and fluidity withal of one telling a story by
word of mouth, with which the consciousness of the supernatural is
introduced into, and maintained amid, the elaborately conventional,
sophisticated, disabused world Mr. Wilde depicts so cleverly, so
mercilessly. The special fascination of the piece is, of course, just
there--at that point of contrast. Mr. Wilde's work may fairly claim to
go with that of Edgar Poe, and with some good French work of the same
kind, done, probably, in more or less conscious imitation of it.

* * * * *

_The Athenaeum_ in reviewing "The Picture of Dorian Gray," in its issue
of June 27th, 1891, under the heading of "Novels of the Week," said:--

Mr. Oscar Wilde's paradoxes are less wear