"Dorian Gray," our æsthetic jury deals with it as harshly as any moralist could desire. Says Mr. Kernahan: "I found the atmosphere stifling and tainted, and was repelled by the sneers, the cynicism, in a word, by what seemed to me the wickedness by which Lord Henry sought to remove the landmarks of good and evil." Says Walter Pater: "To lose the moral sense therefore, for instance, the sense of sin and righteousness, as Mr. Wilde's heroes are bent on doing as speedily, as completely, as they can, is to lose, or lower, organization, to become less complex, to pass from a higher to a lower degree of development." Says that eminent authority on the lives and deaths of the heroes of the Yellow Nineties, Mr. Arthur Symons: "Wilde was an extremely typical figure. . . . If he might be supposed for a moment to represent anything for himself he would be the perfect representative of all that is evidently meant by us in our modern use of the word 'Decadence.'"
It is interesting to observe that critics of Wilde's own school of art for art's sake are beginning to pull his literary accomplishments to pieces, to praise "Intentions" and "De Profundis" and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" with reservations, and to grant him but one flawless masterpiece, "The Importance of Being Earnest," which, however, Mr. Shaw says, is "heartless." The line of attack is this: They declare that he originates little or nothing, that his convictions are all second-hand, that his taste and judgment are defective and his knowledge superficial, that he has no assured personal style in either poetry or prose, that his purple passages are full of echoes and mimicry of Ruskin, Whistler, Arnold, Pater, Rossetti, Gautier, Baudelaire. Whistler, who of course
