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 _Décandents._ 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 morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a
poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its
pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences,
the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex
refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of
the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a
malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and
the creeping shadows....

For years Dorian Gray could not free himself from the memory of this
book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he never
sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no less than
five large paper copies of the first edition, and had them bound in
different colours, so that they might suit his various moods and the
changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have