DulIness and dirt are the chief features of Lippincott's this month. The element it that is unclean, though undeniably amusing, is furnished by Mr Oscar Wilde's story of The Picture of Dorian Gray'. It is a tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French Décadents – a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction a gloating study of the mental and physical corruption of a fresh, fair and golden youth, which might be horrible and fascinating but for its effeminate frivolity, its studied insincеrity, its theatrical cynicism, its tawdry mysticism, its flippant philosophisings, and the contaminating trail of garish vulgarity which is over all Mr Wildе's elaborate Wardour Street aestheticism and obtrusively cheap scholarship.

Mr Wilde says his book has 'a moral'. The 'moral', so far as we can collect it, is that man's chief end is to develop his nature to the fullest by 'always searching for new sensations', that when the soul gets sick the way to cure it is to deny the senses nothing, for 'nothing', says one of Mr Wilde's characters, Lord Henry Wotton, 'can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul. Man is half angel and half ape, and Mr Wilde's book has no real use if it be not to inculcate the 'moral' that when you feel yourself becoming too angelic you cannot do better than rush out and make a beast of yourself. There is not a single good and holy impulse of human nature, scarcely a fine feeling or instinct that civilization, art, and religion have developed throughout the ages as part of the barriers between Humanity and Animalism that is not held up to ridicule and contempt in 'Dorian Gray', if, indeed, such strong words can be fitly applied to the actual effect of Mr Wilde's airy levity and fluent impudence. His desperate effort to vamp up a 'moral' for the book at the end is, artistically speaking, coarse and crude, because the whole incident of Dorian Gray's death is, as they say on the stage, 'out of the picture’. Dorian's only regret is that unbridled indulgence in every form of secret and unspeakable vice, every resource of luxury and art, and sometimes still more piquant to the jaded young man of fashion, whose lives 'Dorian Gray' pretends to sketch, by every abomination of vulgarity and squalor is - what? Why, that it will leave traces of premature age and loathsome sensualness on his pretty face, rosy with the loveliness that endeared youth of his odious type to the paralytic patricians of the Lower Empire.

Dorian Gray prays that a portrait of himself which an artist, who raves about him as young men do about the women they love not wisely but too well, has painted may grow old instead of the original. This is what happens by some supernatural agency, the introduction of which seems purely farcical, so that Dorian goes on enjoying unfading youth year after year, and might go on for ever using his senses with impunity to cure his soul, defiling English society with the moral pestilence which is incarnate in him, but for one thing. That is his sudden impulse not merely to murder the painter – which might be artistically defended on the plea that it is only a fresh development of his scheme for realizing every phase of life-experience - but to rip up the canvas in a rage, merely because, though he had permitted himself to do one good action, it had not made his portrait less hideous. But all this is inconsistent with Dorian Gray's cool, calculating, conscienceless character, evolved logically enough by Mr Wilde's 'New Hedonism'.

Then Mr Wilde finishes his story by saying that on hearing a heavy fall Dorian Gray's servants rushed in, found the portrait on the wall as youthful looking as ever, its senile ugliness being transferred to the foul profligate himself, who is lying on the floor stabbed to the heart. This is a sham moral, as indeed everything in the book is a sham, except the one element in the book which will taint every young mind that comes in contact with it. That element is shockingly real, and it is the plausibly insinuated defence of the creed that appeals to the senses 'to cure the soul whenever the spiritual nature of man suffers from too much purity and self-denial.

The rest of this number of Lippincott consists of articles of harmless padding.