His peculiar kind of beauty might be imaged by a strangely colored Eastern vessel, and hidden within it, a few delicate young serpents. For he has something of the coiled up life of the serpents, in his poisonous sins; sins he communicates to others, ruining their youthful lives with no deliberate malice, but simply because he can not help it. He has no sense of shame, even in his most ignoble nights. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's face; but secret vices can not be concealed; one sees them in the mere ironical curl of sinister lips, or in the enigmatical lifting of an eyelid. He has made the devil's bargain, but not in the sense in which Faustus sells his soul to Satan; yet he is always entangled in the painted sins, the more and more hideous aspects, of his intolerably accusing portrait, taken, certainly, in Wilde's usual manner, from _La Peau de Chagrin_ of Balzac; only, and therein lies the immense difference, the man's life never shrinks, but the very lines and colors of his painted image shrivel, until the thing itself--the thing he has come to hate as one hates hell--has its revenge. A passion for caprice, a whimsical Irish temperament, a love of art for art's sake--it is in such qualities as these that I find the origin of the beautiful force of estheticism, the exquisite echoes of the poems, the subtle decadence of _Dorian Gray_, and the paradoxical truths, the perverted common sense of the _Intentions._ Certainly, as Pater realized, Wilde, with his hatred of the bourgeois seriousness of dull people, has always taken refuge from commonplace in irony. Life, to him, even when he is most frivolous, ought not to be realism, but a following after art: a provoking enough phrase for those who are lost to the sense of suggestiveness. He is conscious of the charm of grateful echoes, and is always original in his quotations.