The story of the book is a fantastic invention like that of Balzac's "Le Peau de Chagrin," in which the scrap of skin from a wild ass shrinks with each wish of its possessor. The picture of Dorian Gray, painted by his friend, ages with the lines of cruelty, lust and hypocrisy that should mar its ever-youthful subject. He, remaining as beautiful as when at twenty-one he had inspired the painter with a masterpiece, walks in the ways of men, sullying his soul, whose bodily reflection records neither his age nor his sins. It is the sort of invention that would have pleased Hawthorne, and the book itself is written with the marked ethical sympathy that Wilde, in his preface, denounced as "an unpardonable mannerism of style." Perhaps the reason why it was so loudly accused of immorality was that in the popular mind luxury and sin are closely allied, and the unpardonable mannerism that made him preach, in a parable, against the one, did not hide his whole-hearted delight in describing the other. The preface, inspired by the hostility the book aroused, is an essay not in the gentle art of making enemies, but in that of annoying them when made. If his critics tell him that his book leers with the eyes of foulness and dribbles with the lips of prurience, Wilde replies, with an ambiguity as disturbing as his smile, that "it is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors," and again that "the highest, as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography." His arrows are not angrily tipped with poison, but are not for that the less displeasing to those against whom they are directed. They are weighted not with anger but with aesthetic theory. They are so far separate from the story that they are best discussed with the essays of _Intentions_. There are a few strange books that share the magic of some names, like Cornelius Agrippa, Raymond Lully, and Paracelsus, names that possibly mean more to us before than after we have investigated the works and personalities that lie behind them. These books are mysterious and kept, like mysteries, for peculiar moods. They are not books for every day, nor even for every night. We keep them for rare moments, as we keep in a lacquer cabinet some crystal-shrined thread of subtle perfume, or some curious gem, to be a solace in a mood that does not often recur, or, perhaps, to be an instrument in its evocation. _Dorian Gray_, for all its faults, is such a book. It is unbalanced; and that is a fault. It is a mosaic hurriedly made by a man who reached out in all directions and took and used in his work whatever scrap of jasper, or porphyry or broken flint was put into his hand; and that is not a virtue. But in it there is an individual essence, a private perfume, a colour whose secret has been lost. There are moods whose consciousness that essence, perfume, colour, is needed to intensify.