His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him....  It was the strangest book he had ever read.  It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him.  Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him.  Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.

It was a novel without a plot, and with only one character, being, 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 Decandents. 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 almost entirely lost control.

The book thus characterized is obviously by a French writer—­I have good reason for thinking that it was A Rebours by Huysmans—­and how any responsible reader can have imagined that Walter Pater’s The Renaissance answers to this description passes all understanding.  A critic guilty of so patent a misstatement must either never have read The Picture of Dorian Gray, or never have read The Renaissance.  On the other hand, if on other more reliable evidence it can be found that Oscar Wilde was one of those “young men” misled by Pater’s book, for whose spiritual safety Pater, as we have seen, was so solicitous, one can only remind oneself again of the phrase quoted above in regard to “that soil of human nature” into which a writer casts his seed.  If that which was sown a lily comes up a toadstool, there is evidently something wrong with the soil.