Lord Henry smiled.  “He gives you good advice, I suppose.  People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.”

“You don’t mean to say that Basil has got any passion or any romance in him?”

“I don’t know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance,” said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes.  “Has he never let you know that?”

“Never.  I must ask him about it.  I am rather surprised to hear it.  He is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit of a Philistine.  Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered that.”

“Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into [30] his work.  The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense.  The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists.  Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves.  A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.  But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating.  The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look.  The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible.  He lives the poetry that he cannot write.  The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

“I wonder is that really so, Harry?” said Dorian Gray, putting some perfume on his handkerchief out of a large gold-topped bottle that stood on the table.  “It must be, if you say so.  And now I must be off.  Imogen is waiting for me.  Don’t forget about to-morrow.  Good-by.”

As he left the room, Lord Henry’s heavy eyelids drooped, and he began to think.  Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as Dorian Gray, and yet the lad’s mad adoration of some one else caused him not the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy.  He was pleased by it.  It made him a more interesting study.  He had been always enthralled by the methods of science, but the ordinary subject-matter of science had seemed to him trivial and of no import.  And so he had begun by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others.  Human life,—­that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating.  There was nothing else of any value, compared to it.  It was true that as one watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not wear over one’s face a mask of glass, or keep the sulphurous fumes from troubling the brain and making the imagination turbid with monstrous fancies and misshapen dreams.  There were poisons so subtle that to know their properties one had to sicken of them.  There were maladies so strange that one had to pass through them if one sought to understand their nature.  And, yet, what a great reward one received!  How wonderful the whole world became to one!  To note the curious hard logic of passion, and the emotional colored life of the intellect,—­to observe where they met, and where they separated, at what point they became one, and at what point they were at discord,—­there was a delight in that!  What matter what the cost was?  One could never pay too high a price for any sensation.