“You have done too many foolish things in your life to be entitled to give yourself that name, Dorian,” answered Lord Henry, with his sweet, melancholy smile.

The lad frowned.  “I don’t like that explanation, Harry,” he rejoined, “but I am glad you don’t think I am heartless.  I am nothing of the kind.  I know I am not.  And yet I must admit that this thing that has happened does not affect me as it should.  It seems to me to be simply like a wonderful ending to a wonderful play.  It has all the terrible beauty of a great tragedy, a tragedy in which I took part, but by which I have not been wounded.”

“It is an interesting question,” said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad’s unconscious egotism,—­“an extremely interesting question.  I fancy that the explanation is this.  It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style.  They affect us just as vulgarity affects us.  They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that.  Sometimes, however, a tragedy that has artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives.  If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect.  Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play.  Or rather we are both.  We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us.  In the present case, what is it that has really happened?  Some one has killed herself for love of you.  I wish I had ever had such an experience.  It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life.  The people who have adored me—­there have not been very many, but there have been some—­ have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they to care for me.  They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences.  That awful memory of woman!  What a fearful thing it is!  And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals!  One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details.  Details are always vulgar.

[49] “Of course, now and then things linger.  I once wore nothing but violets all through one season, as mourning for a romance that would not die.  Ultimately, however, it did die.  I forget what killed it.  I think it was her proposing to sacrifice the whole world for me.  That is always a dreadful moment.  It fills one with the terror of eternity.  Well,—­would you believe it?—­a week ago, at Lady Hampshire’s, I found myself seated at dinner next the lady in question, and she insisted on going over the whole thing again, and digging up the past, and raking up the future.  I had buried my romance in a bed of poppies.  She dragged it out again, and assured me that I had spoiled her life.  I am bound to state that she