But, forgetting these mechanics and listening to that light-hearted conversation, we become aware that we are enjoying the exposition of a point of view without an understanding of which Wilde would be unintelligible as either man or writer. It does not represent him completely; a man's points of views are as various as his moods. But, with 'The Decay of Lying,' it does represent what was, perhaps, the dominant mood of his life. The dialogues overlap, but do not contradict each other. It can hardly have been chance that divided them in _Intentions_, by 'Pen, Pencil, and Poison,' that reflects the mood directly opposite, the mood in which he delighted to see a personality express itself in clothes, in vice, in action of any kind other than the vivid inaction of art. It is more likely to have been self-knowledge. For the mood that dictated the study of Wainewright was akin to that in which he found it an astounding adventure to entertain poisonous things. "It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement." Wilde's tragedy may be traced to the conflict between these moods, the one inviting him to life, the other to art. In either case, life or art matched its colours to seduce his temperament. The mood of the dialogues was that in which he turned, not necessarily always to writing, but to seek experience in art. In this mood he preferred, if you like to put it so, to take life at second-hand, and was happier to speak of Corot than of twilight, of Turner than of sunset. In this mood, like Vivian, he did not seek in Japanese art to know Japan, but rather to learn a new country "anywhere out of the world." Ancient Greece did not mean to him the Peloponnesian War, but the candour of Grecian statuary and the small figures of Tanagra, in the folds of whose dancing dresses, that seem always to have caught the tint of the evening sky in their terra-cotta, he found the secret of quite another country than the Greece of the historian. It was always his pleasure to begin where others had ended, and criticism rather than creation came to mean for him the delicate adventures of the intellect, such a life as was the best part of his own. And so criticism became creation for him, building its impressions into things beautiful in themselves, and transforming the life of the critic into something no less delightful than the subjects of his contemplation.