“All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.”
When talking about his friend Cyril Graham, George Erskine spares no colorful epithets describing his friend’s appearance. He pays some attention to his inner world as well, but it is mostly the looks of Cyril Graham that Erskine has been attracted to. Cyril Graham is considered a spoilt young man, and this perversity is the result of the attention he is receiving from the people around him. Beauty is the biggest sin a person cannot solve, and it is a great job of an individuality not to get under the influence of the people around and not to think that beauty is an answer to everything. Oscar Wilde had developed this theme in many other works.
“It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal."
Giving advice is one of the most ungrateful things, and the author gives an example of its truthfulness on George Erskine’s giving advice to Cyril Graham. When a person receives an advice which in the end turns out to be a very good one, this person would never accept that it might be somebody else’s worth but his own. In the situation completely opposite – when the advice turns to catastrophe – a person would never accept his own fault, but would put the guilt on the one who had given the advise. So, the situation is rather contradictory – the best thing might be, after all, not to give advices at all, as nothing good might come out of it anyway.
“You forget that a thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.”
Cyril Graham has committed suicide because George Erskine did not believe in his theory about Willie Hughes (Mr. W.H.). George Erskine feels rather sorry for his friend, but he does not feel any regret or consider himself guilty in any way, as what Cyril tried to prove was completely crazy, at least Erskine thought so. His point is that death is not a trigger for everything, there is reason in the first place, and when a person decides to die – it is his own decision, no matter what was the cause of such a decision.
