His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him.
From PUDNEY 122: Wilde himself, in letters to his critics, described his own book as "poisonous" - precisely the same adjective used to describe the little yellow book in the novel. In likening Dorian Gray to the little yellow book while defending it from accusations of immorality, Wilde was perhaps enjoying a private joke at the expense of his critics.
"There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral,—immoral from the scientific point of view.""Why?""Because to influence a person is to give him one's own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one's nature perfectly,—that is what each of us is here for.
From PUDNEY 122: Lord Henry's view, which sounds very much in line with Wilde's own ideas as developed in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, implies that influence over another is necessarily "immoral." This, by implication, flatly contradicts the claim made in the Preface that there can be no such thing as a moral or immoral book, and it does this very clearly and unambiguously by depicting a book that is immoral "from the scientific point of view."
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.
From PUDNEY 120: The use of the word "tragedy" - which of course can denote a theatrical genre as well as an event in real life - hints at something interesting: the idea that life can itself become a form of art. Lord Henry suggests that a person can be both actor and audience; this is certainly the case with Dorian himself. Dorian is a devotee of the arts in all their forms (audience). But it is also suggested that he is himself an artist (actor), a man for whom "Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts." Dorian Gray's status as both artist and artwork, is both exemplified and confused by his relationship with his portrait. The beautiful, "real" Dorian does not reflect the sinful reality of his existence - instead, the painting does. The novel also effects an almost farcical reversal of the Preface's dictum about art concealing the artist, as Dorian, the artist, quite literally conceals art, by locking it up in his attic. Perhaps significantly, the painting's other creator, Basil Hallward, also intended to hide it from public view. This is not the only point at which the novel appears consciously and subtly to mock the opinions expressed in the Preface.