The Picture of Dorian Gray | Page 3

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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by
Oscar Wilde
THE PREFACE
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of
beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find
ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there
is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly
written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a
glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own
face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the
morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to
prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever
morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist
instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point
of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view
of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who
go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work
of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is
in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he
does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it
intensely.
All art is quite useless.
OSCAR WILDE

CHAPTER 1
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind
stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent
of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as
was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of
the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches
seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and
then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains
that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese
effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through
the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness
and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long
unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the

straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of
London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.
In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a
young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away,
was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years
ago caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many strange
conjectures.
As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his
art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he
suddenly started up, and closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he
sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might
awake.
"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said Lord Henry
languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too
large and too vulgar.