The writer of the article then suggests that I, in common with that great and noble artist Count Tolstoi, take pleasure in a subject because it is dangerous.  About such a suggestion there is this to be said.  Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual.  Good people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace, type, are artistically uninteresting.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies.  They represent colour, variety and strangeness.  Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.  Your critic, if I must give him so honourable a title, states that the people in my story have no counterpart in life; that they are, to use his vigorous if somewhat vulgar phrase, ‘mere catchpenny revelations of the non-existent.’  Quite so.

If they existed they would not be worth writing about.  The function of the artist is to invent, not to chronicle.  There are no such people.  If there were I would not write about them.  Life by its realism is always spoiling the subject-matter of art.

The superior pleasure in literature is to realise the non-existent.

And finally, let me say this.  You have reproduced, in a journalistic form, the comedy of Much Ado about Nothing and have, of course, spoilt it in your reproduction.

The poor public, hearing, from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it.  But, alas! they will find that it is a story with a moral.  And the moral is this:  All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.

The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity.  Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself.  Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life.  He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray—­a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy.  Is this an artistic error?  I fear it is.  It is the only error in the book.—­I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, Oscar Wilde.

16 Tite street, Chelsea, June 26.

III.  MR. OSCAR WILDE’S DEFENCE

(St. James’s Gazette, June 28, 1890.)

To the Editor of the St. James’s Gazette.

Sir,—­As you still keep up, though in a somewhat milder form than before, your attacks on me and my book, you not only confer on me the right, but you impose upon me the duty of reply.