Your critic has cleared himself of the charge of personal malice, his denial and yours being quite sufficient in the matter; but he has done so only by a tacit admission that he has really no critical instinct about literature and literary work, which, in one who writes about literature, is, I need hardly say, a much graver fault than malice of any kind.

Finally, Sir, allow me to say this.  Such an article as you have published really makes me despair of the possibility of any general culture in England.  Were I a French author, and my book brought out in Paris, there is not a single literary critic in France on any paper of high standing who would think for a moment of criticising it from an ethical standpoint.  If he did so he would stultify himself, not merely in the eyes of all men of letters, but in the eyes of the majority of the public.

You have yourself often spoken against Puritanism.  Believe me, Sir, Puritanism is never so offensive and destructive as when it deals with art matters.  It is there that it is radically wrong.  It is this Puritanism, to which your critic has given expression, that is always marring the artistic instinct of the English.  So far from encouraging it, you should set yourself against it, and should try to teach your critics to recognise the essential difference between art and life.

The gentleman who criticised my book is in a perfectly hopeless confusion about it, and your attempt to help him out by proposing that the subject-matter of art should be limited does not mend matters.  It is proper that limitation should be placed on action.  It is not proper that limitation should be placed on art.  To art belong all things that are and all things that are not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the freedom of art in the selection of subject-matter.  I now trust, Sir, that these attacks on me and on my book will cease.  There are forms of advertisement that are unwarranted and unwarrantable.—­I am, Sir, your obedient servant,

Oscar Wilde.

16 Tite street, S. W., June 27.

IV. (St. James’s Gazette, June 30, 1890.)

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

Sir,—­In your issue of this evening you publish a letter from ’A London Editor’ which clearly insinuates in the last paragraph that I have in some way sanctioned the circulation of an expression of opinion, on the part of the proprietors of Lippincott’s Magazine, of the literary and artistic value of my story of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Allow me, Sir, to state that there are no grounds for this insinuation.  I was not aware that any such document was being circulated; and I have written to the agents, Messrs. Ward and Lock—­who cannot, I feel sure, be primarily responsible for its appearance—­to ask them to withdraw it at once.  No publisher should ever express an opinion of the value of what he publishes.  That is a matter entirely for the literary critic to decide.