(Daily Chronicle, July 2, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Daily Chronicle.

Sir,—­Will you allow me to correct some errors into which your critic has fallen in his review of my story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in today’s issue of your paper?

Your critic states, to begin with, that I make desperate attempts to ‘vamp up’ a moral in my story.  Now, I must candidly confess that I do not know what ‘vamping’ is.  I see, from time to time, mysterious advertisements in the newspapers about ‘How to Vamp,’ but what vamping really means remains a mystery to me—­a mystery that, like all other mysteries, I hope some day to explore.

However, I do not propose to discuss the absurd terms used by modern journalism.  What I want to say is that, so far from wishing to emphasise any moral in my story, the real trouble I experienced in writing the story was that of keeping the extremely obvious moral subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect.

When I first conceived the idea of a young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth—­an idea that is old in the history of literature, but to which I have given new form—­I felt that, from an aesthetic point of view, it would be difficult to keep the moral in its proper secondary place; and even now I do not feel quite sure that I have been able to do so.  I think the moral too apparent.  When the book is published in a volume I hope to correct this defect.

As for what the moral is, your critic states that it is this—­that when a man feels himself becoming ‘too angelic’ he should rush out and make a ‘beast of himself.’  I cannot say that I consider this a moral.  The real moral of the story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its punishment, and this moral is so far artistically and deliberately suppressed that it does not enunciate its law as a general principle, but realises itself purely in the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the object of the work of art itself.

Your critic also falls into error when he says that Dorian Gray, having a ‘cool, calculating, conscienceless character,’ was inconsistent when he destroyed the picture of his own soul, on the ground that the picture did not become less hideous after he had done what, in his vanity, he had considered his first good action.  Dorian Gray has not got a cool, calculating, conscienceless character at all.  On the contrary, he is extremely impulsive, absurdly romantic, and is haunted all through his life by an exaggerated sense of conscience which mars his pleasures for him and warns him that youth and enjoyment are not everything in the world.  It is finally to get rid of the conscience that had dogged his steps from year to year that he destroys the picture; and thus in his attempt to kill conscience Dorian Gray kills himself.