Of one who is the greatest figure in the world’s literature since Greek days, Keats remarked that he had as much pleasure in conceiving the evil as he had in conceiving the good.  Let your reviewer, Sir, consider the bearings of Keats’s fine criticism, for it is under these conditions that every artist works.  One stands remote from one’s subject-matter.  One creates it and one contemplates it.  The further away the subject-matter is, the more freely can the artist work.

Your reviewer suggests that I do not make it sufficiently clear whether I prefer virtue to wickedness or wickedness to virtue.  An artist, Sir, has no ethical sympathies at all.  Virtue and wickedness are to him simply what the colours on his palette are to the painter.  They are no more and they are no less.  He sees that by their means a certain artistic effect can be produced and he produces it.  Iago may be morally horrible and Imogen stainlessly pure.  Shakespeare, as Keats said, had as much delight in creating the one as he had in creating the other.

It was necessary, Sir, for the dramatic development of this story to surround Dorian Gray with an atmosphere of moral corruption.  Otherwise the story would have had no meaning and the plot no issue.  To keep this atmosphere vague and indeterminate and wonderful was the aim of the artist who wrote the story.  I claim, Sir, that he has succeeded.  Each man sees his own sin in Dorian Gray.  What Dorian Gray’s sins are no one knows.  He who finds them has brought them.

In conclusion, Sir, let me say how really deeply I regret that you should have permitted such a notice as the one I feel constrained to write on to have appeared in your paper.  That the editor of the St. James’s Gazette should have employed Caliban as his art-critic was possibly natural.  The editor of the Scots Observer should not have allowed Thersites to make mows in his review.  It is unworthy of so distinguished a man of letters.—­I am, etc.,

Oscar Wilde.

16 Tite street, Chelsea, July 9.

VII.  ART AND MORALITY

(Scots Observer, August 2, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Scots Observer.

Sir,—­In a letter dealing with the relations of art to morals recently published in your columns—­a letter which I may say seems to me in many respects admirable, especially in its insistence on the right of the artist to select his own subject-matter—­Mr. Charles Whibley suggests that it must be peculiarly painful for me to find that the ethical import of Dorian Gray has been so strongly recognised by the foremost Christian papers of England and America that I have been greeted by more than one of them as a moral reformer.