whole.  The writer of the paragraph goes on to state that he does not ‘like the cover.’  This is, no doubt, to be regretted, though it is not a matter of much importance, as there are only two people in the world whom it is absolutely necessary that the cover should please.  One is Mr. Ricketts, who designed it, the other is myself, whose book it binds.  We both admire it immensely!  The reason, however, that your critic gives for his failure to gain from the cover any impression of beauty seems to me to show a lack of artistic instinct on his part, which I beg you will allow me to try to correct.

He complains that a portion of the design on the left-hand side of the cover reminds him of an Indian club with a house-painter’s brush on top of it, while a portion of the design on the right-hand side suggests to him the idea of ‘a chimney-pot hat with a sponge in it.’  Now, I do not for a moment dispute that these are the real impressions your critic received.  It is the spectator, and the mind of the spectator, as I pointed out in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that art really mirrors.  What I want to indicate is this:  the artistic beauty of the cover of my book resides in the delicate tracing, arabesques, and massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory, the colour effect culminating in certain high gilt notes, and being made still more pleasurable by the overlapping band of moss-green cloth that holds the book together.

What the gilt notes suggest, what imitative parallel may be found to them in that chaos that is termed Nature, is a matter of no importance.  They may suggest, as they do sometimes to me, peacocks and pomegranates and splashing fountains of gold water, or, as they do to your critic, sponges and Indian clubs and chimney-pot hats.  Such suggestions and evocations have nothing whatsoever to do with the aesthetic quality and value of the design.  A thing in Nature becomes much lovelier if it reminds us of a thing in Art, but a thing in Art gains no real beauty through reminding us of a thing in Nature.  The primary aesthetic impression of a work of art borrows nothing from recognition or resemblance.  These belong to a later and less perfect stage of apprehension.

Properly speaking, they are no part of a real aesthetic impression at all, and the constant preoccupation with subject-matter that characterises nearly all our English art-criticism, is what makes our art-criticisms, especially as regards literature, so sterile, so profitless, so much beside the mark, and of such curiously little account.—­I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, Oscar Wilde.

Boulevard des CAPUCINES, Paris.

II.

(Pall Mall Gazette, December 11, 1891.)

To the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette.

Sir,—­I have just had sent to me from London a copy of the Pall Mall Gazette, containing a review of my book A House of Pomegranates. {163} The writer of this review makes a certain suggestion which I beg you will allow me to correct at once.