He starts by asking an extremely silly question, and that is, whether or not I have written this book for the purpose of giving pleasure to the British child.  Having expressed grave doubts on this subject, a subject on which I cannot conceive any fairly educated person having any doubts at all, he proceeds, apparently quite seriously, to make the extremely limited vocabulary at the disposal of the British child the standard by which the prose of an artist is to be judged!  Now, in building this House of Pomegranates, I had about as much intention of pleasing the British child as I had of pleasing the British public.  Mamilius is as entirely delightful as Caliban is entirely detestable, but neither the standard of Mamilius nor the standard of Caliban is my standard.  No artist recognises any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament.  The artist seeks to realise, in a certain material, his immaterial idea of beauty, and thus to transform an idea into an ideal.  That is the way an artist makes things.  That is why an artist makes things.  The artist has no other object in making things.  Does your reviewer imagine that Mr. Shannon, for instance, whose delicate and lovely illustrations he confesses himself quite unable to see, draws for the purpose of giving information to the blind?—­I remain, Sir, your obedient servant,

Oscar Wilde. 
Boulevard des CAPUCINES, Paris.

PUPPETS AND ACTORS

(Daily Telegraph, February 20, 1892.)

To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Sir,—­I have just been sent an article that seems to have appeared in your paper some days ago, {164} in which it is stated that, in the course of some remarks addressed to the Playgoers’ Club on the occasion of my taking the chair at their last meeting, I laid it down as an axiom that the stage is only ‘a frame furnished with a set of puppets.’

Now, it is quite true that I hold that the stage is to a play no more than a picture-frame is to a painting, and that the actable value of a play has nothing whatsoever to do with its value as a work of art.  In this century, in England, to take an obvious example, we have had only two great plays—­one is Shelley’s Cenci, the other Mr. Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, and neither of them is in any sense of the word an actable play.  Indeed, the mere suggestion that stage representation is any test of a work of art is quite ridiculous.  In the production of Browning’s plays, for instance, in London and at Oxford, what was being tested was obviously the capacity of the modern stage to represent, in any adequate measure or degree, works of introspective method and strange or sterile psychology.  But the artistic value of Strqfford or In a Balcony was settled when Robert Browning wrote their last lines.  It is not, Sir, by the mimes that the muses are to be judged.