The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde

October, 1994 Etext #174


*Project Gutenberg's The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde*
This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska. The
equipment: an IBM-compatible 486/33, a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet
IIc flatbed scanner, and Calera Recognition Systems' M/Series
Professional OCR software and RISC Accelerator Board.

THE PREFACE

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal
the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another
manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without
being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom
beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well
written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing
his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not
seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the
subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the
perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything.
Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical
sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable
mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express
everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an
art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the
point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the
musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the
type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the
surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their
peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new,
complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with
himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he
does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that
one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE



CHAPTER 1

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light
summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through
the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume
of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was
lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry
Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured
blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to
bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the
fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long
tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window,
producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of
those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an
art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness
and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through
the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the
dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the
stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon
note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist
himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago
caused, at the time, such public excitement and gave rise to so many
strange conjectures.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so
skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his
face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and
closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought
to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he
might awake.

"It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said
Lord Henry languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the
Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone


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