



Produced by Judith Boss.  HTML version by Al Haines.










The Picture of Dorian Gray

by

Oscar Wilde




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-
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