Y OF "DORIAN GRAY"
MR ROBERT BUCHANAN ON PAGAN VICIOUSNESS
COMPARATIVE TABLE OF CHAPTERS
PASSAGES WHICH APPEAR IN THE 1890 EDITION ONLY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ORIGINAL EDITIONS
UNAUTHORISED EDITIONS
TRANSLATIONS
DUTCH
FRENCH
GERMAN
ITALIAN
POLISH
RUSSIAN
SWEDISH

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_On the whole, an artist in England gains something by being attacked.
His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of
course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very
contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or
style from the suburban intellect._

* * * * *

ART AND MORALITY

"Why do you always write poetry? Why do you not write prose? Prose is so
much more difficult."

These were the words of Walter Pater to Oscar Wilde on the occasion of
their first meeting during the latter's undergraduate days at Oxford.[1]
Those were "days of lyrical ardours and of studious sonnet-writing,"
wrote Wilde, in reviewing one of Pater's books some years later,[2]
"days when one loved the exquisite intricacy and musical repetitions of
the ballade, and the vilanelle with its linked long-drawn echoes and its
curious completeness; days when one solemnly sought to discover the
proper temper in which a triolet should be written; delightful days, in
which, I am glad to say, there was far more rhyme than reason."

Oscar Wilde was never a voluminous writer--"writing bores me so," he
once said to Andre Gide--and at the time of which he speaks he had
published little except some occasional verses in his University
magazines. Then, in 1881, came his volume of collected poems, followed
at intervals during the next nine or ten years by a collection of fairy
stories and some essays in the leading reviews.

"I did not quite understand what Mr. Pater meant," he continues, "and it
was not till I had carefully studied his beautiful and suggestive essays
on the Renaissance that I fully realised what a wonderful self-conscious
art the art of English prose-writing really is, or may be made to be."

It has been suggested that it was his late apprenticeship to an art that
requires life-long study which rendered Wilde's prose so insincere,
resembling more the conscious artifice of the modern French school than
the restrained, yet jewelled style of Pater, whom he claimed as his
master