from a psychological point of view.

They seem to me to be certainly far more interesting than prigs; and I
am of opinion that Lord Henry Wotton is an excellent corrective of the
tedious ideal shadowed forth in the semi-theological novels of our age.

He then makes vague and fearful insinuations about my grammar and my
erudition. Now, as regards grammar, I hold that, in prose at any rate,
correctness should always be subordinate to artistic effect and musical
cadence; and any peculiarities of syntax that may occur in "Dorian Gray"
are deliberately intended, and are introduced to show the value of the
artistic theory in question. Your writer gives no instance of any such
peculiarity. This I regret, because I do not think that any such
instances occur.

As regards erudition, it is always difficult, even for the most modest
of us, to remember that other people do not know quite as much as one
does one's self. I myself frankly admit I cannot imagine how a casual
reference to Suetonius and Petronius Arbiter can be construed into
evidence of a desire to impress an unoffending and ill-educated public
by an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most
ordinary of scholars is perfectly well acquainted with the "Lives of the
Caesars" and with the "Satyricon."

"The Lives of the Caesars," at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at
Oxford for those who take the Honour School of "Literae Humaniores"; and
as for the "Satyricon" it is popular even among pass-men, though I
suppose they are obliged to read it in translations.

The writer of the article then suggests that I, in common with that
great and noble artist Count Tolstoi, take pleasure in a subject because
it is dangerous. About such a suggestion there is this to be said.
Romantic art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good
people, belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace type,
are artistically uninteresting.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They
represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's
reason; bad people stir one's imagination. Your critic, if I must give
him so honourable a title, states that the people in any story have no
counterpart in life; that they are, to use his vigorous if somewhat
vulgar phrase, "mere catchpenny revelations of the non-existent." Quite
so.

If they existed they would not be worth writing about. The function of
the artist is to