in prose.

It was not till 1890 that he published his first and only novel, _The
Picture of Dorian Gray_, with its strangeness of colour and its
passionate suggestion flickering like lightning through the gloom of the
subject. The Puritans and the Philistines, who scented veiled
improprieties in its paradoxes, were shocked; but it delighted the
connoisseur and the artist, wearied as they were with the hum-drum
accounts of afternoon tea parties and the love affairs of the curate.

That such a master of prose and scholarship as Pater should have written
in terms of commendation of _Dorian Gray_ is sufficient to prove how
free from offence the story really is. In the original version of the
story one passage struck Pater as being indefinite and likely to suggest
evil to evil minds. This paragraph Wilde elaborated, but he refused to
suppress a single sentence of what he had written. "No artist is
consciously wrong," he declared.

A similar incident is recorded as early as 1878. Shairp, the Professor
of Poetry at Oxford, suggested some improvements in Wilde's Newdigate
Prize Poem _Ravenna_. Wilde listened to all the suggestions with
courtesy, and even took notes of them, but he went away and had the poem
printed without making a single alteration in it.

_The Picture of Dorian Gray_ first appeared on June 20th, 1890, in
_Lippincott's Monthly Magazine_ for July. It was published in America by
the J.B. Lippincott Company of Philadelphia simultaneously with the
English edition of the same magazine issued by Messrs. Ward, Lock and
Co.

A few weeks before the publication of his romance Wilde wrote a letter
to a publisher stating that his story would appear in Lippincott's on
the following 20th of June, and that after three months the copyright
reverted to him. The publication of _Dorian Gray_ would "create a
sensation," he wrote; he was "going to add two additional chapters," and
would the publishing house with whom he was corresponding care to
consider it?

Unfortunately the letter bears no indication of the house to which it
was sent. However, on the 1st of July in the following year _The Picture
of Dorian Gray_ was published in book form by Messrs. Ward, Lock and Co.
In this form it contained seven new chapters. The binding was of a rough
grey paper, the colour of cigarette ash, with back of parchment vellum.
The gilt lettering and design was by Charles Ricketts. A sumptuous
_edition de luxe_, limited to two hundred and