ienced in writing the
story was that of keeping the extremely obvious moral subordinate to the
artistic and dramatic effect.

When I first conceived the idea of a young man selling his soul in
exchange for eternal youth--an idea that is old in the history of
literature, but to which I have given new form--I felt that, from an
aesthetic point of view, it would be difficult to keep the moral in its
proper secondary place; and even now I do not feel quite sure that I
have been able to do so. I think the moral too apparent. When the book
is published in a volume I hope to correct this defect.

As for what the moral is, your critic states that it is this--that when
a man feels himself becoming "too angelic" he should rush out and make a
"beast of himself." I cannot say that I consider this a moral. The real
moral of the story is that all excess, as well as all renunciation,
brings its punishment, and this moral is so far artistically and
deliberately suppressed that it does not enunciate its law as a general
principle, but realises itself purely in the lives of individuals, and
so becomes simply a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the
object of the work of art itself.

Your critic also falls into error when he says that Dorian Gray, having
a "cool, calculating, conscienceless character," was inconsistent when
he destroyed the picture of his own soul, on the ground that the picture
did not become less hideous after he had done what, in his vanity, he
had considered his first good action. Dorian Gray has not got a cool,
calculating, conscienceless character at all. On the contrary, he is
extremely impulsive, absurdly romantic, and is haunted all through his
life by an exaggerated sense of conscience which mars his pleasures for
him and warns him that youth and enjoyment are not everything in the
world. It is finally to get rid of the conscience that had dogged his
steps from year to year that he destroys the picture; and thus in his
attempt to kill conscience Dorian Gray kills himself.

Your critic then talks about "obtrusively cheap scholarship." Now,
whatever a scholar writes is sure to display scholarship in the
distinction of style and the fine use of language; but my story contains
no learned or pseudo-learned discussions, and the only literary books
that it alludes to are books that any fairly educated reader may be
supposed to be acquainted with, such as the "Satyricon" of Petronius
Arbiter, or Gautier's "E