tolerable to his readers. That is his punishment. No doubt, it is
the artist's privilege to be nasty; but he must exercise that
privilege at his peril.

During the next two weeks various correspondents aired their views on
the subject, and in the third week[14] Oscar Wilde replied to them
thus:--

Sir,--In a letter, dealing with the relations of art to morals,
published in your columns--a letter which I may say seems to me in many
respects admirable, especially in its insistence on the right of the
artist to select his own subject-matter--Mr. Charles Whibley suggests
that it must be peculiarly painful to me to find that the ethical import
of "Dorian Gray" has been so strongly recognised by the foremost
Christian papers of England and America that I have been greeted by more
than one of them as a moral reformer.

Allow me, sir, to re-assure on this point not merely Mr. Charles Whibley
himself, but also your, no doubt, anxious readers. I have no hesitation
in saying that I regard such criticisms as a very gratifying tribute to
my story. For if a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who
have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics
appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will
fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own
shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator,
and not life, that art really mirrors.

And so in the case of "Dorian Gray," the purely literary critic, as in
the _Speaker_ and elsewhere, regards it as a "serious and fascinating
work of art"[15]: the critic who deals with art in its relation to
conduct, as the _Christian Leader_ and the _Christian World_, regards it
as an ethical parable: _Light_, which I am told is the organ of the
English mystics, regards it as "a work of high spiritual import"[16]:
the _St. James's Gazette_, which is seeking apparently to be the organ
of the prurient, sees or pretends to see in it all kinds of dreadful
things, and hints at Treasury prosecutions: and your Mr. Charles Whibley
genially says that he discovers in it "lots of morality."

It is quite true that he goes on to say that he detects no art in it.
But I do not think that it is fair to expect a critic to be able to see
a work of art from every point of view. Even Gautier had his limitations
just as much as Diderot had, and in modern England Goethes are rare. I
can only assure Mr. Charles