y in an artist is an
unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of
the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is
the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface
do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of
opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and
vital.

When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not
admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one
admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

OSCAR WILDE.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

CHAPTER I

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light
summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through
the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume
of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was
lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry
Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured
blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to
bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then
the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long
tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window,
producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of
those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an
art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness
and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through
the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the
dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the
stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon
note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the
full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty,
and in front of it, some little distance away, was sittin