5.

II. MR. OSCAR WILDE AGAIN

(St. James's Gazette, June 27, 1890.)

SIR,--In your issue of today you state that my brief letter published in
your columns is the 'best reply' I can make to your article upon Dorian
Gray. This is not so. I do not propose to discuss fully the matter
here, but I feel bound to say that your article contains the most
unjustifiable attack that has been made upon any man of letters for many
years.

The writer of it, who is quite incapable of concealing his personal
malice, and so in some measure destroys the effect he wishes to produce,
seems not to have the slightest idea of the temper in which a work of art
should be approached. To say that such a book as mine should be 'chucked
into the fire' is silly. That is what one does with newspapers.

Of the value of pseudo-ethical criticism in dealing with artistic work I
have spoken already. But as your writer has ventured into the perilous
grounds of literary criticism I ask you to allow me, in fairness not
merely to myself but to all men to whom literature is a fine art, to say
a few words about his critical method.

He begins by assailing me with much ridiculous virulence because the
chief personages in my story are puppies. They _are_ puppies. Does he
think that literature went to the dogs when Thackeray wrote about
puppydom? I think that puppies are extremely interesting from an
artistic as well as 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