evidence of a desire to impress an unoffending and ill-educated public by
an assumption of superior knowledge. I should fancy that the most
ordinary of scholars is perfectly well acquainted with the Lives of the
Caesars and with the Satyricon.

The Lives of the Caesars, at any rate, forms part of the curriculum at
Oxford for those who take the Honour School of Literae Humaniores; and as
for the Satyricon it is popular even among pass-men, though I suppose
they are obliged to read it in translations.

The writer of the article then suggests that I, in common with that great
and noble artist Count Tolstoi, take pleasure in a subject because it is
dangerous. About such a suggestion there is this to be said. Romantic
art deals with the exception and with the individual. Good people,
belonging as they do to the normal, and so, commonplace, type, are
artistically uninteresting.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They
represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's
reason; bad people stir one's imagination. Your critic, if I must give
him so honourable a title, states that the people in my story have no
counterpart in life; that they are, to use his vigorous if somewhat
vulgar phrase, 'mere catchpenny revelations of the non-existent.' Quite
so.

If they existed they would not be worth writing about. The function of
the artist is to invent, not to chronicle. There are no such people. If
there were I would not write about them. Life by its realism is always
spoiling the subject-matter of art.

The superior pleasure in literature is to realise the non-existent.

And finally, let me say this. You have reproduced, in a journalistic
form, the comedy of Much Ado about Nothing and have, of course, spoilt it
in your reproduction.

The poor public, hearing, from an authority so high as your own, that
this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory
Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas! they will
find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess,
as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.

The painter, Basil Hallward, worshipping physical beauty far too much, as
most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a
monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere
sensation and pleasure, tries to kill conscience, and at that moment
kills