EA, July 9.

VII. ART AND MORALITY

(Scots Observer, August 2, 1890.)

To the Editor of the Scots Observer.

SIR,--In a letter dealing with the relations of art to morals recently
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 for 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 reassure, 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: 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; 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 Whibley that no moral apotheosis to which he
has added the most modest contribution could possibly be a source of
unhappiness to an artist.--I remain, Sir, your obedient servant,

OSCAR WILDE.

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