The 1891 Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Picture of Dorian Gray was vilified by British reviewers upon its appearance in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. Feeling aggrieved and misunderstood, Wilde appended the following aphorisms to the novel, as a Preface, upon its publication in book form one year later. The novel has since rarely been printed without the Preface, though the Preface has often been printed or anthologized separately, as representing Wilde’s artistic credo.
Many of the aphorisms are based on statements Wilde made in letters to the press defending his novel following publication in Lippincott’s. Others are based on ideas contained in Gautier’s Preface to Mademoiselle du Maupin (1835), a manifesto of “art for art’s sake,” also written in reply to critics who had attacked its author’s moral character. Before attaching them to the novel, Wilde published twenty-three of the aphorisms in the Fortnightly Review in March 1891, where they appeared over his signature under the title “A Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The aphorism “No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything” was added, and one or two others were slightly altered, when the Preface appeared—again over Wilde’s signature—in the book edition of Dorian Gray in April 1891.
Wilde’s Preface is an example of what the critic Gérard Genette terms a “delayed preface” insofar as it serves a “compensatory” purpose and responds “to the first reactions of the first public and the critics” (Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin [Cambridge University Press, 1997], p. 240). However, Genette himself treats Wilde’s Preface as an example of the “preface-manifesto” (p. 228) whereby an author seeks to redefine or overthrow existing artistic conventions. In the breadth of its aims, says Genette, Wilde’s Preface is comparable not merely to Gautier’s Preface to Mademoiselle du Maupin but also to Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus and to Victor Hugo’s never-completed “philosophical preface” to Les Misérables.
THE PREFACE
The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meaning in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy 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.