The Preface to  The Picture of Dorian Gray  

 
by Oscar Wilde
 
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 meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming.  This is a fault.

                              Those who find beautiful meaning 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.
 
 
The Picture of Dorian Gray — a novel about a young, physically beautiful, but amoral man who owns a magical portrait.  As he commits acts of cruelty and vice, his own physical body remains perfect, but the portrait changes, turning progressively more hideous as it reflects his character (he eventually has to keep it hidden in the attic).
 
realism — A literary movement of the late nineteenth century, Realism focused on acute psychological and sociological understanding of characters and their motivations.  Typically, characters in Realistic fiction were engaged in the mundane aspects of life:  earning a living, marrying and trying to sustain a marriage, and so on.  Realistic writers saw themselves as correcting the excesses of Romanticism, with its unlikely plots and extreme emotion.  Some of the more famous Realists include Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Edith Wharton.
 
Caliban — A character in Shakespeare’s final masterpiece, The Tempest, Caliban is a kind of brutish servant of the magician Prospero.  He is ugly and ignorant, but not without intelligence and ambition, and he steals Prospero’s books in an attempt to become more powerful.  Wilde is referring to how Caliban is enraged by his own brutal appearance and nature.
 
romanticism — A literary movement of the early nineteenth century century, Romanticism focuses on intensity of experience and language, rather than plausibility of plot.  Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is one example of a romance, not in the sense of love story (the love affair is pretty much over before the story begins in that book) but in the sense of the extremes of beauty and passion snd the presence of Nature as a living, nearly sentient entity.
 
type — ideal form or epitome
 
musician — See the writings of the critic Walter Pater, from whom Wilde learned this idea.  Pater had written “All art aspires to the condition of music.”