One of the most famous and most frequently quoted statements about the moral responsibility of artists can be found in Oscar Wilde ’s preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book,” writes Wilde, “Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” His claim is that works of art are legitimate objects of aesthetic judgement, but not of moraljudgement.
Wilde added this preface when the novel was reprinted a year after its initial publication in a literary magazine. The preface was Wilde’s considered response to various reviewers who had found his book to be immoral. The extent of this antagonism should not be exaggerated. Only a few reviewers had condemned the novel in these terms, and there was never any serious campaign for it to be banned.
Wilde also replied separately, by letter, to each of the magazines and newspapers which had published these condemnatory reviews. These letters were collected together after his death and republished in a little volume entitled Art and Morality. (Today, they can be found more easily in the collected edition of Wilde’s correspondence.) It is worth our while to read and compare the various arguments he puts forward.
He makes his first statement of the principle later enunciated in his preface in his letter to The St. James’s Gazette: “The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.” However in a second letter to the same magazine he makes the surprising claim that “The public… will find that [Dorian Gray] is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. ”
The Daily Chronicle had been even more condemnatory, describing Wilde’s novel as “a poisonous book…. heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” To this Wilde replied: “My story is poisonous if