himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of
life. He finds that those who reject the battle are more deeply wounded
than those who take part in it.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in Dorian Gray--a moral which the prurient
will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose
minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the
only error in the book.--I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR
WILDE.

16 TITE STREET, CHELSEA, June 26.

III. MR. OSCAR WILDE'S DEFENCE

(St. James's Gazette, June 28, 1890.)

To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette.

SIR,--As you still keep up, though in a somewhat milder form than before,
your attacks on me and my book, you not only confer on me the right, but
you impose upon me the duty of reply.

You state, in your issue of today, that I misrepresented you when I said
that you suggested that a book so wicked as mine should be 'suppressed
and coerced by a Tory Government.' Now, you did not propose this, but
you did suggest it. When you declare that you do not know whether or not
the Government will take action about my book, and remark that the
authors of books much less wicked have been proceeded against in law, the
suggestion is quite obvious.

In your complaint of misrepresentation you seem to me, Sir, to have been
not quite candid.

However, as far as I am concerned, this suggestion is of no importance.
What is of importance is that the editor of a paper like yours should
appear to countenance the monstrous theory that the Government of a
country should exercise a censorship over imaginative literature. This
is a theory against which I, and all men of letters of my acquaintance,
protest most strongly; and any critic who admits the reasonableness of
such a theory shows at once that he is quite incapable of understanding
what literature is, and what are the rights that literature possesses. A
Government might just as well try to teach painters how to paint, or
sculptors how to model, as attempt to interfere with the style, treatment
and subject-matter of the literary artist, and no writer, however eminent
or obscure, should ever give his sanction to a theory that would degrade
literature far more than any didactic or so-called immoral book could
possibly do.

You then express your surprise that 'so experienced a literary gentleman'
as myself should imagine that your critic was animated by any feeling of
pe