Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray."

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of those books you hear about over and over but hardly anyone actually reads.  I found it joyously well-written, with some incredibly nimble and poetic passages.  It is a profound work.  Here's the opening Preface, which is serious and philosophical, and at times, confusing.  It makes you think.

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 meanings 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. 

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I'll try not to give it all away, since everyone should read it, and when they do, they will be changed. It's a Faustian story, about a young man who makes a devilish bargain to stay youthful his whole life, and to focus only on things of beauty.  Not in an artistic way, but in a materialistic way. The Gothic setting takes you back to old tyme London with carriages, private clubs, and exquisite manners.

Here are some of sentences and passages that stood out to me:

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think.

* * * * *

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world.  They can sit at their ease and gape at the play

* * * * *

"... the one charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception absolutely necessary for both parties."

 * * * * *

The sunlight slipped over the polished leaves. In the grass white daisies were tremulous. 

* * * * *

The wind shook some blossoms from the trees, and the heavy lilac-blooms, with their clustering stars, moved to and fro in the languid air.

* * * * *

"You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages." 

* * * * *

"I could not get rid of her. She brought me up to Royalties, and people with Stars and Garters, and elderly ladies with gigantic tiaras and parrot noses."

* * * * *

"... none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves." 

* * * * *

"We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty."

* * * * *

"... there is no doubt that Genius lasts longer than beauty." 

* * * * *

 There was a rustle of chirruping sparrows in the green lacquer leaves of the ivy, and the blue cloud-shadows chased themselves across the grass like swallows. 

 * * * * *

And that's just in Chapter One!