Do ponto de vista da forma, o modelo de todas as artes é a arte do músico. Do ponto de vista da emoção, o modelo é o ofício do ator. Toda arte é ao mesmo tempo superfície e símbolo. Aqueles que penetram abaixo da superfície o fazem por sua conta e risco. Aqueles que leem os símbolos também o fazem por sua conta e risco. É o espectador, e não a vida, o que a arte realmente reflete. A diversidade de opiniões sobre uma obra de arte mostra que essa obra é nova, complexa e vital. Quando os críticos discordam, o artista está de acordo consigo mesmo. Podemos perdoar um homem por fazer alguma coisa útil, contanto que ele não a admire. A única desculpa para se fazer uma coisa inútil é admirá-la intensamente.

Toda arte é completamente inútil.

OSCAR WILDE

[1]Prefácio à edição publicada em abril de 1891 pela Ward, Lock and Bowden Company. Este prefácio consiste de uma coleção de declarações sobre o papel do artista, sobre a arte em si e o valor da beleza e serve como um indicador do caminho pelo qual Wilde pretendia que seu romance fosse lido.

[2] Wilde acredita que o artista deve apenas criar Arte, não tentar sobrepujá-la com sua própria personalidade ou outros assuntos fúteis. O artista deve se lançar no que T. S. Eliot denominaria mais tarde como uma “extinção gradual da personalidade”. Aqui pode-se observar a influência sobre Wilde do credo a “Arte pela Arte”, ou “l’Art pour l’Art” no original em francês.

[3] Neste aforismo, Wilde sugere que os livros devem ser julgados apenas pelo valor literário ao invés de sê-lo com base em um julgamento moral subjetivo. Em um contexto mais amplo, a Arte deve ser julgada unicamente a nível estético, ao invés de ser decifrada através de significados mais profundos.

CHAPTER I

The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as usual, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-colored blossoms of the laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flame-like as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters who, in an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the black-crocketed spires of the early June hollyhocks, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive, and the dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ.

In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures.

As he looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake.

“It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done,” said Lord Henry, languidly. “You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is the only place.”

“I don’t think I will send it anywhere,” he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. “No: I won’t send it anywhere.”

Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. “Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation.