Wilde, always perfectly self-conscious, was not unaware of this difference between his own writing and that of most of his contemporaries. When _Dorian Gray_ was attacked for immorality, Wilde wrote, in a letter to a paper: "My story is an essay on decorative art. It reacts against the brutality of plain realism." _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was written for publication in a magazine. Seven chapters were added to it to make it long enough for publication as a novel, because those who buy books, like those who buy pictures, are unable to distinguish between size and quality, and imagine that value depends upon area. The preface was written to answer assailants of the morality of the story in its first form, and included only when it was printed as a book. These circumstances partly explain the lack of proportion, and of cohesion, that mars, though it does not spoil, the first French novel to be written in the English language. England has a traditional novel-form with which even the greatest students of human comedy and tragedy square their work. In France there is no such tradition, with the result that the novel is a plastic form, moulded in the most various ways by the most various minds. After all, it is a question of name, and it is impossible without elaborate and tedious qualification to discuss classifications of literature. They should not be made, or they should be made differently, for, at present, they deal only with superficial resemblances, depending, sometimes, upon nothing more essential than the price for which a book is sold. They have, however, a distinct influence upon production. In France, Flaubert's "Tentation de Saint Antoine," that wonderful dream in which so many strange dialogues are overheard, Remy de Gourmont's "Une Nuit au Luxembourg," that delightful speculative mirage, and Huysmans' "A Rebours," that phantasmagoria of intellectual experience, are all included in publishers' lists of novels and sold as such. Publishers in England are not so catholic. Whatever the reason may be, economical, depending upon the publisher, traditional, depending on the writer, Wilde's _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ was the first novel for many years to be written in England with that freedom in choice of matter and manner that has for a long time been in no way extraordinary in France. It has, so far, had no successor free as itself from the enforced interest in a love affair, to which we have grown so mournfully accustomed.