It was not to be expected that Mr. Wilde would agree with his reviewer as to the artistic merit of his booklet. Let it be conceded to him that he has succeeded in surrounding his hero with such an atmosphere as he describes. This is his reward. It is none the less legitimate for a critic to hold and to express the opinion that no treatment, however skilful, can make the atmosphere tolerable to his readers. That is his punishment. No doubt, it is the artist's privilege to be nasty; but he must exercise that privilege at his peril. During the next two weeks various correspondents aired their views on the subject, and in the third week[14] Oscar Wilde replied to them thus:-- Sir,--In a letter, dealing with the relations of art to morals, published in your columns--a letter which I may say seems to me in many respects admirable, especially in its insistence on the right of the artist to select his own subject-matter--Mr. Charles Whibley suggests that it must be peculiarly painful to me to find that the ethical import of "Dorian Gray" has been so strongly recognised by the foremost Christian papers of England and America that I have been greeted by more than one of them as a moral reformer. Allow me, sir, to re-assure on this point not merely Mr. Charles Whibley himself, but also your, no doubt, anxious readers. I have no hesitation in saying that I regard such criticisms as a very gratifying tribute to my story. For if a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than æsthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. And so in the case of "Dorian Gray," the purely literary critic, as in the _Speaker_ and elsewhere, regards it as a "serious and fascinating work of art"[15]: the critic who deals with art in its relation to conduct, as the _Christian Leader_ and the _Christian World_, regards it as an ethical parable: _Light_, which I am told is the organ of the English mystics, regards it as "a work of high spiritual import"[16]: the _St. James's Gazette_, which is seeking apparently to be the organ of the prurient, sees or pretends to see in it all kinds of dreadful things, and hints at Treasury prosecutions: and your Mr. Charles Whibley genially says that he discovers in it "lots of morality."