A short summary of the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

 

The Preface to the Picture of Dorian Gray

 In the Preface to "The Picture of Dorian Gray" Wilde rejected the didacticism that characterized the Victorian novel in the first half of the century. According to him art is the cult of Beauty and can prevent the murder of the soul, whereas the artist is an alien in a materialistic world, he writes only to please himself and is not concerned in communicating his theories to his fellow-beings.

His pursuit of beauty and fulfilment are the tragic acts of a superior being inevitably turned into an outcast. Wilde’s Preface to "The Picture of Dorian Gray" may be considered the manifesto of the English Aesthetic Movement since it speaks about the subject of art and the role of the artist.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things but is not interested in communicating his ideas to mankind and he writes only to please himself.

He might consider the moral or immoral lives of people as part of the subject matter of his work, but art itself is not meant to teach the public anything. The true artist does not aim at proving anything and he makes no judgement of right or wrong.

What people call vices or virtues, are merely materials for the artist. Those who attempt to go beneath the surface of a work, or to find out a particular meaning in a symbol, do so at their own risk.

Wilde concludes the preface by saying that " All art is quite useless"; that is, art exists for its own sake (Art for Art’s Sake) and not for any moral purpose. On the contrary the two Romantic poets, Wordsworth and Coleridge, in their Preface to "Lyrical Ballads", point out the didactic role of poetry whose aim is to show the reader the negativity of Industrial Revolution. Dickens also had a didactic aim in his novels- he wanted to draw his readers’ attention on some of the social problems of his time.