So far as your works are concerned you pose as not being concerned about morality or immorality?—I do not know whether you use the word "pose" in any particular sense.
It is a favourite word of your own?—Is it? I have no pose in this matter. In writing a play or a book I am concerned entirely with literature, that is, with art. I aim not at doing good or evil, but in trying to make a thing that will have some quality of beauty.
After the criticisms that were passed on "Dorian Gray" was it modified a good deal?—No. Additions were made. In one case it was pointed out to me—not in a newspaper or anything of that sort, but by the only critic of the century whose opinion I set high, Mr. Walter Pater—that a certain passage was liable to misconstruction, and I made one addition.
This is in your introduction to "Dorian Gray": "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."—That expresses my view of art.
Then, I take it that no matter how immoral a book may be, if it is well written it is, in your opinion, a good book?—Yes; if it were well written so as to produce a sense of beauty which is the highest sense of which a human being can be capable. If it were badly written it would produce a sense of disgust.
Then a well-written book putting forward perverted moral views may be a good book?—No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.
A novel of "a certain kind" might be a good book?—I do not know what you mean by "a novel of a certain kind."
Then I will suggest "Dorian Gray" as open to the interpretation of being a novel of that kind.—That could only be to brutes and illiterates.
An illiterate person reading "Dorian Gray" might consider it such a novel?—The views of illiterates on art are unaccountable. I am concerned only with my view of art. I do not care twopence what other people think of it.
The majority of persons would come under your definition of Philistines and illiterates?—I have found wonderful exceptions.