Stuart Mason > Quotes

“I must admit that, either from temperament or taste, or from both, I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticised from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate;”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“As you assailed me first, I have a right to the last word. Let that last word be the present letter, and leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that it deserves.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The English public, as a mass, takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral, and your réclame will, I have no doubt, largely increase the sale of the magazine; in which sale, I may mention, with some regret, I have no pecuniary interest.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The public ... is always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else ... quite oblivious of the fact that if he did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young: let him so live that when old age comes he shall at least have the satisfaction of knowing that no opportunity of pleasure and indulgence has escaped untasted.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“That the editor of the St. James's Gazette should have employed Caliban as his art-critic was possibly natural. The editor of the Scots Observer should not have allowed Thersites to make mows in his reviews. It is unworthy of so distinguished a man of letters.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“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.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“But his story is also a vivid, though carefully considered, exposure of the corruption of a soul, with a very plain moral, pushed home, to the effect that vice and crime make people coarse and ugly.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“I remain, Sir, your obedient servant, OSCAR WILDE. The correspondence continued for three weeks longer, but Oscar Wilde took no further part in it.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“Your critic states, to begin with, that I make desperate attempts to "vamp up" a moral in my story. Now I must candidly confess that I do not know what "vamping" is. I see, from time to time, mysterious advertisements in the newspapers about "How to Vamp," but what vamping really means remains a mystery to me—a mystery that, like all other mysteries, I hope some day to explore.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The Times, February 23rd, 1893, in reviewing "Salome", said: "It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive and very offensive." Wilde replied (Times, March 2nd), "The opinions of English critics on a French work of mine have, of course, little, if any interest for me.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“Mr. Oscar Wilde makes his third and, we presume, his final reply to the criticism which we published on "The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“My story is an essay on decorative art. It re-acts against the crude brutality of plain realism. It is poisonous, if you like, but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection is what we artists aim at.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“To the Editor of the St. James's Gazette.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The pleasure that one has in creating a work of art is a purely personal pleasure, and it is for the sake of this pleasure that one creates. The artist works with his eye on the object. Nothing else interests him.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“You then express your surprise that "so experienced a literary gentleman" as myself should imagine that your critic was animated by any feeling of personal malice towards him. The phrase "literary gentleman" is a vile phrase, but let that pass.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The poor public, hearing from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas, they will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“To say that such a book as mine should be "chucked into the fire" is silly. That is what one does with newspapers.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“When it (the public) says a work of art is grossly unintelligible, it means that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when it describes a work as grossly immoral, it means that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“I dislike newspaper controversies of any kind, and of the two hundred and sixteen criticisms of "Dorian Gray," that have passed from my library table into the waste-paper basket I have taken public notice of only three.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“It is not proper that limitation should be placed on art. To art belong all things that are and all things that are not, and even the editor of a London paper has no right to restrain the freedom of art in the selection of subject-matter.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The pleasure that one has in creating a work of art is a purely personal pleasure, and it is for the sake of this pleasure that one creates. The artist works with his eye on the object. Nothing else interests him. What people are likely to say does not even occur to him.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“When the public says a work is grossly unintelligible, it means that the artist has said a beautiful thing that is new; when the public describes a work as grossly immoral, it means that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“Art should never try to be popular. The public should try and make itself artistic.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“Why should an artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism?”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“Wilde was indeed a true prophet when he foretold that his story would create a sensation.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

“The superior pleasure in literature is to realise the non-existent.”
― Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality A Defence of "The Picture of Dorian Gray"