ABSTRACT
The artist', Oscar Wilde writes in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, 'is the creator of beautiful things'. The idea in itself seems innocuous, even banal. But in its literary-historical context – that of late nineteenth-century aestheticism, which still bore the traces of earlier, high Victorian aestheticisms – it was provocative. But whereas Wilde aggressively disavowed art's morality or immorality and counted the 'elect' as those 'to whom beautiful things mean only beauty', Strachey, in the second fragment, seems inclined to view art through a moral lens. The first meaning of art has it that there is 'no connexion with morals' when art is merely the 'arrangement of physical things'. The third meaning, and the 'highest' one, has art in a Keatsian manner 'touch[ing] morals' and connected also with truth. Both Art and Morals should be defined. But only possible to define Art – a definition of Morality has been searched for in vain throughout the ages.
