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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it
appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two
stupid expressions - one is that the work of art is grossly
unintelligible; the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.
What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they
say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has
said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a
work as grossly immoral, they mean 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. But they
probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use
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