The Preface - Analysis 

The Preface of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered the manifesto of Aestheticism.
The layout structure is made up by a list of short sentences which produces an epigrammatic effect: each sentence is engraved in reader's mind.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Right from the first sentence Mr. Wilde defines the artist figure and not the poet figure because the role of literature was going to change. In Romanticism the poet expresses his sensations and feeling, in the end of Victorian Age there is not the poet but there is the artist, he who creates beautiful things and not expresses his solitude and intolerance in living life as the romantic poet.
There isn't the ego in the centre of an opera but the art, and the artist must sacrifice his subjectivity to favour the art.

The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Oscar Wilde defines also the critic figure, who is able to reveal his impression of beautiful things. The criticism is a form of autobiography because the critic manifests his intuition in relation of his autobiography and his life.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

Not the ordinary people must understand the high power of art. Only the elects, who are learned people, have the possibility to recognize Beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

With this sentece Mr. Wilde brokes with the tradition. The literature with a moral and utilitarian aim is declined. The only important is how a book is written not about it is.

The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

In this passage Oscar Wilde explain because there is a refuse of Realism and Romanism making reference to a Shakespearean character, Caliban a monster. In Realism, Caliban can see him in the mirror and he is angry because it reflects his ugliness; in other word realism literature shows peoples as they are and this vision is not accepted because gives them a negative connotation. In Romanticism Calliban is angry because can't see him in the mirror and then not having his image is intolerance. In both the situation Caliban is angry because of his ugliness and it celebrates the Beauty and the Aestheticism of the nineteenth-century.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.
No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

Here is restated the philosophy which would underline that the only aim of the art is the art. The morality, the personal ideas, the message aren't important how the art and the way in which it is expresses.