Wilde believes that lying—“the telling of beautiful untrue things”—is the proper aim of art. It’s “an art, a science, and a social pleasure,” and its decay is responsible for the decay of literature. Today everyone is obsessed with representing reality as accurately as possible — with facts and accuracy. But “if something cannot be done to check, or at least to modify, our monstrous worship of facts,” he writes, “Art will become sterile and beauty will pass away from the land.”

The artist endows things with beauty and is the reason why attention is paid to some things in the first place. Wilde writes about the fog in London as an example. It has always existed. But its wonder and the attention paid to it happened because “poets and painters have taught the loveliness of such effects…They did not exist till Art had invented them.”