Themes
The critic without instinct
Almost every letter charges a journalist with lacking artistic instinct. The Speaker's critic cannot see the beauty of a book cover for thinking of sponges and hats; the Pall Mall Gazette's reviewer judges prose by the vocabulary of the British child; the papers that discuss Lady Windermere's Fan show 'the BÅ“otianism of a country that has produced some Athenians.' Wilde says artists will read criticism with interest only when 'criticism becomes in England a real art', and until then he treats the newspaper review as something to be corrected, not heeded.
Art against resemblance
The longest letter makes a serious point about seeing. The beauty of the Pomegranates cover lies in its 'delicate tracing, arabesques, and massing of many coral-red lines on a ground of white ivory', and what the gilt suggests, peacocks to Wilde or chimney-pot hats to the critic, is of no importance. 'The primary æsthetic impression of a work of art borrows nothing from recognition or resemblance.' The Kipling letter makes the same claim about fiction: any correspondence between art and nature is 'a matter of entirely secondary importance.'
The artist's own standard
Wilde repeatedly refuses to let an audience set the terms of his work. He did not write A House of Pomegranates for children, because 'No artist recognises any standard of beauty but that which is suggested by his own temperament.' He did not write Salome for Bernhardt, because writing for a performer 'is for the artisan in literature.' Even the change to Lady Windermere's Fan, he insists, came from his own sense of psychological interest and the views of his young friends, never from the critics.
The epigram as weapon
The letters show Wilde's public quarrels conducted by epigram. Whistler is warned to 'remain, as I do, incomprehensible. To be great is to be misunderstood.' The Thirteen Club is told that 'Common sense is the enemy of romance.' T. P. O'Connor's excuse that the doggerel might be early work draws 'Only mediocrities progress.' The Green Carnation is dismissed in two sentences. The short, formal letter to an editor becomes a stage for the kind of line his comedies were built on.