TEXT VI

This is a dialogue between Basil Hallward and Lord Henry, in which the former, an artist, is telling the latter, his friend, about Dorian Gray’s beauty:

“(…) The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet. They neither bring ruin upon others, nor ever receive it from alien hands. Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray’s good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.”

“Dorian Gray? Is that his name?” asked Lord Henry, walking across the studio towards Basil Hallward.

“Yes, that is his name. I didn’t intend to tell it to you.”

(WILDE, Oscar. The picture of Dorian Gray. London: Penguin Classics, 1994 [1891]. p. 10).

The sentence “If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat.” is an example of zero conditional. It was written in that form because it expresses something that, for the character, is a(n):