ABSTRACT
Yet to speak of his personality is to broach the very reason why the abiding taste left in the mind by the reading of these twelve beautiful volumes is the taste of disappointment and disillusion. Superficially, no one was more introspective than Wilde. His gaze was constantly fixed on himself; yet not on himself, but on his reflection in the looking-glass. There is a vast difference between honest introspection, in which a man turns his eyes inward to search for what is there that he may develop and improve it, and the actor’s pose before his mirror to see that his make-up, his disguise, his semblance, is becoming and effective. Wilde never got further than that; he stopped short at Peter Pan’s ‘Oh, the cleverness of me!’ and the Neronic ‘Qualis artifex pereo!’1 which is the real text of his apologia De Profundis. Introspection of the genuine kind he never achieved. Probably he was never compelled to learn the art. A brilliant youth, and the astonishing success of his early poses, relieved him of the necessity and unfitted him for the exercise; and it is only when we come to read his collected works that we see how he paid for it in the end. Never being forced to
search in himself for himself and develop what he found there into the firm basis of his life’s work, he continued to pose, to imitate, to build on sand. How long will it be before the sand covers all his building? With a mind not a jot less keen than Whistler’s, he had none of the conviction, the high faith, for which Whistler found it worth while to defy the crowd. Wilde had poses to attract the crowd. And the difference was this, that while Whistler was a prophet who liked to play Pierrot, Wilde grew into a Pierrot who liked to play the prophet.
