ABSTRACT
The full edition of the works of Oscar Wilde which Messrs. Methuen have recently published appears at a time very appropriate for some sound considerations of them. The time has certainly come when this extraordinary man, Oscar Wilde, may be considered merely as a man of letters. And for this purpose the new Methuen edition is very valuable. It contains two poems that have never been published and many that have never been read and one can really now read them all without prejudice, as if they came from a new genius. He sometimes pretended that art was more important than morality, but that was mere play-acting. Morality or immorality was more important than art to him and everyone else. But the very cloud of tragedy that rested on his career makes it easier to treat him as a mere artist now. His was a complete life, in that awful sense in which your life and mine are incomplete; since we have not yet paid for our sins. In that sense onemight call it a perfect life, as one speaks of a perfect equation; it cancels out. On the one hand we have the healthy horror of the evil; on the other the healthy horror of the punishment. We have it all the more because both sin and punishment were highly civilized; that is, nameless and secret. Some have said that Wilde was sacrificed; let it be enough for us to insist on the literal meaning of the world. Any ox that is really sacrificed is made sacred.
