ABSTRACT
I agree with you, Dorian Gray is a dreadful book, and, had Wilde lived to do his work, it would have been forgotten as a poor, early, money-making effort. At the most it contains the subject for a small story such as Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ or Gautier’s ‘Fortunio,’ neither of which is good. Wilde wrote during five years only; it is only in the very last things, The Soul of Man, Poems in Prose and Salomé, and in The Importance of Being Earnest, that he has given a hint at the power of thought, sardonic insight, and wit which characterized the man himself. Les Goncourt say that nothing published by Gautier showed the power, originality, and beauty of his conversation. Nothing written by Wilde hints at the richness of his conversation. He at once summarized a period, in all its faults, but was also the enfant terrible of that period. His fall was an accident, a miscalculation, and the result of a conspiracy. He impressed me as at once the kindliest and most generous of men I ever met and the most richly endowed in intellect. At that time I was a very young man and did not credit him with the powers he had, and which were latent more than actual; I was conscious of his quite extraordinary vitality and also of his bad taste and occasional triviality. I now believe we lost in him the possibilities of one of those strange, complex blends in character such as Heine, for instance, whose influence is incalculable. Heine was a cynic and a sentimentalist, often a rare genius. What would Wilde have been? Would he have been a great critic, would he haverevived the art of artificial comedy-by that I mean criticism of manners and character instead of our modern comedy of adultery and brutal pathos? I am unable to say! Believe me, there was something in him which had the power to charm or fascinate the rarer type of man, since he won friends in France among people of very different range and character, and at that time he was a mental and physical wreck, under the influence of drink and the threat of illness. That no one among the greater Englishmen of his time should have befriended him at the time of his fall, has left with me an incurable distrust of them; it has altered my estimate of their intellect and work, and left an element of hostility towards England itself.
