ABSTRACT

This volume has for many reasons been looked for with interest. Mr. Wilde has rightly or wrongly been marked out as representing the newest development of academical aestheticism. He has had to undergo the irrational abuse and ridicule, and the still more irrational flattery, earned by principles and tendencies with many of which he can have but little sympathy. His poems will therefore be read with the twofold purpose of discovering what these new teachers have to say, and what claim Mr. Wilde has to be heard by the public whom he addresses. That the latter claim will be conceded no one who has read these poems can doubt. They are the product of a fresh, vigorous mind, dowered with a quick perception of the beauties of nature, with a command of varied and musical language, with a sympathetic sensuousness which would gain rather than lose by the vesture of a thicker veil. Critics may blame or praise; they cannot speak of Mr. Wilde’s work with contempt. But the message of the new gospel is not delivered with so clear a note. We are bewildered by the irregular pulsations of a sympathy which never wearies. Roman Catholic ritual, stern Puritanism, parched Greek islands, cool English lanes and streams, Paganism and Christianity, despotism and Republicanism, Wordsworth, Milton, and Mr. Swinburne, receive in turn the same passionate devotion. Perhaps this inconsistency is more attributable to the author than to the school. Keats has told us that

the imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy, but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick sighted.