ABSTRACT
It is noteworthy and, to some, an unpalatable fact that for ten years or more the literary renown of Oscar Wilde has been steadily spreading, the true character of his personality and work revealing itself more and more clearly to ever-widening circles of appreciative students. It is beginning to be realized, it seems, that Wilde’s contributions to EnglishLetters are, perhaps, the most remarkable furnished by any writer of his generation, with the possible exception of Stevenson, and that he was one of the most brilliantly gifted literary men that England ever produced. No change in the general attitude of men’s minds regarding matters of literature can explain this away. On the contrary, the ‘Aesthetic Movement,’ with which Wilde was identified at the outset of his career, has long ceased to be a thing of actual interest; and so, almost, in its turn has that ‘Decadent School,’ whose great literary figure he was to become. Things in him that struck his contemporaries as audaciously ‘advanced,’ and were so no doubt, may now seem a little false and faded. To us of a later generation who take an interest in his writings, this interest is neither a personal one, nor one largely bound up with considerations of ‘schools’ or ‘movements.’ It is an aesthetic interest. In other words, we are beginning to see his work in its true perspective, to form an artistic judgment on it, to apply to it what Matthew Arnold called ‘the real estimate’ of literature, in contradistinction to the ‘personal’ and the ‘historic’ estimate. We are no longer impassioned against the man by the sensational incidents of his life. His crime against Society need only occupy our attention in so far as it influenced his artistic nature. Indeed, hardly anybody now, save those who have cultivated an over-delicacy of sentiment, would care to take offence at the tolerant conceit implied in such terms as a ‘chronological error’ or an ‘anachronism,’ in dealing with one whose fantasy led him to imagine himself living in the Italy of the Renaissance, or in Greece at the time of Socrates. The long years that already separate us from his death have helped to throw into the background all that was ephemeral and unessential in him; and with each year that passes, the essential fact about him stands out more clearly and prominently: that he was a man of supreme literary talent, who wrote wonderful and extraordinary things, and who exercised, and still exercises, and will no doubt continue to exercise for a long time to come, an important intellectual and artistic influence, both in his own country and abroad. Ten years ago, Sir Richard Garnett and Edmund Gosse, in their history of English Literature (vol. IV, 1903,) had not a word for Oscar Wilde. Even as late as 1907, another wellknown compiler of literary history, either from personal rancour or for some equally cogent reason, could affect a sort of semi-official ignorance of the man who wrote De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol
Perhaps the time-limit was reached in 1912 when Andrew Lang, in his History of English Literature, a book of nearly 700 pp., still felt justified in ignoring Wilde. This attitude is no longerpossible. Ill-will and prejudice have had their day, even among the professional distributors of praise and blame in matters literary. Nobody who would now set forth however bare an outline of the English literature of the last few decades can pretend to know nothing of a man who so effectively summed up and impersonated, in his life and in his writings, some of the vital tendencies of an epoch. Even into the popular manuals of literary history Oscar Wilde, so long excluded and so rigorously tabooed, is forcing his way at last. Thousands of ordinary readers who were taught to look upon Wilde as merely the infamous central figure in some fearful scandal, will now learn to associate his name with many choice works of art, made accessible to them in cheap editions. It is a significant fact that in one of the latest and most concise of these handbooks, Compton-Rickett’s admirable little History of English Literature, Pater and Arnold (as critic and prosewriter) are dismissed in six lines each, whereas Wilde alone occupies twenty-six.
