ABSTRACT
It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr-whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I’m at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British ‘middle-class morality,’ then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither.…For copiousness, sustained wit, and verbal brilliancy the man had few equals. It was amazing, hisconversation. I met him when he came here, and once again much later. Possibly that is why I care so little for his verse, a pasticcio of Swinburne-(in the wholly admirable biography of this poet by Mr. Gosse, reference is made to O.W. by the irascible hermit of Putney: ‘I thought he seemed a harmless young nobody.
