ABSTRACT
When, however, Mr. Harris says that Wilde has a place with Congreve as a dramatist, we advance with him willingly on to surer ground. In the comedy of manners he has his certain position; and more than this, his criticism has in it some elements of permanent value. Intentions is an extravagant and paradoxical book, it is true; it is also true that the central idea in the essay ‘On the Decay of Lying’ and much of its working out are lifted without acknowledgment from Sainte-Beuve’s masterly essay on Balzac. Nevertheless, in ‘The Critic as Artist’ there is plenty of original thinking and acute insight and, though the passages of jewelled writing are tedious enough, one has the satisfaction of feeling that Wilde wrote them with his tongue either wholly in his cheek or half-way there. (Mr. Harris, by the way, has been taken in by one piece of paste, when he quotes Wilde as seriously speaking of ‘a mad, scarlet thing by Dvorak.’ The grin is peculiarly obvious in that passage of Intentions!) But when we sum up Wilde’s artistic achievement in the drama and the critical essay, and add to it the unconvincing De Profundis, and add to that the half-successful Ballad of
Reading Gaol and The Sphinx (to which the late JamesElroy Flecker and others through him have owed not a little), what have we? Something considerable, no doubt, but nothing unique. It was Wilde’s hard fate that he should have been beaten in his own field by his own contemporaries. We are told that as a talker he could not hold his own with Whistler; we know for ourselves that he was no match for him as a controversialist. We can see, moreover, that in the comedy of manners he has been equalled, if not surpassed by Mr. Shaw, with whom as a writer of English prose he cannot even be compared.
