INTRODUCTION

PARADOX is never so absolutely king as when you try to determine the separate ways of life and of literature. The poet lives his life, you say, and that is one matter; the poem lives its life, and that is quite another matter. Between the writer and his writings the discriminating must observe di

vorce.

Then, directly contradicting, is the theory of the goodly who are touched with the taint of Puritanism. Every written line, these hold, is the intimate expression of self. The sinner cannot write other than sinful things.

The farther you fare, if you would reach dogma on this point, the deeper will you mire. Paradox alone rules. And rules nowhere so supremely as in the case of Oscar Wilde. If, on the one hand, we plead that it is the man's letters, not his life, that posterity should cherish; on the other, it is folly for us to forget how completely, in Wilde, the artist

chose life as well as letters for expressing self.

Life itself is an art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it," wrote Wilde in his marvellous essay on Wainewrightmarvellous in itself, and more so for the tragic thaumaturgy by which Time made of it a prophecy of Wilde's own fate!-and Charles Whibley, later, echoed with "there is an art of life, as there are arts of colour, form, and speech." Yet, if we incline to consider Wilde as the artist in life, if we recall his career as æsthete, as triumphant dandy, as successful playwright, we have also to remember the tragedy, the prison, the dismal, horrid crumbling to a sordid death. Inextricably mingled are his living and his writing; yet to consider his prose, his plays, his poetry, only by the light of his prison and its aftermath, were as stupid as to imagine that one may ever quite read any page of his without finding there some echo of a personality. No man whose energy, whose delight in a personal pose, and whose paradoxic infatuation with art could make such an impress on the time and the land he lived in can be erased by any act of his own, or by our volition, from the world's chronicle. If his triumphs were gorgeous; if he turned the fogs of London into rose-gardens for his fancy; if in vanity and impertinence he had ruled his world as