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 diThen, 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.

vorce.

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

a monarch, dictating in taste and thought and language, he was to taste, later, the depths of despair, and pain; his soul, once so arrogant in its scorn of human emotion, was to suffer sorrow, and shame and contempt. The mood of the triumphant dandy we have in his earlier, that of the self-pitying suf*ferer, in his later writings. In life, as in letters, he was always the man of his mood, the artist in attitudes. One must take him, if one can, at the particular mood that best pleases one.

While it is my mind now to concern myself only with that mood of Wilde's in which he produced the essays in Intentions, it was scarce possible to come to this without touching, however lightly, upon the perplexing, paradoxic problem of the man's life and its bearing on his art. Just as all his living was a paradox, so the relation between that living and his writing must ever remain one. A month after Wilde's death, when Puritan ears were to all intents closed against his name, I published an argument seeking to disestablish the connection between his noble artistic achievement and the cloud under which his name still lay. That was, of course, special pleading. Now, barely five years later, Time has nobly fulfilled all I then forecast. It takes no courage now, as then, upon the news of his death, to admit one's appreciation of

In con

Oscar Wilde's artistic accomplishment. tinental Europe no play is more frequently performed at this writing than Wilde's Salome; his books and his plays are everywhere conspicuous. Colder critical perspective of Time and Comparison has not diminished the regard for his writings. The posthumous publication of certain prison letters of his called De Profundis tended, but the other day, to darken counsel somewhat. Here, again, was the gaping wound laid open, the tortured soul writhing to find itself amid its countless attitudes. Here what had been arrogance was turned to pity, and to a pagan, yet piteous, interpretation of the Christ; yet here, still, was the pose, the attitude, the unquenchable artist in attitudes.

Nothing, in the case before us, can be thrown away. It is as futile to consider the life alone as the letters alone. All was of a piece. Yet the happy mean, the discriminating way, is, having in mind the art his life assumed, to consider as distinctly as possible the art he put on paper. His life was as complete a work of art, with heights and depths, triumphs and tragedies, as was ever composed. There, then, is one Magnum Opus. Some will like it, some loathe it; some, in reading his written art, will like to forget his acted art, some will recall it gladly: you see, do what one

will, one proceeds in circles, issuing always upon paradox.

Paradox and moods, it is always these in the case of Wilde. And never more so than in the case of his essays. His fairy tales, his poetry, notably The Ballad of Reading Gaol, his exquisite plays-living still not only in themselves, but as models to later playwrights-have my full meed of appreciation, yet it is in his essays that I find him at his best. Here the wisdom under his paradox is most discoverable. Here, forgetting his life, one may most clearly discern his most characteristic attitude toward life. Here, in Intentions, are the most precious utterances of this amateur in art and life. Jewels of wit and paradox are in these pages scattered so profusely, that if once one start to pick them up, one may not stop, save for sheer weariness. Truly one may declare, as William Watson does of Lowell, that the brilliance "is so great and so ubiquitous that it pays the not inconsiderable penalty of diverting our attention from the real soundness that underlies it all. So dazzling is the flash, and at times so sharp the report, that we scarcely notice the straightness of the aim."

In that portion of the bookish world about us that fashions its verdicts upon academic formula the existence of any essayists save Lamb, Montaigne,