Oscar Wilde. Leonard Cresswell Ingleby

The συνετοι, the connoisseurs, always recognised the genius of Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde from the very first moment when he began to write. For many years ordinary people to whom literature and literary affairs were not of, at anyrate, absorbing interest only knew of Oscar Wilde by his extravagances and poses.

Then it happened that Wilde turned his powers in the direction of the stage and achieved a swift and brilliant success. The English public then began to realise that here was an unusually brilliant man, and the extraordinary genius of the subject of this work would have certainly been universally recognised in a few more years, when the shocking scandals associated with his name occurred and Oscar Wilde disappeared into oblivion.

A great change gradually took place in public opinion. Little by little the feeling of prejudice against the work of Oscar Wilde began to die away. The man himself was dead. He had expiated his crimes by a prolonged agony of the most hideous suffering and disgrace, and people began to wonder if his writings were in any way associated with the dark side of his life and character, or whether they might not, after all, be beautiful, pure, and treasures of the literature of our time. The four comedies of Manners, "Lady Windermere's Fan," "The Ideal Husband," "A Woman Of No Importance," "The Importance Of Being Earnest," everyone had seen and laughed at. They were certainly absolutely without offence. It was gradually seen that because a house was built by an architect of an immoral private life that did not necessarily invalidate it as a residence, that if Stephenson had ended his life upon the gallows people would still find railways convenient and necessary. The truth gradually dawned that Wilde had never in his life written a line that was immoral or impure, and that, in short, the criminal side of him was only a part of his complex nature, horribly disastrous for himself and his personal life, but absolutely without influence upon his work.

Art and his aberration never mingled or overlapped. Everybody began to realise the fact.

Opinion was also being quietly moulded from within by a band of literary and artistic people, some of them friends of the late author, others knowing him simply through his work.

The public began to ask for Wilde's books and found it almost impossible to obtain them, for the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," published while its author was still alive, had not stimulated any general demand for other works.

It was after Oscar Wilde's death that his friends and

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