p.

He smiled away my arguments, and sent his paper to the _Fortnightly_
office when I happened to be abroad. Much to my chagrin, my assistant
rejected it rudely, whereupon Oscar sent it to Blackwoods, who
published it in their magazine. It set everyone talking and arguing.
To judge by the discussion it created, the wind of hatred and of
praise it caused, one would have thought that the paper was a
masterpiece, though in truth it was nothing out of the common. Had it
been written by anybody else it would have passed unnoticed. But
already Oscar Wilde had a prodigious notoriety, and all his sayings
and doings were eagerly canvassed from one end of society to the
other.

"The Portrait of Mr. W.H." did Oscar incalculable injury. It gave his
enemies for the first time the very weapon they wanted, and they used
it unscrupulously and untiringly with the fierce delight of hatred.
Oscar seemed to revel in the storm of conflicting opinions which the
paper called forth. He understood better than most men that notoriety
is often the forerunner of fame and is always commercially more
valuable. He rubbed his hands with delight as the discussion grew
bitter, and enjoyed even the sneering of the envious. A wind that
blows out a little fire, he knew, plays bellows to a big one. So long
as people talked about him, he didn't much care what they said, and
they certainly talked interminably about everything he wrote.

The inordinate popular success increased his self-confidence, and with
time his assurance took on a touch of defiance. The first startling
sign of this gradual change was the publication in _Lippincott's
Magazine_ of "The Picture of Dorian Gray." It was attacked immediately
in _The Daily Chronicle_, a liberal paper usually distinguished for a
certain leaning in favour of artists and men of letters, as a "tale
spawned from the leprous literature of the French _decadents_--a
poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the mephitic
odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction."

Oscar as a matter of course replied and the tone of his reply is
characteristic of his growth in self-assurance: he no longer dreads
the imputation of viciousness; he challenges it: "It is poisonous, if
you like; but you cannot deny that it is also perfect, and perfection
is what we artists aim at."

When Oscar republished "The Picture of Dorian Gray" in book form in
April, 1891, he sent me a large paper copy and with the copy he wrote
a l