enough to command his respect, but utterly
without that fortifying body of acquaintance among plain men in which
a man must move as himself a plain man, and be Smith and Jones and
Wilde and Shaw and Harris instead of Bosie and Robbie and Oscar and
Mister. This is the sort of folly that does not last forever in a man
of Wilde's ability; but it lasted long enough to prevent Oscar laying
any solid social foundations.[3]

[Footnote 2: I had touched on the evil side of his snobbery, I
thought, by saying that it was only famous actresses and great ladies
that he ever talked about, and in telling how he loved to speak of the
great houses such as Clumber to which he had been invited, and by half
a dozen other hints scattered through my book. I had attacked English
snobbery so strenuously in my book on "The Man Shakespeare," had
resented its influence on the finest English intelligence so bitterly,
that I thought if I again laid stress on it in Wilde, people would
think I was crazy on the subject. But he was a snob, both by nature
and training, and I understand by snob what Shaw evidently understands
by it here.]

[Footnote 3: The reason that Oscar, snobbish as he was, and admirer of
England and the English as he was, could not lay any solid social
foundations in England was, in my opinion, his intellectual interests
and his intellectual superiority to the men he met. No one with a fine
mind devoted to things of the spirit is capable of laying solid social
foundations in England. Shaw, too, has no solid social foundations in
that country.

_This passing shot at English society serves it right. Yet able men
have found niches in London. Where was Oscar's?--G.B.S._]

"Another difficulty I have already hinted at. Wilde started as an
apostle of Art; and in that capacity he was a humbug. The notion that
a Portora boy, passed on to T.C.D. and thence to Oxford and spending
his vacations in Dublin, could without special circumstances have any
genuine intimacy with music and painting, is to me ridiculous.[4]
When Wilde was at Portora, I was at home in a house where important
musical works, including several typical masterpieces, were being
rehearsed from the point of blank amateur ignorance up to fitness for
public performance. I could whistle them from the first bar to the
last as a butcher's boy whistles music hall songs, before I was
twelve. The toleration of popular music--Strauss's waltzes, for
instance--was to me positively a p