not affect the
truth and power of your portrait. Wilde's memory will have to stand or
fall by it.

"You will be blamed, I imagine, because you have not written a lying
epitaph instead of a faithful chronicle and study of him; but you will
not lose your sleep over that. As a matter of fact, you could not have
carried kindness further without sentimental folly. I should have made
a far sterner summing up. I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of
heaven shut against him: he is too good company to be excluded; but he
can hardly have been greeted as, 'Thou good and faithful servant.' The
first thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety
and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things,
and that geniuses[10] and clever people are as common as rats. Well,
Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him
for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it
had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for
it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to
suffer horribly: indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion
could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in
comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per
cent. of its devotees.

[Footnote 10: The English paste in Shaw; genius is about the rarest
thing on earth whereas the necessary quantum of "honesty, sobriety and
industry," is beaten by life into nine humans out of ten.--ED.

_If so, it is the tenth who comes my way.--G.B.S._]

"We must try to imagine what judgment we should have passed on Oscar
if he had been a normal man, and had dug his grave with his teeth in
the ordinary respectable fashion, as his brother Willie did. This
brother, by the way, gives us some cue; for Willie, who had exactly
the same education and the same chances, must be ruthlessly set aside
by literary history as a vulgar journalist of no account. Well,
suppose Oscar and Willie had both died the day before Queensberry left
that card at the Club! Oscar would still have been remembered as a wit
and a dandy, and would have had a niche beside Congreve in the drama.
A volume of his aphorisms would have stood creditably on the library
shelf with La Rochefoucauld's Maxims. We should have missed the
'Ballad of Reading Gaol' and 'De Profundis'; but he would still have
cut a considerable figure in the Dictionary of National Biography, and
been re