ed public, and that
they have been retained in the fourteenth (separate) edition, of which Mr.
Ross sends me a copy. I possessed only the first edition. I do not want to
part with it, but the fourteenth is a great deal more interesting than the
first. It contains a dedicatory letter by Mr. Ross to Dr. Max Meyerfeld
("But for you I do not think the book would ever have been published"),
and some highly interesting letters written in Reading Gaol by Wilde to
Mr. Ross (which had previously been published in Germany). In the course
of this dedicatory letter, Mr. Ross says: "In sending copy to Messrs.
Methuen (to whom alone I submitted it) I anticipated refusal, as though
the work were my own. A very distinguished man of letters who acted as
their reader advised, however, its acceptance, and urged, in view of the
uncertainty of its reception, the excision of certain passages, to which I
readily assented."

* * * * *

This explains clearly enough the motive for suppressing the passages. But
even after making allowance for the natural timidity and apprehensiveness
of the publishers' reader, I cannot quite understand why those particular
passages were cut out. Here is one of them: "I had genius, a distinguished
name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a
philosophy and philosophy an art. I altered the minds of men and the
colours of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make
people wonder. I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and
made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or sonnet; at the
same time I widened its range and enriched its characteristics. Drama,
novel, poem in prose, poem in rhyme, subtle or fantastic dialogue,
whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty. To truth
itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful
province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of
intellectual existence. I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a
mere mode of fiction. I awoke the imagination of my century so that it
created myth and legend around me. I summed up all systems in a phrase,
and all existence in an epigram. Along with these things I had things that
were different. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless
and sensual ease." It is difficult to see anything in the factitious but
delightful brilliance of this very characteristic swagger that co