ret of "The Finer
Grain" and those who have it not. There can be no reconciliation, no
truce, no "rapport" between these. At best there can be only
mitigated hostility on the one side, and ironical submission on the
other. The world is made after this fashion and after no other, and
the best policy is to follow our great artists and turn the contrast
between the two into a cause of aesthetic entertainment.

Duality rules the universe. If it were not for the fools there would be
no wisdom. If it were not for those who could never understand him,
there could be no Henry James.

One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us of
this author's method, how futile it is, in this world whereof the
beginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tedious
and photographic reality.

People do not and perhaps never will--even in archetypal Platonic
drawing-rooms--converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell
the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so
felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and
great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new
and impossible worlds for our enjoyment.

And the world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia
of psychological beauty--some universal Garden of Versailles
unprofaned by the noises of the crowd--where among the terraces
and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and
make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with
the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets;
human figures without name or place. For who remembers the
names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their "great good
places" in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of
the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste
the only moral code?

OSCAR WILDE

The words he once used about himself--"I am a symbolic figure"
--remain to this day the most significant thing that can be said of
Oscar Wilde.

It is given to very few men of talent, this peculiar privilege--this
privilege of being greater in what might be called the _shadow of
their personality_ than in any actual literary or artistic achievement
--and Wilde possesses it in a degree second to none.

"My genius is in my life," he said on another occasion, and the
words are literally and most fatally true.

In the confused controversies of the present age