it is difficult to
disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side
with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider
and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called
the Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob;
that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding,
at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most
stupid brutality.

It would be hardly a true statement to say that the Renaissance
referred to--this modern Renaissance, not less formidable than the
historic revolt which bears that name--is an insurrection of free
spirits against Christianity. It is much rather a reversion to a humane
and classic reasonableness as opposed to mob-stupidity and
middle-class philistinism--things which only the blundering of centuries of
popular misapprehension could associate with the sublime and the
imaginative figure of Christ.

It is altogether a mistake to assume that in "De Profundis" Wilde
retracted his classic protest and bowed his head once more in the
house of Rimmon.

What he did was to salute, in the name of the aesthetic freedom he
represented, those enduring elements of human loveliness and
beauty in that figure which three hundred years of hypocritical
puritanism have proved unable to tarnish. What creates the peculiar
savagery of hatred which his name has still the power to conjure up
among the enemies of civilisation has little to do with the ambiguous
causes of his final downfall. These, of course, gave him up, bound
hand and foot, into their hands. But these, though the overt excuse of
their rancour, are far from being its real motive-force. To reach that
we must look to the nature of the formidable weapon which it was
his habit, in season and out of season, to use against this mob-rule--I
mean his sense of humour.

The stupid middle-class obscurantism, so alien to all humane
reasonableness, which, in our Anglo-Saxon communities, masquerades
under the cloak of a passionate and imaginative religion,
is more sensitive to ridicule than to any other form of attack,
and Wilde attacked it mercilessly with a ridicule that cut to the bone.

They are not by any means of equal value, these epigrams of his,
with which he defended intelligence against stupidity and classical
light against Gothic darkness.

They are not as humorous as Voltaire's. They are not as
philosophical as Goethe's. Compared with the