aphorisms of these
masters they are light and frivolous. But for this very reason perhaps,
they serve the great cause--the cause of humane and enlightened
civilisation--better in our age of vulgar mob-rule than more
recondite "logoi."

They pierce the hide of the thickest and dullest; they startle and
bewilder the brains of the most crass and the most insensitive. And it
is just because they do this that Wilde is so cordially feared and
hated. It was, one cannot help feeling, the presence in him of a
shrewd vein of sheer boyish bravado, mingled--one might go even
as far as that--with a dash of incorrigible worldliness in his own
temper, that made his hits so effective and wounding.

It is interesting, with this in mind, to compare Wilde's witticisms
with those of Matthew Arnold or Bernard Shaw. The reason that
Wilde's lash cuts deeper than either of these other champions of
rational humanism, is that he goes, with more classical clearness,
straight to the root of the matter.

The author of "Thyrsis" was not himself free from a certain
melancholy hankering after "categorical imperatives," and beneath
the cap and bells of his theological fooling, Shaw is, of course, as
gravely moralistic as any puritan could wish.

Neither of these--neither the ironical schoolmaster nor the farcical
clown of our Renaissance of intelligence--could exchange ideas with
Pericles, say, or Caesar, without betraying a puritanical fussiness
that would grievously bewilder the lucid minds of those great men.

The philosophy of Wilde's aesthetic revolt against our degraded
mob-ridden conscience was borrowed from Walter Pater, but
whereas that shy and subtle spirit moved darkly and mysteriously
aside from all contact with the vulgar herd, Wilde, full of gay and
wanton pride in his sacred mission, lost no opportunity of flaunting
his classic orthodoxy in the face of the heretical mob.

Since the death of Wilde, the brunt of the battle for the spiritual
liberties of the race has been borne by the sterner and more
formidable figure of Nietzsche; but the vein of high and terrible
imagination in this great poet of the Superman sets him much closer
to the company of the saints and mystics than to that of the
instinctive children of the pagan ideal.

Oscar Wilde's name has become a sort of rallying cry to all those
writers and artists who suffer, in one degree or another, from the
persecution of the mob--of the mob goaded on to blind brutality by