ring it, nor
does the "wide aerial landscape" of our human wayfaring show less
fair, or its ancient antagonist the "salt estranging sea" less terrible,
because these require no legendary art to endow them with mystery.

Plausible and full of significance as these honeyed arguments in
"Intentions" are--and fruitful as they are in affording us weapons
wherewith to defend ourselves from the mob--it is still well, it is still
necessary, to place against them the great Da Vinci saying, "Nature
is the Mistress of the higher intelligences."

Wilde must be held responsible--along with others of his epoch--for
the encouragement of that deplorable modern heresy which finds in
bric-a-brac and what are called "objets d'art" a disproportionate
monopoly of the beauty and wonder of the world. One turns a little
wearily at last from the silver mirrors and purple masks. One turns
to the great winds that issue forth out of the caverns of the night.
One turns to the sun and to the rain, which fall upon the common
grass.

However! It is not a wise procedure to demand from a writer virtues
and qualities completely out of his role. In our particular race there
is far more danger of the beauty and significance of art--together
with all its subtler and less normal symbols--perishing under crude
and sentimental Nature-worship, than of their being granted too
large a place in our crowded house of thought.

After all, the art which Wilde assures us adds so richly to Nature, "is
an art which Nature makes." They are not lovers of what is rarest
and finest in our human civilisation who would suppress everything
which deviates from the common track.

Who has given these people--these middle-class minds with their
dull intelligences--the right to decide what is natural or unnatural in
the presence of the vast tumultuous forces, wonderful and terrible,
of the life-stream which surrounds us?

The mad smouldering lust which gives a sort of under-song of
surging passion to the sophisticated sensuality of "Salome" is as
much an evocation of Nature as the sad sweet wisdom of that
sentence in "De Profundis"--"Behind joy and laughter there may be
a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is
always sorrow."

What, beneath all his bravado and his paradoxes, Wilde really
sought, was the enjoyment of passionate and absorbing emotion, and
no one who hungers and thirsts after this--be he "as sensual as the
brutish sting itself"--can