f soft fabrics and the odour of rare perfumes!
One seems to see him, a languid-limbed "revenant," with
heavy-lidded drowsy eyes and voluptuous lips, emerging all swathed and
wrapped in costly cerements out of the tomb of some Babylonian
king.

After all, it remains a tremendous triumph of personality, the
manner in which this portly modern Antinous has taken captive our
imagination. His influence is everywhere, like an odour, like an
atmosphere, like a diffused flame. We cannot escape from him.

In those ridiculous wit-contests with Whistler, from which he
always emerged defeated, how much more generous and careless
and noble he appears than the wasp-like artist who could rap out so
smartly the appropriate retort! He seems like a great lazy king, at
such times, caught off his guard by some skipping and clever knave
of his spoilt retinue. Perhaps even now no small a portion of the
amused and astonished wonder he excites is due to the fact that he
really had, what so few of us have, a veritable passion for precious
stuffs and woven fabrics and ivory and cedar wood and beads of
amber and orchid-petals and pearl-tinted shells and lapis-lazuli and
attar of roses.

It is open to doubt whether even among artists, there are many who
share Wilde's Hellenic ecstasy in these things. This at any rate was
no pose. He posed as a man of the world. He posed as an immoralist.
He posed as a paradoxist. He posed in a thousand perverse
directions. But when it comes to the colour and texture and odour
and shape of beautiful and rare things--there, in his voluptuous
delight in these, he was undeniably sincere.

He was of course no learned virtuoso. But what does that matter?
The real artist is seldom a patient collector or an encyclopedic
authority. That is the role of Museum people and of compilers of
hand-books. Many thoroughly uninteresting minds know more about
Assyrian pottery and Chinese pictures than Oscar Wilde knew about
wild flowers.

Knowledge, as he teaches us himself, and it is one of the
profoundest of his doctrines, is nothing. Knowledge is external and
incidental. The important thing is that one's senses should be
passionately alive and one's imagination fearlessly far-reaching.

We can embrace all the treasures of the Herods and all the riches of
the Caesars as we lay our fingers upon a little silver coin, if the
divine flame is within us, and, if not, we may excavate a thousand
buried cities and return learned and