the larger sense he was always within those
unexcluding walls, those spacious courts of the Ecclesia of humanity.
There was no trace in him, for all his caprices, of that puritanism of
denial which breaks the altars and shatters the idols at the bidding of
scientific iconoclasm.

What the anonymous instinct of humanity has rendered beautiful by
building into it the golden monuments of forlorn hopes and washing
it with the salt tears of desperate chances remained beautiful to him.
From the narcissus-flowers growing on the marble ledges of
Parnassus, where Apollo still weeps for the death of Hyacinth and
Pan still mourns the vanishing of Syrinx, to the passion-flowers
growing on the slopes of Calvary, he, this lover of eidola and images,
worships the white feet of the bearers of dead beauty, and finds in
the tears of all the lovers of all the lost a revivifying rain that even in
the midst of the dust of our degeneracy makes bloom once more, full
of freshness and promise, the mystical red rose of the world's desire.

The wit of his "Golden lads and girls" in those superb comedies may
soon fall a little faint and thin upon our ears. To the next generation
it may seem as faded and old-fashioned as the wit of Congreve or
Sheridan. Fashions of humour change more quickly than the
fashions of manner or of dress. The only thing that gives
immortality to human writing is the "eternal bronze" of a noble and
imaginative style. Out of such divine material, with all his
petulances and perversities, Oscar Wilde's style was hammered and
beaten. For there is only one quarry of this most precious metal, and
the same hand that shapes from it the "Sorrow that endureth forever"
must shape from it the "Pleasure that abideth for a moment," and the
identity of these two with that immortal bronze is the symbol of the
mystery of our life.

The senses that are quickened by the knowledge of this mystery are
not far from the ultimate secret. As with the thing sculptured, so
with the sculptor.

Oscar Wilde is a symbolic figure.

SUSPENDED JUDGMENT

The conclusion of any book which has tried to throw into
momentary relief the great shadowy figures who have led and
misled humanity must necessarily be no more than a new suspension
of judgment; of judgment drawing its interest from the colour of the
mind of the individual making it, of judgment guarded from the
impertinence of judicial decision by its confessed implication of
radical subject