Page:Critical Woodcuts (1926).pdf/220

 contrary, he applied his brilliant intellect to getting in; so that his imprisonment must be counted among his successes.

Wilde's major life effort was directed to the task of separating art from morality; in that he failed deplorably. That is his tragedy. Far from being an artist pure and undefiled by ethical intention, as he declared that an artist should be, he is himself incessantly a moralist, often a very bad moralist, sometimes unconsciously a very stern and sound moralist, but always his art is inseparable from his morality. In other writers, the story, as we say, carries a moral. In his case the morality carries the story, carries the dazzling critical dialogue, carries the bright flimsy structure of his dining-room comedies. And it is as a moralist that the exponent of art for art's sake has been most influential.

Oscar Wilde's works are in English literature, and they are likely to remain there. He will be revisited by successive generations of pilgrims, chiefly young pilgrims, as the affable, indulgent, sparkling host of a famous and infamous house on the æsthetic turnpike. There are better houses—and worse—farther along the road, but many pilgrims will never ask anything better than Wilde can give them. He has good wine, white and red; he will chant you poetry, not as good as Shelley or Keats but almost as good as FitzGerald and Housman; he will show you lovely pastorals which won't remind you of nature but will recall "Thyrsis" and "The Scholar Gipsy"; and he will show you charming "Hellenic" things which won't feel quite Greek but will remind you of the pictures of Albert Moore and Sir Frederick Leighton.

Didn't some one say truly enough that he is a man