Page:Writings of Oscar Wilde - Volume 01.djvu/28

14 —peace to the soul of Whistler!—he was the greatest wit of his day.

When one recalls the man himself, one sees clearly why he inevitably became the modern master of paradox; for his love of paradox was but a reflection of his own nature. He himself was his own supreme paradox. And that, of course, was just as he would have chosen. "The artist never does the same thing twice," I remember his once saying; and he lived up to his own dictum in the manner in which, when one of his moods, or poses, had exhausted its interest for him, he abandoned it instantly and completely, as though it had never been his at all—abandoned it often for its exact opposite; as when, for instance, the long-haired aesthete of the knee-breeches and sunflowers suddenly emerged upon London as the most conventional of modern dandies. These sudden transformations, though he affected to take them with great solemnity, gave him quite a boyish delight; for there was in all his poses a masquerading boyishness, which enabled him to laugh at himself all the time—or perhaps I had better say most of the time—while the onlooker was taking him in such deadly earnest. To startle and shock