Page:Writings of Oscar Wilde - Volume 01.djvu/32

18 they were so true. Truth, even more than brevity, is the soul of wit. I have said that Wilde was his own supreme paradox. Of course, it is in the nature of the poet to be a paradox, for it is not so much his business to be a consistent self, like real human beings, but to be the "wandering voice" that expresses and interprets all the various feelings and moods of his fellow-men. Hence, he is so often accused of contradicting himself, when he is merely speaking for others, nature having made him a multiplex being just for that purpose. You might as well ask an actor to play one part all his life as to ask a poet to be always the same thing. Of course, some poets are—and a little of them goes a long way.

Few writers, however, have illustrated this Undine quality of the artist to such a degree as Oscar Wilde. To minds unfamiliar with the transformations of the artist, simple straight-cut minds that cannot understand how such poets as Villon and Verlaine, side by side with their disreputable external lives, could write poems not only of true beauty, but of sincere piety—to such minds it will, no doubt, seem bewildering that the same man should have written so diversely as in the various volumes