Page:Writings of Oscar Wilde - Volume 01.djvu/40

26 One might add Beau Brummell, and one gains a rough generalization of the complexity that was Oscar Wilde. Keats, Sheridan and Beau Brummell. Not that he was so eminent as any one of these in their own special characteristic; but it was the combination of all three in one man, plus his own extraordinary individuality, that made him so original a figure, that made him, as I said at the beginning—Oscar Wilde.

As for his plays, while there have been contemporary English dramatists more serious, more original in plot, more painstaking in observation, yet I think Wilde's plays stand a chance of out-lasting them all, by virtue of two qualities, their wit, and perhaps even more, that great antiseptic against time—which is style. Sheridan lives as much by his style as by his wit, and no one since Sheridan has brought to the English drama that combination of wit and style except Oscar Wilde. I am speaking, of course, of his comedies. His poetical dramas strike me as having comparatively little value. Of all his work they are least original. "Salomé," the most conspicuous of them, is merely imitation Maeterlinck, and Wilde, with all his originality, was very—assimilative. It