One comes at any rate to see, from the exquisite success upon us of this author's method, how futile it is, in this world whereof the beginning and the end are dreams, to bind an artist down to tedious and photographic reality. People do not and perhaps never will--even in archetypal Platonic drawing-rooms--converse with one another quite so goldenly; or tell the amber-coloured beads of their secret psychology with quite so felicitous an unction. What matter? It is the prerogative of fine and great art to create, by its shaping and formative imagination, new and impossible worlds for our enjoyment. And the world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia of psychological beauty--some universal Garden of Versailles unprofaned by the noises of the crowd--where among the terraces and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets; human figures without name or place. For who remembers the names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their "great good places" in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste the only moral code? OSCAR WILDE The words he once used about himself--"I am a symbolic figure" --remain to this day the most significant thing that can be said of Oscar Wilde. It is given to very few men of talent, this peculiar privilege--this privilege of being greater in what might be called the _shadow of their personality_ than in any actual literary or artistic achievement --and Wilde possesses it in a degree second to none. "My genius is in my life," he said on another occasion, and the words are literally and most fatally true. In the confused controversies of the present age it is difficult to disentangle the main issues; but it seems certain that side by side with political and economic divisions, there is a gulf growing wider and wider every day between the adherents of what might be called the Hellenic Renaissance and the inert, suspicious, unintelligent mob; that mob the mud of whose heavy traditions is capable of breeding, at one and the same time, the most crafty hypocrisy and the most stupid brutality. It would be hardly a true statement to say that the Renaissance referred to--this modern Renaissance, not less formidable than the historic revolt which bears that name--is an insurrection of free spirits against Christianity. It is much rather a reversion to a humane and classic reasonableness as opposed to mob-stupidity and middle-class philistinism--things which only the blundering of centuries of popular misapprehension could associate with the sublime and the imaginative figure of Christ. It is altogether a mistake to assume that in "De Profundis" Wilde retracted his classic protest and bowed his head once more in the house of Rimmon.