As a matter of fact, Meredith realized this, and was a friend to many Irish national movements from the Home Rule struggle down to the Gaelic League, to the latter of which the Irish part of him sent a subscription a year or two ago. He saw things from the point of view of an Imperial Liberal idealist, however, not of a Nationalist. In the result, he did not know the every-day and traditional setting of Irish life sufficiently well to give us an Irish Nationalist central figure as winning and heroic, even in his extravagances, as, say, the patriotic Englishman, Neville Beauchamp. At the same time, one must be thankful for a book so obviously the work of a great abundant mind--a mind giving out its criticisms like flutters of birds--a heroic intellect always in the service of an ideal liberty, courage, and gracious manners--a characteristically island brain, that was yet not insular. XVII--OSCAR WILDE Oscar Wilde is a writer whom one must see through in order to appreciate. One must smash the idol in order to preserve the god. If Mr. Ransome's estimate of Wilde in his clever and interesting and seriously-written book is a little unsatisfactory, it is partly because he is not enough of an iconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than second-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of literature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the egoistic,--æsthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist. This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as Mr. Ransome says, "though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams." Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if _Salomé_ had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written. "It is possible," observes Mr. Ransome, "that we owe _The Importance of Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing _Salomé_ at the Palace Theatre." If this conjecture is right, one can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in _The Importance of Being Earnest_, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of supreme genius in its kind.