As a decorative artist Wilde has no flaws. The perfect design applied in his multifarious productions makes one compare him to the titans of the High Renaissance: Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit. The graceful form justifies even his obvious moral-fairy-tales, even his unoriginal, Keats-esque and Poe-esque poems. It is for the style that we accept his _De Profundis_, that insincerest attempt for sincerity. But Wilde strove for more than mere external artistic effect. In his critical essays he lifted the critic to the heights of co- and re-creation, and instructed him to demand from a work of art eternal values. “The critic rejects those obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reveries and moods and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true and no interpretation final.” We, his disciples in aesthetic valuations, come to our master with his own criterion, and find him on more than one occasion grievously wanting in the requirements that he had set up for the artist. He either has no message to deliver, as in his clever plays, or he delivers his message in such an outspoken way that no field is left for suggestion or imaginative interpretation. He had transgressed Mallarmé’s maxim—“To name is to kill; to suggest is to create” not only in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, the work that belongs to the crushed, semi-penitent Wilde; he committed this unpardonable sin in his masterpiece, _Salomé_! That wonderful harmonious ghastliness, woven out of moods and motives, surcharged with suggestive tragedy and fatalism, suddenly breaks into a criminal vulgarity through the introduction of a “real” dead head, which drives away illusion and atmosphere, and strikes your nostrils with the odor of theatrical grease paint. The rehabilitation of Oscar Wilde was imposed upon the Anglo-Saxon world by the continent, especially by Germany, the expropriator of English geniuses, where the production of Wilde’s plays has rivalled in frequency those of Shakespeare. I know of a German pundit who chose as a topic for his doctor’s dissertations “The Influence of Pater on Oscar Wilde”. But continental depreciation is as fast as Anglo-Saxon appreciation is slow. Neue Zeiten, neue Vögel; neue Vögel, neue Lieder. European literature in recent decades has had more meteors than stars. Wilde’s flash is rapidly vanishing. You may call me a Cassandra, but I venture a prophecy that soon Wilde will find his peaceful place in American colleges alongside with Austen, Eliot, Meredith, etc.