The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating shapes. As for the paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush, and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired pawnbroker. The Eternal Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse for life is its brevity. Why, then, do we yearn for that unending corridor through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed by the burden of our chimera--our ego? I confess that I prefer to watch on the edge of some vast promontory the swift approach of a dark sun rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar spaces to the celestial assignation made at the beginning of Time for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the populous path of the Milky Way, has hitherto escaped colliding with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that apocalyptic flare-up--surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing in greasy bliss--Higher Space may be manifested and Time and Tri-Dimensional Space be no more. The rest is silence. CHAPTER XIX O. W. It is an enormous advertisement nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily accumulating; why, I'm at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-class morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the note of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana--or Oscariana--which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek god," as his fervent admirers think.