unusual interest; some of the reviews are curiously prophetic; some are,
of course, biassed by prejudice hostile or friendly; others are conceived
in the author's wittiest and happiest vein; only a few are colourless.
And if, according to Lord Beaconsfield, the verdict of a continental
nation may be regarded as that of posterity, Wilde is a much greater
force in our literature than even friendly contemporaries ever supposed
he would become.

It should be remembered, however, that at the time when most of these
reviews were written Wilde had published scarcely any of the works by
which his name has become famous in Europe, though the protagonist of the
aesthetic movement was a well-known figure in Paris and London. Later he
was recognised--it would be truer to say he was ignored--as a young man
who had never fulfilled the high promise of a distinguished university
career although his volume of Poems had reached its fifth edition, an
unusual event in those days. He had alienated a great many of his Oxford
contemporaries by his extravagant manner of dress and his methods of
courting publicity. The great men of the previous generation, Wilde's
intellectual peers, with whom he was in artistic sympathy, looked on him
askance. Ruskin was disappointed with his former pupil, and Pater did
not hesitate to express disapprobation to private friends; while he
accepted incense from a disciple, he distrusted the thurifer.

From a large private correspondence in my possession I gather that it
was, oddly enough, in political and social centres that Wilde's amazing
powers were rightly appreciated and where he was welcomed as the most
brilliant of living talkers. Before he had published anything except his
Poems, the literary dovecots regarded him with dislike, and when he began
to publish essays and fairy stories, the attitude was not changed; it was
merely emphasised in the public press. His first dramatic success at the