the front. In Wilde's own poetry we have particularly a perpetually
toppling possibility of the absurd; a sense of just falling too short or
just going too far. "Plant lilies at my head" has something wrong about
it; something silly that is not there in--

"And put a grey stone at my head"

in the old ballad. But even where Wilde was right, he had a way of being
right with this excessive strain on the reader's sympathy (and gravity)
which was the mark of all these men with a "point of view." There is a
very sound sonnet of his in which he begins by lamenting mere anarchy,
as hostile to the art and civilisation that were his only gods; but ends
by saying--

"And yet
These Christs that die upon the barricades
God knows that I am with them--in some ways."

Now that is really very true; that is the way a man of wide reading and
worldly experience, but not ungenerous impulses, does feel about the
mere fanatic, who is at once a nuisance to humanity and an honour to
human nature. Yet who can read that last line without feeling that Wilde
is poised on the edge of a precipice of bathos; that the phrase comes
very near to being quite startlingly silly. It is as in the case of
Maeterlinck, let the reader move his standpoint one inch nearer the
popular standpoint, and there is nothing for the thing but harsh,
hostile, unconquerable mirth. Somehow the image of Wilde lolling like an
elegant leviathan on a sofa, and saying between the whiffs of a scented
cigarette that martyrdom is martyrdom in some respects, has seized on
and mastered all more delicate considerations in the mind. It is unwise