A weaker professor of aesthetics would have been discouraged by the monetary
and other difficulties of his position and would have lost heart at the outset
in front of the impenetrable blank wall of English philistinism and contempt.
But Oscar Wilde was conscious of great ability and was driven by an inordinate
vanity. Instead of diminishing his pretensions in the face of opposition he
increased them. He began to go abroad in the evening in knee breeches and silk
stockings wearing strange flowers in his coat--green cornflowers and gilded
lilies--while talking about Baudelaire, whose name even was unfamiliar, as a
world poet, and proclaiming the strange creed that "nothing succeeds like
excess." Very soon his name came into everyone's mouth; London talked of
him and discussed him at a thousand tea-tables. For one invitation he had
received before, a dozen now poured in; he became a celebrity.

Of course he was still sneered at by many as a mere "poseur"; it still seemed
to be all Lombard Street to a china orange that he would be beaten down
under the myriad trampling feet of middle-class indifference and disdain.

Some circumstances were in his favour. Though the artistic movement inaugurated
years before by the Pre-Raphaelites was still laughed at and scorned by the
many as a craze, a few had stood firm, and slowly the steadfast minority had
begun to sway the majority as is often the case in democracies. Oscar Wilde
profited by the victory of these art-loving forerunners. Here and there among
the indifferent public, men were attracted by the artistic view of life and
women by the emotional intensity of the new creed. Oscar Wilde became the
prophet of an esoteric cult. But notoriety even did not solve the monetary
question, which grew more and more insistent. A dozen times he waved it aside
and went into debt rather than restrain himself. Somehow or other he would fall
on his feet, he thought. Men who console themselves in this way usually fall
on someone else's feet and so did Oscar Wilde. At twenty-six years of age and
curiously enough at the very moment of his insolent-bold challenge of the world