portrait, it seems unlikely that anyone else will do it.

English "strachery" may accuse me of attacking morality: the accusation
is worse than absurd. The very foundations of this old world are moral: the
charred ember itself floats about in space, moves and has its being in obedience
to inexorable law. The thinker may define morality: the reformer may try to
bring our notions of it into nearer accord with the fact: human love and pity
may seek to soften its occasional injustices and mitigate its intolerable
harshness: but that is all the freedom we mortals enjoy, all the breathing-space
allotted to us.

In this book the reader will find the figure of the Prometheus-artist clamped,
so to speak, with bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English
puritanism. No account was taken of his manifold virtues and graces: no credit
given him for his extraordinary achievements: he was hounded out of life because
his sins were not the sins of the English middle-class. The culprit was in much
nobler and better than his judges.

Here are all the elements of pity and sorrow and fear that are required in
great tragedy.

The artist who finds in Oscar Wilde a great and provocative subject for his
art needs no argument to justify his choice. If the picture is a great and
living portrait, the moralist will be satisfied: the dark shadows must all be
there, as well as the high lights, and the effect must be to increase our
tolerance and intensify our pity.

If on the other hand the portrait is ill-drawn or ill-painted, all the reasoning
in the world and the praise of all the sycophants will not save the picture
from contempt and the artist from censure.