"The poor are poor creatures," was his real belief, "and must always be hewers
of wood and drawers of water. They are merely the virgin soil out of which men
of genius and artists grow like flowers. Their function is to give birth to
genius and nourish it. They have no other "raison d'etre". Were men as
intelligent as bees, all gifted individuals would be supported by the community,
as the bees support their queen. We should be the first charge on the state
just as Socrates declared that he should be kept in the Prytaneum at the
public expense.

"Don't talk to me, Frank, about the hardships of the poor. The hardships of
the poor are necessities, but talk to me of the hardships of men of genius, and
I could weep tears of blood. I was never so affected by any book in my life as
I was by the misery of Balzac's poet, Lucien de Rubempre."

Naturally this creed of an exaggerated individualism appealed peculiarly to the
best set in London. It was eminently aristocratic and might almost be defended
as scientific, for to a certain extent it found corroboration in Darwinism. All
progress according to Darwin comes from peculiar individuals; "sports" as men of
science call them, or the "heaven-sent" as rhetoricians prefer to style them.
The many are only there to produce more "sports" and ultimately to benefit
by them. All this is valid enough; but it leaves the crux of the question
untouched. The poor in aristocratic England are too degraded to produce
"sports" of genius, or indeed any "sports" of much value to humanity. Such
an extravagant inequality of condition obtains there that the noble soul is
miserable, the strongest insecure. But Wilde's creed was intensely popular
with the "Smart Set" because of its very one-sidedness, and he was hailed as
a prophet partly because he defended the cherished prejudices of the "landed"
oligarchy.