whereupon Oscar sent it to Blackwoods, who published it in their magazine. It
set everyone talking and arguing. To judge by the discussion it created, the
wind of hatred and of praise it caused, one would have thought that the paper
was a masterpiece, though in truth it was nothing out of the common. Had it
been written by anybody else it would have passed unnoticed. But already Oscar
Wilde had a prodigious notoriety, and all his sayings and doings were eagerly
canvassed from one end of society to the other.

"The Portrait of Mr. W. H." did Oscar incalculable injury. It gave his enemies
for the first time the very weapon they wanted, and they used it unscrupulously
and untiringly with the fierce delight of hatred. Oscar seemed to revel in
the storm of conflicting opinions which the paper called forth. He understood
better than most men that notoriety is often the forerunner of fame and is
always commercially more valuable. He rubbed his hands with delight as the
discussion grew bitter, and enjoyed even the sneering of the envious. A wind
that blows out a little fire, he knew, plays bellows to a big one. So long as
people talked about him, he didn't much care what they said, and they certainly
talked interminably about everything he wrote.

The inordinate popular success increased his self-confidence, and with time his
assurance took on a touch of defiance. The first startling sign of this
gradual change was the publication in "Lippincott's Magazine" of "The Picture
of Dorian Gray." It was attacked immediately in "The Daily Chronicle", a
liberal paper usually distinguished for a certain leaning in favour of artists
and men of letters, as a "tale spawned from the leprous literature of the French
"decadents"--a poisonous book, the atmosphere of which is heavy with the
mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction."

Oscar as a matter of course replied and the tone of his reply is characteristic
of his growth in self-assurance: he no longer dreads the imputation of