the fact that we are born in an age when only the dull are treated
seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood. Don't
degrade me into the position of giving you useful information.
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from
time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Through the parted curtains of the window I see the moon like a
clipped piece of silver. Like gilded bees the stars cluster round
her. The sky is a hard hollow sapphire. Let us go out into the
night. Thought is wonderful, but adventure is more wonderful
still. Who knows but we may meet Prince Florizel of Bohemia, and
hear the fair Cuban tell us that she is not what she seems?

ERNEST. You are horribly wilful. I insist on your discussing this
matter with me. You have said that the Greeks were a nation of
art-critics. What art-criticism have they left us?

GILBERT. My dear Ernest, even if not a single fragment of art-
criticism had come down to us from Hellenic or Hellenistic days, it
would be none the less true that the Greeks were a nation of art-
critics, and that they invented the criticism of art just as they
invented the criticism of everything else. For, after all, what is
our primary debt to the Greeks? Simply the critical spirit. And,
this spirit, which they exercised on questions of religion and
science, of ethics and metaphysics, of politics and education, they
exercised on questions of art also, and, indeed, of the two supreme
and highest arts, they have left us the most flawless system of
criticism that the world has ever seen.

ERNEST. But what are the two supreme and highest arts?