Oscar Wilde, too, I had often heard at his best, the most brilliant
talker of our time, his wit flashing in the spring sunlight of Oxford
luncheon-parties as now in his beautiful writings, like the jewelled
rapier of Mercutio. But his works, too, will be searched in vain by the
seeker after definite aesthetic truth.

With A.C. Swinburne I had sat and watched the lava that yet flowed from
those lips that were kissed in youth by all the Muses. Neither from him
nor from J.M. Whistler's brilliant aphorisms on art could be gathered
anything more than the exquisite pleasure of the moment: the
_monochronos haedonae_. Of the great pedagogues, I had known, but never
sat at the feet of Jowett, whom I found far less inspiring than any of
the great men above mentioned. Among the dead, I had studied Herbert
Spencer and Matthew Arnold, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Guyau: I had
conversed with that living Neo-Latin, Anatole France, the modern
Rousseau, and had enjoyed the marvellous irony and eloquence of his
writings, which, while they delight the society in which he lives, may
well be one of the causes that lead to its eventual destruction.

The solution of the problem of Aesthetic is not in the gift of the Muses.

To return to Naples. As I looked over those pages of the bound volumes
of _La Critica_. I soon became aware that I was in the presence of a
mind far above the ordinary level of literary criticism. The profound
studies of Carducci, of d'Annunzio, and of Pascoli (to name but three),
in which those writers passed before me in all their strength and in all
their weakness, led me to devote several days to the _Critica_. At the
end of that time I was convinced that I had made a discovery, and wrote
to the philosopher, who owns and edits that journal.