s, 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.

It will be seen from this that Oscar Wilde was in some danger of
suffering from excessive popularity and unmerited renown. Indeed if he
had loved athletic sports, hunting and shooting instead of art and
letters, he might have been the selected representative of
aristocratic England.

In addition to his own popular qualities a strong current was sweeping
him to success. He was detested by the whole of the middle or
shop-keeping class which in England, according to Matthew Arnold, has
"the sense of conduct--and has but little else." This class hated and
feared him; feared him for his intellectual freedom and his contempt
of conventionality, and hated him because of his light-hearted
self-indulgence, and also because it saw in him none of its own sordid
virtues. _Punch_ is peculiarly the representative of this class and of
all English prejudices, and _Punch_ jeered at him now in prose, now in
verse, week after