e
was recognised--it would be truer to say he was ignored--as a young man
who had never fulfilled the high promise of a distinguished university
career although his volume of Poems had reached its fifth edition, an
unusual event in those days. He had alienated a great many of his Oxford
contemporaries by his extravagant manner of dress and his methods of
courting publicity. The great men of the previous generation, Wilde's
intellectual peers, with whom he was in artistic sympathy, looked on him
askance. Ruskin was disappointed with his former pupil, and Pater did
not hesitate to express disapprobation to private friends; while he
accepted incense from a disciple, he distrusted the thurifer.

From a large private correspondence in my possession I gather that it
was, oddly enough, in political and social centres that Wilde's amazing
powers were rightly appreciated and where he was welcomed as the most
brilliant of living talkers. Before he had published anything except his
Poems, the literary dovecots regarded him with dislike, and when he began
to publish essays and fairy stories, the attitude was not changed; it was
merely emphasised in the public press. His first dramatic success at the
St. James's Theatre gave Wilde, of course, a different position, and the
dislike became qualified with envy. Some of the younger men indeed were
dazzled, but with few exceptions their appreciation was expressed in an
unfortunate manner. It is a consolation or a misfortune that the wrong
kind of people are too often correct in their prognostications of the
future; the far-seeing are also the foolish.

From these reviews which illustrate the middle period of Wilde's meteoric
career, between the aesthetic period and the production of Lady
Windermere's Fan, we learn _his_ opinion of the contemporaries who
thought little enough of him. That he revised many of these opinions,
notably those that are harsh, I need scarcely say; and after his release
from prison he lost much of his admiration for certain writers. I would
draw special attention to those reviews of Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Wilfrid
Blunt, Mr. Alfred Austin, the Hon. John Collier, Mr. Brander Matthews and
Sir Edwin Arnold, Rossetti, Pater, Henley and Morris; they have more
permanent value than the others, and are in accord with the wiser
critical judgments of to-day.

For leave to republish the articles from the Pall Mall Gazette I am
indebted to Mr. William Waldorf Astor, the