iconoclast. He has not realized with sufficient clearness that, while
Wilde belonged to the first rank as a wit, he was scarcely better than
second-rate as anything else. Consequently, it is not Wilde the beau of
literature who dominates his book. Rather, it is Wilde the
egoistic,--aesthetic philosopher, and Wilde the imaginative artist.

This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be. For, as Mr.
Ransome says, "though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he
preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams."
Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if _Salome_
had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written.
"It is possible," observes Mr. Ransome, "that we owe _The Importance of
Being Earnest_ to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from
playing _Salome_ at the Palace Theatre." If this conjecture is right, one
can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in _The
Importance of Being Earnest_, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of
supreme genius in its kind.

It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughter
for laughter's sake. Or you might say that, in the literature of farce, it
has a place as a "dainty rogue in porcelain." It is even lighter and more
fragile than that. It is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles. It is the very
ecstasy of levity. As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing the
possibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been "born, or
at least bred, in a handbag," or as we watch Jack and Algernon wrangling
over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehow
to be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense.
Some people will contend that Wilde's laughter is always the laughter not
of the open air but of the salon. But there is a spontaneity in the
laughter of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ that seems to me to
associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field.

It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer that one
quarrels with Mr. Ransome. Wilde was much better at showing off than at
revealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much more
delightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as a
wit and persifleur. On his serious side he ranks, not as an original
artist, but as a popularizer--the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps,
in English literatu