re. He popularized William Morris, both his domestic
interiors and his Utopias, in the aesthetic lectures and in _The Soul of
Man under Socialism_--a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide
fame of which Mr. Ransome curiously misses. He popularized the cloistral
aestheticism of Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe in _Intentions_ and
elsewhere. In _Salome_ he popularized the gorgeous processionals of
ornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had expended not the least
marvellous portion of his genius.

Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue and
ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the assailant of
even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat tea
with a mockery that sparkled like wine. Lighting upon a world that
advertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, as
heroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvet
knee-breeches may have done to make the British public aware of the
genius, say, of Walter Pater? Not that Wilde was not a finished egoist,
using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself to
advertise them. But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the
authors should benefit by his outrageous breeches.

It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then--a popularizer who, for
a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer--that Wilde seems to me to stand to
his age. What, then, of Mr. Ransome's estimate of _Salome_? That it is a
fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny. But of what
quality is this fascination? It is, when all is said and done, the
fascination of the lust of painted faces. Here we have no tragedy, but a
mixing of degenerate philtres. Mr. Ransome hears "the beating of the wings
of the angel of death" in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the
atmosphere that Wilde fails to create. As the curtain falls on the broken
body of _Salome_ one has a sick feeling, as though one had been present
where vermin were being crushed. There is not a hint of the elation, the
liberation, of real tragedy. The whole thing is simply a wonderful piece
of coloured sensationalism. And even if we turn to the costly sentences of
the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and
design Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in
his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town
displaying his collection