of splendid gems?

Wilde speaks of himself in _De Profundis_ as a lord of language. Of
course, he was just the opposite. Language was a vice with him. He took to
it as a man might take to drink. He was addicted rather than devoted to
language. He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility
towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious
of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure. How
beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone
knows who has read his brief _Endymion_ (to name one of the poems), and
the many hyacinthine passages in _Intentions_. But when one is anxious to
see the man himself as in _De Profundis_--that book of a soul imprisoned
in embroidered sophistries--one feels that this cloak of strange words is
no better than a curse.

If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled
slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much
laughter as well as language in _Intentions_ that I am inclined to agree
with Mr. Ransome that _Intentions_ is "that one of Wilde's books that most
nearly represents him." Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on
taking Wilde far too seriously. For instance, he tells us that "his
paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths." How horrified Wilde would have been
to hear him say so! His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths--or a
good deal less. They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of
them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion. Mr. Ransome's
attitude on the question of Wilde's sincerity seems to me as impossible as
his attitude in regard to the paradoxes. He draws up a code of artistic
sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which
every great artist is a living denial. But there is no room to go into
that. Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome's conclusions, we must
be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of
one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one
of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century.

XVIII.--TWO ENGLISH CRITICS

(1) MR. SAINTSBURY

Mr. Saintsbury as a critic possesses in a high degree the gift of sending
the reader post-haste to the works he criticizes. His _Peace of the
Augustans_ is an almost irresistible incitement to go and forget the
present world among the poets and novelists an