, or dream they catch, in those elaborate delicately
modulated sentences, Wilde has little or nothing.

What he achieves is a certain crystalline lucidity, clear and pure as
the ring of glass upon glass, and with a mellifluous after-tone or
echo of vibration, which dies away upon the ear in a lingering
fall--melancholy and voluptuous, or light and tender as the hour and the
moment lead.

He is at his best, or at any rate his style shows itself at its best, not
in the utterances of those golden epigrams, the gold of which, as days
pass, comes in certain cases to look lamentably like gilt, but in his
use of those far-descended legendary images gathered up into poetry
and art again and again till they have acquired the very tone of time
itself, and a lovely magic, sudden, swift and arresting, like the odour
of "myrrh, aloes, and cassia."

The style of Wilde is one of the simplest in existence, but its
simplicity is the very apex and consummation of the artificial. He
uses Biblical language with that self-conscious preciosity--like the
movements of a person walking on tiptoe in the presence of the
dead--which is so different from the sturdy directness of Bunyan or
the restrained rhetoric of the Church of England prayers. There
come moments when this premeditated innocence of tone--this
lisping in liturgical monosyllables--irritates and annoys one. At such
times the delicate unction of his naivete strikes one, in despite of its
gravity, as something a little comic; as though some very
sophisticated and experienced person suddenly joined in a children's
game and began singing in a plaintive tenderly pitched voice--

"This is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our
hands--
This is the way we wash our hands,
On a cold and frosty morning!"

But it were absurd to press this point too far. Sophisticated though
the simplicity of Wilde is, it does actually spring with all its
ritualistic tiptoeing straight out of his natural character. He was born
artificial, and he was born with more childishness than the great
majority of children.

I like to picture him as a great Uranian baby, full of querulousness
and peevishness, and eating greedily, with a sort of guileless wonder
that anyone should scold him for it, every species of forbidden fruit
that grows in the garden of life! How infantile really, when one
thinks of it, and how humorously solemn the man's inordinate
gravity over the touch o