assembled a jury as competent and as sympathetic as a problematic man of letters could hope for.
In those years when Wilde spent his golden hours scrubbing his cell in prison, washing his tin dishes and, in the evening, reading a few chapters of the New Testament in Greek, he wrote in "De Profundis": "If life be, as it surely is, a problem to me, I am no less a problem to life. People must adopt some attitude toward me, and so pass judgment both on themselves and me."
One aspect of the problem which Wilde presents to us is suggested by George Bernard Shaw as follows: "Oscar seems to have said: 'I will love nobody; I will be utterly selfish, and I will be not merely a rascal but a monster, and you shall forgive me everything. In other words, I will reduce your standards to absurdity not by writing them down, though I could do that so well—in fact, have done it—but by actually living them down and dying them down.'"
So far as his moral character is concerned, our jury is in substantial agreement. Wilde's own intimates cheerfully concede nearly everything which a moralistic critic cares to allege against it. They concede that he was indolent, colossally egotistical, selfish, weak, flabby, incomparably vain, insolent to tradesmen and inferiors, a flatterer of wealth and titles, a thoroughgoing snob in the English sense, extravagant and untrustworthy in money matters, intemperate in eating and drinking, incapable of genuine friendship, and a sexual pervert.
And yet we forgive him everything; and yet in his earlier years he was welcomed by every hostess in London; and yet Mr. Frank Harris declares that "he would rather spend an evening with him than
