Oscar Wilde: A Dandy of Letters with Renan or Carlyle, or Verlaine or Dick Burton or Davidson. . . . I have known no more charming, no more quickening, no more delightful spirit. . . . It may be that I prize humor and good-humor and eloquence of poetic speech, the artist qualities, more than goodness or loyalty or manliness, and so overestimate things amiable. But the lovable and joyous things are to me the priceless things, and the most charming man I ever met was assuredly Oscar Wilde."
The solution of Mr. Shaw's "problem" is simple. Whenever we become infatuated with what we have conventionally called "a thoroughly bad man" we find on consideration that he possesses a string of virtues, sometimes rare virtues, which are not listed as such in the catalogue of the austere moralist. It was, for example, Wilde's central virtue that he enjoyed his life, enjoyed it immensely, enjoyed it in obviously felicitous circumstances, and enjoyed it keenly even in circumstances of misery and shame. That is one of the rarest of human virtues, and Wilde possessed it to an extraordinary degree. There is nothing whatever which human beings covet more, when they are honest, than a capacity for enjoyment.
Wilde possessed also an extraordinary faculty for communicating his pleasure. The "vice" of his vanity, if we choose to call it so, operated to social profit, spurring him incessantly to give pleasure in exchange for the pleasure of being conspicuous. Like all the famous dandies from whom he is descended—Beau Nash, Beau Brummel, Byron, Disraeli, D'Orsay, Bulwer-Lytton—he courted the public like a player; he dressed, posed, talked and sinned for the public, and he won the public because he kept it incessantly in a state of wonder, delight, amusement and horror. Like
