was a fountain of malice, charged him outright with plagiarism, and, more venomously, asserted that he was as poor a judge of a coat as of a picture! But that—c'était la guerre. Much more damaging are these cold verdicts of Mr. Arthur Symons who cannot be accused of defective sympathies towards diabolists.
Wilde, certainly from what I knew of him as a man and as a writer, was almost utterly devoid of artistic judgment, and it is no wonder that Whistler had to drop his acquaintance. . . .
Wilde said nothing which had not been said before him. In his devotion to beauty he seemed to have given up the whole world, and yet what was most tragic in the tragedy was that he never recognized the true face of beauty. He followed beauty, and beauty fled from him, for his devotion was that of the lover proud of many conquests. He was eager to proclaim the conquest, and too hasty to distinguish between beauty and beauty's handmaid. His praise of beauty is always a boast, never a homage. When he attempted to create beauty in words he described beautiful things.
That reaffirms in other words what Pater said about him thirty-five years ago. Oscar Wilde is properly and accurately called a decadent because he degrades the æsthetic movement, lowers its level. The æsthetic movement in its highest phases was the successor of a moribund religious explanation of the world. Along toward the middle of the last century it undertook the task which was falling from the palsied hands of the church: it undertook a fresh, sincere, adequate expression of man's feeling toward the mystery and beauty and terror of life—the whole of it. So Ruskin
