I am delighted to be able to put Shaw’s considered judgment of Wilde beside my own for the benefit of my readers.  For if there had been anything I had misseen or misjudged in Wilde, or any prominent trait of his character I had failed to note, the sin, whether of omission or commission, could scarcely have escaped this other pair of keen eyes.  Now indeed this biography of Wilde may be regarded as definitive.

Shaw says his judgment of Wilde is severer than mine—­“far sterner,” are his words; but I am not sure that this is an exact estimate.

While Shaw accentuates Wilde’s snobbishness, he discounts his “Irish charm,” and though he praises highly his gifts as dramatist and story-teller he lays little stress on his genuine kindness of nature and the courteous smiling ways which made him so incomparable a companion and intimate.

On the other hand he excuses Wilde’s perversion as pathological, as hereditary “giantism,” and so lightens the darkest shadows just as he has toned down the lights.

I never saw anything abnormal in Oscar Wilde either in body or soul save an extravagant sensuality and an absolute adoration of beauty and comeliness; and so, with his own confessions and practises before me, I had to block him in, to use painters’ jargon, with black shadows, and was delighted to find high lights to balance them—­lights of courtesies, graces and unselfish kindness of heart.

On the whole I think our two pictures are very much alike and I am sure a good many readers will be almost as grateful to Shaw for his collaboration and corroboration as I am.

POSTSCRIPT

Since writing this foreword I have received the proof of his contribution which I had sent to Shaw.  He has made some slight corrections in the text which, of course, have been carried out, and some comments besides on my notes as Editor.  These, too, I have naturally wished to use and so, to avoid confusion, have inserted them in italics and with his initials.  I hope the sequence will be clear to the reader.

MY MEMORIES OF OSCAR WILDE

BY BERNARD SHAW

MY DEAR HARRIS:—­

“I have an interesting letter of yours to answer; but when you ask me to exchange biographies, you take an unfair advantage of the changes of scene and bustling movement of your own adventures.  My autobiography would be like my best plays, fearfully long, and not divided into acts.  Just consider this life of Wilde which you have just sent me, and which I finished ten minutes ago after putting aside everything else to read it at one stroke.

“Why was Wilde so good a subject for a biography that none of the previous attempts which you have just wiped out are bad?  Just because his stupendous laziness simplified his life almost as if he knew instinctively that there must be no episodes to spoil the great situation at the end of the last act but one.  It was a well made life in the Scribe sense.  It was as simple as the life of Des Grieux, Manon Lescaut’s lover; and it beat that by omitting Manon and making Des Grieux his own lover and his own hero.