This is, of course, as Wilde would have liked it to be.  For, as Mr. Ransome says, “though Wilde had the secret of a wonderful laughter, he preferred to think of himself as a person with magnificent dreams.”  Indeed, so much was this so, that it is even suggested that, if Salome had not been censored, the social comedies might never have been written.  “It is possible,” observes Mr. Ransome, “that we owe The Importance of Being Earnest to the fact that the Censor prevented Sarah Bernhardt from playing Salome at the Palace Theatre.”  If this conjecture is right, one can never think quite so unkindly of the Censor again, for in The Importance of Being Earnest, and in it alone, Wilde achieved a work of supreme genius in its kind.

It is as lightly-built as a house of cards, a frail edifice of laughter for laughter’s sake.  Or you might say that, in the literature of farce, it has a place as a “dainty rogue in porcelain.”  It is even lighter and more fragile than that.  It is a bubble, or a flight of bubbles.  It is the very ecstasy of levity.  As we listen to Lady Bracknell discussing the possibility of parting with her daughter to a man who had been “born, or at least bred, in a handbag,” or as we watch Jack and Algernon wrangling over the propriety of eating muffins in an hour of gloom, we seem somehow to be caught up and to sail through an exhilarating mid-air of nonsense.  Some people will contend that Wilde’s laughter is always the laughter not of the open air but of the salon.  But there is a spontaneity in the laughter of The Importance of Being Earnest that seems to me to associate it with running water and the sap rising in the green field.

It is when he begins to take Wilde seriously as a serious writer that one quarrels with Mr. Ransome.  Wilde was much better at showing off than at revealing himself, and, as the comedy of showing off is much more delightful than the solemn vanity of it, he was naturally happiest as a wit and persifleur.  On his serious side he ranks, not as an original artist, but as a popularizer—­the most accomplished popularizer, perhaps, in English literature.  He popularized William Morris, both his domestic interiors and his Utopias, in the aesthetic lectures and in The Soul of Man under Socialism—­a wonderful pamphlet, the secret of the world-wide fame of which Mr. Ransome curiously misses.  He popularized the cloistral aestheticism of Pater and the cultural egoism of Goethe in Intentions and elsewhere.  In Salome he popularized the gorgeous processionals of ornamental sentences upon which Flaubert had expended not the least marvellous portion of his genius.

Into an age that guarded respectability more closely than virtue and ridiculed beauty because it paid no dividend came Wilde, the assailant of even the most respectable ugliness, parrying the mockery of the meat tea with a mockery that sparkled like wine.  Lighting upon a world that advertised commercial wares, he set himself to advertise art with, as heroic an extravagance, and who knows how much his puce velvet knee-breeches may have done to make the British public aware of the genius, say, of Walter Pater?  Not that Wilde was not a finished egoist, using the arts and the authors to advertise himself rather than himself to advertise them.  But the time-spirit contrived that the arts and the authors should benefit by his outrageous breeches.