The time had now come for Oscar to conquer London as he had conquered Oxford.  He had finished the first class in the great World-School and was eager to try the next, where his mistakes would be his only tutors and his desires his taskmasters.  His University successes flattered him with the belief that he would go from triumph to triumph and be the exception proving the rule that the victor in the academic lists seldom repeats his victories on the battlefield of life.

It is not sufficiently understood that the learning of Latin and Greek and the forming of expensive habits at others’ cost are a positive disability and handicap in the rough-and-tumble tussle of the great city, where greed and unscrupulous resolution rule, and where there are few prizes for feats of memory or taste in words.  When the graduate wins in life he wins as a rule in spite of his so-called education and not because of it.

It is true that the majority of English ’Varsity men give themselves an infinitely better education than that provided by the authorities.  They devote themselves to athletic sports with whole-hearted enthusiasm.  Fortunately for them it is impossible to develop the body without at the same time steeling the will.  The would-be athlete has to live laborious days; he may not eat to his liking, nor drink to his thirst.  He learns deep lessons almost unconsciously; to conquer his desires and make light of pain and discomfort.  He needs no Aristotle to teach him the value of habits; he is soon forced to use them as defences against his pet weaknesses; above all he finds that self-denial has its reward in perfect health; that the thistle pain, too, has its flower.  It is a truism that ’Varsity athletes generally succeed in life, Spartan discipline proving itself incomparably superior to Greek accidence.

Oscar Wilde knew nothing of this discipline.  He had never trained his body to endure or his will to steadfastness.  He was the perfect flower of academic study and leisure.  At Magdalen he had been taught luxurious living, the delight of gratifying expensive tastes; he had been brought up and enervated so to speak in Capua.  His vanity had been full-fed with cloistered triumphs; he was at once pleasure-loving, vainly self-confident and weak; he had been encouraged for years to give way to his emotions and to pamper his sensations, and as the Cap-and-Bells of Folly to cherish a fantastic code of honour even in mortal combat, while despising the religion which might have given him some hold on the respect of his compatriots.  What chance had this cultured honour-loving Sybarite in the deadly grapple of modern life where the first quality is will power, the only knowledge needed a knowledge of the value of money.  I must not be understood here as in any degree disparaging Oscar.  I can surely state that a flower is weaker than a weed without exalting the weed or depreciating the flower.

The first part of life’s voyage was over for Oscar Wilde; let us try to see him as he saw himself at this time and let us also determine his true relations to the world.  Fortunately he has given us his own view of himself with some care.