Socrates was found guilty of corrupting the young and was put to death for the offence.  His accusation and punishment constitute surely a great and significant action such as Matthew Arnold declared was alone of the highest and most permanent literary value.

The action involved in the rise and ruin of Oscar Wilde is of the same kind and of enduring interest to humanity.  Critics may say that Wilde is a smaller person than Socrates, less significant in many ways:  but even if this were true, it would not alter the artist’s position; the great portraits of the world are not of Napoleon or Dante.  The differences between men are not important in comparison with their inherent likeness.  To depict the mortal so that he takes on immortality—­that is the task of the artist.

There are special reasons, too, why I should handle this story.  Oscar Wilde was a friend of mine for many years:  I could not help prizing him to the very end:  he was always to me a charming, soul-animating influence.  He was dreadfully punished by men utterly his inferiors:  ruined, outlawed, persecuted till Death itself came as a deliverance.  His sentence impeaches his judges.  The whole story is charged with tragic pathos and unforgettable lessons.  I have waited for more than ten years hoping that some one would write about him in this spirit and leave me free to do other things, but nothing such as I propose has yet appeared.

Oscar Wilde was greater as a talker, in my opinion, than as a writer, and no fame is more quickly evanescent.  If I do not tell his story and paint his portrait, it seems unlikely that anyone else will do it.

English “strachery” may accuse me of attacking morality:  the accusation is worse than absurd.  The very foundations of this old world are moral:  the charred ember itself floats about in space, moves and has its being in obedience to inexorable law.  The thinker may define morality:  the reformer may try to bring our notions of it into nearer accord with the fact:  human love and pity may seek to soften its occasional injustices and mitigate its intolerable harshness:  but that is all the freedom we mortals enjoy, all the breathing-space allotted to us.

In this book the reader will find the figure of the Prometheus-artist clamped, so to speak, with bands of steel to the huge granitic cliff of English puritanism.  No account was taken of his manifold virtues and graces:  no credit given him for his extraordinary achievements:  he was hounded out of life because his sins were not the sins of the English middle-class.  The culprit was in[1] much nobler and better than his judges.

Here are all the elements of pity and sorrow and fear that are required in great tragedy.

The artist who finds in Oscar Wilde a great and provocative subject for his art needs no argument to justify his choice.  If the picture is a great and living portrait, the moralist will be satisfied:  the dark shadows must all be there, as well as the high lights, and the effect must be to increase our tolerance and intensify our pity.