“There is no general rule of health; it is all personal, individual....  I only demand that freedom which I willingly concede to others.  No one condemns another for preferring green to gold.  Why should any taste be ostracised?  Liking and disliking are not under our control.  I want to choose the nourishment which suits my body and my soul.”

I can almost hear him say the words with his charming humorous smile and exquisite flash of deprecation, as if he were half inclined to make fun of his own statement.

It was not his views on art, however, which recommended him to the aristocratic set in London; but his contempt for social reform, or rather his utter indifference to it, and his English love of inequality.  The republicanism he flaunted in his early verses was not even skin deep; his political beliefs and prejudices were the prejudices of the English governing class and were all in favour of individual freedom, or anarchy under the protection of the policeman.

“The poor are poor creatures,” was his real belief, “and must always be hewers of wood and drawers of water.  They are merely the virgin soil out of which men of genius and artists grow like flowers.  Their function is to give birth to genius and nourish it.  They have no other raison d’etre.  Were men as intelligent as bees, all gifted individuals would be supported by the community, as the bees support their queen.  We should be the first charge on the state just as Socrates declared that he should be kept in the Prytaneum at the public expense.

“Don’t talk to me, Frank, about the hardships of the poor.  The hardships of the poor are necessities, but talk to me of the hardships of men of genius, and I could weep tears of blood.  I was never so affected by any book in my life as I was by the misery of Balzac’s poet, Lucien de Rubempre.”

Naturally this creed of an exaggerated individualism appealed peculiarly to the best set in London.  It was eminently aristocratic and might almost be defended as scientific, for to a certain extent it found corroboration in Darwinism.  All progress according to Darwin comes from peculiar individuals; “sports” as men of science call them, or the “heaven-sent” as rhetoricians prefer to style them.  The many are only there to produce more “sports” and ultimately to benefit by them.  All this is valid enough; but it leaves the crux of the question untouched.  The poor in aristocratic England are too degraded to produce “sports” of genius, or indeed any “sports” of much value to humanity.  Such an extravagant inequality of condition obtains there that the noble soul is miserable, the strongest insecure.  But Wilde’s creed was intensely popular with the “Smart Set” because of its very one-sidedness, and he was hailed as a prophet partly because he defended the cherished prejudices of the “landed” oligarchy.

It will be seen from this that Oscar Wilde was in some danger of suffering from excessive popularity and unmerited renown.  Indeed if he had loved athletic sports, hunting and shooting instead of art and letters, he might have been the selected representative of aristocratic England.