Oscar Wilde as man and artist is a study of extremes and contradictions. He approached life empirically, as Walter Pater had taught him at Oxford, but the pupil determined to pursue sensation beyond art into life. Wilde insisted that the two greatest arts were life and literature. His success in each is measured by the depth of his failures. He dominated his age by personality, yet following his release from prison, he went into exile and assumed a new name. He who had sought fame and success spent his last years as a dilettante of anonymity. Wilde was a man who knew himself too well to believe in anything for very long; consequently, he believed in everything and died a convert to Roman Catholicism, concluding perhaps the longest deferred conversion since Augustine. In contrast to Augustine, however, the church congratulated itself very little over the declaration of Wilde...