It is in the relation of a great popularizer, then—­a popularizer who, for a new thing, was not also a vulgarizer—­that Wilde seems to me to stand to his age.  What, then, of Mr. Ransome’s estimate of Salome?  That it is a fascinating play no lover of the pageantry of words can deny.  But of what quality is this fascination?  It is, when all is said and done, the fascination of the lust of painted faces.  Here we have no tragedy, but a mixing of degenerate philtres.  Mr. Ransome hears “the beating of the wings of the angel of death” in the play; but that seems to me to be exactly the atmosphere that Wilde fails to create.  As the curtain falls on the broken body of Salome one has a sick feeling, as though one had been present where vermin were being crushed.  There is not a hint of the elation, the liberation, of real tragedy.  The whole thing is simply a wonderful piece of coloured sensationalism.  And even if we turn to the costly sentences of the play, do we not find that, while in his choice of colour and jewel and design Flaubert wrought in language like a skilled artificer, Wilde, in his treatment of words, was more like a lavish amateur about town displaying his collection of splendid gems?

Wilde speaks of himself in De Profundis as a lord of language.  Of course, he was just the opposite.  Language was a vice with him.  He took to it as a man might take to drink.  He was addicted rather than devoted to language.  He had a passion for it, but too little sense of responsibility towards it, and, in his choice of beautiful words, we are always conscious of the indolence as well as the extravagance of the man of pleasure.  How beautifully, with what facility of beauty, he could use words, everyone knows who has read his brief Endymion (to name one of the poems), and the many hyacinthine passages in Intentions.  But when one is anxious to see the man himself as in De Profundis—­that book of a soul imprisoned in embroidered sophistries—­one feels that this cloak of strange words is no better than a curse.

If Wilde was not a lord of language, however, but only its bejewelled slave, he was a lord of laughter, and it is because there is so much laughter as well as language in Intentions that I am inclined to agree with Mr. Ransome that Intentions is “that one of Wilde’s books that most nearly represents him.”  Even here, however, Mr. Ransome will insist on taking Wilde far too seriously.  For instance, he tells us that “his paradoxes are only unfamiliar truths.”  How horrified Wilde would have been to hear him say so!  His paradoxes are a good deal more than truths—­or a good deal less.  They helped, no doubt, to redress a balance, but many of them were the merest exercises in intellectual rebellion.  Mr. Ransome’s attitude on the question of Wilde’s sincerity seems to me as impossible as his attitude in regard to the paradoxes.  He draws up a code of artistic sincerity which might serve as a gospel for minor artists, but of which every great artist is a living denial.  But there is no room to go into that.  Disagree as we may with many of Mr. Ransome’s conclusions, we must be grateful to him for a thoughtful, provocative, and ambitious study of one of the most brilliant personalities and wits, though by no means one of the most brilliant imaginative artists, of the nineteenth century.