It is often assumed that he had no clear and coherent view of life, no belief, no faith to guide his vagrant footsteps; but such an opinion does him injustice.  He had his own philosophy, and held to it for long years with astonishing tenacity.  His attitude towards life can best be seen if he is held up against Goethe.  He took the artist’s view of life which Goethe was the first to state and indeed in youth had overstated with an astonishing persuasiveness:  “the beautiful is more than the good,” said Goethe; “for it includes the good.”

It seemed to Oscar, as it had seemed to young Goethe, that “the extraordinary alone survives”; the extraordinary whether good or bad; he therefore sought after the extraordinary, and naturally enough often fell into the extravagant.  But how stimulating it was in London, where sordid platitudes drip and drizzle all day long, to hear someone talking brilliant paradoxes.

Goethe did not linger long in the halfway house of unbelief; the murderer may win notoriety as easily as the martyr, but his memory will not remain. “The fashion of this world passeth away,” said Goethe, “I would fain occupy myself with that which endures.”  Midway in life Goethe accepted Kant’s moral imperative and restated his creed:  “A man must resolve to live,” he said, “for the Good, and Beautiful, and for the Common Weal.”

Oscar did not push his thought so far:  the transcendental was not his field.

It was a pity, I sometimes felt, that he had not studied German as thoroughly as French; Goethe might have done more for him than Baudelaire or Balzac, for in spite of all his stodgy German faults, Goethe is the best guide through the mysteries of life whom the modern world has yet produced.  Oscar Wilde stopped where the religion of Goethe began; he was far more of a pagan and individualist than the great German; he lived for the beautiful and extraordinary, but not for the Good and still less for the Whole; he acknowledged no moral obligation; in commune bonis was an ideal which never said anything to him; he cared nothing for the common weal; he held himself above the mass of the people with an Englishman’s extravagant insularity and aggressive pride.  Politics, social problems, religion—­everything interested him simply as a subject of art; life itself was merely material for art.  He held the position Goethe had abandoned in youth.

The view was astounding in England and new everywhere in its onesidedness.  Its passionate exaggeration, however, was quickening, and there is, of course, something to be said for it.  The artistic view of life is often higher than the ordinary religious view; at least it does not deal in condemnations and exclusions; it is more reasonable, more catholic, more finely perceptive.

“The artist’s view of life is the only possible one,” Oscar used to say, “and should be applied to everything, most of all to religion and morality.  Cavaliers and Puritans are interesting for their costumes and not for their convictions....