and clever people are as common as rats.  Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious.  Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly:  indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per cent. of its devotees.

[Footnote 10:  The English paste in Shaw; genius is about the rarest thing on earth whereas the necessary quantum of “honesty, sobriety and industry,” is beaten by life into nine humans out of ten.—­ED.

If so, it is the tenth who comes my way.—­G.B.S.]

“We must try to imagine what judgment we should have passed on Oscar if he had been a normal man, and had dug his grave with his teeth in the ordinary respectable fashion, as his brother Willie did.  This brother, by the way, gives us some cue; for Willie, who had exactly the same education and the same chances, must be ruthlessly set aside by literary history as a vulgar journalist of no account.  Well, suppose Oscar and Willie had both died the day before Queensberry left that card at the Club!  Oscar would still have been remembered as a wit and a dandy, and would have had a niche beside Congreve in the drama.  A volume of his aphorisms would have stood creditably on the library shelf with La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims.  We should have missed the ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and ‘De Profundis’; but he would still have cut a considerable figure in the Dictionary of National Biography, and been read and quoted outside the British Museum reading room.

“As to the ‘Ballad’ and ‘De Profundis,’ I think it is greatly to Oscar’s credit that, whilst he was sincere and deeply moved when he was protesting against the cruelty of our present system to children and to prisoners generally, he could not write about his own individual share in that suffering with any conviction or sympathy.[11] Except for the passage where he describes his exposure at Clapham Junction, there is hardly a line in ‘De Profundis’ that he might not have written as a literary feat five years earlier.  But in the ‘Ballad,’ even in borrowing form and melody from Coleridge, he shews that he could pity others when he could not seriously pity himself.  And this, I think, may be pleaded against the reproach that he was selfish.  Externally, in the ordinary action of life as distinguished from the literary action proper to his genius, he was no doubt sluggish and weak because of his giantism.  He ended as an unproductive drunkard and swindler; for the repeated sales of the Daventry plot, in so far as they imposed on the buyers and were not transparent excuses for begging, were undeniably swindles.  For all that, he does not appear in his writings a selfish or base-minded