Oscar Wilde now began to take a definite place in the English social world. His wit, his brilliance of conversation, his singular charm of manner all combined to render him a welcome guest, and in many cases a valued friend, in circles where distinction of intellect and charm of personality are the only passports. He began to make money and to indulge a natural taste for profusion and splendour. Yet, let it be said here, and said with emphasis, that greatly as he desired, and acquired, the elegances of life, increasing fortune found him as kind and generous as before. It is a known fact that he gave away large sums of money to those less fortunate in the effort to make an income by artistic pursuits. His purse was always open to the struggling and the unhappy and his influence constantly exerted on their behalf.
Suddenly all London was captured by the brilliant modern comedies he began to write. Success of the completest kind had arrived, the poet's name was in everyone's mouth. Curiously enough it is the French students of Wilde's career who have paid the most attention to Wilde in this second period. The man of society, the witty talker, the maker of epigrams—Wilde at his apogee just before his fall—this is the picture on which the Latin psychologists have liked to dwell.
"In our days, the master of repartee and the after-dinner speaker is foredoomed to forgetfulness, for he always stands alone, and to gain applause has to talk down to and flatter lower-class audiences. No writer of blood-curdling melodramas, no weaver of newspaper novels is obliged to lower his talent so much as the professional wit. If the genius of Mallarmé was obscured by the flatterers that surrounded him, how much more was Wilde's talent overclouded by the would-be-witty, shoddy-elegant, and cheaply-poetical society hangers-on, who covered him with incense. We are told that the first attempts of the sparkling talker were by no means successful in the Parisian salons.
"In the house of Victor Hugo, seeing he must wait to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen, he succeeded in gaining only a reputation for artificiality.
"We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of tenderness for everything in nature."
Thus M. Charles Grolleau, and there is much in his point of view. The writer of "The Happy Prince" and "The House of Pomegranates" is a different person from the paradoxical causeur who went cometlike through a few London and Paris seasons before disappearing into the darkness of space.
And it was the encouragement and applause bestowed upon Oscar Wilde during the second period that not only confirmed him in his determination to live as the complete flaneur, but which prevented even sympathetic critics from appreciating his work at its true worth.
The late M. Hugues Rebell, who knew him fairly intimately, said of him:
"It is true that Mallarmé has not written much, but all he has done is valuable. Some of his verses are most beautiful, whilst Wilde seemed never to finish anything. The works of the English æsthete are very interesting, because they characterise his epoch; his pages are useful from a documentary point of view, but are not extraordinary from a literary standpoint. In the 'Duchess of Padua,' he imitates Hugo and Sardou; the 'Picture of Dorian Gray' was inspired by Huysmans; 'Intentions' is a vade mecum of symbolism, and all the ideas contained therein are to be found in Mallarmé and Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. As for Wilde's poetry, it closely follows the lines laid down by Swinburne. His most original composition is 'Poems in Prose.' They give a correct idea of his home-chat, but not when he was at his best; that, no doubt, is because the art of talking must always be inferior to any form of literary composition. Thoughts properly set forth in print after due correction must always be more charming than a finely sketched idea hurriedly enunciated when conversing with a few disciples. In ordinary table-talk we meet nothing more than ghosts of new-born ideas foredoomed to perish. The jokes of a wit seldom survive the speaker. When we quote the epigrams of Wilde, it is as if we were exhibiting in a glass case a collection of beautiful butterflies, whose wings have lost the brilliancy of their once gaudy colours. Lively talk pleases, because of the man who utters it, and we are impressed also by the gestures which accompany his frothy discourse. What remains of the sprightly quips and anecdotes of such celebrated hommes d'esprit as Scholl, Becque, Barbey d'Aurevilly! Some stories of the eighteenth century have been transmitted to us by Chamfort, but only because he carefully remodelled them by the aid of his clever pen."
Yet during all the time of his success, when he was receiving flattery enough, celebrity enough, money enough to turn the head of a far stronger-willed man than he was, there is abundant evidence of a frequent aspiration after better things. Serene and lofty moods came to him now and again and found utterance in his words or writings.
From the very beginning of his career he had been in the public eye. Now he had, it seemed, come into his own. The years of ridicule and misrepresentation, the years of the first period, were over and done with. A real and solid popularity seemed to be his. Yet, just as he had spoilt and obscured his æsthetic message by those eccentricities which the Anglo-Saxon mind will not permit in anyone who comes professing to teach it, so now Oscar Wilde was to spoil the triumphs of the second period by a mental intoxication that led him step by step to ultimate ruin and disgrace.
At this moment let us sum up the results at which we have arrived in the study of this complex character. We are all of us complex, but Wilde was more strangely compounded than the ordinary man in exact proportion as his intelligence was greater and his power beyond the general measure. This much and no more.