So, of Wilde himself, I cannot but hope and believe that though he told many stories of exceeding beauty, none of which were true, yet hidden away in his heart was much that was gracious, true, noble and beautiful, the story of which will now never be known, for like the poet lad of his fantasy he told it to no one. Of what was evil and what was good in his life, only a merciful God can strike the balance, and only a merciful God shall judge.
As one who knew Wilde personally, I am sometimes asked whether I was not instinctively aware that the man was bad. Frankly I was not. Possibly because scandal does not interest me, and other things do, I had not heard the rumours which I now understand were even then prevalent, and so I took him as I found him, an agreeable companion, a brilliant conversationalist, a versatile and accomplished man of letters. On the crime of which he has since been committed, I make no comment, if only for the reason that I did not follow the evidence at his trial, just as I abstained from reading Mr. W. T. Stead’s _Maiden Tribute to Modern Babylon_--not because of any innate niceness on my part, but for the same reason which causes me to turn aside if, in my morning’s walk, I come across offal which it is not my business to remove. The Wilde of the days of which I am writing was foppish in dress and affected in manner. He talked and wrote much nonsense, as I held it to be, about there being no such thing as a moral or an immoral book or picture; that the book or picture was either a work of art, or was not a work of art, and there the matter ended; but much of this talk I attributed to pose, and I had even then learned that some of the men who are most anxious to have us believe them moralists--and stern moralists at that--are often less moral in their life than some of those who make no pretence of any morals at all.
To the folk who objected that Wilde has boasted of being a “pagan” I replied that he probably used the word--just then very much in vogue--in the same sense in which Mr. Kenneth Grahame used it when he entitled a volume, bubbling over with the joy of life, with animal spirits, keen observation, and exquisite humour, _Pagan Papers_. Wilde’s “paganism” I took as meaning no more than that he claimed for himself freedom from formula, most of all freedom from cant in his attitude towards the accepted conventions, whether literary, artistic, social, or even religious.