Chapter 9 - Page 2

He told me once that he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament
and, had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of
Beaconsfield, whose early style resembles his, being meant for
crowds, for excitement, for hurried decisions, for immediate
triumphs. Such men get their sincerity, if at all, from the
contact of events; the dinner table was Wilde's event and made him
the greatest talker of his time, and his plays and dialogues have
what merit they possess from being now an imitation, now a record,
of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by saying
that his very admiration for his predecessors in poetry, for
Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while
he was a very young man, made any success seem impossible that
could satisfy his immense ambition: never but once before had the
artist seemed so great, never had the work of art seemed so
difficult. I would then compare him with Benvenuto Cellini who,
coming after Michael Angelo, found nothing left to do so
satisfactory as to turn bravo and assassinate the man who broke
Michael Angelo's nose.