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Moralists liked to recall after his disgrace the unhealthy tendencies Oscar already showed at Oxford—his sermon-inspiring crack: "Would that I could live up to my blue china;" his incense-burning and precious bric-a-brac, decadent paintings, rhapsodies in verse to Actress Lily Langtry, his declaration that "I want to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world." What was less frequently recalled was that he was the pet of Slade Professor John Ruskin and of the great Walter Pater, who was once so overcome by his protege's beautiful talk about the "new Hellenism" that he went on his knees, kissed Oscar's hand. No one enjoyed more than Ruskin and Pater the story of how Oscar had thrown four big athletes downstairs when they came to teach the "blue china cove" a manly lesson.

Revealing of Wilde's character is Biographer Winwar's picture of the sun-flower-&-lily school he dramatized, the arch-esthete contemporaries he cultivated and admired—Painter Jimmie Whistler, who hammered home the theory that art has no morals and trained Wilde in the most cynical wit of the century; Ernest Dowson, hashish-smoking, tuberculous poet who died young in the gutter after writing Cynara, a poetic rosary for disillusioned young men; Artist Aubrey Beardsley, spidery, sardonic, tuberculous genius, called "the most monstrous of orchids" by Wilde; French Novelist Huysmans, who carried decadent experiments in subtle sensations as far as they have ever gone; Theophile Gautier, "Holy ghost of the exotic-aesthetic, satanic-mystical school;" Smithers, the fantastic under-the-counter bookseller, "wonderful and depraved," who aided mightily in finishing off his beloved protege Ernest Dowson with women and drink. "Good people," declared Oscar, "exasperate one's reason; bad people stir one's imagination."

Such was the "new Hellenism," which Wilde dramatized to the bitter end. Refusing his friends' advice to flee rather than stand trial, broken by two years' hard labor in prison (productive of his most sincerely questioning work, De Profundis), a drink-cadging exile in the Paris bistros, penniless, bloated, deaf, dying piecemeal at 44 of cerebral meningitis, Oscar could still summon up a deathbed defiance of what he called Philistia. "I am,," said he, tossing off a glass of friends' champagne, "dying beyond my means."

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