"He was a great artist. He also was really a charlatan. I mean by a charlatan one sufficiently dignified to despise the tricks that he employs. ... Wilde and his school professed to stand as solitary artistic souls apart from the public. They professed to scorn the middle class, and declared that the artist must not work for the bourgeois. The truth is that no artist so really great ever worked so much for the bourgeois as Oscar Wilde. No man, so capable of thinking about truth and beauty, ever thought so constantly about his own effect on the middle classes. ... One might go through his swift and sparkling plays with a red and blue pencil marking two kinds of epigrams; the real epigram which he wrote to please his own wild intellect, and the sham epigram which he wrote to thrill the very tamest part of our tame civilization."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
G. K. Chesterton, Daily News (19 October 1909)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
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Oscar Wilde
1854 – 1900
irischer Schriftsteller
578 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Oscar Wilde →
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