Few men in English literature have lived a nobler, purer life than Robert Southey, and yet his very name sets us a-yawning, and if he lives at all it is solely due to his little pot-boiler, become a classic, the "Life of Nelson." The two great events in Nelson's life were his meeting with Lady Emma Hamilton and his meeting with the French. Now, disguise it as we may, it still remains true that, in thinking of Nelson, we think as much of Lady Emma as we do of Trafalgar. Of course, in saying this I realize that I am not an Englishman making a public address on the anniversary of the great battle.
Southey's life gives the lie to that solemn remark about genius being simply a capacity for hard work: if it were so, he would have ranked high; he worked incessantly, produced his to-day neglected poems, supported his family and contributed toward the support of the families of his friends. He was a good man, and worked himself to death; but he was not a genius.
On the other hand, Wilde was; but his life was not good, it was not pure; he did injury to his friends; and to his wife and children, the greatest wrong a man could do them, so that she died of a broken heart, and his sons live under an assumed name; yet, notwithstanding all this, perhaps to some extent by reason of it, he is a most interesting personality, and no doubt his future place in literature will be to some extent influenced by the fate which struck him down just at the moment of his greatest success.
Remembering Dr. Johnson's remark that in lapidary work a man is not upon oath, it has always seemed to me that something like the epitaph he wrote for Goldsmith's monument in Westminster Abbey might with equal justice have been carved upon Wilde's obscure tombstone in a neglected corner of Bagneux Cemetery in Paris. The inscription I refer to translates: "He left scarcely any style of writing untouched and touched nothing that he did not adorn."
I am too good a Goldsmithian to compare Goldsmith, with all his faults and follies, to Wilde, with his faults and follies, and vices superadded; but Wilde wrote "Dorian Gray," a novel original and powerful in conception, as powerful as "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"; and remembering that Wilde was also an essayist, a poet, and a dramatist, I think we may fairly say that he too touched nothing that he did not adorn.