The avant-garde Wilde is less the dramatist, who worked safely within Victorian conventions, than the essayist, particularly as an aphorist whose prinicipal proto-modernist theme was that art is primarily about materials and experience indigenous to art. Few writers in any language could create so many memorable knockout lines, whether in speech or in print, especially about art, artists’ lives, and the artistic process. Among them:
In his tragically short life, Wilde was also a successful playwright;...