The examples of Wilde's epistolary style, published
since his death, have been generally associated with disagreeable
subjects. Those included here will, I hope, prove a pleasant contrast.
ROBERT ROSS
HOW THEY STRUCK A CONTEMPORARY
There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make
it too true, and _The Black Arrow_ is so inartistic as not to contain a
single anachronism to boast of, while the transformation of Dr. Jekyll
reads dangerously like an experiment out of the _Lancet_. As for Mr.
Rider Haggard, who really has, or had once, the makings of a perfectly
magnificent liar, he is now so afraid of being suspected of genius that
when he does tell us anything marvellous, he feels bound to invent a
personal reminiscence, and to put it into a footnote as a kind of
cowardly corroboration. Nor are our other novelists much better. Mr.
Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon
mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style,
his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire.
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