If they are not intellectually or technically adventurous, however, Wilde’s works are incomparable for their talk-talk that tends to be Wilde’s own put into the mouths of his characters. His poems and plays tend to look across the English Channel to the examples of the Symbolists and the masters of the pièce bien faite, though his Salomé, a biblical play written in French after the style of the then acclaimed dramatist Maurice Maeterlinck, was to engender a yet more significant work of art, Richard Strauss’s opera of the same title. Wilde’s literary works are polished achievements in established modes rather than experiments in thought or form.

However, Wilde’s Irish wit and eloquence made the articulation of this intellectual pastiche something distinctively his own.

Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan in their operetta Patience: Or, Bunthorne’s Bride (1881) and in Robert Smythe Hichens’s novel The Green Carnation (1894), mingled ideas from his two very different Oxford mentors, John Ruskin and Walter Pater, with the influence of the French Symbolists and, for a time, certain theories of the American painter James McNeill Whistler. More visibly than any British contemporary, Oscar Wilde personified the doctrines of turn-of-the-century aestheticism-that art existed for its own sake and that one should live so as to make from the raw materials of one’s own existence an elegantly finished artifice. Yet it must be admitted that Wilde’s presence, poses, ideas, and epigrams made him a potent influence, if not on the English literary tradition, at least on the artistic community of his own day. To accuse Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) of anything so active-sounding as “achievement” would be an impertinence that the strenuously indolent author would most likely deplore.

Oscar wilde play an ideal husband