Max Beerbohm on Oscar Wilde

“Despite the number of his books and plays, Mr. Wilde was not, I think, what one calls a born writer. His writing seemed always to be rather an overflow of intellectual temperamental energy than an inevitable, absorbing function. That he never concentrated himself on any one form of literature is a proof that the art of writing never really took hold of him.”

“I have had the privilege of listening also to many other masters of table-talk—Meredith James, Augustine Birrell and Arthur Balfour, Gilbert Chesterton and Desmond MacCarthy and Hilaire Belloc—all of them splendid in their own way. But assuredly Oscar in his own way was the greatest of them all—the most spontaneous and yet the most polished, the most soothing and yet the most surprising. That his talk was mostly a monologue was not his own fault. His manners were very good; he was careful to give his guests or his fellow guests many a conversational opening; but seldom did anyone respond with more than a very few words. Nobody was willing to interrupt the music of so magnificent a virtuoso. To have heard him consoled me for not having heard Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke, Lord Brougham or Sydney Smith.”