Wilde started as an apostle of Art; and in that capacity he was a humbug.

The notion that a Portora boy, passed on to T.C.D.and thence to Oxford and spending his vacations in Dublin, could without special circumstances have any genuine intimacy with music and painting, is to me ridiculous.[4] When Wilde was at Portora, I was at home in a house where important musical works, including several typical masterpieces, were being rehearsed from the point of blank amateur ignorance up to fitness for public performance.

I could whistle them from the first bar to the last as a butcher's boy whistles music hall songs, before I was twelve.

The toleration of popular music--Strauss's waltzes, for instance--was to me positively a painful acquirement, a sort of republican duty.
[Footnote 4: I had already marked it down to put in this popular edition of my book that Wilde continually pretended to a knowledge of music which he had not got.

He could hardly tell one tune from another, but he loved to talk of that "scarlet thing of Dvorak," hoping in this way to be accepted as a real critic of music, when he knew nothing about it and cared even less.