Vyvyan Holland described the magic of Wilde’s fairy stories as he told them to children, sitting on the stairs in Tite Street, Chelsea. This was his true vein, and telling such stories was his kind of happiness. The famous essay on Art and Socialism, included here, is just such a story, a child-like picture of what might be, which depends upon intellectual surprise, and the inversion of the usual expectations. This inversion, and the play of paradox, were not in him just a trick of style, or a mannerism. Rather they expressed his sense that to be taken by surprise, and to be liberated from the constraints of literalness and of an accepted picture of reality is the supreme pleasure that a writer can provide.
The author of this article fails to mention that Vyvyan Holland was Wilde's son.
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