Like Henry Arthur Jones, whose earnestness amused him, Oscar Wilde was an idealist. Jones, the disciple of Arnold, organized drama against the petty and suburban; Wilde, the disciple of Pater, marshalled his own personality against the drab and doctrinaire. Neither man cared much for reality. As a moral idealist, Jones looked at modern barbarism and found it unnatural; as an aesthetic idealist, Wilde, the spectator of his personal drama, considered actuality less interesting than his own thoughts about it:

Wilde's intellect, shaped by artists and thinkers of all ages, allowed a comic detachment from himself and his times; his impressionable soul, whirling from one gem-like flame to the next, made him the slave of hedonism.