CYRIL. Writing an article! That is not very consistent after what you have just said.
VIVIAN Who wants to be consistent? The dullard and the doctrinaire, the tedious people who carry out their principles to the bitter end of action, to the reductio ad absurdum of practice. Not I. Like Emerson, I write over the door of my library the word "Whim."
The introduction to the edition I'm browsing, "The Oxford Authors Oscar Wilde," edited by Isobel Murray, has this to say regarding Emerson:
"A fair number of Emerson's essays are quoted by Wilde, but it is 'Self-Reliance', with its call for inconsistency and nonconformity in the interests of self-realization, that is outsstandingly influential; it is echoed in many places, including of course The Critic as Artist, and I would argue is a major inspiration for Wilde's essay 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism'.
...
And above all, Emerson is free of the 'earnestness' so prevalent in English Victorian essayists and prose-writers--and he writes with clarity, individuality, and style, coining epigrammatic phrases that Wilde relishes."
Permit me to include here a maxim (from 'A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated') pertinent to weblogs:
"In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public.
Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody."