Oscar Wilde's method of work

Having learned from Frank Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, that he was very well acquainted with Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) and had written a life of Wilde (who was the "greatest talker" Harris ever met—and Harris talked with the likes of Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and Guy de Maupassant), I decided to read it. Chapter 8 begins:

The period of growth of any organism is the most interesting and most instructive. And there is no moment of growth in the individual life which can be compared in importance [to] the moment when a man begins to outtop his age, and to suggest the future evolution of humanity by his own genius....
    This period for Oscar Wilde began with his marriage [1884]....
    During this period we were often together. He lunched with me once or twice a week, and I began to know his method of work. Everything came to him in the excitement of talk, epigrams, paradoxes, and stories; and when people of great position or title were about him he generally managed to surpass himself....
    As soon as he lost his editorship [of The Woman's World], he took to writing for the reviews; his articles were merely the resumé of his monologues....
    [They] made it manifest that Wilde had at length, as Heine phrased it, reached the topmost height of the culture of his time and was now able to say new and interesting things...In fact, all the papers which in 1891 were gathered together and published in book form under the title of Intentions had about them the stamp of originality. They achieved a noteworthy success with the best minds, and laid the foundation of his fame. Every paper contained, here and there, a happy phrase or epigram or flirt of humor, which made it memorable to the lover of letters.

But:

They were all...conceived and written from the standpoint of the artist, and the artist alone, who never takes account of ethics, but uses right and wrong indifferently as colors of his pallette. "The Decay of Lying" seemed to the ordinary, matter-of-fact Englishman a cynical plea in defence of mendacity. To the majority of readers, "Pen, Pencil, and Poison" was hardly more than a shameful attempt to condone cold-blooded murder. The very articles which grounded his fame as a writer helped to injure his standing and repute....[pp. 66-68, Chapter 8 of Oscar Wilde]