Photo: Marc Brenner “There was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1890. “No other activity was like it. To project one’s soul into some gracious form … to hear one’s own intellectual views echoed back to one … to convey one’s temperament into another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume: there was a real joy in that — perhaps the most satisfying joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own, an age grossly carnal in