VIII

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    I saw a good deal of Wilde at that time??was it 1887 or 1888???I have no way of fixing the date except that I had published my first book The Wanderings of Usheen and that Wilde had not yet published his Decay of Lying. He had, before our first meeting, reviewed my book ae its vagueness of iion, and the iness of its speech, praised without qualification; and what was worth more than any review had talked about it, and now he asked me to eat my Xmas dinner with him, believing, I imagihat I was alone in London.

    He had just renounced his velveteen, and even those cuffs turned backward over the sleeves, and had begun to dress very carefully in the fashion of the moment. He lived in a little house at Chelsea that the architect Godwin had decorated with an elegahat owed something to Whistler. There was nothing mediaeval, nor Pre?Raphaelite, no cupboard door with figures upon flat gold, no peacock blue, no dark background. I remember vaguely a white drawing room with Whistler etgs, let in to white panels, and a dining room all white: chairs, walls, mantlepiece, carpet, except for a diamond?shaped piece of red cloth in the middle of the table under a terra cotta statuette, and I think a red shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling to a little above the statuette. It erhaps too perfe its unity, his past of a few years before had gooo pletely, and I remember thinking that the perfect harmony of his life there, with his beautiful wife and his two young children, suggested some deliberate artistiposition.

    He ended, & dispraised himself, during dinner by attributing characteristics like his own to his try: We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers sihe Greeks. When dinner was over he read me from the proofs of The Decay of Lying and when he came to the sentence: Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet ied it. The world has bee sad because a puppet was once melancholy, I said, Why do you ge "sad" to "melancholy?" He replied that he wanted a full sound at the close of his sentence, and I thought it no excuse and an example of the vague impressivehat spoilt his writing for me. Only when he spoke, or when his writing was the mirror of his speech, or in some simple fairytale, had he words exaough to hold a subtle ear. He alarmed me, though not as Henley did for I never left his house thinking myself fool or dunce.

    He flattered the intellect of every man he liked; he made me tell him long Irish stories and pared my art of story?telling to Homers; and once when he had described himself as writing in the sus paper age 19, profession genius, infirmity talent, the uest, a young journalist fresh from Oxford or Cambridge, said What shoul９9lｉｂ?d I have written? and was told that it should have been profession talent, infirmity genius. When, however, I called, wearing shoes a little too yellow??unblaed leather had just bee fashionable??I uood their extravagence when I saw his eyes fixed upon them; an another day Wilde asked me to tell his little boy a fairy story, and I had but got as far as Once upon a time there was a giant whetle boy screamed and ran out of the room. Wilde looked grave and I lunged into the shame of clumsihat afflicts the young. When I asked for some literary gossip for some provincial neer, that paid me a few shillings a month, he explained very explicitly that writing literary gossip was no job fentleman. Though to be pared to Homer passed the time pleasantly, I had not beely perturbed had he stopped me with Is it a long story? as Henley would certainly have done. I was abashed before him as wit and man of the world alone. I remember that he deprecated the very general belief in his success or his efficy, and I think with siy. One form of success had gone: he was no more the lion of the season, and he had not discovered his gift for writing edy, yet I think I knew him at the happiest moment of his life. No sdal had darkened his fame, his fame as a talker was growing among his equals, & he seemed to live in the enjoyment of his own spoy. One day he began: I have been iing a Christian heresy, aold a detailed story, iyle of some early father, of how Christ recovered after the Crucifixion and, esg from the tomb, lived on for many years, the one man upoh who khe falsehood of Christianity. O. Paul visi?９9ｌｉｂ?ed his town and he alone in the carpenters quarter did not go to hear him preach. The other carpenters noticed that heh, for some unknown reason, he kept his hands covered. A few days afterwards I found Wilde, with smock frocks in various colours spread out upon the floor in front of him, while a missionary explaihat he did not object to the heathen going naked upon week days, but insisted upon clothes in church. He had brought the smock frocks in a cab that the only art?critic whose fame had reached tral Africa might select a colour; so Wilde sat there weighing all with a scious ecclesiastinity.

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