he was a pagan born: as Gautier says, "One for whom the visible world
alone exists," endowed with all the Greek sensuousness and love of
plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier, wholly out of
sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of the faithless
who _cannot_ believe,"[5] to whom a sense of sin and repentance are
symptoms of weakness and disease.

Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting
Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek
story throned in the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa
and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared,
to the worship of the beautiful.

Another dominant characteristic of the young man may here find its
place.

While still at Oxford his tastes--the bent of his mind, and his
temperament--were beginning to outline his future. He spent his
vacations in Dublin and always called upon his old school friend
Edward Sullivan in his rooms at Trinity. Sullivan relates that when
they met Oscar used to be full of his occasional visits to London and
could talk of nothing but the impression made upon him by plays and
players. From youth on the theatre drew him irresistibly; he had not
only all the vanity of the actor; but what might be called the born
dramatist's love for the varied life of the stage--its paintings,
costumings, rhetoric--and above all the touch of emphasis natural to
it which gives such opportunity for humorous exaggeration.

"I remember him telling me," Sullivan writes, "about Irving's
'Macbeth,' which made a great impression on him; he was fascinated by