In spite of Mr. Robert Ross's opinion I regard "Salome," as a student work, an
outcome of Oscar's admiration for Flaubert and his "Herodias," on the one hand,
and "Les Sept Princesses," of Maeterlinck on the other. He has borrowed the
colour and Oriental cruelty with the banquet-scene from the Frenchman, and from
the Fleming the simplicity of language and the haunting effect produced by
the repetition of significant phrases. Yet "Salome" is original through the
mingling of lust and hatred in the heroine, and by making this extraordinary
virgin the chief and centre of the drama Oscar has heightened the interest of
the story and bettered Flaubert's design. I feel sure he copied Maeterlinck's
simplicity of style because it served to disguise his imperfect knowledge of
French and yet this very artlessness adds to the weird effect of the drama.

The lust that inspires the tragedy was characteristic, but the cruelty was
foreign to Oscar; both qualities would have injured him in England, had it
not been for two things. First of all only a few of the best class of English
people know French at all well, and for the most part they disdain the sex-
morality of their race; while the vast mass of the English public regard French
as in itself an immoral medium and is inclined to treat anything in that tongue
with contemptuous indifference. One can only say that "Salome" confirmed
Oscar's growing reputation for abnormal viciousness.

It was in 1892 that some of Oscar's friends struck me for the first time as
questionable, to say the best of them. I remember giving a little dinner to
some men in rooms I had in Jermyn Street. I invited Oscar, and he brought a
young friend with him. After dinner I noticed that the youth was angry with
Oscar and would scarcely speak to him, and that Oscar was making up to him.
I heard snatches of pleading from Oscar--"I beg of you . . . . It is not true
. . . . You have no cause" . . . . All the while Oscar was standing apart from
the rest of us with an arm on the young man's shoulder; but his coaxing was in
vain, the youth turned away with petulant, sullen ill-temper. This is a mere