'See what a fine thing has been written by one of my lads.'




VI


My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never
before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had
written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous.
There was present that night at Henley's, by right of propinquity
or of accident, a man full of the secret spite of dullness, who
interrupted from time to time and always to check or disorder
thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was foiled and thrown.
I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality that I think
all Wilde's listeners have recorded, came from the perfect
rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it
possible. That very impression helped him as the effect of metre,
or of the antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is
itself a true metre, helps a writer, for he could pass without
incongruity from some unforeseen swift stroke of wit to elaborate
reverie. I heard him say a few nights later: 'Give me "The
Winter's Tale," "Daffodils that come before the swallow dare" but
not "King Lear." What is "King Lear" but poor life staggering in
the fog?' and the slow cadence, modulated with so great precision,
sounded natural to my ears. That first night he praised Walter
Pater's 'Essays on the Renaissance:' 'It is my golden book; I
never travel anywhere without it; but it is the very flower of
decadence. The last trumpet should have sounded the moment it was